2 ms·

The macro economic conditions are such that only senior technical people and similar high-value employees are getting jobs.

anon50118810 4y ago
It's absolutely true that almost all of the remote jobs I'm seeing are explicitly senior or above, or require 3+ years of experience. I meet this, but for entry level people looking for something immediately, I'd recommend support or QA work to stay afloat while building a personal portfolio and hoping to get lucky with an employer who is actually desperate for developers.
- falcolas 4y ago
  I'm not so sure that QA work even still exists. And I'm pretty certain it's been eliminated as a path to being a developer. There's been an insanely strong push to eliminate QA and put that work on developers (in addition to all the other specializations they now generalize in) in the past decade.
  - monkpit 4y ago
    What a wild thing to post
  - forgotusername6 4y ago
    The majority of my team started their career as manual testers. We are all software engineers now and do not have a manual test team at all. We don't even have an automation test team. The company does have a few roles like that still but they are massively reduced.
  - xtracto 4y ago
    QA is a position/work that has been heavily outsourced. I know because I've met several QA outsourcing firms in Mexico and Ukraine that have really good business in the US.
  - anon50118810 4y ago
    Support and QA have long been questionable paths into software development, but if you're entry-level and looking for remote work vaguely in the field, these are good roles. This is especially true for support which can be done relatively independently by inexperienced people, unlike software development, which requires a lot of mentoring for entry-level people that remote environments haven't really figured out how to accommodate yet.
bdw5204 4y ago
The problem right now is that the FAANG companies and the tier below that have suddenly laid off an absolute ton of people (and not hired a ton of people that they'd normally have hired) so you're competing with those people for the pool of open jobs. If you're the kind of developer who would usually end up at the second tier companies, those companies are going to be hiring the people Facebook and Twitter just laid off before they hire you. That's perfectly rational because the laid off FAANG developers are, on average, better developers than everybody else on the job market. This isn't good for anybody but is what happens when the market is suddenly flooded with tons of highly desirable developers.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  They have announced massive layoffs but I sincerely doubt that a majority of them represent mid/senior level software engineers. There's lots of fields in the tech sector: tech-support, documentation, quality assurance, software testing, etc. Nothing this last year has led me to believe you'll have any trouble getting a engineering job provided you're not looking for an entry-level position.

anon50118810 4y ago

It's absolutely true that almost all of the remote jobs I'm seeing are explicitly senior or above, or require 3+ years of experience. I meet this, but for entry level people looking for something immediately, I'd recommend support or QA work to stay afloat while building a personal portfolio and hoping to get lucky with an employer who is actually desperate for developers.

falcolas 4y ago
I'm not so sure that QA work even still exists. And I'm pretty certain it's been eliminated as a path to being a developer. There's been an insanely strong push to eliminate QA and put that work on developers (in addition to all the other specializations they now generalize in) in the past decade.
- monkpit 4y ago
  What a wild thing to post
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  The majority of my team started their career as manual testers. We are all software engineers now and do not have a manual test team at all. We don't even have an automation test team. The company does have a few roles like that still but they are massively reduced.
- xtracto 4y ago
  QA is a position/work that has been heavily outsourced. I know because I've met several QA outsourcing firms in Mexico and Ukraine that have really good business in the US.
- anon50118810 4y ago
  Support and QA have long been questionable paths into software development, but if you're entry-level and looking for remote work vaguely in the field, these are good roles. This is especially true for support which can be done relatively independently by inexperienced people, unlike software development, which requires a lot of mentoring for entry-level people that remote environments haven't really figured out how to accommodate yet.

bdw5204 4y ago

The problem right now is that the FAANG companies and the tier below that have suddenly laid off an absolute ton of people (and not hired a ton of people that they'd normally have hired) so you're competing with those people for the pool of open jobs. If you're the kind of developer who would usually end up at the second tier companies, those companies are going to be hiring the people Facebook and Twitter just laid off before they hire you. That's perfectly rational because the laid off FAANG developers are, on average, better developers than everybody else on the job market. This isn't good for anybody but is what happens when the market is suddenly flooded with tons of highly desirable developers.

throwaway675309 4y ago
They have announced massive layoffs but I sincerely doubt that a majority of them represent mid/senior level software engineers. There's lots of fields in the tech sector: tech-support, documentation, quality assurance, software testing, etc. Nothing this last year has led me to believe you'll have any trouble getting a engineering job provided you're not looking for an entry-level position.