8 ms·

Not surprised. I'm probably a fair bit older than the average HN reader (finished undergrad in 1995). This is the hottest job market I've seen since the heigh

• digianarchist 5y ago
  Browsing /r/cscareerquestions it looks like entry level folks are having a hard time breaking into the industry. Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems.
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    I think there is a bit of a selection bias going on in that subreddit. I finished undergrad last May and had multiple offers to choose from well before I even graduated. Maybe covid has slowed hiring since, though.
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      Eh, I talk to a fair number of undergrads and I think it has been tough this past year.
      • jshen 5y ago
        Something is off then. Are they in big cities? Do they not know where/how to apply? We’ve had a hard time hiring anyone, including entry level.
        • whimsicalism 5y ago
          I mean, what sort of compensation are you offering? Also - I'm talking about last year, not now. But I am recently out of college and have not even passed resume screen by a few companies despite referral, credentials, etc.
          • jshen 5y ago
            We’re not a big tech company, so comp isn’t quite what it is at Amazon, FB, etc. but, it’s solid. 100k+ salary, annual grant of restricted stock units, good health and other benefits etc. Having said that, there’s a contradiction in claiming that college grads can’t find jobs while suggesting that a company offering six figures can’t find people because of comp.
            • whimsicalism 5y ago
              > while suggesting that a company offering six figures can’t find people because of comp. Never said that - but if you had answered $50k, I probably would have! I'm surprised you are having trouble hiring people - but perhaps if you are in the Bay and hiring new grads, they might be surprised when it is in the low $100ks.
            • zo1 5y ago
              Are you offering remote? That might be a big factor that could influence things at this point in time.
              • jshen 5y ago
                We do, but that’s not the point. Someone suggested that new comp sci grads are having a very hard time finding work. I don’t believe that given how hot the market is right now. If anyone is having real trouble, then they are either being selective (won’t move to a big city, have high demands, etc), OR something is wrong. Maybe their resume is terrible, maybe they are bad at interviews, etc.
                • whimsicalism 5y ago
                  There are many companies where I don't get past the resume screen as a new grad, meanwhile the companies I do get interviews with will come back with an offer >$200k. But I have to apply to 20-30 companies to get 1 interview, so there is clearly a problem at the resume-screening stage for new grads.
        • bboylen 5y ago
          What city are you in, if I may ask?
          • jshen 5y ago
            We offices in several cities. LA, Seattle, and more.
        • akomtu 5y ago
          Have you adjusted your pay for inflation? The rent prices have nearly doubled in ten years, so if you offer 100k today, it's like offering 60k in 2011.
          • jshen 5y ago
            Starting salaries were around 75-80k ten years ago. Again, there’s a contradiction in the claim that college grads in comp sci can’t find jobs, and the suggestion you are making.
    • antiterra 5y ago
      New grad jobs are often a completely different pool from the rest of the roles, so that doesn’t necessarily conflict.
    • rejectedandsad 5y ago
      I only had 4 offers to choose from. It's a bimodal distribution between the 200K+ 0YOE folks and everyone else.
      • skeeter2020 5y ago
        >> I only had 4 offers to choose from I busted ass to get a single job; how is "only" 4 offers not amazing?
      • smabie 5y ago
        4 is a lot
        • rejectedandsad 5y ago
          Is it? Most folks seem to have like 6-7. Only 2 of mine were "real" from full time interviews, other two were from internships. I had a really low hit rate and didn't get into any top companies.
          • smabie 5y ago
            Stop comparing yourself to other people and focus on your self. I'm sure you can achieve what you desire. I for example didn't graduate for hs and college, and yet, I managed to get to a place in life which my younger self would have classified as "wild ly successful." However, everyone (including me) always wants more, and massively takes for granted their current situation. So I get it, but keep your head down and keep on climbing!
  • bboylen 5y ago
    As a self taught guy transitioning from chemical engineering, I hope its not too hard. Starting my search in a couple months
    • oehtXRwMkIs 5y ago
      Doing something similar, good luck. Can't tell if it's very difficult or very easy.
      • bboylen 5y ago
        I don't think it is super easy. I think it is doable though
    • deregulateMed 5y ago
      I did this. Engineering was more rewarding than software, but software pays better. I do engineering in my personal projects now.
      • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
        I'm curious why you find engineering more rewarding than software. I studied engineering for a couple of years at university and dislike it a lot compared to software.
  • milofeynman 5y ago
    I think this is a problem across the industry. Companies don't want to give engineers adequate raises so they get trained as juniors and walk out and get 20-30k raises. So then everyone is only interested in seniors. Senior has all but lost its meaning too... It describes how long you've been in the industry, not if you have the skills to be a technical leader, etc. At larger corps when a senior leaves, you're often given budget to re-hire a senior, so there is no incentive to hire a junior/entry level. A lot of companies don't even have pathways from internships to entry-level positions. They just let them finish their internship and say "good luck" This is a problem for diversity as well. Look at the makeup of the seniors in the industry. Now look at the junior/entry level folks coming out of master programs, colleges and boot camps.
    • pm90 5y ago
      I don’t think it’s a question of raises, more like they’re just not willing to invest the time. Most non giant companies don’t have good processes for on boarding engineers so it’s mostly yolo. They want engineers to be productive very quickly. Someone just out of college will likely not have the skills required to drive projects on their own to completion without help/supervision. Bigger companies have pretty great onboarding tools and processes and dev tools that abstract most complex things away, allowing developers to become productive rapidly. I think of them as factories that can extract the most value out of new grads. I say this as someone who was a junior not that long ago, but of course my experience is anecdotal so take it with a pinch of salt.
      • mason55 5y ago
        Yeah I always see this expressed as a criticism, like "oh these small companies just hate junior devs! Everyone wants to hire a senior dev, no one wants to hire a junior dev and train them!" But it's not always that easy. If you're a small company still looking for product-market fit or doing a fair bit of greenfield development, there's just not much work for a junior dev to do. These companies aren't all stupid or lazy or discriminating against new grads for some reason. It's the same reason estimates are hard - we're building brand new things that we've never built before and a lot of the work is in the design. Junior devs need to be told what to do. The architects/senior devs become a huge bottleneck because they can only design so much stuff at once, so until you can find more of them you can't hire more junior devs because there's not going to be anything for them to do. Until you get to a point where you're doing repeatable work or your design/architecture is solidified enough to keep people on the guard rails, there's just not a ton of work for a junior dev to do. Finally, you also have the issue that a lot of devs don't want to get into any kind of management but they want to be managed by technical people. You end up with a shortage of decent managers (where "decent" means both someone who's ok at the job of management and is acceptable to the team). If we had more work to give to junior devs we'd happily hire them - they are so much cheaper! And one other contributing factor is a lack of unions. Say what you will about seniority-based comp/perks, they do make people stay in one job for longer, which makes it more worthwhile to invest in a junior dev.
  • Alex3917 5y ago
    > Employers are mostly recruiting senior levels it seems. Because no one is going to hire a junior developer to work remote. The job market isn't especially hot, it's just temporarily distorted in a way that favors more experienced developers.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      Eh, even as someone with 1.8 years experience (at least I still feel very junior) I get a steady flood of recruiters and can easily get a pile of interviews. I think it’s that if you have zero experience, you are a huge unknown. Anything more and work abounds.
    • alfalfasprout 5y ago
      Not sure sure this "distortion" is temporary though. There's going to continue to be a shortage of more senior engineers for years to come because of their relative scarcity. Fact is... if you're senior/staff/principal now assuming you stay competitive you're in luck.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    I suspect that is no more the case than it has always been. While the overall job market demand might be very high now, I doubt that the proportions of demand for entry-level and senior roles has changed significantly.
  • paxys 5y ago
    I know many new college grads who got offers from multiple tier-1 and tier-2 silicon valley software companies in the same range as what I got as a senior engineer with 8 years of experience a few years ago. I'm talking base salary $160K-$180K, $300K equity grant, 10% annual bonus, sign on bonus, relocation...the works. Not to say that everyone can simply walk in to these jobs (and they shouldn't!), but if a graduating CS major cannot find any decent software job today I'd be more inclined to suspect their skills than the industry itself.
    • deregulateMed 5y ago
      Is it really "the works" if you have to move to SV? I'm profiting 100k/yr in the Midwest, and it's a junior-ish position. Could be worse, could be Tesla 90k/yr revenue.
      • paxys 5y ago
        Bay area is expensive for sure but such salary comparisons are always exaggerated. Housing is the only thing that makes a significant difference to the annual budget for a ~22 year old, and even a $20K salary bump is more than enough to cover the difference in rent and other basic monthly expenses. It will almost always be worth it career-wise and financially to work in silicon valley for a few years, especially at the start of your career.
        • deregulateMed 5y ago
          Fair point. If you can get a mortgage, I imagine it's even better.
        • aiisjustanif 5y ago
          I guess no state income tax isn’t even a factor then? I’d argue the $200k compensation in Texas is on par with the $300k compensation in SV after everything is said and done.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    There are a surprising number of people who graduate CS/CE without writing any meaningful amount of code. To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News. There are a lot out there who have never done so much as make a web page with more than copy/pasted Jquery and expect to get jobs.
    • deregulateMed 5y ago
      I've seen these people get a job in testing and never leave... Or they move to a program management position. On the flip side, self taught coders can do pretty much anything with bad form. Although even at my job I find myself doing things with bad form unless the task requires it to be written well.
      • MattGaiser 5y ago
        This is one of my concerns about myself. I have never really had the opportunity to work with experienced developers for a long period of time (at least not experienced with the work I was doing) so for all I knew I am doing all sorts of things with bad form.
    • fridif 5y ago
      >"To me a decent junior should be able to build a basic Hacker News" In what time period? With what features? With what non functional requirements? Show me a senior who can! I have a better test for evaluating anyone's skills: Write a function that puts Strings in an array. Then write another function that goes searching for a string in an array. Write a unit test to confirm your code is working. Explain what happens to the performance of our code if we can guarantee our array is sorted. If they can past this test, you're already better than most candidates in my eyes, and it takes about 10 mins to find out.
      • MattGaiser 5y ago
        I would be satisfied with anything approaching a forum, with wide flexibility in specific features. If you know enough about a web framework to get it going, use it to complete a specific set of tasks, and get it deployed with a database, it would put you ahead of a heck of a lot of grads that I know. I wasn't suggesting this as an interview question, but more a self check for juniors. Can you actually bring something end to end? Yours works better in an interview setting, although it seems fairly trivial.
• marktangotango 5y ago
  > This is the hottest job market I've seen Clearly this is anecdotal, but what types of things lead you to this conclusion?
  • arnvald 5y ago
    I live in EU and there are a few things that have changed: - tons of remote offers, even with technologies like Java where in the past very few offers were remote - salaries significantly up compared to 1-2y ago (getting 90-100k eur for a remote position in EU was rare, now it's not surprising to see such numbers) - companies shorten interview processes, both in terms of numbers of rounds but also the time the whole process takes. In the past companies could reply to your application after a week, now I saw a few cases where a week after applying they send an offer
    • ericd 5y ago
      Are you seeing more offers from US companies? I've been assuming that SV-based engineers are sort of shooting themselves in the foot by demanding their companies go remote, because there are so many good engineers in the EU making a small fraction of what an SV engineer makes (even at 100k EUR).
      • arnvald 5y ago
        I do (though this is anecdotal data, nothing I dug into). I have some LinkedIn job searches saved for Amsterdam, NL and I started noticing jobs from companies like Twitter, Github or Stripe where now they allow working remotely from EU countries. It's different than it was 2y ago.
        • ericd 5y ago
          Thanks, I wonder how much of that is just the way things were going for those companies, vs accelerated by the shift to remote-only.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• dpaleka 5y ago
  Is it really? I'm graduating soon, but recruiters haven't started reaching out yet. But in a normal year, I suppose they would: https://danielpaleka.com/docs/cv-daniel-paleka.pdf https://danielpaleka.com/docs/cv-daniel-paleka.pdf
• draw_down 5y ago
  A big difference is the bar to entry. In those days it was “you know HTML? Get in here!” Now people have to get their craniums examined before receiving an offer.