5 ms·

The market being harder for juniors seems correct from what I’m seeing. I’ve been looking frequently for the last month to see what’s out there, and virtually n

The market being harder for juniors seems correct from what I’m seeing. I’ve been looking frequently for the last month to see what’s out there, and virtually no one I’ve noticed is seeking junior developers.

vinyl7 4y ago
I've been searching for my first junior/entry level position for 4 months now. There's very few junior/entry positions, and the ones that are posted are asking for 2-3 years experience, and a Bachelors/Masters/PHD...for web development. The market is either asking for senior developers at senior pay, or mid-senior level developers at entry level pay. I'm not the kind of person who would job hop every 2 years like what seems to be common in the industry. If a company is willing to take me on and help train me and bring me up to speed, I'd stay with them for 4+ years. I'd think that would be very valuable to a company, but at least what I read on the internet...companies have come to expect a high turnover for developers and thus are unwilling to put in any effort into a new employee.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  What kind of studies do you have? Do you know the basics of like CS, algorithms, data structures? Do you know a programming language at a decent level? For the field you are trying to get in, do you know some common used frameworks, libraries and tools? If the answer is yes to all, you shouldn't have trouble to find a job. If one of the answers is a no, then you have to solve that problem.
  - vinyl7 4y ago
    I'm mostly self taught. Been programming as a hobby for 10+ years, mostly focused on learning game development but have also done web development. I have "shipped" two Ludum Dare games done in C++, and I have a web app I recently developed with React/PHP/MySQL for an organization that is deployed. The only credential I have is a Full Stack Web development cert from a bootcamp at a big name university. The DSA stuff I self-taught because it's pretty essential to game dev, and the bootcamp taught me the MERN stack.
    - DeathArrow 4y ago
      Without formal education it is going to be a bit harder. You can test yourself by seeing if you can answer typical interview questions which can be found online. You can see if you can solve the stuff from Codility, Leetcode, Hackerranck in a reasonable amount of time.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  If no one’s told you yet: the experience list on a job listing are a wish list, not a requirement list. Frequently it is a wildly unrealistic wish list. I have NEVER seen all of those requirements fulfilled.
  - b3morales 4y ago
    This. Crucially, the actual interviewers/hiring committee may not have even read the job posting. They have the technical expertise and know what they are looking for; the HR/recruiters filtering at the front end are considerably less clueful. You do need to get past that filter, but after that, the bullet list is all but irrelevant.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  >I'm not the kind of person who would job hop every 2 years like what seems to be common in the industry. ...you haven't even started. If you were regularly getting offers with 50%, 100%, or 200% more than you currently earn you'd rethink that position pretty quick.
mirntyfirty 4y ago
Unless it’s a “junior” developer with 5 years of experience willing to “wear multiple hats” and “go the extra mile to deliver requirements.”
- Clubber 4y ago
  I mean if that's what you gotta to do get your foot in the door, that's what you gotta do. My first job out of college in the late 90s took 3 months to find. I already had an internship where I did development for money and networking and workstation support. For the first job, I built the applications, designed the database, setup all the servers and all the workstations. I even crimped network cables and managed a fire/move within a week. I did everything for little pay (relative to the market, it was a living wage and I was salary + benefits) and I absolutely busted my ass to do it well. I worked there for two years and then one day, the director of customer service said she knew someone who was looking for someone and if I was interested. I said yes and that was the first Fortune 500 on my resume. It won't be given to you (unless you're extremely lucky) but if you bust your ass like you're trying to impress the hell out of someone, people will notice and eventually, good things will happen. Always bust your ass like you're trying to impress the hell out of someone, it will take you far.
  - Comevius 4y ago
    "if you bust your ass like you're trying to impress the hell out of someone, people will notice and eventually, good things will happen" In most industries, most of the time hard work no longer pays off. It is not rewarded, it is exploited. The people who would notice are increasingly sociopathic and short-highted, because that's how you make it these days. Hard work can still open doors, but you have to be smart about who you work for.
    - baq 4y ago
      the point is to impress while delivering, not delivering to impress. perhaps a subtle difference, but of huge importance to priorities of the individual.
    - 4y ago
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
I haven't really paid attention to that market for quite a while, but when I was actively looking for a job as a junior dev in SF in 2012, I remember being absolutely maddened by patio11's repeated comments the roaring demand for devs. "Anyone who can fizzbuzz" was the phrase I remember him using. At that time I was junior, but I'd made and published 3 flash games, hacked on the UI of my WP blog quite a bit and made some basic tools with Node.js. I could definitely fizzbuzz, discuss time and space complexity, solve the equivalent of today's easy leetcode questions and more. And yet I saw my savings dwindle towards zero while reading on HN about how easy it was to get a job as a dev. My feeling is that there's always been a considerable demand for great devs and very little demand for juniors. I've seen companies advertise positions for interns but I honestly can't recall a single time they were advertising roles for junior or entry level devs.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Part of the problem is perhaps that you were looking for titles explicitly coded 'junior' at all. Title inflation basically means that many devs that would basically be juniors in real engineering companies are considered senior. It's a weird market where the difference between 0 and 1 year of experience can be so dramatically reflected in salaries and opportunities.
  - viceroyalbean 4y ago
    I saw a job posting recently looking for senior developers with 3 years of work experience. I mean, I have 3 years of full time experience + a little more experience working part time and internships, and I would consider myself a junior dev.
    - steve_adams_86 4y ago
      I’m in over 10 years now and I find the deeper I go, the less I like this senior title. I mean, what will I be in another 10 years? In 15? These titles are meaningless, really. I agree though, at 3 years I was still fairly junior in the scheme of things. I was doing full stack work and building money-making applications from scratch, but it wasn’t great work. It wasn’t going to scale well, the front end was based on an ad-hoc framework because I was afraid of learning and implementing new tools like backbone.js, there were very few tests, not great internal tooling to aid workflows, I wasn’t a great mentor, etc. A lot of what I did was because it worked once before, and not because I knew exactly how and why. My fourth year was when I got my first senior title, though. I like when companies distinguish engineering levels by capability. E1 through E7 for example, where E5+ would be approximately what people imagine when they hear the term senior. Unfortunately everyone uses different leveling, so it’s hard to adhere to that. Our industry would benefit from standards.
acchow 4y ago
If the funnel for juniors tightens up for a couple years, won't the shortage for senior+ worsen down the road? I see this as overall bad for innovation.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- imtringued 4y ago
  Abandoning people with long term consequences for short term gain is a hallmark of capitalism. If it doesn't pay a positive interest rate throw it in the trash and save the money that would have to be spent to keep it alive. By "it" I include humans.
devwastaken 4y ago
As Ive said for over a year now - CS grads cant get hired. Companies are not knocking on their door. Unis have to go out of their way to get companies to even associate. What you hear of big hiring is select schools in select places. Corps want experienced devs, they do not want to create experienced devs. They get away with this because there's no standards like any other field of engineering. We don't band together and create avenues for education, employment and advancement. This is largely the fault of existing devs knowing the above to be true, and they want it for themselves despite harming the market overall. Degrees have largely become meaningless. Uni's have become democratic political battlegrounds that push activism above academics. There isn't anything learned in a 4 year degree that you couldn't get with a healthy appetite for YouTube. But they're just adult daycares for parents that think the system will work for their kids. I say that as someone whom unfortunately has to work at such a place.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >There isn't anything learned in a 4 year degree that you couldn't get with a healthy appetite for YouTube. But they're just adult daycares for parents that think the system will work for their kids. Would you rather go to a surgery with a doctor who "learned" by watching YouTube or with one spent his time in University and residency? The state of political activism eating from the inside and destroying the higher learning in US is pretty sad. But the reaction to that shouldn't stopping learning but kicking political activism out from schools.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  As a senior in software development, I frequently help out with the recruitment side of whatever companies I'm employed with, and an applicant with a formally accredited degree in computer science definitely stands out as a strong signal to pursue a potential interview with them. I know at least nominally they'll have some passing familiarity with simulations, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, data structures and algorithms. You can learn all of this information on your own but it's more difficult for me to verify. While this is not as true if I'm looking to hire a senior engineer, it is significantly more important for entry level positions.
- 4y ago
Silhouette 4y ago
The market is always harder for juniors whether times are easy or hard. The unfortunate difference this time is that today's juniors might have spent their last couple of years reading stories on sites like HN and levels.fyi about starting on six-figure salaries at big name companies and maybe doubling that with the other perks. They might have also been exposed to some of the most mercenary attitudes to career development I can ever recall seeing where loyalty is a dirty word and jumping ship every few months for a pay bump is the norm. At the same time they still have the usual conceit of most new grads in this industry and don't understand that at best they will probably contribute little real value to begin with while taking up a lot of time from other people who could. In other words juniors almost always have negative immediate value to their employer. In the boom times we have enjoyed in tech for the past few years a lot of newbies could get away with that and make a lot of money but really that has been the exception and it's not normal. Now the reality is setting in that you can't reasonably expect an employer to invest a huge amount of money to pay you to cost them even more money and then leave before you get better and make them enough money to become a net contributor. In a world without the weird employment market dynamics of the recent boom times that just doesn't make any sense.

vinyl7 4y ago

I've been searching for my first junior/entry level position for 4 months now. There's very few junior/entry positions, and the ones that are posted are asking for 2-3 years experience, and a Bachelors/Masters/PHD...for web development. The market is either asking for senior developers at senior pay, or mid-senior level developers at entry level pay. I'm not the kind of person who would job hop every 2 years like what seems to be common in the industry. If a company is willing to take me on and help train me and bring me up to speed, I'd stay with them for 4+ years. I'd think that would be very valuable to a company, but at least what I read on the internet...companies have come to expect a high turnover for developers and thus are unwilling to put in any effort into a new employee.

DeathArrow 4y ago
What kind of studies do you have? Do you know the basics of like CS, algorithms, data structures? Do you know a programming language at a decent level? For the field you are trying to get in, do you know some common used frameworks, libraries and tools? If the answer is yes to all, you shouldn't have trouble to find a job. If one of the answers is a no, then you have to solve that problem.
- vinyl7 4y ago
  I'm mostly self taught. Been programming as a hobby for 10+ years, mostly focused on learning game development but have also done web development. I have "shipped" two Ludum Dare games done in C++, and I have a web app I recently developed with React/PHP/MySQL for an organization that is deployed. The only credential I have is a Full Stack Web development cert from a bootcamp at a big name university. The DSA stuff I self-taught because it's pretty essential to game dev, and the bootcamp taught me the MERN stack.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    Without formal education it is going to be a bit harder. You can test yourself by seeing if you can answer typical interview questions which can be found online. You can see if you can solve the stuff from Codility, Leetcode, Hackerranck in a reasonable amount of time.
dghlsakjg 4y ago
If no one’s told you yet: the experience list on a job listing are a wish list, not a requirement list. Frequently it is a wildly unrealistic wish list. I have NEVER seen all of those requirements fulfilled.
- b3morales 4y ago
  This. Crucially, the actual interviewers/hiring committee may not have even read the job posting. They have the technical expertise and know what they are looking for; the HR/recruiters filtering at the front end are considerably less clueful. You do need to get past that filter, but after that, the bullet list is all but irrelevant.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
>I'm not the kind of person who would job hop every 2 years like what seems to be common in the industry. ...you haven't even started. If you were regularly getting offers with 50%, 100%, or 200% more than you currently earn you'd rethink that position pretty quick.

mirntyfirty 4y ago

Unless it’s a “junior” developer with 5 years of experience willing to “wear multiple hats” and “go the extra mile to deliver requirements.”

Clubber 4y ago
I mean if that's what you gotta to do get your foot in the door, that's what you gotta do. My first job out of college in the late 90s took 3 months to find. I already had an internship where I did development for money and networking and workstation support. For the first job, I built the applications, designed the database, setup all the servers and all the workstations. I even crimped network cables and managed a fire/move within a week. I did everything for little pay (relative to the market, it was a living wage and I was salary + benefits) and I absolutely busted my ass to do it well. I worked there for two years and then one day, the director of customer service said she knew someone who was looking for someone and if I was interested. I said yes and that was the first Fortune 500 on my resume. It won't be given to you (unless you're extremely lucky) but if you bust your ass like you're trying to impress the hell out of someone, people will notice and eventually, good things will happen. Always bust your ass like you're trying to impress the hell out of someone, it will take you far.
- Comevius 4y ago
  "if you bust your ass like you're trying to impress the hell out of someone, people will notice and eventually, good things will happen" In most industries, most of the time hard work no longer pays off. It is not rewarded, it is exploited. The people who would notice are increasingly sociopathic and short-highted, because that's how you make it these days. Hard work can still open doors, but you have to be smart about who you work for.
  - baq 4y ago
    the point is to impress while delivering, not delivering to impress. perhaps a subtle difference, but of huge importance to priorities of the individual.
  - 4y ago

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

I haven't really paid attention to that market for quite a while, but when I was actively looking for a job as a junior dev in SF in 2012, I remember being absolutely maddened by patio11's repeated comments the roaring demand for devs. "Anyone who can fizzbuzz" was the phrase I remember him using. At that time I was junior, but I'd made and published 3 flash games, hacked on the UI of my WP blog quite a bit and made some basic tools with Node.js. I could definitely fizzbuzz, discuss time and space complexity, solve the equivalent of today's easy leetcode questions and more. And yet I saw my savings dwindle towards zero while reading on HN about how easy it was to get a job as a dev. My feeling is that there's always been a considerable demand for great devs and very little demand for juniors. I've seen companies advertise positions for interns but I honestly can't recall a single time they were advertising roles for junior or entry level devs.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
Part of the problem is perhaps that you were looking for titles explicitly coded 'junior' at all. Title inflation basically means that many devs that would basically be juniors in real engineering companies are considered senior. It's a weird market where the difference between 0 and 1 year of experience can be so dramatically reflected in salaries and opportunities.
- viceroyalbean 4y ago
  I saw a job posting recently looking for senior developers with 3 years of work experience. I mean, I have 3 years of full time experience + a little more experience working part time and internships, and I would consider myself a junior dev.
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    I’m in over 10 years now and I find the deeper I go, the less I like this senior title. I mean, what will I be in another 10 years? In 15? These titles are meaningless, really. I agree though, at 3 years I was still fairly junior in the scheme of things. I was doing full stack work and building money-making applications from scratch, but it wasn’t great work. It wasn’t going to scale well, the front end was based on an ad-hoc framework because I was afraid of learning and implementing new tools like backbone.js, there were very few tests, not great internal tooling to aid workflows, I wasn’t a great mentor, etc. A lot of what I did was because it worked once before, and not because I knew exactly how and why. My fourth year was when I got my first senior title, though. I like when companies distinguish engineering levels by capability. E1 through E7 for example, where E5+ would be approximately what people imagine when they hear the term senior. Unfortunately everyone uses different leveling, so it’s hard to adhere to that. Our industry would benefit from standards.

acchow 4y ago

If the funnel for juniors tightens up for a couple years, won't the shortage for senior+ worsen down the road? I see this as overall bad for innovation.

newaccount2021 4y ago
imtringued 4y ago
Abandoning people with long term consequences for short term gain is a hallmark of capitalism. If it doesn't pay a positive interest rate throw it in the trash and save the money that would have to be spent to keep it alive. By "it" I include humans.

devwastaken 4y ago

As Ive said for over a year now - CS grads cant get hired. Companies are not knocking on their door. Unis have to go out of their way to get companies to even associate. What you hear of big hiring is select schools in select places. Corps want experienced devs, they do not want to create experienced devs. They get away with this because there's no standards like any other field of engineering. We don't band together and create avenues for education, employment and advancement. This is largely the fault of existing devs knowing the above to be true, and they want it for themselves despite harming the market overall. Degrees have largely become meaningless. Uni's have become democratic political battlegrounds that push activism above academics. There isn't anything learned in a 4 year degree that you couldn't get with a healthy appetite for YouTube. But they're just adult daycares for parents that think the system will work for their kids. I say that as someone whom unfortunately has to work at such a place.

DeathArrow 4y ago
>There isn't anything learned in a 4 year degree that you couldn't get with a healthy appetite for YouTube. But they're just adult daycares for parents that think the system will work for their kids. Would you rather go to a surgery with a doctor who "learned" by watching YouTube or with one spent his time in University and residency? The state of political activism eating from the inside and destroying the higher learning in US is pretty sad. But the reaction to that shouldn't stopping learning but kicking political activism out from schools.
throwaway675309 4y ago
As a senior in software development, I frequently help out with the recruitment side of whatever companies I'm employed with, and an applicant with a formally accredited degree in computer science definitely stands out as a strong signal to pursue a potential interview with them. I know at least nominally they'll have some passing familiarity with simulations, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, data structures and algorithms. You can learn all of this information on your own but it's more difficult for me to verify. While this is not as true if I'm looking to hire a senior engineer, it is significantly more important for entry level positions.
4y ago

Silhouette 4y ago

The market is always harder for juniors whether times are easy or hard. The unfortunate difference this time is that today's juniors might have spent their last couple of years reading stories on sites like HN and levels.fyi about starting on six-figure salaries at big name companies and maybe doubling that with the other perks. They might have also been exposed to some of the most mercenary attitudes to career development I can ever recall seeing where loyalty is a dirty word and jumping ship every few months for a pay bump is the norm. At the same time they still have the usual conceit of most new grads in this industry and don't understand that at best they will probably contribute little real value to begin with while taking up a lot of time from other people who could. In other words juniors almost always have negative immediate value to their employer. In the boom times we have enjoyed in tech for the past few years a lot of newbies could get away with that and make a lot of money but really that has been the exception and it's not normal. Now the reality is setting in that you can't reasonably expect an employer to invest a huge amount of money to pay you to cost them even more money and then leave before you get better and make them enough money to become a net contributor. In a world without the weird employment market dynamics of the recent boom times that just doesn't make any sense.