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I'm searching for a job right now as a junior backend engineer with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and 2yoe in that field. I have absolutely no leverage

I'm searching for a job right now as a junior backend engineer with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering and 2yoe in that field. I have absolutely no leverage and there are very few positions available for juniors in the market. It's obvious why more experienced engineers have leverage--the entire industry has a massive pipeline problem in that it fails to train the juniors that will later satisfy the increasing demand for seniors. The pandemic made this problem worse, not better, as no one feels capable of training juniors over zoom and also no one wants to go into the office. I believe senior engineers will keep seeing their leverage increase for the next 5 years as companies continue to avoid hiring juniors.

jopsen 5y ago
There is a huge pipeline of paid internships available... These are literally hiring pipelines. Sure, it's not easy to land an internship, but paid internships is the norm. Unlike many other industries. Moreover, you really should just apply for anyone looking to hire an engineer, senior/junior/etc. doesn't matter that much :)
- Invictus0 5y ago
  The gatekeeper for these jobs is almost always not an engineer--it's a 40k/yr HR person with a psychology degree that does 3 things: count how many yoe you have, control-f to see if the skills in your resume match the requisition, and check to make sure you went to a prestige university. And I don't even blame them, because the entry level positions are swamped with hundreds if not thousands of applications, most of which are abysmal. I've applied to dozens of positions so far, and although I can pass a code test easily, the real trouble is just getting them to offer it to me. And as for internships, they typically require that the applicant be pursuing a degree in computer science; not much help for someone 2 years out from graduation.
  - jopsen 5y ago
    Yeah, getting a foot in the door is probably hard. (Not impossible, just hard) I just mean: there actually are lots of pipelines like paid internships. That doesn't mean people aren't lost. I've experienced companies blinding their hiring pipeline to things like name, gender, age, university, etc. because biases causes you to loose out on valuable talent. Yes, I'm sure it still hard, and many companies don't try to avoid biases. But software is a lot less conservative than other industries :)
burlesona 5y ago
I think there’s something to this. While the big co’s do train, they also have a lot of cachet and recruit from top schools whose grads would be fairly likely to land jobs even without the big co internships. Meanwhile, at a small company, the six-figure cost of a single engineer creates a very hard limit such that there can only be a few engineers on the team. Given that constraint it is very hard to justify allocating one of those scarce “roster spots” to a junior engineer who may not add much value to the team for a long time depending on how hard they work and how aggressively they ramp up. Paradoxically, the high salaries that engineers command make training engineers on the job much more difficult. I wonder if there is an opportunity there for something like an apprentice developer program, as a step on the ladder underneath “junior engineer,” to help more people get past that first step.

jopsen 5y ago

There is a huge pipeline of paid internships available... These are literally hiring pipelines. Sure, it's not easy to land an internship, but paid internships is the norm. Unlike many other industries. Moreover, you really should just apply for anyone looking to hire an engineer, senior/junior/etc. doesn't matter that much :)

Invictus0 5y ago
The gatekeeper for these jobs is almost always not an engineer--it's a 40k/yr HR person with a psychology degree that does 3 things: count how many yoe you have, control-f to see if the skills in your resume match the requisition, and check to make sure you went to a prestige university. And I don't even blame them, because the entry level positions are swamped with hundreds if not thousands of applications, most of which are abysmal. I've applied to dozens of positions so far, and although I can pass a code test easily, the real trouble is just getting them to offer it to me. And as for internships, they typically require that the applicant be pursuing a degree in computer science; not much help for someone 2 years out from graduation.
- jopsen 5y ago
  Yeah, getting a foot in the door is probably hard. (Not impossible, just hard) I just mean: there actually are lots of pipelines like paid internships. That doesn't mean people aren't lost. I've experienced companies blinding their hiring pipeline to things like name, gender, age, university, etc. because biases causes you to loose out on valuable talent. Yes, I'm sure it still hard, and many companies don't try to avoid biases. But software is a lot less conservative than other industries :)

burlesona 5y ago

I think there’s something to this. While the big co’s do train, they also have a lot of cachet and recruit from top schools whose grads would be fairly likely to land jobs even without the big co internships. Meanwhile, at a small company, the six-figure cost of a single engineer creates a very hard limit such that there can only be a few engineers on the team. Given that constraint it is very hard to justify allocating one of those scarce “roster spots” to a junior engineer who may not add much value to the team for a long time depending on how hard they work and how aggressively they ramp up. Paradoxically, the high salaries that engineers command make training engineers on the job much more difficult. I wonder if there is an opportunity there for something like an apprentice developer program, as a step on the ladder underneath “junior engineer,” to help more people get past that first step.