As a Tech Lead, I can tell you to never ever act like you know more than you do. Quite the opposite. Where I've been successful it's because I'm not afraid to have people think I'm dumb and completely uninformed about everything.
... yeah... I would redirect that into --- 'just do it' That's to say, if there's a hard job to do at work that you can see - say a whole system needs to get rewritten because the implementation is garbage, just re-write it. Yeah it's gonna be messy and break a lot of code, but if you have a better idea about how to make the thing to its job better and more cleanly, why not give it a shot? Put it on a branch and if it doesn't get merged it doesn't get merged. Great way to learn what's going on anyway. I've had good success with that approach. 'Fake it til you make it' sounds like you're just going to nod a lot and people are going to see wind going through your ears. IDK great advice if you want to get into upper-management maybe. Not so great if you're looking to actually get stuff done.
Yeah this has been my experience but in the security side of tech. People who pretend to know it all are going to make mistakes when the conversations get into the nitty gritty and trying to act too confident around people who actually do know their stuff can make it look worse. I do get where the fake it til make it comes from as far as being able to talk a good game and know enough lingo to use it. In general the advice to "act like a senior" is fairly valid you should try to act like the role you want or at least do the things that a senior role would do.
@@namanhkapur "no one really know what they're doing, we're all just trying to figure it out" This is not how it works my man. I think that part of the reason companies are hiring seniors is expressly because they want people who know what they are doing.
The thing that worked okay for my fellow bootcampers was to reach out to medium-sized, older local/regional businesses. They often have a legacy system that they have to train new hires on regardless of the applicants background. It's not sexy and the pay isn't amazing, but it gets coding employment on your resume.
This is what I did, somewhat unpleasant experience but kept me employed long enough that I eventually made it to Google 🙏 those stepping stone jobs are real
I survived the 2001-2002 recession by putting my name in with Technical Temp companies. Update an Access DB here for a week, then write a Crystal Report somewhere else for a day... go to another site and pound data into Excel... Personally, I was fine with that. My overhead was low, I had a roommate to help with my mortgage. I only ended up in a salaried job because it was a temp-to-perm assignment, and the company decided to "perm" me.
All these companies hiring only senior developers not realizing that after a while they will face a massive problem which is that no one was hiring junior developers and it is those developers who eventually become the senior developers that they want. If no one wants junior devs, in 10-15 years the no. of senior devs is going to plummet, because the people who would have been seniors by then were not able to get the jobs that would have given them that level of experience.
That's an over-exaggeration, I worked in a big tech. We still have ample young junior/middle level devs. They are in their mid-20s and have long runway for their career growth. But I agree, I have not seen many interns or devs who are fresh out of college
They'll say dumb shit like "AI will be able to write websites at that point", failing to realize that AI is a tool. Take search engines for example, so much information you can access, but if you don't know how to query it all of it is useless and even dangerous. Most people don't know how to properly use a search engine or ask well formulated questions, you're telling me that they can instruct AI on how to build something for them? lol!
They probably (realistically) expect civilization to have ended by that point. They won't be hiring developers, they'll be hiring armed guards for their bunker.
Fake it until you make it is somewhat good advice, because a typical person is probably underselling their skills. However, a senior does the opposite. A senior loudly and confidently proclaims when they don’t know something and can lead a discussion to figure it out.
I took the most value out of this comment, as an entry level SWE starting out in intern positions(I graduate in a year hoping to find entry level SWE positions), I'm getting the biggest imposter syndrome from fake it till you make it, but I feel like with how competitive the market is, it's what you have to do. But once I get a full time position, I'm definitely gonna be more honest with my co-workers to solve things more efficiently. Thanks for your comment! If you have any tips for new coming SWEs, i'd love to hear it!
Your phrase is indeed way much better. I've grown to hate the original mantra. I met a lot BS professionals who would swear by it and actually "succeed". For a while though, before everyone could catch their crap by a mile. I mean, people need food at the table and pay the bills, so if necessary, go for it, but don't live by it. Also, please don't flaunt it to coworkers.
@@bb5242 I'd argue "fake it 'til you make it" tends to get applied a lot in the "buy my course" consultant space. There are indeed fakes that swear by that slogan, but merely "make it being a fake". OPs alternate slogan seems more practice oriented, akin to "the master has failed more often than the student has tried".
I'm an American who has lived in the East for 20+ years. The market for developers in countries like India and Vietnam are stronger than ever. I have a friend in Vietnam who has a software engineering firm. He says it's difficult to even get junior devs. American firms are outsourcing more while assigning the jobs needing real finesse to the highly skilled American developers. We've seen this short-sighted max-profit-now mindset in other industries. It is this mindset which has decimated American manufacturing. Look at semiconductors, for example. What as once in the US wheelhouse has now been gone so long that the US can't revamp domestic industry because it simply doesn't have the expertise, let alone the infrastructure. Look forward 10 years. Polish, Vietnamese, and Indian firms will have been investing in juniors, and happily picking up all the junior work that US firms farmed out. Tech dominance will shift to the developing world and the US will be even less competitive than it is now.
@@apl1568 lumayan banyak. tapi kembali lagi, agak bias ke senior lvl yang minimal harus punya 3 tahun pengalaman. sebetulnya saya ingin segara memulai berkarir di kancah internasional. meski idealnya saya harus menabung pengalaman kerja minimal 5 tahun dan sambil terus mengembangkan keahlian khusus. tapi saya tetap mencoba apply saja. it's not hurt to try.
And i've noticed that companies that do not put the salary ranges in their JDs just waste everyones time as well, but here we are! The job searching process sucks for everyone it seems every since its been bloated and corporatized. The Tech companies became the thing they set out to "Disrupt".
The reason is simple. Companies are GREEDY and don’t want to invest in their employees and train them. They’d rather get instant gratification with people with 5-years experience already.
Exactly. This whole idea have providing solutions to job seekers in this market comes down to more grindset BS. The world is supposed to be more efficient, and here I am working twice as hard as my parents to make half the money.
I work for a certain company that I won't mention here. We trained and had a very techy CEO who encourages non programmers to be programmers if he joined us ... guess what? We have 200% more engineers than neccessary according to our board of directors and have had constant instability and crashes costing us millions! Now we only hire senior engineers. Sorry but you all can be dangerous with production code and we have a no hire jr or intern now. Admittingly I would not be hired here now as we become conservative. We need more architects and not genius programmers making critical design decisions.
It's a vicious cycle. Companies know that engineers tend to leave after 1-2 years in order to get a better salary at a different company (I've been doing this my entire professional career like most others), so what's the point of hiring juniors and training them up when they are just going to leave? Now said companies could increase the junior's salary as they gain experience to become more of a mid-level, but there's a 99% chance that is not going to happen because it's exactly as you said, companies are greedy and don't want to invest in their employees.
I'm currently in a software engineering bootcamp and will be looking for a job around summertime. What is your advice for someone who is new to this? I am willing to get any developer job though. Not just "tech industry". I know I'll need a showcase of projects.@@TundraShark
Sadly, even as a senior engineer with 25+ years and a 6-figure salary, I got laid off too with the lame excuse of "We need to chase revenue and cut cost" It is an unfortunate fact that the more you succeed and earn, the more at risk you become. Also once you are over 50, corporations seem to think you are too old...how stupid!
Sorry to hear that. I don’t want to comment too much on your particular circumstances because I don’t know too much about it aside from your comment. So I will focus on what I think about the changing landscape of software engineering and why it might have made technical experience of older engineer less valuable. I am in the field for 5 years and my uncle just retired with 30+ years of programming experience. From my conversations with him, he was baffled by our responsibilities and how much we earn nowadays (the fact that right out of university we get 6 figures baffles anyone who is not familiar with the field) In FANG like companies, we are expected to learn schema design, project planning (to a degree), implementation, test design and framework, deployment automation on the job. These are all things that a typical “senior engineer” needs to have knowledge of nowadays. In his company, there are database admins to handle the schema, programmer to implement and qa to automate and do the testing. It is a bit unfortunate, because when the landscape change, technical expertise becomes less relevant. Same can be said to my generation with the AI revolution incoming. On a side example , my uncle was so curious that how are we supposed to know everything. he went ahead and asked me some questions about SQL optimization. Honestly I don’t know the answer with 100% confidence, but within 1 min of googling to confirm some of my assumptions, I was able to produce the right answer.
"They act like they know what they are doing, even if they don't" is the most junior mindset you can possibly have. Mark of a true senior is that they know their shit, but they also know their limitations and are not scared to ask/collaborate with people in areas where they have defficiencies. What makes someone a senior is not that they know everything, but that they know HOW to ask someone who does have relevant knowledge the right questions, so they can get whats going on. In the end what you should be striving to do, is to create the best possible technical solution. If you have the knowledge to do so: great, you can do it. If not, you need to be able to talk to people either to have them chip in or at least get you to a point where you can take over. Thats exactly what makes seniors so valuable: They are ressourcfull enough to get to where they need to go, even if they dont have the necessary knowledge when they are given the task.
gonna side more with namanh here - I'm seeing that a true senior trait, perhaps even 'staff' or 'consultant' trait, that juniors lack is the ability to deep dive and figure it out yourself - sometimes the original people that wrote the area are gone and the documentation is nonexistent. Being able to figure out other people's code, with their own patterns etc, and suss out their intentions, to the point of being able to find bugs and resolve them in line with the existing code, ie maintaining it - is in itself a skill set that you develop on the job. Few are willing to do so without handholding (which develops the skill much less - a myopia that skips the learning) - and others that are capable would rather just throw it out and do a full rewrite - usually not worth it to business just to fix a few bugs. More often than not a full rewrite just results in the same situation later on anyways after the rewriter has left. 13yrs+ sw dev here.
@@lucidiusdonovan3807 I 100% agree with you, those are the qualities of a senior dev for sure. But what you describe (in my opinion) is not "fake it until you make it" but that's just "doing the work".
@@lucidiusdonovan3807 Honestly if you're talking about hard skills then you're not very senior. Everybody can figure everything out. You need to know the jobs of everyone surrounding you, everyone's skill levels, and the correct people to forward any questions you receive from juniors to. You also need to work on your mentorship abilities and figure out exactly how to do what your immediate boss does. Hard skill development is the domain of juniors.
@@namanhkapurThis is the honest to God truth. Most seniors are having a hard enough time trying to figure out wth we're even supposed to be doing. The tasks seniors get can be seriously nasty. I have a project in the pipe that's going to require me to learn native Windows development, something I've never done before, and honestly that's the fun part (I also need to untangle a bunch of messes that will come from trying to integrate features into our systems). It's hard to give learning opportunities to juniors when there's still so much seniors have to learn on such a frequent basis. And companies need to much of a mish-mash of skills to not lean on just raw experience (rather than efficient training)
I know the pain. I graduated recently and while visiting my university in Germany I gained a little over 2 years of work coding experience. I also worked as a freelancer for half a year, participated in plenty of hackathons getting prices and I still struggle to get a junior level position. Now I stopped rolling out applications with the old mindset of developers being highly desirable and allowing me to demand +50k a year. I poured in a lot more effort into my CV than I had to in the past, ask for 20% less salary or even lower for a more appealing position and hope that I can get over the hurdle to accumulate even more work experience while I work night shifts at Burger King for minimum wage. It's very exhausting to work full-time physical labor while trying to manage life and improving your skill set by building things of your own because close to every entry level job has crazy high requirements.
Du arbeitest bei Burger King? Verstehe ich dich richtig? Du machst irgendwas falsch. Du hast doch sogar schon zwei Jahre Berufserfahrung. Es wird doch an allen Ecken und Enden gesucht. Bleibt nur eine Frage für mich: Was machst Du falsch? Wohnst Du in nem Dorf und willst da nicht weg? Selbst dann, ich arbeite 100% remote und es werden inzwischen so viele Stellen remote ausgeschrieben, eben weil so ein Mangel an Entwicklern besteht. Mensch, wir stellen sogar Leute ein, die keine Berufserfahrung haben und Motiviation zeigen, dass sie den Job lernen wollen. Und diese Kollegen wollen trotzdem gern 50k aufwärts und bekommen das dann auch, weil sie sonst nen anderen Job annehmen. "It's very exhausting to work full-time physical labor" Das glaube ich sofort. Du musst als DEV arbeiten und das ASAP. Meine Befürchtung wäre sonst eher, dass die 2 Jahre Berufserfahrung sonst eher ein Nachteil als ein Vorteil werden, nach dem Motto "Der hat 2 Jahre Erfahrung aber schafft es dann keinen Job zu finden? Der hat wohl keinen Skill." Denn eins ist klar, als Dev braucht man das Können. Zeugnisse und co sind großflächig völlig egal, aber man muss was leisten können. Alles Gute dir
ach mir fällt grad auf, vielleicht bist Du ja aus Deutschland weg, aus der EU raus ... dann wäre das natürlich eine Erklärung. Angstellte außerhalb der EU ist schon extrem unangenehm für die Unternehmen, da kann ich verstehen dass das nicht gemacht wird.
@@justsomeone953Ne, ich lebe in Deutschland. Mein Lebenslauf war vorher schon sehr minderwertig und hat mich nicht in dem besten Licht dastehen lassen, aber es war gut genug um mir die Interviews einzuholen und ich hatte die freie Auswahl vor ein paar Jahren. Jetzt aber hab ich mit dem gleichen Lebenslauf endlos viele Absagen bekommen. Ich hab ihn vor kurzen signifikant verbessert, weswegen ich hoffe, dass es daran lag, aber der alte Lebenslauf und die leicht bessere Version haben mir 2 Interviews gebracht von 20~30 Bewerbungen. Ich hoffe, dass die Kombination von sehr sauberen Lebenslauf und geringer Lohnanfrage schnell Ergebnisse erzielt den ich bin schon auf Jobsuche seit 1 Monat und habe gerade nichts am laufen außer ein bisschen Burger flippen. Ich kann dir gerne mal mein Lebenslauf schicken, falls du drüber gucken willst.
@@justsomeone953 Nein, ich lebe noch in Deutschland aber habe aktuell diese Probleme. Der Punkt am Ende ist das ich gute Job Angebote bekommen habe vor 2 Jahren mit hohen Gehaltsvorschlägen trotz geringen Aufwand. Ich hab damals wirklich nicht viel Energie darin investieren müssen um voran zu kommen. Mit den gleichen hab ich seit einen Monat keinen Erfolg. Ich hab den jetzt signifikant überarbeitet, verbessert und viele Gedanken hineinfließen lassen. Ich hoffe das es daran gelegen hat.
Same brother, it’s frustrating to say the least. I was laid off last November and have applied for over 200+ jobs. No invite for an interview but I agree with you in a sense about faking till you make it.
"Fake it until you make it" is the fastest way to lose the respect of the senior developers. I can teach someone who asks for help, but I cannot help someone who makes stupid mistakes. It might be different about the recruiting process though, there nobody has time to understand everything the candidate can do. 20+ years
Personally, I've seen something a bit more sinister happening. While yes, Senior and Staff engineers are still in very high demand, many companies lowered the requirements by a few years (e.g. you can now get many Senior positions after 3-5 years, rather than 5-10 years as it was before). BUT, the pay was bumped down about 1 level lower. So now, you'll be hired to do Senior work with Senior-level expectations, even after 3-5 years, but you'll still be paid as a mid-level engineer.
That has always been happening. The salary range for a senior dev across all companies is something ridiculous like $80k-$800k. The title is meaningless. All that matters is the salary. Titles can be faked on LinkedIn and noon cares. Your next employer won’t call the past one and ask to verify that you were a senior developer.
@@Noah_527 Not saying you are wrong about your main point but my employer definitely ran a work background check that shows titles and any job I had ever used my social on. Not sure if it's new but blew my mind as I had some side jobs that popped up that were not on my resume. Got the job, but still, crazy.
@@gamereactzAre you working for a large or govt company? I've never had an employer run more than a criminal background check on me. I think one actually ran a credit check which was weird. Pulling up all jobs makes sense since you SSN can be used to pull up your W2s and 1099s. Did they show you the output of the work background check? The same title can be vastly between jobs so I'd think it could be explained away to a future employer. Were the side jobs paid using cash or did they 1099 you? One of my side jobs only zelled me monthly and the other 1099ed me so I did have to pay tax each year for it.
I'm in my first job, basically doing freelance projects but for a senior developer and under his supervision. I've demonstrated enough resilience and passion that he wanted me to continue working for him. But I don't know what I'll do next, I'm 6 months in with the first 3 months being like an internship but the last 3 as an actual job.
Mind if I ask you where do you search for freelance on? Would it be UpWork, etc? I've been unemployed for over 6 months now and I'm starting to consider but don't know where to start.
I entered coding 24 years ago, and I keep needing to remind myself that young developers just need time and practice, that just because I can architect and code well engineered systems, does not automatically mean the rest of the world can also do this. I've been coding a for a very long time, across many different languages and platforms, from fintech to assembly... It takes dedication and a lot tenacity to just keep going.
Today, it is expected that experience is gained on your own time. Its absolutely disgusting, and will more than likely turn me away from working in tech. I dont want to work for an industry like that, let alone bend over backwards improving myself for it.
@@nickelbutt when I was 15, I was learning how to program VGA ports to display custom graphics in 320x200 resolution. By the time I was at Uni, I was writing games in assembly. I think self learning is an absolute must in all cases.
@@nickelbuttno company wants to pay you to learn, they expect you to produce during work hours and learn on your own time. However if you don’t love learning technology on your own time it will be difficult to succeed, judging from my long experience in the biz
This. I go wide and show I can be deployed wherever and I’ll survive. Granted I have always worked for startups/small company’s so that’s my target demographic 😂 Those aws reinvents help a lot when pick up infrastructure skills
@kapur An experienced generalist with an AI is better than a Specialist. AI is going to kill the specialists. The smaller the team the less valuable the specialist. And the teams will only get smaller from now on. This will be different for Big Tech (for some time), but for industry-at-large I think that's the trend. AI is also going to extend the length of the career of experienced developers who have other things to worry in life besides work.
"No one knows what they're doing" - this statement sums up why companies are hiring less junior engineers. Many senior engineers do in fact know what is going on. The best senior engineers I've met can often isolate and debug problems without having to look at the code. They can determine the source just by you describing the issue
He is a RUclipsr incentivzed to sell the dream lmao. He is paid for views, not teaching people to code. He doesn't know himself. It's blind leading the blind and it's sad to watch.
I can confirm, my tech lead can in many instances take one glance at my code and then spot the issue. The ability to deduce the solution the just by looking at the code takes both practice and experience. He can look at a cloud architecture design and spot flaws right away. That kind of foresight really is necessary and required and it’s why I don’t ask for more money until my skills reasonably fall in line with his.
I don't want to be that guy, but what did you do in school to help you out? Congrats on graduating from a top university, but there's more to it than just graduating. (I'm sorry if this comes out as sounding aggressive, it could be my own bias coming from a lower ranked school in my state, I didn't major in CS, but got a software engineering job before graduating lined up) Like, my personal mantra when it comes to school is never, where you went, but what did you do when you were there. And I get that the things that worked for me in 2016 don't work today, it's just, I hate this attitude when I know universities offer so much outside of the classes If not IN the classes if you go for it (and research what classes are available to you that offer skills you want to get better at, make the degree work for you, that you WORK for that degree) Like, I understand my own personal edge, being in a field of a bunch of CS majors as someone who did IT, where in my school, being an IT major was considered a dumber CS major who couldn't do math. But man, I did it. But I made use of the networking tools and what was around me in college, name dropping people for internships, school clubs, hackathons, game jams, learning how to interview people as a college newspaper Columnist, did a youth group (I'm not religious) where I was a graphic designer, stuff like that, Schools offer more than just degrees, please, folks, I just want people to know that there are tools there that you should be using. Your school wants you hired as much as you do, so use your school in helping you get a job
@@FF18Cloud, agreed 100%. It is also very important that we keep a constant growth mindset and keep learning. Too often people only engage in learning/building while they at school. Focus on building stuff and be obsessive with adding values. We all listening to a channel called “What’s in it for me”. Nobody cares what you want unless you can do something for them first.
@@FF18Cloud so thats where i messed up. Once covid hit i did the bare minimum. It really doesnt matter what uni someone went to , it matters what you did (now i know that). So atm doing a few projects that ive always wanted to do pre uni. Trying to improve my github. But yh things r rough as i even got rejected from internships (paying barely anything). Didnt even get an interview.
One more tip that might help: If you're shooting for these top FAANG places and not having any luck, definitely consider applying to smaller, lesser known places. Preferably those that take at least a little pride in their engineering culture. You can work there for a few years, trying your best to learn and grow, and suddenly you'll be mid-level or a senior engineer yourself. It might take a bit longer but at least you'll get paid and get some real world experience. Just be careful not to develop any bad habits in these roles, and keep up to date with sought-after technologies. Who knows, maybe you can convince them to let you build a project using LLMs / GraphQL / Spark / Rust / Whatever. Thanks for sharing the video Namanh, and sorry about the layoffs. It's courageous of you to be so open and positive about it.
Also a correction: senior engineers typically require MORE onboarding time, not less than juniors. Also, they don't just magically crank out 2-3x the amount of work... the work they do is substantially different. They take charge of projects and understand them at a higher level, they're in charge of communication, planning, and managing tech debt. A mid-level engineer should not be a worse coder than a senior. The skills that differentiate mid and senior level are almost all soft skills and "wisdom" via experience, things that you can only learn by actually doing the job.
As someone that is looking for his first job and screaming about "Entry level being 5 years of experience". Thank you for this. This is just what I needed to hear. I might go into some grunt work in the meantime, just to survive. But as a dev. I really just wanna work remotely and not get stuck in a warehouse somewhere. I will follow this series with great interest. (.Net dev here)
You got this. It is doable. Need to keep learning and developing your skills. Not just technical coding skills but also your resume, projects, portfolio, interview skills, communication skills... Find those things that might be weak and fix them. Consistancy is key and you will get it eventually. (speaking as a dev who has just under 5 years and 4 years of it fully remote, as a Full stack .Net and React/Angular dev).
@@neomangeo7822 Thank you for that. I am trying to learn everyday. I am still in my vocational education for a couple of weeks more. What would be a good size for a project I could show someone? I mean. I was thinking of making a site for a bunch of different timers I need everyday. Like, drink water reminder every 20-30 min or a stretch reminder etc with todo-list and tracking. Making it as a pwa-app. Such things, are that presentable enough? Or do you have an example on what I am supposed to be doing with my time? :)
I have actually followed all your advice already and now I'm in a self employed position in education. I'm not really fully using my comp sci degree but tbh I don't care it's paying the bills. At the end of the day, if you have ambition, you are only going to stay working for someone the first 3 to 5 years to raise capital and experience for your own company.
once you git gud, you become impossible to ignore. i think people misunderstand what that means and spend all of their time leetcoding and solely studying system design. sure, those things are important, but the market is oversaturated with such leetcode monkeys who think that being a SWE is only being good at DSA. in reality being a good SWE means being able to think about the bigger picture of problems, understanding how to build good "product", being a reliable and likeable team member, and a good communicator. these are what i think about when hiring someone. to entry-level folks, i strongly suggest working on your own end-to-end personal projects that solve real-world issues, and getting involved in online or in-person tech communities to share ideas or even work together.
That is true, but companies keep dishing out Leetcode questions in interviews. Even if you know DSA very well, you’re always gonna have to waste your time brush up on the very minute details that you tend to forget when you’re employed and actually building stuff. You need to remember that the people doing the interviewing saw the problem and solution beforehand and often don’t even measure up to the expectations they have for you. It’s all a load of bs. I suspect THIS is an overlooked reason why layoffs happened. They hired a bunch of juniors who can’t do anything but Leetcode, then wonder why they’re not productive at the company when they incentivized them to only Leetcode in place of building actual skills. I haven’t had a single tech interview that asked me anything of relevance to the job, besides one with Asana a few years back, for an apprenticeship role. How assbackwards.
@@anclaudys I think leetcode started as a way to "weed" out candidates that did not meet minimum skill levels, but may have backfired. It used to be that programming interviews were interactive. Getting the wrong answer wasn't necessarily an interview failure. Failing came if the candidate would/could not "work the problem" on followup questions. "Too many" of these candidates were getting to in person interviews, so leetcode came in to "save" interviewer time at the cost of losing touch with the mind behind the answer.
@@ebs-user-xs8ll4bk4d Working through a problem on an actual white board is a better way to "rate the candidate's thought process" indeed. Making them code the solution out via video easily becomes a race to the bottom on who can solve the problem more accurately. I'm not discounting DSA and leetcode style thinking (just DSA thinking). I'm having to choose between a singly linked list algorithm or a queue while coding a project on RUclips live as I'm typing this lmaoo
I don't think it matters, quite honestly. Most "senior" devs have lousy skills but think they're great. I think it is very hard for companies to recognize real talent these days. They seem to reward everything but actual talent and know how.
I think part of the problem is unreasonably high starting salaries and reluctance to then raise salaries of the engineers who prove to be useful. If you're assuming your junior developer is going to be useless, starting out with a probationary period makes sense. If they really are pretty useless you can end things there or offer to keep them around on a low salary. If they're useful, start paying them mid level engineer salaries after a couple months. In other words, instead of spending tons of effort on guessing if someone you met maybe two or three times in interviews is going to be a good developer, give them a chance and then offer an appropriate amount of money to keep them around.
How to get a job for a modest salary: be code superman, ubermensch even do everything cary the company singlehandedly be everyone's teacher. So you can get to try and not be replaceable for a "competitive salary". I swear if I could improve things for everyone I would.
idk man, as a senior engineer i've discussed this with friends and colleagues, and everyone agrees that AI will replace the grunt and bulk work often done by entry level employees. The market is not looking good at all for newly graduated students because they will be competing with AI for many years until they become ''useful''. You need to be able to show a significant amount of skill and work on different projects etc and this means, for new graduates, alot of unpaid labor basically. The job market is going to become really weird the coming years and I feel sorry for people that study software or computer engineering right now. (I live in Sweden so maybe this is only applicable here).
My friend working as an art lead at a game company said the same thing since AI art became a thing though he is very worried about it: if AI replaced all the junior, who's going to be the senior in the future?
@@l2xsniper1 Not really. There will be a few jobs created but most of the regular work that normal people can do will be done by AI. In the past if humans stopped building say buggy whips they could after a period of pain and hardship build cars. This is different because the number of humans needed is going to be drastically reduced. Imagine if we stopped making buggy whips and never needed people to make cars. That's AI. Also people tend to ignore the individuals in these big societal shifts. A lot of people are going to suffer a lot of hardship as AI takes over. .
I’m a senior engineer at one of the biggest and most well known companies that invested a lot into AI. I disagree with “fake it till you make it”. The more senior you are, the more work is expected and if you significantly over-inflate your knowledge and therefore the expectations, you will just burn out. Btw. AI will rewrite the whole industry very soon anyway, and there will be even tougher market conditions. Imo we have about up to 5 years before there will be a revolutionary change in how software is made. Make the most of it.
This is an honest comment. As a junior, I was arrogant. I thought I knew everything. The more senior I get, the more I easily say "I don't know the answer to your question".
"Be a people person" - This is the #1 advise. So many people focus on their leetcode answers and forget that this is an interview... How you "feel" in the interview is more important that how many answers you have recited in your head.
1:39 - I am 65, I have 43 years of experience in high-performance computing, specializing in device drivers, OS integration and tuning, working in many languages, database, networking... and they pushed me out a window two months ago... just spoke with the former manager of OS software who, after 33 years with the company, has moved (or was moved) to being more involved in his church full-time...
All the IT at my company was outsourced to India a few years ago. Now we have a load of people who can barely write clear english emails, let alone collaborate on large projects. But this is the future.
Being a people person is very important skills in today market. I have a friend who has 3 years of experience in infrastructure but he wants to move to iOS without commercial experience, then I introduced him to another friend who brought his cv straight to hiring manager. After 3 rounds of interview he got the mid level job in a med-big company.
It's been about 6 months and +300 applications with no dice. And look, I get why a company would not want to hire a junior, but I just don't understand how sustainable this is when the juniors of now have no opportunity to become the seniors of the future. It's come to the point where they don't even want to "pay with experience" anymore. This is stupid.
It's tough for junior engineers right now, and it's not sustainable long term. The game companies are playing is to stop hiring short term and have a large hiring spike again when the economy does better or the talent well runs dry. The advice I give junior people looking for a job right now is to go after paid internships as well. Getting your foot in the door is the most important step right now.
@@muizzy Paid internships are 99.9% of the time only for current students. What about the majority of entry level and junior developers looking for work that are already out of school and couldn't get/ or find an internship in school? They are fucked.
@@vectoralphaSec Apply anyway, just use an outdated resume or one where the graduation date is ambiguous, e.g. 2024. Maybe you're going to hear "sorry, we only accept students", but at least you're in the room with the recruiter and/or doing the interviews. You can ask them for advice on finding a position, which makes it so much easier. Perhaps they even have another open position which isn't public (yet). They've already determined they like you, so maybe they can pass you along. Like I said in the earlier message, getting your foot in the door is the most important thing right now. If you're respectful and honest about your situation, the worst that can happen is that you get the same no as if you didn't apply, but the potential upside is enormous. Just don't pretend you're still in school during the interview or phone screen when asked about it.
“Fake it till you make it” has to be the worst advice I’ve ever heard. If you wanna act like a senior, stop being the guy who implements features and fixing bugs and start owning functional areas and leading projects… in addition to fixing bugs and implementing features. The devs who can email are forever getting senior positions over the devs who know react better than you. Adopt a level of cross functional thinking and only then will you be allowed to act like you know what you’re talking about when you don’t- cuz you can find out in 2 hours with 5 emails.
How will the guy get to that point in nobody in their mother wants to give him a chance to grow and learn 🤔 ? How can I get to the god damn point of getting hired ? Hell on one of my last interviews I outperformed 90% of their candidates and showed the necessary qualities for a long lasting and hardworking individual with growth mindset AAAAAAND that was not enough. Nah bro, F the companies.
2022 easy cake, you know "T" you got the job. Now it's hard thank god i able to get job from 2 companies with senior role from SE 2 in last company(I have +4 yr exp). What i learn from process now interviews are very less as one platform i use to get 10+ companies to apply+ interview are not able to refer one company for 1.5 month.
While there's a real problem with intake of junior engineers, there's an even bigger problem for what "Senior" means. The vast majority of "Senior" software engineers today are at the level we expected of juniors only 10 years ago. And the competence levels continue to rapidly slide downhill. Everyone is scrambling for seniors because they're trying to get hold of at least a few really competent folks and have no time or resources to try and train up juniors.
Senior developer sounds impressive, but in my experience it just means "not a beginner any more". Most senior devs I ever met weren't anything special.
@@StarsMannyyes, that is what it's supposed to mean. What do you propose we do with the overwhelming number of perpetual beginners that are now called "Senior"?
I’m not so sure that specialization will be the need in the future. My intuition tells me that the Sr Engineers are in demand now because they have a broader swath of experience across different areas. IT has changed a lot in 20 years. Many of us “older folks” who have been around that long see that where we had wide access to all parts of the dev cycle and components, newcomers are relegated to learning a single piece of the “assembly line”. It’s like being part of a company where everyone used to know how to build a complete guitar but now you only put screws in keys on the head stock. They’ll never gasp how to build a complete guitar because that just isn’t how it’s done now.
I graduated in 2015 here in northern Europe. And they claimed there was a massive shortage of developers here for years. In short it was basically close to impossible to get a permanent job after I passed my Developer exam. Hundreds of rejections over the years, and pretty much the fastest way to get work was if you knew the right people in the industry. So all your talk about how easy it was to get a job pre-2020 is pretty much nonsense, at least in my country.
Thanks Namanh for another great video about the software engineering job market. Let's see if there'll be any correction in the second half of this year..... I hope that it would be much sooner than that. We'll find out.
I really dont believe in fake it til you make it. You definitely need to be more confident than the job descriptions call for because those jds are usually wrong anyway. But dont sell yourself as more than you really are. Go out, apply, interview, and you will find where your level really is. Best advice here is networking. Getting to know people especially hiring managers at social events can really shortcut your way into roles but it is definitely the long game. For some people it is just a year of networking and they get a job through it. It took me 10 years for my network to have a role i was ready for. But all the networking i did exposed me to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences that i took with me into interviews.
The ONLY one true way to get actual real-life experience is to actually work for a company and gain experience on the job itself from the day-to-day work that is done there. BUT if no company is hiring entry level devs with no experience anymore then how in the hell will they ever get that real world experience?? They will be stuck at the bottom of no professional experience forever by force essentially. This is a massive problem that will come back to bite all these companies in the ass one day big time. What companies need to do is create a brand-new program where they hire entry level devs for the cheapest possible. We're talking $40k - $45k annually, not 6 figures. Then mold these people into the developers that the company wants to have by training them and giving them that experience. If every company was forced by law to have this type of program, it would solve a lot of problems for developers/ the employees. From the very beginning Entry Level meant straight out of college, and no work experience at all whatsoever. This has been forgotten and it's not good for the industry as a whole.
Love how bro shows he’s got 3 years of experience while pretending he’s got experience to tell you how to overcome the market. Bro get back to applying to jobs and getting some real offers
Faking experience is a horrible advice. If you fail to find a high paying job, find ANY job that will give you experience. In the first 6 years of experience developer salary doubles every two years. Don't expect to get paid senior level salaries if your experience is lacking. Basically, look for a job as an opportunity to get experience, not money.
😡 You have been brainwashed. Youre not wrong from a practical standpoint, but this is a horrible thing to say. They are supposed to provide us experience AND money. But instead, we get less money, and expected to be totally trained before accepting a job.
@@nickelbutt That is called "entitlement". What law says that they are supposed to provide you "experience AND money"? Even as a senior developer (20+ years), sometimes I accept smaller salaries, sometimes I have higher salaries, depending on the market. Nobody owes me anything.
Ignore all comments starting from "as a tech lead , senior this and senior that " , they are just trying to flex on you. Keep up the good work, you are right on track, while these tech leads and seniors are busy commenting
6:34 “They act like they know what they are doing even when they don’t.” That shows how junior you are. The “fake it till you make it” (fitymi) does not work. You can start off like that in an interview, but less than five questions and I will know what you really know. Also, if fitymi works it means the company is full of dilettans. It means chaos. It means the environment is not honest. Do you want to work in a place like that? Do you really advocate to be dishonest as a “professional” behavior? To be a con artist?
"Do you want to work in a place like that?" Bro I just want to work somewhere. I've shown my skills, knowledge and dedication to learn and improve and It's still not good enough. Sorry but if I can outperform 90% of your candidates and show good softskills qualities you damn better know I deserve to be hired. Companies are searching for a perfect unicorn in a field where such unicorns don't exist. We are in the field of constant change in technologies... . Why isn't HR ever seeking skills for adaptability ? For fast learning ? For decent communication skills ? For great time management skills ? So many better qualities to focus on and instead we got fcking live coding tasks in an interview for candidates that are straight up sh1tting their pants because they haven't seen an interview in weeks/months and some extremely random questions that weren't anywhere in the job description. Or some stupid language specific thing that you will never know unless you've been exposed to that specific thing.
@@angelg3642 those are the excuses of a candidate who does not meet the requirement and blames it on someone else. "if I can outperform 90% of your candidates" No. You do not with that attitude. If I have 100 candidates and I need only 8 then you being the 9th is not enough. "show good softskills qualities": Your response suggests that you do not. Blaming your unsuccessfulness on someone else is not a good soft skill. After all, even if it is not your "fault" per see, it is much more likely you can change yourself than the environment. "I deserve to be hired": Being hired is not a matter of deserving it. If I do not need you, I will not hire you, even if you are as clever as Einstein. "Companies are searching for a perfect unicorn in a field where such unicorns don't exist.": You just do not know them because they are hired. "Why isn't HR ever seeking skills for adaptability ? For fast learning ? For decent communication skills ? For great time management skills ?": They do. However, from these three, only communication skills can reliably be perceived during an interview. "we got fcking live coding tasks in an interview for candidates that are straight up sh1tting their pants": If you communicate like this in an interview they will not only not hire you but you will also be red-flagged. You have to be able to code. What else do you expect as a software developer? Should the company hire a software developer who cannot code? A taxi driver who cannot drive? A gravedigger who cannot dig? "extremely random questions that weren't anywhere in the job description" Do you really expect the job description to list all possible questions? "Or some stupid language specific thing that you will never know unless you've been exposed to that specific thing." You were never exposed to that language construct because you never used it. And you never used it because you did not learn it in the first place. Can you code without it? Yes. After all, you can code in machine code. It is possible. But if you know the language features then your code will be better. It is only a "stupid feature" while you do not know it. Know your tool.
along with "fake it til you make it" being a people person can take you pretty far. companies value soft skills like being sociable, likeable, and effective communication extremely highly. if you have less dev experience but good people skills from previous work experience, that often translates well in the tech industry. this is especially true for juniors and beginners; companies believe you can learn the tech but they cant teach you to speak confidently in stand up or with a client
Software Development is tough. My experience is study every day. It is a cut throat environment because of constant fear of being let go. As a beginner , you will be given many tasks Seniors know are not good and for you it is a trial by fire. You will get little information and little help. Your responsibility to ask questions and set up meetings , also do not use inter - office chats like slack or Microsoft teams for anything personal or unprofessional. Lastly, your job is 24 hours. Meaning , at anytime you will feel a need to check out a branch on the repo, run a simulation on test environment, etc. I encourage you to do so and learn your future tasks at the company. This will help save time during last minute changes.
Most people calling themselves software engineers are barely competent and they certainly aren't engineers. A person with 20 or 30 years' experience who is still going with vast domain knowledge is incredibly useful and economically advantageous for a company. I'm not a people person but I started coding when I was 14 and 40 years later I still do it and people pay me lots of money. Very senior engineers don't just know how to solve a problem but they understand how businesses work. They understand the reasons why things work in the way they do. I started out with Bell Labs writing assembly language then C before working for Microsoft, JP Morgan, Sony, BAE Systems and Arm. New languages, frameworks, styles are easy because you know they're all based on the same fundamentals as 40 years ago. They're just another way of saying the same thing. My advice is simple: learn how to do one thing really, really well because once you've done that you can learn how to do another thing really well and eventually you understand that the next thing is simply a progression of what you've mastered before. Focus on the moment and build on your past. When you stop enjoying it stop.
A problem I am facing is that I have a portfolio of RestAPI examples and personal projects but none of the companies even care to know about any of that. The only thing they care about is whether or not the person has enough industry experience. If you have less than 5, you are screwed. More than 5? Good to go. If you are a junior or mid tier right now, the best you can do is be patient and hope for the best. Understand that unless you are business savvy person, most of this is outside of your control and it's not an indicator of your own talents. It's the job market that is looking for safe bets, seniors that don't exist for all the job and extreme risk aversion for any juniors.
"fake it till you make it" XD you made my day! Cheers! P.S. I've been applying for Junior Go Developer position over 8 months without success. I got really good rest and time for doing what I like in programming the most. But I'm running out of the budget and need some money to pay my bills every month so this is not so colorful like one can see it from outside.
As a senior developer, I am used to doing everything from scratch, it is almost impossible to find a job for me today. Most companies are actually looking for junior/mid-level positions BUT with a degree in computer science and 5 years of experience. Low-level projects that really require a senior level are very rare. There are hundreds of candidates for each offer. It's also hard to find them because every offers now mention "senior" even for very basic works The situation is crazy both ways...
Ok can you explain what it means to BUILD? Let's say I want to build a simple angular crud app and go about doing so by googling the steps and reading documentation on how it's done. I then go about copying the code I see to build my app. Now how is this different from following a video tutorial on RUclips on how to do the same thing if the results are the same? The steps provided by google to build the app amount to tutoring or a tutorial same as the RUclips video. So it's confusing when junior devs are told to build something and leave tutorial hell when they'll be googling tutorials to build the app anyway
No, you google the concepts needed to build the app, getting those concepts to work in practice will take lots of trial and error and that's where you will grow and learn. Break your crud app into small steps and achieve those small steps without copy pasting someone else's crud app that's the same idea. Reading the documentation and applying it to your personal project is learning while copying and pasting the code from a non-original idea off youtube is not learning. I hope you got something out of this because I also was in your shoes recently.
@@salem8909 My point is this. There is nothing wrong with copying and pasting other people's code you do it long enough you will know what not to copy. Break down an app into concepts and doing from documentation is literally the same thing because if you're not doing things the way they're supposed to be done the app won't work. And the idea of originality is also a separate matter all together because nothing is original and everything is built on top of each other. The reason I say this is tech giants always copying and stealing ideas from each other when they all spend billions in r&d with the sharpest brains in house. Why is this? Because progress comes from innovation and you only innovate by building on what already exists. Building say the iphone15 in 1950 would have been impossible because the technology to support didn't exist. I hope you get my point. There is nothing dirty about copying ideas that already exist and adding to them. But it seems there is this obsession with creating something phenomenal out of thin air without any tutorials which is hilarious because software engineers don't memorize code.
@@OfoeNelson hmm I was trying to get at learning, I don’t think copy and pasting is bad in general I just think it’s bad for learning, of course no one wants to reinvent the wheel but if you want to learn and grow you kinda have too. You can’t expect yourself to think like a senior programmer and have the right ideas all the time, it’s ok to be wrong or go about something inefficiently because then you learn why it’s bad and how to make it better, that’s what being an engineer is all about.
@@salem8909 What are you saying? Of course you CANT reinvent the wheel. Seniors copy and paste too no shame in it. Just pointing out that the whole romanticisation of software development needs to change for the better so it's less confusing to people who don't know better. You are not a typist you are a developer so if copying something gets the job done so be it. Of course you will learn how to build by copying and pasting if you do it for 100s of times you're bound to learn. I'm curious what level are you right now? L4 or L5?
@@OfoeNelson Look buddy you got a real bad attitude toward this, if you want to just copy and paste code all day and call yourself a developer then go for it, no one is stopping you. If you actually want to level up and improve your skills and be valuable to a company you wouldn’t copy paste everything, it’s quite simple tbh. Why have to look up the same thing 100 times instead of just being able to do it yourself by learning the required concepts, you need to think like an engineer bro, copy paste won’t get you past a technical interview especially in this market, again we’re taking about inexperienced developers.
At my current company, which is a small startup, they were looking for professionals with stacked skills. They needed someone with FE Engineering and UI/UX Design experience (UX Engineering), which I had and got employed with little to no competition. With skill stacking, you have more of a chance to reach the top 1% expert pool in the market in particular set of skills and become an outlier on interviews. Albeit, this is more valuable in job openings that explicitly asks for the set of skills you have, and usually at smaller teams, but it may be a viable strategy for some.
If you have a mature codebase, it just takes too much time to train juniors and also clean up all their pull requests. And we've had decades for most codebases to mature.
“Too much time” is BS. Its about money, and shareholders dont want to spend more money for training. What you say here is the equivalent of saying tech jobs should avoid hiring new people, which is actually pretty dumb.
@@perfectionbox And the irony is that most companies seem to value growth, learning and opportunity while expecting you to be nearly perfect candidate already 😂😂. If you aren't that then there's isn't a job opportunity.
Dude - giant corporations were OVER hiring in 2020 because money was FREE - the interest rate was down to near 1% so companies could pretend they had infinite money to hire tonnes of people. I got tonnes of random recruiters chasing after me even though I wasn't even job hunting, it was wild, glad I didn't take the bait. Now that we're back in reality, these giant companies had to drop a bunch of people and go back to normal. It sucks now, but it will normalize.
@@angelg3642 Yes - it was a very unusual and rare time to be employed. Things normalizing back down now means a lot of pain before the market is fully flat / reset. It sucks now until then, and will be hard for people starting now. Granted, you can be sure if you get a job now that you are cut-out for it, and there is nothing stopping you while you are young and have few financial obligations to code something yourself and produce your own value, especially with AI covering your weaknesses
Fake to til you make it .. I can tell you that you wouldn't last 5 minutes if I interviewed you. I have 30 years of experience BTW. If there is one thing I cannot tolerate its bullshitters. I can't stress this enough. Engineers must not be like sales people. I prefer honesty because then I know who I am dealing with when I delegate work to you. I need to know that it will get done. So tell it like it is. What I look for? First, basic skills. 2nd enthusiasm ( which is hard to gauge). But if I see that you do projects on your own initiative, and not just leet coding exercises .. or whatever its called - but rather if you do projects on your own, then I have a sense that you are in it because you love it and not simply because you are looking for a big paycheck. Folks with some skill, decent intelligence and an overabundance of enthusiasm should do fine despite the admittedly challenging times that you face today. Don't give up, don't bullshit.
One of the biggest mistakes as a senior developer is when you act like you know it all, but you don't. Senior developers don't hide their struggles. So it's the other way around. I worked at 2 companies (full time) since the recession, so let me tell you this. Nowadays, specialization means less chance of fulfilling the job description. Most of the job postings on LinkedIn, Indeed, etc., require you to have knowledge of cloud, devOps, UI/UX and many more, even if you are a FE developer. So, specialization is no longer relevant. And if you can spend 3-4 hours per day for 1 month (or 1 hour per day for 3 months) to learn new things like programming languages, fw, cloud services, you can have enough skills to get the job.
"Fake it till you make it" is a dead end job. At most it'll be entertaining but in a context of doing something serious with only yourself as a resource, you'll be scrounging for a use of something dumb you made up. The ultimate cosmic Irony. Another analogy, "Fake it till you make it" is like rock climbing with rope. most people do it, and to do the hardest climbs, everyone needs it, but those who are free, climb without rope.
7:10 - I was the guy people went to for answers. What changed was I did not know anybody on Mahogany Row any more. I used to know everybody (including the entrepreneur who started the company) and they knew me and knew the things I had done for the company. And a new management team rolled in, and I knew none of them, and none of them knew me. And, somehow, I fell out a window...
As a senior engineer with 7 years of experience, I mis-spelt 'appendLeft' instead of 'appendleft' and used a dictionary instead of a list in python in the last two weeks. And you think I'm two to three times more productive than a junior. Don't even ask about that time with a long dash, or em dash ("-")
12 YoE here. If you take the "fake it till you make it" approach; you're NGMI. Don't become an easy stepping stone for someone else. Remember others are collaborating and competing with you at the same time. If s/w engineering is tough, switch to product / program mgmt. Don't fake it, we'll bury you alive. As Leads & Seniors, part of our reputation is on the line to ensure you're skilled, competent and knowledgeable.
"Act like a senior engineer" translates to "Put whatever the job description is asking for on your resume, and fake it till you make it" This is coming from a QA with 10+ years (of REAL) experience. People do not care, they are just going down the checklist. Only thing that matters is the face to face interviews (zoom or otherwise).
The whole idea that "no one knows what they're doing" is you trying to make yourself feel better. There are plenty of experienced people who actually do have encyclopedic knowledge of systems and languages. Those people have more than 5-7 years of experience. "Fake it til you make it" is the worst advice because experienced people will see right through you.
The reason for this is overproduction of very low quality juniors - all those boot camp graduates, self-taughts and "graduates" of sub-par universities. It is nearly impossible now to filter out the worthy ones from this horrible horde. So employers have nothing else left but to compete for the seniors like there is no tomorrow.
@@vitalyl1327 Bruh, employers test your leetcode solving skills, ask you DSA even though nearly nobody uses it, ask you if you know the most random fact about a certain language, test your coding skills by giving you 30 minutes or less on some random tasks and straight up watching your every single move 😂. How tf do you think employees will do quality work when they are focused on preparing for these bs interviews 😂. That's not the junior's fault . The junior was working on what was expected of him to know for the interview and the job. Nobody ever taught the junior the important part of the work. Stop making excuses
@@angelg3642 cool story, bro, too bad it is not what's really happening. But if it helps you to rationalise for yourself why you cannot find a job - fine, go with it.
Tech careers are awful. Get out of tech. Even if you get hired the age discrimination will kill your career by 45. And experience doesn't matter after five years because everything changes. So at 50 you'll have the same experience as someone who's 30. And don't even get me started on the outsourcing and offshoring. My former employer has tons of entry level jobs --in India.
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As a Tech Lead, I can tell you to never ever act like you know more than you do. Quite the opposite. Where I've been successful it's because I'm not afraid to have people think I'm dumb and completely uninformed about everything.
take fake it till you make it with a grain of salt but i do stand by diving deep even when you’re clueless, it’s how you learn
... yeah... I would redirect that into --- 'just do it'
That's to say, if there's a hard job to do at work that you can see - say a whole system needs to get rewritten because the implementation is garbage, just re-write it. Yeah it's gonna be messy and break a lot of code, but if you have a better idea about how to make the thing to its job better and more cleanly, why not give it a shot? Put it on a branch and if it doesn't get merged it doesn't get merged. Great way to learn what's going on anyway.
I've had good success with that approach.
'Fake it til you make it' sounds like you're just going to nod a lot and people are going to see wind going through your ears. IDK great advice if you want to get into upper-management maybe. Not so great if you're looking to actually get stuff done.
Totally agree, how you evaluate your own skills really matters cause if your ego is higher than your skillset that's a red flag.
Yeah this has been my experience but in the security side of tech. People who pretend to know it all are going to make mistakes when the conversations get into the nitty gritty and trying to act too confident around people who actually do know their stuff can make it look worse. I do get where the fake it til make it comes from as far as being able to talk a good game and know enough lingo to use it. In general the advice to "act like a senior" is fairly valid you should try to act like the role you want or at least do the things that a senior role would do.
@@namanhkapur "no one really know what they're doing, we're all just trying to figure it out"
This is not how it works my man. I think that part of the reason companies are hiring seniors is expressly because they want people who know what they are doing.
The thing that worked okay for my fellow bootcampers was to reach out to medium-sized, older local/regional businesses. They often have a legacy system that they have to train new hires on regardless of the applicants background. It's not sexy and the pay isn't amazing, but it gets coding employment on your resume.
can i ask where you went to bootcamp, and if you got the job?
This is what I did, somewhat unpleasant experience but kept me employed long enough that I eventually made it to Google 🙏 those stepping stone jobs are real
I survived the 2001-2002 recession by putting my name in with Technical Temp companies. Update an Access DB here for a week, then write a Crystal Report somewhere else for a day... go to another site and pound data into Excel... Personally, I was fine with that. My overhead was low, I had a roommate to help with my mortgage. I only ended up in a salaried job because it was a temp-to-perm assignment, and the company decided to "perm" me.
@@zzmane Truecoders, currently just supplementing my school teacher job with freelance work.
Interesting, so you walk into the businesses or find their recruiters online and reach out to them?
This remembers me the "5 years of experience required" for a 2 years old platform.
LOL
I've encountered that so many times in interviews, and when I call them out on it, they stammer and stutter LOL
Or the one where they asked the guy who wrote something to have 10 years of experience on it, despite it being much younger than 10 years itself lol.
Minimum 15yrs experience with Svelte
It was a posting for python's fastapi
All these companies hiring only senior developers not realizing that after a while they will face a massive problem which is that no one was hiring junior developers and it is those developers who eventually become the senior developers that they want. If no one wants junior devs, in 10-15 years the no. of senior devs is going to plummet, because the people who would have been seniors by then were not able to get the jobs that would have given them that level of experience.
That's an over-exaggeration, I worked in a big tech. We still have ample young junior/middle level devs. They are in their mid-20s and have long runway for their career growth. But I agree, I have not seen many interns or devs who are fresh out of college
They'll say dumb shit like "AI will be able to write websites at that point", failing to realize that AI is a tool. Take search engines for example, so much information you can access, but if you don't know how to query it all of it is useless and even dangerous. Most people don't know how to properly use a search engine or ask well formulated questions, you're telling me that they can instruct AI on how to build something for them? lol!
Its all about short-term profits. I doubt many of these executives even care about their companies 15 years from now.
These companies don't know what's going to happen in 3-4 years times, or expects to shuffle their workforce by then.
They probably (realistically) expect civilization to have ended by that point. They won't be hiring developers, they'll be hiring armed guards for their bunker.
Fake it until you make it is somewhat good advice, because a typical person is probably underselling their skills. However, a senior does the opposite. A senior loudly and confidently proclaims when they don’t know something and can lead a discussion to figure it out.
I took the most value out of this comment, as an entry level SWE starting out in intern positions(I graduate in a year hoping to find entry level SWE positions), I'm getting the biggest imposter syndrome from fake it till you make it, but I feel like with how competitive the market is, it's what you have to do. But once I get a full time position, I'm definitely gonna be more honest with my co-workers to solve things more efficiently. Thanks for your comment! If you have any tips for new coming SWEs, i'd love to hear it!
Lmao not at my company
I've replaced the phrase "fake it until you make it" to "do it until you are it" as it gives me less imposter syndrome
love it
Your phrase is indeed way much better.
I've grown to hate the original mantra. I met a lot BS professionals who would swear by it and actually "succeed". For a while though, before everyone could catch their crap by a mile.
I mean, people need food at the table and pay the bills, so if necessary, go for it, but don't live by it. Also, please don't flaunt it to coworkers.
Like yours WAY MORE.
Way "better" mindset.
@@k-yo Business isn't like RUclips, you can't fake certain things.
@@bb5242 I'd argue "fake it 'til you make it" tends to get applied a lot in the "buy my course" consultant space. There are indeed fakes that swear by that slogan, but merely "make it being a fake".
OPs alternate slogan seems more practice oriented, akin to "the master has failed more often than the student has tried".
I'm an American who has lived in the East for 20+ years. The market for developers in countries like India and Vietnam are stronger than ever. I have a friend in Vietnam who has a software engineering firm. He says it's difficult to even get junior devs. American firms are outsourcing more while assigning the jobs needing real finesse to the highly skilled American developers. We've seen this short-sighted max-profit-now mindset in other industries. It is this mindset which has decimated American manufacturing. Look at semiconductors, for example. What as once in the US wheelhouse has now been gone so long that the US can't revamp domestic industry because it simply doesn't have the expertise, let alone the infrastructure. Look forward 10 years. Polish, Vietnamese, and Indian firms will have been investing in juniors, and happily picking up all the junior work that US firms farmed out. Tech dominance will shift to the developing world and the US will be even less competitive than it is now.
Is your Vietnamese friend hiring right now? I'd like to try to apply to his firm.
@@harddiskkosong3661 Apa km org Indonesia?
@@apl1568 ya benar
@@harddiskkosong3661 susah cari kerja tech di Vietnam klo ga bisa berbahasa Vietnam. Ada banyak kerja di Indonesia, kan?
@@apl1568 lumayan banyak. tapi kembali lagi, agak bias ke senior lvl yang minimal harus punya 3 tahun pengalaman. sebetulnya saya ingin segara memulai berkarir di kancah internasional. meski idealnya saya harus menabung pengalaman kerja minimal 5 tahun dan sambil terus mengembangkan keahlian khusus. tapi saya tetap mencoba apply saja. it's not hurt to try.
keep studying, keep practicing, keep your resume and portfolio up to date, apply
it is HARD, but it is possible to find a new job
YES
I’m trying to hire principal engineers and I noticed a lot of the “fake it till you make it” crowd just wastes everyone’s time.
And i've noticed that companies that do not put the salary ranges in their JDs just waste everyones time as well, but here we are!
The job searching process sucks for everyone it seems every since its been bloated and corporatized. The Tech companies became the thing they set out to "Disrupt".
Principal Engineers are always tough to hire. References are a very good source
The reason is simple. Companies are GREEDY and don’t want to invest in their employees and train them. They’d rather get instant gratification with people with 5-years experience already.
Exactly. This whole idea have providing solutions to job seekers in this market comes down to more grindset BS.
The world is supposed to be more efficient, and here I am working twice as hard as my parents to make half the money.
I work for a certain company that I won't mention here. We trained and had a very techy CEO who encourages non programmers to be programmers if he joined us ... guess what? We have 200% more engineers than neccessary according to our board of directors and have had constant instability and crashes costing us millions! Now we only hire senior engineers. Sorry but you all can be dangerous with production code and we have a no hire jr or intern now. Admittingly I would not be hired here now as we become conservative. We need more architects and not genius programmers making critical design decisions.
It's a vicious cycle. Companies know that engineers tend to leave after 1-2 years in order to get a better salary at a different company (I've been doing this my entire professional career like most others), so what's the point of hiring juniors and training them up when they are just going to leave? Now said companies could increase the junior's salary as they gain experience to become more of a mid-level, but there's a 99% chance that is not going to happen because it's exactly as you said, companies are greedy and don't want to invest in their employees.
I'm currently in a software engineering bootcamp and will be looking for a job around summertime. What is your advice for someone who is new to this? I am willing to get any developer job though. Not just "tech industry". I know I'll need a showcase of projects.@@TundraShark
@@timgibney5590 you can still train people on how to be architects
Sadly, even as a senior engineer with 25+ years and a 6-figure salary, I got laid off too with the lame excuse of "We need to chase revenue and cut cost" It is an unfortunate fact that the more you succeed and earn, the more at risk you become. Also once you are over 50, corporations seem to think you are too old...how stupid!
Sorry to hear that. I don’t want to comment too much on your particular circumstances because I don’t know too much about it aside from your comment. So I will focus on what I think about the changing landscape of software engineering and why it might have made technical experience of older engineer less valuable.
I am in the field for 5 years and my uncle just retired with 30+ years of programming experience.
From my conversations with him, he was baffled by our responsibilities and how much we earn nowadays (the fact that right out of university we get 6 figures baffles anyone who is not familiar with the field)
In FANG like companies, we are expected to learn schema design, project planning (to a degree), implementation, test design and framework, deployment automation on the job.
These are all things that a typical “senior engineer” needs to have knowledge of nowadays. In his company, there are database admins to handle the schema, programmer to implement and qa to automate and do the testing.
It is a bit unfortunate, because when the landscape change, technical expertise becomes less relevant. Same can be said to my generation with the AI revolution incoming.
On a side example , my uncle was so curious that how are we supposed to know everything. he went ahead and asked me some questions about SQL optimization. Honestly I don’t know the answer with 100% confidence, but within 1 min of googling to confirm some of my assumptions, I was able to produce the right answer.
"They act like they know what they are doing, even if they don't" is the most junior mindset you can possibly have. Mark of a true senior is that they know their shit, but they also know their limitations and are not scared to ask/collaborate with people in areas where they have defficiencies. What makes someone a senior is not that they know everything, but that they know HOW to ask someone who does have relevant knowledge the right questions, so they can get whats going on. In the end what you should be striving to do, is to create the best possible technical solution. If you have the knowledge to do so: great, you can do it. If not, you need to be able to talk to people either to have them chip in or at least get you to a point where you can take over. Thats exactly what makes seniors so valuable: They are ressourcfull enough to get to where they need to go, even if they dont have the necessary knowledge when they are given the task.
fair but the point is no one knows what they're doing, we're all just figuring it out and i stand by that
gonna side more with namanh here - I'm seeing that a true senior trait, perhaps even 'staff' or 'consultant' trait, that juniors lack is the ability to deep dive and figure it out yourself - sometimes the original people that wrote the area are gone and the documentation is nonexistent. Being able to figure out other people's code, with their own patterns etc, and suss out their intentions, to the point of being able to find bugs and resolve them in line with the existing code, ie maintaining it - is in itself a skill set that you develop on the job. Few are willing to do so without handholding (which develops the skill much less - a myopia that skips the learning) - and others that are capable would rather just throw it out and do a full rewrite - usually not worth it to business just to fix a few bugs. More often than not a full rewrite just results in the same situation later on anyways after the rewriter has left. 13yrs+ sw dev here.
@@lucidiusdonovan3807 I 100% agree with you, those are the qualities of a senior dev for sure. But what you describe (in my opinion) is not "fake it until you make it" but that's just "doing the work".
@@lucidiusdonovan3807 Honestly if you're talking about hard skills then you're not very senior. Everybody can figure everything out. You need to know the jobs of everyone surrounding you, everyone's skill levels, and the correct people to forward any questions you receive from juniors to. You also need to work on your mentorship abilities and figure out exactly how to do what your immediate boss does. Hard skill development is the domain of juniors.
@@namanhkapurThis is the honest to God truth. Most seniors are having a hard enough time trying to figure out wth we're even supposed to be doing.
The tasks seniors get can be seriously nasty. I have a project in the pipe that's going to require me to learn native Windows development, something I've never done before, and honestly that's the fun part (I also need to untangle a bunch of messes that will come from trying to integrate features into our systems).
It's hard to give learning opportunities to juniors when there's still so much seniors have to learn on such a frequent basis. And companies need to much of a mish-mash of skills to not lean on just raw experience (rather than efficient training)
I know the pain. I graduated recently and while visiting my university in Germany I gained a little over 2 years of work coding experience. I also worked as a freelancer for half a year, participated in plenty of hackathons getting prices and I still struggle to get a junior level position.
Now I stopped rolling out applications with the old mindset of developers being highly desirable and allowing me to demand +50k a year. I poured in a lot more effort into my CV than I had to in the past, ask for 20% less salary or even lower for a more appealing position and hope that I can get over the hurdle to accumulate even more work experience while I work night shifts at Burger King for minimum wage.
It's very exhausting to work full-time physical labor while trying to manage life and improving your skill set by building things of your own because close to every entry level job has crazy high requirements.
Du arbeitest bei Burger King? Verstehe ich dich richtig?
Du machst irgendwas falsch. Du hast doch sogar schon zwei Jahre Berufserfahrung.
Es wird doch an allen Ecken und Enden gesucht.
Bleibt nur eine Frage für mich: Was machst Du falsch?
Wohnst Du in nem Dorf und willst da nicht weg? Selbst dann, ich arbeite 100% remote und es werden inzwischen so viele Stellen remote ausgeschrieben, eben weil so ein Mangel an Entwicklern besteht.
Mensch, wir stellen sogar Leute ein, die keine Berufserfahrung haben und Motiviation zeigen, dass sie den Job lernen wollen. Und diese Kollegen wollen trotzdem gern 50k aufwärts und bekommen das dann auch, weil sie sonst nen anderen Job annehmen.
"It's very exhausting to work full-time physical labor" Das glaube ich sofort. Du musst als DEV arbeiten und das ASAP.
Meine Befürchtung wäre sonst eher, dass die 2 Jahre Berufserfahrung sonst eher ein Nachteil als ein Vorteil werden, nach dem Motto "Der hat 2 Jahre Erfahrung aber schafft es dann keinen Job zu finden? Der hat wohl keinen Skill."
Denn eins ist klar, als Dev braucht man das Können. Zeugnisse und co sind großflächig völlig egal, aber man muss was leisten können.
Alles Gute dir
ach mir fällt grad auf, vielleicht bist Du ja aus Deutschland weg, aus der EU raus ... dann wäre das natürlich eine Erklärung.
Angstellte außerhalb der EU ist schon extrem unangenehm für die Unternehmen, da kann ich verstehen dass das nicht gemacht wird.
@@justsomeone953Ne, ich lebe in Deutschland. Mein Lebenslauf war vorher schon sehr minderwertig und hat mich nicht in dem besten Licht dastehen lassen, aber es war gut genug um mir die Interviews einzuholen und ich hatte die freie Auswahl vor ein paar Jahren.
Jetzt aber hab ich mit dem gleichen Lebenslauf endlos viele Absagen bekommen. Ich hab ihn vor kurzen signifikant verbessert, weswegen ich hoffe, dass es daran lag, aber der alte Lebenslauf und die leicht bessere Version haben mir 2 Interviews gebracht von 20~30 Bewerbungen.
Ich hoffe, dass die Kombination von sehr sauberen Lebenslauf und geringer Lohnanfrage schnell Ergebnisse erzielt den ich bin schon auf Jobsuche seit 1 Monat und habe gerade nichts am laufen außer ein bisschen Burger flippen.
Ich kann dir gerne mal mein Lebenslauf schicken, falls du drüber gucken willst.
@@justsomeone953 Nein, ich lebe noch in Deutschland aber habe aktuell diese Probleme. Der Punkt am Ende ist das ich gute Job Angebote bekommen habe vor 2 Jahren mit hohen Gehaltsvorschlägen trotz geringen Aufwand. Ich hab damals wirklich nicht viel Energie darin investieren müssen um voran zu kommen. Mit den gleichen hab ich seit einen Monat keinen Erfolg.
Ich hab den jetzt signifikant überarbeitet, verbessert und viele Gedanken hineinfließen lassen. Ich hoffe das es daran gelegen hat.
Do you live in America ? I work in Germany and the dev market seems more optimistic than other countries
This video reminded me that life is about optimizing for share-holder value!
Ditto. People are way to complacent about it too.
start a company (a cooperative)
I look forward to this series. And we're all rooting for you that you'll get many offers!
Same brother, it’s frustrating to say the least. I was laid off last November and have applied for over 200+ jobs. No invite for an interview but I agree with you in a sense about faking till you make it.
cheers man wishing you the best
"Fake it until you make it" is the fastest way to lose the respect of the senior developers. I can teach someone who asks for help, but I cannot help someone who makes stupid mistakes. It might be different about the recruiting process though, there nobody has time to understand everything the candidate can do. 20+ years
@@noway8563yea, but when you're entering the market recruiters literally won't take you if you admit the things you don't know.
@ 9:05: "The market is tough, yes. But it's not if you'll get a job, but when?".
I love that man!
As AI and experienced programmers
Personally, I've seen something a bit more sinister happening. While yes, Senior and Staff engineers are still in very high demand, many companies lowered the requirements by a few years (e.g. you can now get many Senior positions after 3-5 years, rather than 5-10 years as it was before). BUT, the pay was bumped down about 1 level lower. So now, you'll be hired to do Senior work with Senior-level expectations, even after 3-5 years, but you'll still be paid as a mid-level engineer.
That has always been happening. The salary range for a senior dev across all companies is something ridiculous like $80k-$800k. The title is meaningless. All that matters is the salary. Titles can be faked on LinkedIn and noon cares. Your next employer won’t call the past one and ask to verify that you were a senior developer.
@@Noah_527 Not saying you are wrong about your main point but my employer definitely ran a work background check that shows titles and any job I had ever used my social on.
Not sure if it's new but blew my mind as I had some side jobs that popped up that were not on my resume. Got the job, but still, crazy.
@@gamereactzAre you working for a large or govt company? I've never had an employer run more than a criminal background check on me. I think one actually ran a credit check which was weird.
Pulling up all jobs makes sense since you SSN can be used to pull up your W2s and 1099s. Did they show you the output of the work background check? The same title can be vastly between jobs so I'd think it could be explained away to a future employer.
Were the side jobs paid using cash or did they 1099 you? One of my side jobs only zelled me monthly and the other 1099ed me so I did have to pay tax each year for it.
I'm in my first job, basically doing freelance projects but for a senior developer and under his supervision.
I've demonstrated enough resilience and passion that he wanted me to continue working for him.
But I don't know what I'll do next, I'm 6 months in with the first 3 months being like an internship but the last 3 as an actual job.
Mind if I ask you where do you search for freelance on? Would it be UpWork, etc? I've been unemployed for over 6 months now and I'm starting to consider but don't know where to start.
I entered coding 24 years ago, and I keep needing to remind myself that young developers just need time and practice, that just because I can architect and code well engineered systems, does not automatically mean the rest of the world can also do this. I've been coding a for a very long time, across many different languages and platforms, from fintech to assembly...
It takes dedication and a lot tenacity to just keep going.
Today, it is expected that experience is gained on your own time. Its absolutely disgusting, and will more than likely turn me away from working in tech. I dont want to work for an industry like that, let alone bend over backwards improving myself for it.
@@nickelbutt when I was 15, I was learning how to program VGA ports to display custom graphics in 320x200 resolution. By the time I was at Uni, I was writing games in assembly. I think self learning is an absolute must in all cases.
@@nickelbuttno company wants to pay you to learn, they expect you to produce during work hours and learn on your own time. However if you don’t love learning technology on your own time it will be difficult to succeed, judging from my long experience in the biz
Specializing is actually death right now in this market. This market is good for experienced generalists.
why
This. I go wide and show I can be deployed wherever and I’ll survive. Granted I have always worked for startups/small company’s so that’s my target demographic 😂
Those aws reinvents help a lot when pick up infrastructure skills
@kapur An experienced generalist with an AI is better than a Specialist. AI is going to kill the specialists. The smaller the team the less valuable the specialist. And the teams will only get smaller from now on. This will be different for Big Tech (for some time), but for industry-at-large I think that's the trend.
AI is also going to extend the length of the career of experienced developers who have other things to worry in life besides work.
Then you don't have a job 😂
I don't think so, it's the opposite.
"No one knows what they're doing" - this statement sums up why companies are hiring less junior engineers.
Many senior engineers do in fact know what is going on. The best senior engineers I've met can often isolate and debug problems without having to look at the code. They can determine the source just by you describing the issue
He is a RUclipsr incentivzed to sell the dream lmao. He is paid for views, not teaching people to code. He doesn't know himself. It's blind leading the blind and it's sad to watch.
I can confirm, my tech lead can in many instances take one glance at my code and then spot the issue. The ability to deduce the solution the just by looking at the code takes both practice and experience. He can look at a cloud architecture design and spot flaws right away. That kind of foresight really is necessary and required and it’s why I don’t ask for more money until my skills reasonably fall in line with his.
Market is messed up. Graduated from top 10 uni and I have failed to get a job. Its been 1.5 years and still trying. Last interview was 6 months ago.
damn dude
I don't want to be that guy, but what did you do in school to help you out?
Congrats on graduating from a top university, but there's more to it than just graduating.
(I'm sorry if this comes out as sounding aggressive, it could be my own bias coming from a lower ranked school in my state, I didn't major in CS, but got a software engineering job before graduating lined up)
Like, my personal mantra when it comes to school is never, where you went, but what did you do when you were there.
And I get that the things that worked for me in 2016 don't work today, it's just, I hate this attitude when I know universities offer so much outside of the classes
If not IN the classes if you go for it (and research what classes are available to you that offer skills you want to get better at, make the degree work for you, that you WORK for that degree)
Like, I understand my own personal edge, being in a field of a bunch of CS majors as someone who did IT, where in my school, being an IT major was considered a dumber CS major who couldn't do math. But man, I did it. But I made use of the networking tools and what was around me in college, name dropping people for internships, school clubs, hackathons, game jams, learning how to interview people as a college newspaper Columnist, did a youth group (I'm not religious) where I was a graphic designer, stuff like that,
Schools offer more than just degrees, please, folks, I just want people to know that there are tools there that you should be using. Your school wants you hired as much as you do, so use your school in helping you get a job
@@FF18Cloud, agreed 100%. It is also very important that we keep a constant growth mindset and keep learning.
Too often people only engage in learning/building while they at school. Focus on building stuff and be obsessive with adding values.
We all listening to a channel called “What’s in it for me”. Nobody cares what you want unless you can do something for them first.
try applying for scrum masters job
@@FF18Cloud so thats where i messed up. Once covid hit i did the bare minimum. It really doesnt matter what uni someone went to , it matters what you did (now i know that). So atm doing a few projects that ive always wanted to do pre uni. Trying to improve my github. But yh things r rough as i even got rejected from internships (paying barely anything). Didnt even get an interview.
Good to know I need to be a subject matter expert right out of college just to get an interview 👌🏻
One more tip that might help: If you're shooting for these top FAANG places and not having any luck, definitely consider applying to smaller, lesser known places. Preferably those that take at least a little pride in their engineering culture. You can work there for a few years, trying your best to learn and grow, and suddenly you'll be mid-level or a senior engineer yourself. It might take a bit longer but at least you'll get paid and get some real world experience. Just be careful not to develop any bad habits in these roles, and keep up to date with sought-after technologies. Who knows, maybe you can convince them to let you build a project using LLMs / GraphQL / Spark / Rust / Whatever.
Thanks for sharing the video Namanh, and sorry about the layoffs. It's courageous of you to be so open and positive about it.
Also a correction: senior engineers typically require MORE onboarding time, not less than juniors. Also, they don't just magically crank out 2-3x the amount of work... the work they do is substantially different. They take charge of projects and understand them at a higher level, they're in charge of communication, planning, and managing tech debt. A mid-level engineer should not be a worse coder than a senior. The skills that differentiate mid and senior level are almost all soft skills and "wisdom" via experience, things that you can only learn by actually doing the job.
As someone that is looking for his first job and screaming about "Entry level being 5 years of experience". Thank you for this. This is just what I needed to hear. I might go into some grunt work in the meantime, just to survive. But as a dev. I really just wanna work remotely and not get stuck in a warehouse somewhere. I will follow this series with great interest. (.Net dev here)
you got this bro
You got this. It is doable. Need to keep learning and developing your skills. Not just technical coding skills but also your resume, projects, portfolio, interview skills, communication skills... Find those things that might be weak and fix them. Consistancy is key and you will get it eventually. (speaking as a dev who has just under 5 years and 4 years of it fully remote, as a Full stack .Net and React/Angular dev).
@@neomangeo7822 Thank you for that. I am trying to learn everyday. I am still in my vocational education for a couple of weeks more. What would be a good size for a project I could show someone? I mean. I was thinking of making a site for a bunch of different timers I need everyday. Like, drink water reminder every 20-30 min or a stretch reminder etc with todo-list and tracking. Making it as a pwa-app. Such things, are that presentable enough? Or do you have an example on what I am supposed to be doing with my time? :)
trying just to work remote will mean you'll have insane competition for every single application
I have actually followed all your advice already and now I'm in a self employed position in education. I'm not really fully using my comp sci degree but tbh I don't care it's paying the bills. At the end of the day, if you have ambition, you are only going to stay working for someone the first 3 to 5 years to raise capital and experience for your own company.
once you git gud, you become impossible to ignore. i think people misunderstand what that means and spend all of their time leetcoding and solely studying system design. sure, those things are important, but the market is oversaturated with such leetcode monkeys who think that being a SWE is only being good at DSA. in reality being a good SWE means being able to think about the bigger picture of problems, understanding how to build good "product", being a reliable and likeable team member, and a good communicator. these are what i think about when hiring someone. to entry-level folks, i strongly suggest working on your own end-to-end personal projects that solve real-world issues, and getting involved in online or in-person tech communities to share ideas or even work together.
💯🫡
That is true, but companies keep dishing out Leetcode questions in interviews. Even if you know DSA very well, you’re always gonna have to waste your time brush up on the very minute details that you tend to forget when you’re employed and actually building stuff. You need to remember that the people doing the interviewing saw the problem and solution beforehand and often don’t even measure up to the expectations they have for you. It’s all a load of bs. I suspect THIS is an overlooked reason why layoffs happened. They hired a bunch of juniors who can’t do anything but Leetcode, then wonder why they’re not productive at the company when they incentivized them to only Leetcode in place of building actual skills. I haven’t had a single tech interview that asked me anything of relevance to the job, besides one with Asana a few years back, for an apprenticeship role. How assbackwards.
@@anclaudys I think leetcode started as a way to "weed" out candidates that did not meet minimum skill levels, but may have backfired. It used to be that programming interviews were interactive. Getting the wrong answer wasn't necessarily an interview failure. Failing came if the candidate would/could not "work the problem" on followup questions. "Too many" of these candidates were getting to in person interviews, so leetcode came in to "save" interviewer time at the cost of losing touch with the mind behind the answer.
@@ebs-user-xs8ll4bk4d Working through a problem on an actual white board is a better way to "rate the candidate's thought process" indeed. Making them code the solution out via video easily becomes a race to the bottom on who can solve the problem more accurately.
I'm not discounting DSA and leetcode style thinking (just DSA thinking). I'm having to choose between a singly linked list algorithm or a queue while coding a project on RUclips live as I'm typing this lmaoo
I don't think it matters, quite honestly. Most "senior" devs have lousy skills but think they're great. I think it is very hard for companies to recognize real talent these days. They seem to reward everything but actual talent and know how.
Companies don’t make new software anymore. Most people just use 3-5 apps and consume content
I think part of the problem is unreasonably high starting salaries and reluctance to then raise salaries of the engineers who prove to be useful. If you're assuming your junior developer is going to be useless, starting out with a probationary period makes sense. If they really are pretty useless you can end things there or offer to keep them around on a low salary. If they're useful, start paying them mid level engineer salaries after a couple months.
In other words, instead of spending tons of effort on guessing if someone you met maybe two or three times in interviews is going to be a good developer, give them a chance and then offer an appropriate amount of money to keep them around.
How to get a job for a modest salary: be code superman, ubermensch even do everything cary the company singlehandedly be everyone's teacher. So you can get to try and not be replaceable for a "competitive salary".
I swear if I could improve things for everyone I would.
idk man, as a senior engineer i've discussed this with friends and colleagues, and everyone agrees that AI will replace the grunt and bulk work often done by entry level employees. The market is not looking good at all for newly graduated students because they will be competing with AI for many years until they become ''useful''. You need to be able to show a significant amount of skill and work on different projects etc and this means, for new graduates, alot of unpaid labor basically. The job market is going to become really weird the coming years and I feel sorry for people that study software or computer engineering right now. (I live in Sweden so maybe this is only applicable here).
My friend working as an art lead at a game company said the same thing since AI art became a thing though he is very worried about it: if AI replaced all the junior, who's going to be the senior in the future?
With new disruptive technologies comes new potential jobs and I think learning software engineering will always be relevant.
@@l2xsniper1yes, but the transition is painful nonetheless
@@l2xsniper1 Yeah, not always with the same requirement and salary in the past though.
@@l2xsniper1 Not really. There will be a few jobs created but most of the regular work that normal people can do will be done by AI. In the past if humans stopped building say buggy whips they could after a period of pain and hardship build cars. This is different because the number of humans needed is going to be drastically reduced. Imagine if we stopped making buggy whips and never needed people to make cars. That's AI.
Also people tend to ignore the individuals in these big societal shifts. A lot of people are going to suffer a lot of hardship as AI takes over.
.
I’m a senior engineer at one of the biggest and most well known companies that invested a lot into AI.
I disagree with “fake it till you make it”.
The more senior you are, the more work is expected and if you significantly over-inflate your knowledge and therefore the expectations, you will just burn out.
Btw. AI will rewrite the whole industry very soon anyway, and there will be even tougher market conditions.
Imo we have about up to 5 years before there will be a revolutionary change in how software is made. Make the most of it.
This is an honest comment. As a junior, I was arrogant. I thought I knew everything. The more senior I get, the more I easily say "I don't know the answer to your question".
"Be a people person" - This is the #1 advise. So many people focus on their leetcode answers and forget that this is an interview... How you "feel" in the interview is more important that how many answers you have recited in your head.
good advice for life too i think, people remember how you made them feel not what you did
Solid strat. Soft skills is how I compensate for my professional failings 😅
1:39 - I am 65, I have 43 years of experience in high-performance computing, specializing in device drivers, OS integration and tuning, working in many languages, database, networking... and they pushed me out a window two months ago... just spoke with the former manager of OS software who, after 33 years with the company, has moved (or was moved) to being more involved in his church full-time...
To be clear. I sub'd because you've got the best pro-mic setup I've seen thus far. Style points awarded.
let's goooooooo
Me, a L6 engineer, taking advice from an unemployed dev...
Still very insightful, thanks Namanh!
if you’ve come to flex, pls do it elsewhere…
All the IT at my company was outsourced to India a few years ago. Now we have a load of people who can barely write clear english emails, let alone collaborate on large projects. But this is the future.
Being a people person is very important skills in today market. I have a friend who has 3 years of experience in infrastructure but he wants to move to iOS without commercial experience, then I introduced him to another friend who brought his cv straight to hiring manager. After 3 rounds of interview he got the mid level job in a med-big company.
It's been about 6 months and +300 applications with no dice. And look, I get why a company would not want to hire a junior, but I just don't understand how sustainable this is when the juniors of now have no opportunity to become the seniors of the future. It's come to the point where they don't even want to "pay with experience" anymore. This is stupid.
i empathize trust me
It's tough for junior engineers right now, and it's not sustainable long term. The game companies are playing is to stop hiring short term and have a large hiring spike again when the economy does better or the talent well runs dry.
The advice I give junior people looking for a job right now is to go after paid internships as well. Getting your foot in the door is the most important step right now.
@@muizzy Paid internships are 99.9% of the time only for current students. What about the majority of entry level and junior developers looking for work that are already out of school and couldn't get/ or find an internship in school? They are fucked.
@@vectoralphaSec Apply anyway, just use an outdated resume or one where the graduation date is ambiguous, e.g. 2024.
Maybe you're going to hear "sorry, we only accept students", but at least you're in the room with the recruiter and/or doing the interviews. You can ask them for advice on finding a position, which makes it so much easier. Perhaps they even have another open position which isn't public (yet). They've already determined they like you, so maybe they can pass you along.
Like I said in the earlier message, getting your foot in the door is the most important thing right now. If you're respectful and honest about your situation, the worst that can happen is that you get the same no as if you didn't apply, but the potential upside is enormous. Just don't pretend you're still in school during the interview or phone screen when asked about it.
like me :(@@vectoralphaSec
“Fake it till you make it” has to be the worst advice I’ve ever heard. If you wanna act like a senior, stop being the guy who implements features and fixing bugs and start owning functional areas and leading projects… in addition to fixing bugs and implementing features. The devs who can email are forever getting senior positions over the devs who know react better than you. Adopt a level of cross functional thinking and only then will you be allowed to act like you know what you’re talking about when you don’t- cuz you can find out in 2 hours with 5 emails.
How will the guy get to that point in nobody in their mother wants to give him a chance to grow and learn 🤔 ?
How can I get to the god damn point of getting hired ? Hell on one of my last interviews I outperformed 90% of their candidates and showed the necessary qualities for a long lasting and hardworking individual with growth mindset AAAAAAND that was not enough.
Nah bro, F the companies.
2022 easy cake, you know "T" you got the job. Now it's hard thank god i able to get job from 2 companies with senior role from SE 2 in last company(I have +4 yr exp). What i learn from process now interviews are very less as one platform i use to get 10+ companies to apply+ interview are not able to refer one company for 1.5 month.
While there's a real problem with intake of junior engineers, there's an even bigger problem for what "Senior" means. The vast majority of "Senior" software engineers today are at the level we expected of juniors only 10 years ago. And the competence levels continue to rapidly slide downhill. Everyone is scrambling for seniors because they're trying to get hold of at least a few really competent folks and have no time or resources to try and train up juniors.
Senior developer sounds impressive, but in my experience it just means "not a beginner any more". Most senior devs I ever met weren't anything special.
@@StarsMannyyes, that is what it's supposed to mean. What do you propose we do with the overwhelming number of perpetual beginners that are now called "Senior"?
I’m not so sure that specialization will be the need in the future. My intuition tells me that the Sr Engineers are in demand now because they have a broader swath of experience across different areas. IT has changed a lot in 20 years. Many of us “older folks” who have been around that long see that where we had wide access to all parts of the dev cycle and components, newcomers are relegated to learning a single piece of the “assembly line”.
It’s like being part of a company where everyone used to know how to build a complete guitar but now you only put screws in keys on the head stock. They’ll never gasp how to build a complete guitar because that just isn’t how it’s done now.
I graduated in 2015 here in northern Europe. And they claimed there was a massive shortage of developers here for years. In short it was basically close to impossible to get a permanent job after I passed my Developer exam. Hundreds of rejections over the years, and pretty much the fastest way to get work was if you knew the right people in the industry. So all your talk about how easy it was to get a job pre-2020 is pretty much nonsense, at least in my country.
Do you have a developer job today?
Your channel itself is a great example of positive stuff you can do when things get tough. Best of luck.
appreciate it man
TL:DR "If you want a job act like a slave for your boss and a fake happy clown for your coworkers"
Thanks Namanh for another great video about the software engineering job market.
Let's see if there'll be any correction in the second half of this year.....
I hope that it would be much sooner than that. We'll find out.
thanks for watching!! see you on the stream soon
Agree with this…. did the specializing over 12 years ago. Now I’m building a new tech practice for my company
I really dont believe in fake it til you make it.
You definitely need to be more confident than the job descriptions call for because those jds are usually wrong anyway.
But dont sell yourself as more than you really are. Go out, apply, interview, and you will find where your level really is.
Best advice here is networking. Getting to know people especially hiring managers at social events can really shortcut your way into roles but it is definitely the long game. For some people it is just a year of networking and they get a job through it. It took me 10 years for my network to have a role i was ready for. But all the networking i did exposed me to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences that i took with me into interviews.
The ONLY one true way to get actual real-life experience is to actually work for a company and gain experience on the job itself from the day-to-day work that is done there. BUT if no company is hiring entry level devs with no experience anymore then how in the hell will they ever get that real world experience?? They will be stuck at the bottom of no professional experience forever by force essentially. This is a massive problem that will come back to bite all these companies in the ass one day big time. What companies need to do is create a brand-new program where they hire entry level devs for the cheapest possible. We're talking $40k - $45k annually, not 6 figures. Then mold these people into the developers that the company wants to have by training them and giving them that experience. If every company was forced by law to have this type of program, it would solve a lot of problems for developers/ the employees. From the very beginning Entry Level meant straight out of college, and no work experience at all whatsoever. This has been forgotten and it's not good for the industry as a whole.
Look for a new profession
Paid experience is professional experience, keep that in mind
Right. But the problem is that no one is getting that paid experience.@@kragael
Why would they do that? Development is what they want to do.@@nikm4253
Awesome video Namanh! This was really well structured and echoes a lot of what I've seen as well
thanks man!
Thanks for this video. Some actual solid advice.
Love how bro shows he’s got 3 years of experience while pretending he’s got experience to tell you how to overcome the market. Bro get back to applying to jobs and getting some real offers
lol
Faking experience is a horrible advice. If you fail to find a high paying job, find ANY job that will give you experience. In the first 6 years of experience developer salary doubles every two years. Don't expect to get paid senior level salaries if your experience is lacking. Basically, look for a job as an opportunity to get experience, not money.
😡 You have been brainwashed. Youre not wrong from a practical standpoint, but this is a horrible thing to say. They are supposed to provide us experience AND money. But instead, we get less money, and expected to be totally trained before accepting a job.
@@nickelbutt That is called "entitlement". What law says that they are supposed to provide you "experience AND money"? Even as a senior developer (20+ years), sometimes I accept smaller salaries, sometimes I have higher salaries, depending on the market. Nobody owes me anything.
Ignore all comments starting from "as a tech lead , senior this and senior that " , they are just trying to flex on you. Keep up the good work, you are right on track, while these tech leads and seniors are busy commenting
As a "senior dev" I recognize that I'm my good ole days.
andy would be proud
I love the microphone holder! Also, the video was great :)
6:34 “They act like they know what they are doing even when they don’t.”
That shows how junior you are. The “fake it till you make it” (fitymi) does not work. You can start off like that in an interview, but less than five questions and I will know what you really know. Also, if fitymi works it means the company is full of dilettans. It means chaos. It means the environment is not honest. Do you want to work in a place like that?
Do you really advocate to be dishonest as a “professional” behavior? To be a con artist?
"Do you want to work in a place like that?"
Bro I just want to work somewhere. I've shown my skills, knowledge and dedication to learn and improve and It's still not good enough. Sorry but if I can outperform 90% of your candidates and show good softskills qualities you damn better know I deserve to be hired. Companies are searching for a perfect unicorn in a field where such unicorns don't exist. We are in the field of constant change in technologies... . Why isn't HR ever seeking skills for adaptability ? For fast learning ? For decent communication skills ? For great time management skills ? So many better qualities to focus on and instead we got fcking live coding tasks in an interview for candidates that are straight up sh1tting their pants because they haven't seen an interview in weeks/months and some extremely random questions that weren't anywhere in the job description. Or some stupid language specific thing that you will never know unless you've been exposed to that specific thing.
@@angelg3642 those are the excuses of a candidate who does not meet the requirement and blames it on someone else.
"if I can outperform 90% of your candidates" No. You do not with that attitude. If I have 100 candidates and I need only 8 then you being the 9th is not enough.
"show good softskills qualities": Your response suggests that you do not. Blaming your unsuccessfulness on someone else is not a good soft skill. After all, even if it is not your "fault" per see, it is much more likely you can change yourself than the environment.
"I deserve to be hired": Being hired is not a matter of deserving it. If I do not need you, I will not hire you, even if you are as clever as Einstein.
"Companies are searching for a perfect unicorn in a field where such unicorns don't exist.": You just do not know them because they are hired.
"Why isn't HR ever seeking skills for adaptability ? For fast learning ? For decent communication skills ? For great time management skills ?": They do. However, from these three, only communication skills can reliably be perceived during an interview.
"we got fcking live coding tasks in an interview for candidates that are straight up sh1tting their pants": If you communicate like this in an interview they will not only not hire you but you will also be red-flagged. You have to be able to code. What else do you expect as a software developer? Should the company hire a software developer who cannot code? A taxi driver who cannot drive? A gravedigger who cannot dig?
"extremely random questions that weren't anywhere in the job description" Do you really expect the job description to list all possible questions?
"Or some stupid language specific thing that you will never know unless you've been exposed to that specific thing." You were never exposed to that language construct because you never used it. And you never used it because you did not learn it in the first place. Can you code without it? Yes. After all, you can code in machine code. It is possible. But if you know the language features then your code will be better. It is only a "stupid feature" while you do not know it. Know your tool.
along with "fake it til you make it" being a people person can take you pretty far.
companies value soft skills like being sociable, likeable, and effective communication extremely highly.
if you have less dev experience but good people skills from previous work experience, that often translates well in the tech industry.
this is especially true for juniors and beginners; companies believe you can learn the tech but they cant teach you to speak confidently in stand up or with a client
Interesting topic and great to hear your opinions.
Software Development is tough. My experience is study every day. It is a cut throat environment because of constant fear of being let go. As a beginner , you will be given many tasks Seniors know are not good and for you it is a trial by fire. You will get little information and little help. Your responsibility to ask questions and set up meetings , also do not use inter - office chats like slack or Microsoft teams for anything personal or unprofessional. Lastly, your job is 24 hours. Meaning , at anytime you will feel a need to check out a branch on the repo, run a simulation on test environment, etc. I encourage you to do so and learn your future tasks at the company. This will help save time during last minute changes.
Most people calling themselves software engineers are barely competent and they certainly aren't engineers. A person with 20 or 30 years' experience who is still going with vast domain knowledge is incredibly useful and economically advantageous for a company. I'm not a people person but I started coding when I was 14 and 40 years later I still do it and people pay me lots of money. Very senior engineers don't just know how to solve a problem but they understand how businesses work. They understand the reasons why things work in the way they do. I started out with Bell Labs writing assembly language then C before working for Microsoft, JP Morgan, Sony, BAE Systems and Arm. New languages, frameworks, styles are easy because you know they're all based on the same fundamentals as 40 years ago. They're just another way of saying the same thing. My advice is simple: learn how to do one thing really, really well because once you've done that you can learn how to do another thing really well and eventually you understand that the next thing is simply a progression of what you've mastered before. Focus on the moment and build on your past. When you stop enjoying it stop.
Great video mate! Equally informative and inspiring!
thanks for watching
A problem I am facing is that I have a portfolio of RestAPI examples and personal projects but none of the companies even care to know about any of that. The only thing they care about is whether or not the person has enough industry experience. If you have less than 5, you are screwed. More than 5? Good to go.
If you are a junior or mid tier right now, the best you can do is be patient and hope for the best. Understand that unless you are business savvy person, most of this is outside of your control and it's not an indicator of your own talents. It's the job market that is looking for safe bets, seniors that don't exist for all the job and extreme risk aversion for any juniors.
In 2020, it was still hard to get a High Paying Tech Job.
It's just nearly impossible now.
"fake it till you make it" XD you made my day! Cheers!
P.S. I've been applying for Junior Go Developer position over 8 months without success. I got really good rest and time for doing what I like in programming the most. But I'm running out of the budget and need some money to pay my bills every month so this is not so colorful like one can see it from outside.
As a senior developer, I am used to doing everything from scratch, it is almost impossible to find a job for me today.
Most companies are actually looking for junior/mid-level positions BUT with a degree in computer science and 5 years of experience.
Low-level projects that really require a senior level are very rare. There are hundreds of candidates for each offer.
It's also hard to find them because every offers now mention "senior" even for very basic works
The situation is crazy both ways...
Ok can you explain what it means to BUILD? Let's say I want to build a simple angular crud app and go about doing so by googling the steps and reading documentation on how it's done. I then go about copying the code I see to build my app. Now how is this different from following a video tutorial on RUclips on how to do the same thing if the results are the same? The steps provided by google to build the app amount to tutoring or a tutorial same as the RUclips video. So it's confusing when junior devs are told to build something and leave tutorial hell when they'll be googling tutorials to build the app anyway
No, you google the concepts needed to build the app, getting those concepts to work in practice will take lots of trial and error and that's where you will grow and learn. Break your crud app into small steps and achieve those small steps without copy pasting someone else's crud app that's the same idea. Reading the documentation and applying it to your personal project is learning while copying and pasting the code from a non-original idea off youtube is not learning. I hope you got something out of this because I also was in your shoes recently.
@@salem8909 My point is this. There is nothing wrong with copying and pasting other people's code you do it long enough you will know what not to copy. Break down an app into concepts and doing from documentation is literally the same thing because if you're not doing things the way they're supposed to be done the app won't work. And the idea of originality is also a separate matter all together because nothing is original and everything is built on top of each other. The reason I say this is tech giants always copying and stealing ideas from each other when they all spend billions in r&d with the sharpest brains in house. Why is this? Because progress comes from innovation and you only innovate by building on what already exists. Building say the iphone15 in 1950 would have been impossible because the technology to support didn't exist. I hope you get my point. There is nothing dirty about copying ideas that already exist and adding to them. But it seems there is this obsession with creating something phenomenal out of thin air without any tutorials which is hilarious because software engineers don't memorize code.
@@OfoeNelson hmm I was trying to get at learning, I don’t think copy and pasting is bad in general I just think it’s bad for learning, of course no one wants to reinvent the wheel but if you want to learn and grow you kinda have too. You can’t expect yourself to think like a senior programmer and have the right ideas all the time, it’s ok to be wrong or go about something inefficiently because then you learn why it’s bad and how to make it better, that’s what being an engineer is all about.
@@salem8909 What are you saying? Of course you CANT reinvent the wheel. Seniors copy and paste too no shame in it. Just pointing out that the whole romanticisation of software development needs to change for the better so it's less confusing to people who don't know better. You are not a typist you are a developer so if copying something gets the job done so be it. Of course you will learn how to build by copying and pasting if you do it for 100s of times you're bound to learn. I'm curious what level are you right now? L4 or L5?
@@OfoeNelson Look buddy you got a real bad attitude toward this, if you want to just copy and paste code all day and call yourself a developer then go for it, no one is stopping you. If you actually want to level up and improve your skills and be valuable to a company you wouldn’t copy paste everything, it’s quite simple tbh. Why have to look up the same thing 100 times instead of just being able to do it yourself by learning the required concepts, you need to think like an engineer bro, copy paste won’t get you past a technical interview especially in this market, again we’re taking about inexperienced developers.
If companies don't hire freshers or interns, there will be a shortage of Sr. software engineers in the near future...
Yep sadly private or public companies are more concerned with shareholders and don’t seem the think that far ahead
At my current company, which is a small startup, they were looking for professionals with stacked skills. They needed someone with FE Engineering and UI/UX Design experience (UX Engineering), which I had and got employed with little to no competition. With skill stacking, you have more of a chance to reach the top 1% expert pool in the market in particular set of skills and become an outlier on interviews. Albeit, this is more valuable in job openings that explicitly asks for the set of skills you have, and usually at smaller teams, but it may be a viable strategy for some.
If you have a mature codebase, it just takes too much time to train juniors and also clean up all their pull requests. And we've had decades for most codebases to mature.
“Too much time” is BS. Its about money, and shareholders dont want to spend more money for training.
What you say here is the equivalent of saying tech jobs should avoid hiring new people, which is actually pretty dumb.
@@nickelbutt They'll hire new people, but they want them to be experts from day one
@@perfectionbox And the irony is that most companies seem to value growth, learning and opportunity while expecting you to be nearly perfect candidate already 😂😂. If you aren't that then there's isn't a job opportunity.
This was a great one, thanks for the great advice!
an og day #1 thanks for being here
@@namanhkapur You know it!
In 4-5 years from now, you will have a chronic shortage of developers for at least 10 years to come.
Dude - giant corporations were OVER hiring in 2020 because money was FREE - the interest rate was down to near 1% so companies could pretend they had infinite money to hire tonnes of people.
I got tonnes of random recruiters chasing after me even though I wasn't even job hunting, it was wild, glad I didn't take the bait.
Now that we're back in reality, these giant companies had to drop a bunch of people and go back to normal. It sucks now, but it will normalize.
At least you got paid for 2 whole years and you got 2 whole years of experience to put. It was still much better opportunity than it is nowadays
@@angelg3642 Yes - it was a very unusual and rare time to be employed. Things normalizing back down now means a lot of pain before the market is fully flat / reset. It sucks now until then, and will be hard for people starting now. Granted, you can be sure if you get a job now that you are cut-out for it, and there is nothing stopping you while you are young and have few financial obligations to code something yourself and produce your own value, especially with AI covering your weaknesses
@@angelg3642 Yeah you won't catch me complaining
Fake to til you make it .. I can tell you that you wouldn't last 5 minutes if I interviewed you. I have 30 years of experience BTW. If there is one thing I cannot tolerate its bullshitters. I can't stress this enough. Engineers must not be like sales people. I prefer honesty because then I know who I am dealing with when I delegate work to you. I need to know that it will get done. So tell it like it is. What I look for? First, basic skills. 2nd enthusiasm ( which is hard to gauge). But if I see that you do projects on your own initiative, and not just leet coding exercises .. or whatever its called - but rather if you do projects on your own, then I have a sense that you are in it because you love it and not simply because you are looking for a big paycheck. Folks with some skill, decent intelligence and an overabundance of enthusiasm should do fine despite the admittedly challenging times that you face today. Don't give up, don't bullshit.
Have you interviewed candidates recently ?
Excellent insights 👍
I'm a designer but this helps a lot, thanks for the advice.
Is joining the ai hype train really necessary, my passion is making boring full stack applications and I don't care much for ai.
Full stack will always be needed
One of the biggest mistakes as a senior developer is when you act like you know it all, but you don't. Senior developers don't hide their struggles. So it's the other way around.
I worked at 2 companies (full time) since the recession, so let me tell you this. Nowadays, specialization means less chance of fulfilling the job description. Most of the job postings on LinkedIn, Indeed, etc., require you to have knowledge of cloud, devOps, UI/UX and many more, even if you are a FE developer. So, specialization is no longer relevant. And if you can spend 3-4 hours per day for 1 month (or 1 hour per day for 3 months) to learn new things like programming languages, fw, cloud services, you can have enough skills to get the job.
"Fake it till you make it" is a dead end job. At most it'll be entertaining but in a context of doing something serious with only yourself as a resource, you'll be scrounging for a use of something dumb you made up. The ultimate cosmic Irony. Another analogy, "Fake it till you make it" is like rock climbing with rope. most people do it, and to do the hardest climbs, everyone needs it, but those who are free, climb without rope.
I graduated from Bootcamp in 2023 Feb, no cushy corporate job yet been freelancing and it's paying my bills
freelancing is cheat code, good for you
what stack or technologies you use?
@@Kamrankhan23333 MERN
Yeah like @randomstranger8326 said, what tech stack, technologies you use and what field you work in freelancing?
@@vectoralphaSec Do you really think he's going to reveal his secrets and bring more people into an already competitive field? Come on now.
why are you copying software developer diaries title?
7:10 - I was the guy people went to for answers. What changed was I did not know anybody on Mahogany Row any more. I used to know everybody (including the entrepreneur who started the company) and they knew me and knew the things I had done for the company. And a new management team rolled in, and I knew none of them, and none of them knew me. And, somehow, I fell out a window...
As a senior engineer with 7 years of experience, I mis-spelt 'appendLeft' instead of 'appendleft' and used a dictionary instead of a list in python in the last two weeks. And you think I'm two to three times more productive than a junior. Don't even ask about that time with a long dash, or em dash ("-")
Management will remember the hero fire fighter, not the arsonist. Even when they are the same person.🤣
love it all❤..but did more when you post about salary and how they get in
I wish I was applying for jobs since 2019 instead of waiting to be graduated in 2021.
12 YoE here. If you take the "fake it till you make it" approach; you're NGMI. Don't become an easy stepping stone for someone else. Remember others are collaborating and competing with you at the same time. If s/w engineering is tough, switch to product / program mgmt. Don't fake it, we'll bury you alive. As Leads & Seniors, part of our reputation is on the line to ensure you're skilled, competent and knowledgeable.
Well said man.
"Act like a senior engineer" translates to "Put whatever the job description is asking for on your resume, and fake it till you make it"
This is coming from a QA with 10+ years (of REAL) experience. People do not care, they are just going down the checklist. Only thing that matters is the face to face interviews (zoom or otherwise).
The whole idea that "no one knows what they're doing" is you trying to make yourself feel better. There are plenty of experienced people who actually do have encyclopedic knowledge of systems and languages. Those people have more than 5-7 years of experience. "Fake it til you make it" is the worst advice because experienced people will see right through you.
The reason for this is overproduction of very low quality juniors - all those boot camp graduates, self-taughts and "graduates" of sub-par universities. It is nearly impossible now to filter out the worthy ones from this horrible horde. So employers have nothing else left but to compete for the seniors like there is no tomorrow.
Do you think the market Will Go back with juniors seen that it's hard to find a job ?
@@bra195 likely, yes, when the junior pool shrinks it will be easier to hire juniors and for the worthy juniors to get hired.
@@vitalyl1327 Bruh, employers test your leetcode solving skills, ask you DSA even though nearly nobody uses it, ask you if you know the most random fact about a certain language, test your coding skills by giving you 30 minutes or less on some random tasks and straight up watching your every single move 😂. How tf do you think employees will do quality work when they are focused on preparing for these bs interviews 😂. That's not the junior's fault . The junior was working on what was expected of him to know for the interview and the job. Nobody ever taught the junior the important part of the work. Stop making excuses
@@angelg3642 cool story, bro, too bad it is not what's really happening. But if it helps you to rationalise for yourself why you cannot find a job - fine, go with it.
@@vitalyl1327 How many interviews have you been to in the past year 🤔 ?
Bro they aren't even hiring senior devs anymore. It's over.
Tech careers are awful. Get out of tech. Even if you get hired the age discrimination will kill your career by 45. And experience doesn't matter after five years because everything changes. So at 50 you'll have the same experience as someone who's 30. And don't even get me started on the outsourcing and offshoring. My former employer has tons of entry level jobs --in India.
It sucks, I've been layed off. But I'm so blessed I have 7+ years of experience, knowing that my skills are highly saught after even in this mess
Love your content! Could you add subtitles to your videos? It'd make them more accessible and easier for us to enjoy. Thanks a bunch!
Fake it until they make it, in software, works for short term
Cause after a while nobody takes you seriously.
needed this ty
i gotchu
come back to nyc
@@namanhkapur sent you an insta dm 🤝🏽
even at my company, job ads are internally posted "2nd level and higher applicants strongly preferred" bruh like wtf
that’s disgusting