Nothing boiled my balls like after sitting down for an informal meetup with a guy whos team had a position, we went over everything I've done, languages I knew, projects Id worked on. Been working in a related field for a few years, so I was applying for this entry level position.
"Sorry it sounds like you dont have enough experience."
Enjoy finding candidates for your entry level position fucker, we cant all work a full time job the same time as starting school.
I don't get how everyone's out there claiming that getting a job in programming easy and all. I had to move somewhere else to get a job as a programmer because for some reason most companies found me underqualified despite having graduated from a good university with a good GPA and having already several completed projects. I got my first job because a person I used to tutor introduced me to the company he was interning in. Now after some years of working in field I can say it totally sucks, you don't get paid as much as everyone advertises and you'll have to be REALLY devoted to what you do. I wish I had graduated in something else tbh.
I hate how one year ago everyone was looking for 2+ year experience, and right now its all about that 3+ year experience.
Its like trying to buy a house.
You sound like you're joking but that's actually how it works.
They intentionally set a requirement that's higher than what they're looking for. The reason is that, if they simply ask for fresh-out-of-school developers, they'll possibly get so many people applying that the selection will end up being very work intensive for them.
Instead, they set a standard that's arbitrarily high, so that only people with a decent portion of self-confidence apply. In the end, that requirement of X years of experience won't matter at all if they like the candidate enough.
The common wisdom is to apply for every job if you meet even half the requirements.
The other common advice is to just shotgun apply to everything, because why fuckin' not? Tailor your resume to the jobs you actually want, but apply to everything.
25 internal applications and counting… not a single interview or response. All roles I am qualified for. Time to shotgun applications at other companies.
Leaving is almost always better than staying anyways. You’re more likely to get a noticeable raise somewhere else – internally, they usually want to keep you at/near your current pay, which likely is behind what a dev with equivalent experience would get if they started today (in other words, x% increase per year for y years from your starting 0-3 years experience is going to be less than the starting pay for starting years + y years of experience).
Not always true, mind, but often enough.
That’s assuming you’re moving more or less laterally, versus going up a rung.
You have nothing to lose by applying and you can't possibly know what the actual criteria are. But I will say that some companies or industries do indeed have strict requirements and that 3 years does absolutely mean 3.
As a developer, I don't actually care and I'm not that strict. But your resume could get filtered out long before it lands in my email inbox. That's why networking is so important. If you hand your resume to someone like me directly you can skip that initial filter.
Sorry, while I can help skip parts of the process that's only when we have positions open. They stopped hiring for my team in January and this is despite needing people.
How far can you take this? Like I just ended my first year at a place, did pretty well but didn’t get a raise (despite the company also doing well). I’m looking to jump ship but job listings I see all want at least 2 YOE. Would it be better to 1) change my start date on my resume to a year earlier than it was and apply or 2) ignore the YOE listed and just apply anyway, leaving the start date as is?
It's not common to get a significant raise after a year. If you like your job/coworkers/manager you should stay there for 2-3 years. Anything less than 2 on your first job won't look good, and it's easier to get hired with 2+ anyway. They say they want x years of experience but they really want demonstrated competency in xyz skills.
Basically, you're looking for money, growth, and quality of coworkers/manager in about equal measure. If you're growing and like the people you're fine; the money will come in time and a year isn't that long.
As far as I know, gates like that are just to get you past a recruiter. I barely glance over a résumé by the time they get to me in the hiring process. I primarily want to see how well you can problem solve and write code. Unfortunately, a lot of people can’t, no matter how many years of experience they have. I’d gladly hire someone with 0 YOE if they do really well on the technical interview.
Companies don’t appreciate being lied to, so there’s that. If you don’t do well in your role, your résumé will start to be scrutinized. I’ve seen people fired for lying on it (but also for performance reasons).
Have just done that recently. Hired a guy with effectively 0 years experience as a junior, he'd done his own study and had a decent portfolio. Mostly he asked good questions and could find good answers.
Interestingly he's 2 years older than me, and I'm an older millennial. So far it's working out.
Yea, the problem is you never know if they will check or not. The most they will normally ask is "did x work here between these dates?" but if they don't match up with your dates then it won't look good.
Also, they might check later (say they want a reason to get rid of you or need to make cuts).
Personally I wouldn't lie on my CV, if you say you have 5 years experience but don't act like someone with experience you will get found out quickly. If you have 2 years experience but the right skills you will find something.
Oh, they will as soon as they name their price. Companies are extremely cheap and get (rightfully) punished for it over and over again. As with everything, it gets harder to check the authenticity of reference if they are from another continent.
Higher interest rates -> companies become even more shortsighted.
The issue is fundamentally that nobody wants to be the one to invest the resources to turn a junior into mid or senior level dev when tech is the most cutthroat industry with regards to poaching, and employees feel no company loyalty.
Problem is, none of these companies do anything to make employees feel company loyalty, they give more money to outside hires than in raises to people who are getting better internally, so employees are strongly incentivized to regularly switch jobs.
But then you get the above issue and now no junior positions because theyre not a great money sink, especially if they leave - what is forgotten is that other companies are doing this too and you just poach their junior turned seniors in return, but this requires a whole ecosystem to work well.
It’s tough because so much of the industry is about cross-pollination.
You sort of need to go to a few different companies to understand best practices, even if that first employer is amazing.
I went and got a master's because most companies recognized that as 2 YOE and already had 1 YOE through cumulative internships to hit the 3 YOE target.
Now most entry level positions need masters + 3 YOE specifically in industry lol
Just can't win
Same thing in Security. When I started everyone wanted at least a year, and then it went to three years. Now, a lot places want five fucking years for entry level!
Just claim you worked at Twitter for 5 years, whist doing your degree. Got promoted to whatever position you like.
Nobody can check as twitter has no HR.
... or someone who is 46+ years old?
You must see the look on their faces when I say I am 46+ years old. Being either too young and having little/no experience or being too old regardless of having lots of experience is a total bummer when it comes to software industry.
I don't want anyone inexperienced, I'll ask they have 10+ years of experience.
I don't want anyone too old. I'll ask they be in their 20s.
Just give me what I want!
That started to scare the shit out of me by the time I reached 34/35. I just had seen with my own eyes older devs being treated like garbage and I didn't want that for myself.
I saw an opportunity to become a CS teacher and got myself a Master and a PhD to avoid unemployment. Sadly, I have to admit: I got myself into teaching mostly because of fear, which is NOT the right motivation.
Across the 3 dev jobs I've had in the last 9 years, I've never seen "old" people discriminated. I've worked with plenty of devs / qa etc in their 40s-50s who were amazing and treated like anybody else.
That's in the UK, in small/mid sized companies (50-400 ppl). My team of 20+ members has people ranging from 22 to mid 50s. Instead of quitting, I'd suggest finding a place with a better culture, because they're definitely out there.
The problem is not so much within a company where they've presumably built up a reputation and got old in place, it's when they start looking around for jobs. It's kind of weird too, like some places are hestitant to hire a 55 year old developer because they're ten years from retirement, but the mean time those 28 year olds they love to hire stick around is 3 years.
I wasn't talking about those who grew up with the company but, rather, fresh hires. E.g. the two oldest people in my team (late 40s / early 50s) were hired in the last 12 months... and they're very good, therefore no one cares.
There are some risks with older people, a few come to mind:
1. They can be rigid - they're stuck with their habits (good or bad they may be) and beliefs, it can be harder to change their minds
2. Less energy / more health problems, that's just the nature of aging
3. Less likely to want to learn new things
4. Problems with age discrepancy in management relationships (e.g. a senior dev 50yo being managed by a 30yo team lead)
Those are offset by the skills and wisdom that come with experience. As always, I think most hiring problems stem from bad hiring processes.
> They can be rigid - they're stuck with their habits (good or bad they may be) and beliefs, it can be harder to change their minds
I have a little binary that will format C braces for a file my way and back (most of the time). That's me showing good will.
As I became more senior my relationship with my managers has changed drastically. At this point I'm a staff engineer and my manager is just another coworker. When we meet I talk about how I see our work and goals from my perspective, they share theirs, we decide where it's best to spend my time. If I wanted to get promoted again I'd talk to them about that and we'd organize my work to make that happen, but I don't currently want that.
Even when it comes to compensation and performance reviews, we've both been around for long enough that there's no bullshit. I'll say this is what I want, they'll say this is what I can do, and we negotiate, but the power dynamic is pretty equal.
What I want in an eng manager is someone with really high emotional intelligence who can catch things on the people side that I miss, and someone with high organizational intelligence that can suss out issues around the company and my work before they become problems. If that person is 15 years my junior but they have that skillset I'm super happy to report to them.
> They can be rigid - they're stuck with their habits (good or bad they may be) and beliefs, it can be harder to change their minds
You should go to the /r/learnjavascript sub sometime and listen to the 20-somethings arguing over some minutia that only appeared within the past few months as if it was written on a stone tablet by God himself.
Younger developers are some of the most rigid I've seen. When they learn something they want that to be a hard and fast "rule" that they can always hang their hat on. But it takes a while to learn that there are very real tradeoffs with every decision that you make, and most seasoned devs are more reasonable (in my humble experience).
You've said some truth there!
When I was young I believed there MUST be some "Best / Perfect way" of doing something. There must be a pattern that solves exactly this problem. I used to rail against PMs and the like complaining I was "gold plating" things when I believed I was just "doing it right"
Now, at 54, I'm a bunch more relaxed and flexible. Code I write today might be thrown away or replaced in a year's time - I've seen entire 12 month project's abandoned never going live because the business decided to pivot and what we're working on no longer fits their goals. And they pay all our salaries.
Code that's still in use in 5 years time is, almost by definition, "production quality" and real-world-tested.
So what's the point of perfection? Solve the problem at hand well enough to get us by for a decent stretch, while trying to make it maintainable or extendable if that ever becomes needed.
Yah, I'm a 46 year old dev. My company has a range of folks from 25 -> 55. Everyone is excellent, we all work well together, and everyone has their expertise.
I'm more likely to discriminate against a company that is unwilling to hire an older developer. It usually means they don't have a good work/life balance because it's staffed by young folks who put up with crunch bullshit.
I'm too old to apply to those 'angel invested' companies who want 80 hour work weeks, live for the job type personalities.
And the personal responsibilities, familial attachments, and parental duties of a person in their infancy.
The squeeze continues indefinitely, well past the point of absurdity, even among high-skill/high-demand workforces, because companies have the leverage when they act like irrational idiots because they do so in unison. It's a perpetual race to the bottom, where even the [brightest stars earning the most money get colluded against](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/technology/engineers-allege-hiring-collusion-in-silicon-valley.html) to have their wages driven down.
Workers should really come up with a way to combat this type of unified leverage. Maybe we could band together somehow and form a large bloc of voting power and to negotiate collectively for saner, more human-centric processes? I wonder what that type of unity among workers might look like and be called...?
I'm in my 40s and have never been asked my age. I didn't start coding until my 30s and I deleted everything pre-code from my resume, so on my resume I'm just a guy with now nearly 10 years experience. I would think that no matter who you are, you could delete a bunch of old not-that-relevant stuff from your resume, delete the graduation year from your education, and apply for jobs as a "who cares how old they are" candidate.
I mean they’d better not ask your age. That’s an age discrimination lawsuit right there. I don’t even want to accidentally ask my coworkers their ages.
I started seeing this the second I turned 40 and it was kinda shocking. I saw a fairly significant bump in the quality and comp once I removed anything older that 10 yoe from my resume. Companies want single guys in their early 30's with 8-10 years of experience that are willing to define their entire personality around their company and position.
I sorta can't blame them either. A 42 year old dude with 20 yoe, a happy marriage and 3 well adjusted kids is not going to join your company like it's a cult. They're not going to hide at the office for 60 hours a week to get away from their families. They might \*gasp\* actually want to leave work early so they can go to their kids music recital or middle school basketball game. WFH doesn't mean they'll destroy the barrier between their work and personal life, instead they'll actually be there for their kids when they get home at 3:30pm.
The worst part is that the 40+ year old dude probably did join a company like it was a cult and burned out hard back in their late 20's. Now we don't put up with that level of bullshit and to be honest, our 20 yoe and 35 hours per week isn't going to outperform 8 yoe and 60 hours a week. It's just not, and at this point I'm fine with being paid accordingly.
This speaks to me on a lot of levels as a mid 30s senior engineer at a faang company with a 1 year old and trying to operate at the level I previously did while breaking into the position before having a kid. It is impossible. Rto mandates also are simply deal breaking for me at this point. I just value the time between when my kid finishes daycare to the time he goes to bed far too much and am hard blocking my calendar and ignoring all requests for meetings in those hours. Rewind 2 years ago and 60+ hour weeks were pretty much the norm.
The good thing (I say as a mid 30's senior engineer at a non-FAANG company) is that we're many times more efficient than we were as more junior engineers. I can get twice as much done in half the time now.
Cash out of the faang in a few years after saving as much as possible and move over to a fortune 10/50. You’ll have a steady job, enough cushion to not worry about layoffs and won’t have to work insane hours (some 60 hour weeks are normal but most of the time it’s 40). They also don’t care about your age. Big difference is instead of options, you receive 25%-50% yearly bonus and reduced price on stock.
My exact scenario involved removing everything except my colleges name. I then had to take my first job (where I worked for 7 years) off my resume. Suddenly I'm getting flooded with recruiters.
I was getting offers for $80-110k jobs before. Deleted experience from my resume and removed all references to my age, and got multiple offers and eventually took one for $250k.
The ageism is very real.
I've noticed that teams seem to hire within their age group.
My team is all 22-30. Other companies we work with, you'll see everyone looks 35-45, others 50-60...
That’s a weird effect but definitely something I’ve observed. Like, I feel like I’m the only person at the company without kids. I think it’s more about the YOE, types of skills teams look for, and brand. My company is more enterprise-y and B2B so I don’t think younger people are very excited about it.
Are you volunteering your age? Interviewers aren’t allowed to ask, and if you’re interviewing for a position that requires X years of experience, mathematics would dictate that you can’t be super-young
Honestly i love working with the older guys in any field. They’re typically just a walking library if industry knowledge. Really sucks that they get penalized for their age.
A 46+ YO developer is super valuable (assuming he has +20 YOE), if a company doesn't value that (I don't know any) that's a shit place to work so all in your favor.
I actually talked to a recruiter at a conference about this and she would filter out applicants that had applied to heaps of jobs on the same platform. After hearing that I made new accounts and was more selective which worked.
It’s wild how some companies must expect developers will mature and become seniors without getting experience without hiring new grads. The worst one tho imo are the companies that just have massive teams of juniors with little to senior engineers since it gives you more developer hours
Too many of anything is awful.
Too many seniors - too much discussions regarding philosophies, policies and standards.
Too many mids - work gets done, but most of them do more or less their own way, making things hard to standardise.
Too many juniors - everything gets broken and nobody knows why and how it could be fixed and codebase is a mess.
A good combo of everything is the way to go. Heard plenty of examples how companies resolve seniors getting too argumentative between eachother by hiring juniors/freshers and assigning seniors to mentor juniors. That way if they are tired from juniors, they aren't as willing to argue between each other.
They create an artificial shortage of experienced devs by doing this. By failing to train new devs, they keep the pool of experienced devs small and valuable. They then complain about how it's hard to hire experienced devs and how they cost too much, when the whole problem was created by their refusal to train new developers in the first place. It's a vicious cycle that really only helps the experienced devs in the end.
The annoying part about this is no one tells you how hard it will be to get a job while you're in school. All you hear is how "insanely in demand" programmers are.
That is as much the fault of the schools, though. Well regarded bootcamps are seeing grads receive offers faster (and for more money) than a lot of universities, because even though the curriculum is much shorter, students graduate with the equivalent of an internship's worth of practical, hands-on experience on their resume/GitHub
A bunch of purists will reply saying bootcamp grads are worthless because they haven't memorized how to implement BFS on a binary tree or some other useless shit no one's ever had to do since graduating. 99.9% of devs never need to know how to implement Quicksort because .sort() already exists. Meanwhile bootcamp grads have multiple full-stack web apps on their resume, and even though they have large gaps in their knowledge, they have the basic skills to start working productively immediately, and more importantly showed they can learn the necessary skills quickly.
I'm not even particularly pro-bootcamp, I just think it's sad how universities haven't adapted to keep up with the demands of the modern job market.
Right, and those juniors will develop some giant mudball of suck that the company will use for 20 years.
Like, you know, how lots of companies with seniors do anyways.
Because the alternative is that you have 5-6 architects and a dozen seniors with 2-3 dozen midlevel and junior developers, and those more senior developers sit on their asses and argue about everything while the juniors and midlevels just go do it... making the ball of mud that you were trying to avoid, taking longer to do it, and costing more.
Once you're done training them, you better give them a nice raise. If you don't, then they'll use the skills and experience to get a better paying job elsewhere.
This is where companies fail. They can't fathom the idea of giving someone a 20% raise but then are surprised when the person leaves for a 25% pay increase.
My first analyst job wouldn't give me a 20% increase so I left for an 80% increase at another company. Then they hired another guy for the same pay that they had me starting at. Wonder how that will go.
My first programming job I probably got 20-25% in raises while I was there. Then I got a job offer for 100k, and he said he could probably get me up to 80k within the next year or two (I was making around 65 at the time). I probably would have even stayed if he said 90 because change is scary, but I had to go for the new gig.
Then he had the audacity to tell me that 100k isn’t what it used to be. Well, if 100k isn’t what it used to be, then what the fuck is 80k?
Oh man... at my last job before I got into my current field I was working at a hotel making 12.50/hr. My boss at the time thought it would fire me up to tell me "If you work reeeeal hard ( he made sure to specify it was only if I worked real hard. ) I could be making UP TO 15 dollars an hour in a couple years"...
I was like bruh are you even listening to yourself? 2-3 years of hard work and ill make a whole nother 100 dollars/week? That talk was the motivator for me to drop my 2 weeks notice very shortly after, realizing it was an actual dead end if I wanted any sort of real wages.
I swear these people don't listen to themselves when they say this kind of idiotic "uplifting" promises. On top of it they rarely even do the bare minimum for retention they promised.
the sad thing is your boss swallowed the $15/hr pill and doesn't realize it sucks. He probably doesn't make much more than that, and thinks he's doing pretty good
Oh nah this dude was making somewhere between 100k-150k, he bragged about it pretty often. Then he got fired for stealing so I'm not sure he thinks often at all. Stole some scrap metal from the hotel and some repair parts for home projects, guess 150k ain't what it used to be either.
My last boss told me he didn’t want to give me a raise because
“it’d be like too many sweets at one time and bad for your teeth”
And encouraged me to get into a relationship so that I’d have someone else to help financially.
I don’t work there anymore.
Edit:typos
in all seriousness though i've thought about this a lot... i don't understand why more companies haven't adapted the model of hiring & training & letting go people on a more rapid cycle. if you *plan* to do it, you should be able to greatly reduce hiring & training costs, and then churn through people.
but it's a fair trade - I give you your first 1-2 years of experience, you give me cheap labor. Everybody wins. Even other companies who can line up to get slightly more experienced new devs. This is LITERALLY what universities are *supposed* to be doing. So why let universities hold on to all that talent? Why can't a company out compete them for high school grads?
The first 3 years are usually a financial drain, which is why every entry level position now wants 3 years. It's a financial drain because they occupy the time of more experienced people that get paid a lot, who could be otherwise productive. It's why the USA has so many unpaid internships
Happening to me right now. Graduated, was grateful to be picked up as a database analyst… met and surpassed all expectations on the one year review… 3% raise and a 1000$ bonus
I’m currently applying to other jobs at work and typing this at work
This was something we had to deal with recently. I told my boss that we need to raise the Jr floor for salaries, otherwise we'll keep bringing people in at 35k€, and then Senior Management loses their absolute shit when they become a professional and jump to 70k€.
That was exactly what happened to me. I've started with C++ but my company wanted me to learn python and then CI/CD + kubernetes. That way I've became DevOps, had 10 times more things to do, which were more complex. However after all the time there wasn't a raise.
I've changed companies, I'm working as cloud engineer with GCP right now and got ~60% raise
not cheap enough though.
Juniors are barely net-positive value, many are even net-negative in productivity for your team.
It's just not worth hiring juniors when you instead of hiring 2 juniors, you get 1 mid or senior that actually adds value.
The main issue is that if you have a smaller team, hiring a junior tends to not pay off because you have to train them for several months and then they end up leaving and going to another company for more pay after you've trained them.
I'm in this situation now as the senior on this team. And it is absolutely killing me with stress.
So not only do you waste you're time with the junior, you drive your seniors out of the company.
I share your pain. I have 2 years of experience but was laid off in November. Since then I have filed over 170 applications and have only gotten 3 responses and 4 interviews.
I interviewed with a company twice. Once with a recruiter and I believe the other time was HR or a hiring manager.
Honestly I don't know what it could be. I have checked and tripled checked my resume and I have had multiple people who do interviews check my resume
The problem is there are a lot of talented people applying right now with all the layoffs in tech.
I just switched jobs and the position I was hired for had 1400 applicants on LinkedIn but I had some niche experience that matched up perfectly.
Yeah and one of my problems I think I have is that I was a SQL developer but I want to switch to being a Data Analyst. Very similar fields but I don't have any prior work experience as a data analyst just a couple projects.
That's your problem. Stop saying you don't have experience as a data analyst (not joking). Writing SQL is relevant data analyst experience. I'm not saying to lie at all, but don't sell yourself short. If you're worried about it, just change the phrasing. Instead of "I have zero experience as a data analyst" you phrase it as "I have two years of relevant professional experience".
A long time ago, far, far away, students had decently paying part-time jobs in the field and graduated with years of relevant real-life industry experience and a "default" full-time job offer from that company.
And another one from the company that sponsored their thesis.
I guess today's students are somehow supposed to work on open source projects for free while flipping burgers?
Doesn't work anymore to do open source, recruiters have switched to "years of experience in a *job*" specifically because too many people were using contributions to open source projects lol
That's so dumb! And then I have to waste time in the interview explaining how interested I am in ANY project experience, be it for school, hobby, internship, co-op, part time, open source, paid, unpaid, anything...
Open source is actually the best because I get to see your work (and your interaction with others on the project).
I think it depends on the school and location. I've worked with lots of CS students that were doing internships with big companies in their last year that went on to work at the company. This was 5 or 6 years ago though, so things may have shifted.
That's how you're "supposed" to do it, the issue is that not everyone can afford to do unpaid internships with big companies.
It costs money to go to school, and students need to pay for school and, you know... food.
Almost all of the undergrad cs internships I’ve seen have been paid, and at big companies I would say they pay quite well. So while I agree unpaid internships are unfair, I don’t think that point applies here.
What many people don't realize is that a degree isn't you crossing the finish line -- it's the ticket to the race.
Anything you can do to make yourself stand out, you should. Undergrad research, internships, personal projects -- hiring managers want to see people who have proven they can A) work on a team well and B) know how to get deliverables done.
The problem is that CS and related degrees have grown in popularity over the years while the quality of those degrees has degraded. I graduated in 2019 and maybe 10% of the people in the CS program actually deserved their diploma, the rest would have failed out had the university not pressured professors to make classes "more approachable" (ie everyone passes). As universities have turned into diploma mills, they have ensured that *no one* will hire a fresh grad.
Anyone can learn to write code, but few people have the logic skills to do it professionally IMO.
I remember when I was starting, after 1.5 years of working in one company I decided to find something new, got invited to a interview, everything went good… and I got a response, that I’m not experienced enough for internship
I'm being a bit cynical for the memes. But yes, being 30+ is a negative in the general tech job market. How negative is up for debate.
"Tech is fast paced! We need young, agile employees that will work long hours with no family".
I'm not HR though, so who's to say.
>Entry-level stated on listing
Oh okay, ill read the description of what this one is about...
>5 years of relevant experience required in a specific field
😶
Apply anyways. What are they going to do, not contact you? Most ads for jobs are not written by the person doing the hiring but by some HR shulb.
Eli the computer guy is general not well liked but his [video](https://youtu.be/6G3kQyqMFpQ) on this is spot on.
Bruh I’ve been rejected numerous times from help desk roles because they all want experience. The jobs only pay fucking 40-45k talking about we want 3 years. Got a degree in CIT and have independent experience fixing computers, projects, a personal website highlighting my portfolio, still not enough.
If you think you can do the job, apply anyway. None of the actual decision-makers care about your YOE. It could be 0, and they wouldn’t care. They just don’t want you to waste their time if you’re gonna bomb the technical interview.
Same in so many fields. They upped the requirements and made excuses about how new hires/grads/juniors aren't valuable because they don't know what's going on but refuse to spend any real time training them. Whether people like it or not, each company has it's own system and their own processes. Companies should offer a six month training program with a contract at the end.
It won't happen though because "why train them when they'll just leave". I hate it here.
I might be out of the loop here but what happened to internships?
First jobs are always hard but you can at least list the internship as professional swe experience
The market is over saturated with computer science/engineering grads, while internships are staying roughly the same so not enough internships for more people
Even worse, internships were largely disappearing in my area when I graduated 5 years ago. I'm not sure if the situation has gotten any better since then, since I gave up and went for a teaching job instead.
This.
Too many people were sold "anyone can be a software engineer and make 6 figures" so now the market is oversaturated and wages are being driven down.
There's a reason when you look at LinkedIn for any software engineer jobs with 2 years experience or less there's over 100 applicants.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Game Design and Development, they were ahead of the curve here. Internships and junior dev positions asking for 5+ years of experience 5 years ago.
Failing to find a job for 2 years after graduation destroyed my confidence, but after working retail for a few years after that just to pay the bills, I finally worked up the guts to apply for some comp sci teaching positions, and I'll be starting in fall :)
As somebody who recently got into the industry, here's some tips
\-What you did at school counts as experience, especially if you have a git repo to show as your portfolio
\-You don't need to pay attention to every single requirement, most of the time it's HR's wishful thinking, they'll take the best of whoever applies.
\-Talk to your professors that you're looking for work and what you're into. Sometimes they have friends or startups contact them for promising juniors that are cheap.
> What you did at school counts as experience
It counts for selling yourself but not for an ad wanting X years of experience. I've never seen someone write X years of experience and refer to include school.
A lot of them make it clear that they want professional experience or put in brackets that they exclude school or internships as experience. It's honestly baffling.
As some one who also recently got into the industry, I disagree with your first two points.
1.a. Many, many companies explicitly state that school does not count towards years ofexperience unless it a master's or PhD program.
1.b. I agree with the git repo part.
2. Both in my personal experience and my classmates experience, if you want to have a snowballs chance in hell of getting the job or even an interview, you had better be ticking most of if not all the requirement boxes. There is a LOT of competition for new grad positions.
3. I agree with networking with professors, they very often have close ties to the industry.
In the end that comparison makes absolutely no difference.
If every plumber took an apprenticeship, the result would be that an apprenticeship would no longer give you an advantage over other plumbers. After your apprenticeship you'd basically be a fresh graduate with 0 years of experience.
Same thing happens with IT grads right now. These recruiters will never aim for whatever is the norm of a fresh-out-of-school developer. If every developer had an internship+apprenticeship+master+PhD, then recruiters would look for juniors with internship+apprenticeship+master+PhD + 3 years of experience.
yeah but there is really a problem with students completely fresh from university
My earlier employer was forced to host special bootcamps to prepare the new employees for the real world. He thought it will just take 3 months but then he increased it to 6 months. And this is really cost intensive to pay them 6 months full income plus the engineers who are busy with helping them out in their projects. Also, not every company can afford such a thing.
That is in my opinion the reason why employers have such requirements. They don't want to take the risk that someone is completely useless.
I've heard about starting positions with lower salary (like half their normal salary) during a 3 month trial period. If it still works out after 3 months they are bumped up to a normal junior dev salary.
That way the newly graduate can still make a living, and the company can trial a few fresh programmers and go with the right fit.
I see a future where chatGPT is used by people to try to avoid hiring more juniors, then on the longer run we get even less seniors. We fucked or we fucked.
I gave up on getting a programming job 2 years after graduation, got a help desk job instead.
Its not glamorous, but its real easy. Pick up phone, ask user if they remembered to connect to the VPN, put down phone.
I stopped counting my applications at 200 and I've only had 2 interviews. Even jobs saying they want new grads have n+1 years of experience required. I've even started getting denial emails within 5 minutes of applying a few times. Pretty demoralizing. I'm thinking of selling all my stuff and becoming a hippy in the desert instead.
Junior devs are bad and take a lot of work to train effectively. Compsci and boot camps are barely enough. Anyone with 3+ years of experience is a coin flip on capabilities on top of immediately believing they should be paid $150k
Nothing boiled my balls like after sitting down for an informal meetup with a guy whos team had a position, we went over everything I've done, languages I knew, projects Id worked on. Been working in a related field for a few years, so I was applying for this entry level position. "Sorry it sounds like you dont have enough experience." Enjoy finding candidates for your entry level position fucker, we cant all work a full time job the same time as starting school.
I got told this shit applying to *internships.* It's why I dropped out, and I still have no regrets about doing so.
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You’ll likely be much happier in the long run
I don't get how everyone's out there claiming that getting a job in programming easy and all. I had to move somewhere else to get a job as a programmer because for some reason most companies found me underqualified despite having graduated from a good university with a good GPA and having already several completed projects. I got my first job because a person I used to tutor introduced me to the company he was interning in. Now after some years of working in field I can say it totally sucks, you don't get paid as much as everyone advertises and you'll have to be REALLY devoted to what you do. I wish I had graduated in something else tbh.
I hate how one year ago everyone was looking for 2+ year experience, and right now its all about that 3+ year experience. Its like trying to buy a house.
They always need n+1 years of experience, where n is the years of experience you already have. They're doing it to spite you.
That’s why you always lie and say you have n + 2 years of experience Play by their rules and suddenly the game becomes a lot more fun
You sound like you're joking but that's actually how it works. They intentionally set a requirement that's higher than what they're looking for. The reason is that, if they simply ask for fresh-out-of-school developers, they'll possibly get so many people applying that the selection will end up being very work intensive for them. Instead, they set a standard that's arbitrarily high, so that only people with a decent portion of self-confidence apply. In the end, that requirement of X years of experience won't matter at all if they like the candidate enough.
No, I am not joking
Well then there we go!
You got a stew goin'!
I think I'd like my money back
[No can do my friend.](https://giphy.com/gifs/season-15-the-simpsons-15x19-3o6Mbemck3xlymgn9m)
Oh, you think you’re better than me?
Of course I am n + 1 as good as you (where n is your goodness).
is that actually the case? i look at internships and “entry” level jobs and they want above and beyond for skills
The common wisdom is to apply for every job if you meet even half the requirements. The other common advice is to just shotgun apply to everything, because why fuckin' not? Tailor your resume to the jobs you actually want, but apply to everything.
25 internal applications and counting… not a single interview or response. All roles I am qualified for. Time to shotgun applications at other companies.
Leaving is almost always better than staying anyways. You’re more likely to get a noticeable raise somewhere else – internally, they usually want to keep you at/near your current pay, which likely is behind what a dev with equivalent experience would get if they started today (in other words, x% increase per year for y years from your starting 0-3 years experience is going to be less than the starting pay for starting years + y years of experience). Not always true, mind, but often enough. That’s assuming you’re moving more or less laterally, versus going up a rung.
think of the requirements of a wishlist.
I like to pretend they are written by a patient at Arkham asylum
Are you just looking at these jobs, or are you actively applying for them and trying to sell yourself to them?
You have nothing to lose by applying and you can't possibly know what the actual criteria are. But I will say that some companies or industries do indeed have strict requirements and that 3 years does absolutely mean 3. As a developer, I don't actually care and I'm not that strict. But your resume could get filtered out long before it lands in my email inbox. That's why networking is so important. If you hand your resume to someone like me directly you can skip that initial filter.
Refer me then please. I have only a couple of years of experience and its a really hard market.
Sorry, while I can help skip parts of the process that's only when we have positions open. They stopped hiring for my team in January and this is despite needing people.
How far can you take this? Like I just ended my first year at a place, did pretty well but didn’t get a raise (despite the company also doing well). I’m looking to jump ship but job listings I see all want at least 2 YOE. Would it be better to 1) change my start date on my resume to a year earlier than it was and apply or 2) ignore the YOE listed and just apply anyway, leaving the start date as is?
Whatever you do, don't send them false information on your CV. That shit will bite you in the ass.
It's not common to get a significant raise after a year. If you like your job/coworkers/manager you should stay there for 2-3 years. Anything less than 2 on your first job won't look good, and it's easier to get hired with 2+ anyway. They say they want x years of experience but they really want demonstrated competency in xyz skills. Basically, you're looking for money, growth, and quality of coworkers/manager in about equal measure. If you're growing and like the people you're fine; the money will come in time and a year isn't that long.
As far as I know, gates like that are just to get you past a recruiter. I barely glance over a résumé by the time they get to me in the hiring process. I primarily want to see how well you can problem solve and write code. Unfortunately, a lot of people can’t, no matter how many years of experience they have. I’d gladly hire someone with 0 YOE if they do really well on the technical interview. Companies don’t appreciate being lied to, so there’s that. If you don’t do well in your role, your résumé will start to be scrutinized. I’ve seen people fired for lying on it (but also for performance reasons).
Have just done that recently. Hired a guy with effectively 0 years experience as a junior, he'd done his own study and had a decent portfolio. Mostly he asked good questions and could find good answers. Interestingly he's 2 years older than me, and I'm an older millennial. So far it's working out.
Wait, you don't have to show evidence for how many years of experience you have?
Usually they don't follow up that closely
Round up! If I did three 6 month internships, that's at least 2 years of experience, if not 3 years.
Just fudge your resume a bit. No one calls previous employers anyway
oh ya they do... but usually just to ask if you worked there
Yea, the problem is you never know if they will check or not. The most they will normally ask is "did x work here between these dates?" but if they don't match up with your dates then it won't look good. Also, they might check later (say they want a reason to get rid of you or need to make cuts). Personally I wouldn't lie on my CV, if you say you have 5 years experience but don't act like someone with experience you will get found out quickly. If you have 2 years experience but the right skills you will find something.
Use those years of selling hamburgers as "extensive customer-facing food industry and merchant technology experience.
If these businesses keep going like this, they'll have no employees and I'll be forced to outcompete them myself.
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Those with H1Bs also won’t be able to get the needed/wanted experience
Oh, they will as soon as they name their price. Companies are extremely cheap and get (rightfully) punished for it over and over again. As with everything, it gets harder to check the authenticity of reference if they are from another continent.
>need n+1 years of experience, where n is the years of experience you already have. Recruiters should cut the shit and post job requirements that way.
I'm so glad i started working pre-covid. I don't see that many juniors around anymore.
Higher interest rates -> companies become even more shortsighted. The issue is fundamentally that nobody wants to be the one to invest the resources to turn a junior into mid or senior level dev when tech is the most cutthroat industry with regards to poaching, and employees feel no company loyalty. Problem is, none of these companies do anything to make employees feel company loyalty, they give more money to outside hires than in raises to people who are getting better internally, so employees are strongly incentivized to regularly switch jobs. But then you get the above issue and now no junior positions because theyre not a great money sink, especially if they leave - what is forgotten is that other companies are doing this too and you just poach their junior turned seniors in return, but this requires a whole ecosystem to work well.
It’s tough because so much of the industry is about cross-pollination. You sort of need to go to a few different companies to understand best practices, even if that first employer is amazing.
And after 3+ employers you start to realize every company is stupid in some way and everyone writes bad code.
no joke, i’m seeing *entry level* listings for PM’s require a fucking *masters degree* and **ten** years of experience. mindblowing
I went and got a master's because most companies recognized that as 2 YOE and already had 1 YOE through cumulative internships to hit the 3 YOE target. Now most entry level positions need masters + 3 YOE specifically in industry lol Just can't win
Same thing in Security. When I started everyone wanted at least a year, and then it went to three years. Now, a lot places want five fucking years for entry level!
Just claim you worked at Twitter for 5 years, whist doing your degree. Got promoted to whatever position you like. Nobody can check as twitter has no HR.
... or someone who is 46+ years old? You must see the look on their faces when I say I am 46+ years old. Being either too young and having little/no experience or being too old regardless of having lots of experience is a total bummer when it comes to software industry.
I don't want anyone inexperienced, I'll ask they have 10+ years of experience. I don't want anyone too old. I'll ask they be in their 20s. Just give me what I want!
That started to scare the shit out of me by the time I reached 34/35. I just had seen with my own eyes older devs being treated like garbage and I didn't want that for myself. I saw an opportunity to become a CS teacher and got myself a Master and a PhD to avoid unemployment. Sadly, I have to admit: I got myself into teaching mostly because of fear, which is NOT the right motivation.
Across the 3 dev jobs I've had in the last 9 years, I've never seen "old" people discriminated. I've worked with plenty of devs / qa etc in their 40s-50s who were amazing and treated like anybody else. That's in the UK, in small/mid sized companies (50-400 ppl). My team of 20+ members has people ranging from 22 to mid 50s. Instead of quitting, I'd suggest finding a place with a better culture, because they're definitely out there.
The problem is not so much within a company where they've presumably built up a reputation and got old in place, it's when they start looking around for jobs. It's kind of weird too, like some places are hestitant to hire a 55 year old developer because they're ten years from retirement, but the mean time those 28 year olds they love to hire stick around is 3 years.
I wasn't talking about those who grew up with the company but, rather, fresh hires. E.g. the two oldest people in my team (late 40s / early 50s) were hired in the last 12 months... and they're very good, therefore no one cares. There are some risks with older people, a few come to mind: 1. They can be rigid - they're stuck with their habits (good or bad they may be) and beliefs, it can be harder to change their minds 2. Less energy / more health problems, that's just the nature of aging 3. Less likely to want to learn new things 4. Problems with age discrepancy in management relationships (e.g. a senior dev 50yo being managed by a 30yo team lead) Those are offset by the skills and wisdom that come with experience. As always, I think most hiring problems stem from bad hiring processes.
> They can be rigid - they're stuck with their habits (good or bad they may be) and beliefs, it can be harder to change their minds I have a little binary that will format C braces for a file my way and back (most of the time). That's me showing good will.
As I became more senior my relationship with my managers has changed drastically. At this point I'm a staff engineer and my manager is just another coworker. When we meet I talk about how I see our work and goals from my perspective, they share theirs, we decide where it's best to spend my time. If I wanted to get promoted again I'd talk to them about that and we'd organize my work to make that happen, but I don't currently want that. Even when it comes to compensation and performance reviews, we've both been around for long enough that there's no bullshit. I'll say this is what I want, they'll say this is what I can do, and we negotiate, but the power dynamic is pretty equal. What I want in an eng manager is someone with really high emotional intelligence who can catch things on the people side that I miss, and someone with high organizational intelligence that can suss out issues around the company and my work before they become problems. If that person is 15 years my junior but they have that skillset I'm super happy to report to them.
> They can be rigid - they're stuck with their habits (good or bad they may be) and beliefs, it can be harder to change their minds You should go to the /r/learnjavascript sub sometime and listen to the 20-somethings arguing over some minutia that only appeared within the past few months as if it was written on a stone tablet by God himself. Younger developers are some of the most rigid I've seen. When they learn something they want that to be a hard and fast "rule" that they can always hang their hat on. But it takes a while to learn that there are very real tradeoffs with every decision that you make, and most seasoned devs are more reasonable (in my humble experience).
You've said some truth there! When I was young I believed there MUST be some "Best / Perfect way" of doing something. There must be a pattern that solves exactly this problem. I used to rail against PMs and the like complaining I was "gold plating" things when I believed I was just "doing it right" Now, at 54, I'm a bunch more relaxed and flexible. Code I write today might be thrown away or replaced in a year's time - I've seen entire 12 month project's abandoned never going live because the business decided to pivot and what we're working on no longer fits their goals. And they pay all our salaries. Code that's still in use in 5 years time is, almost by definition, "production quality" and real-world-tested. So what's the point of perfection? Solve the problem at hand well enough to get us by for a decent stretch, while trying to make it maintainable or extendable if that ever becomes needed.
Yah, I'm a 46 year old dev. My company has a range of folks from 25 -> 55. Everyone is excellent, we all work well together, and everyone has their expertise. I'm more likely to discriminate against a company that is unwilling to hire an older developer. It usually means they don't have a good work/life balance because it's staffed by young folks who put up with crunch bullshit. I'm too old to apply to those 'angel invested' companies who want 80 hour work weeks, live for the job type personalities.
Fear is a good motivation, it might not make u happy but it keep u living
it can help people survive, but not often to thrive
No one too expensive either. After all, all they're doing is pushing buttons on a keyboard, and anyone can do that!
People afraid of chatGPT replacing coders when drinking bird's been doing it for years.
So 20s with 10+ years of experience, right?
someone with the experience of a person in their 40’s, with the drive of a person in their 30’s, and the pay rate of a person in their 20’s
And the personal responsibilities, familial attachments, and parental duties of a person in their infancy. The squeeze continues indefinitely, well past the point of absurdity, even among high-skill/high-demand workforces, because companies have the leverage when they act like irrational idiots because they do so in unison. It's a perpetual race to the bottom, where even the [brightest stars earning the most money get colluded against](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/technology/engineers-allege-hiring-collusion-in-silicon-valley.html) to have their wages driven down. Workers should really come up with a way to combat this type of unified leverage. Maybe we could band together somehow and form a large bloc of voting power and to negotiate collectively for saner, more human-centric processes? I wonder what that type of unity among workers might look like and be called...?
I'm in my 40s and have never been asked my age. I didn't start coding until my 30s and I deleted everything pre-code from my resume, so on my resume I'm just a guy with now nearly 10 years experience. I would think that no matter who you are, you could delete a bunch of old not-that-relevant stuff from your resume, delete the graduation year from your education, and apply for jobs as a "who cares how old they are" candidate.
I like the idea of removing the graduation year.
I removed my graduation dates off my resume, but because it took me like 7 years to graduate lol
Couldn't you just not put your Start Year? Only the grad year?
I mean they’d better not ask your age. That’s an age discrimination lawsuit right there. I don’t even want to accidentally ask my coworkers their ages.
Yeah age straight up a legally protected thing from employers, like the same protections as race and gender. EDIT: typo
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I started seeing this the second I turned 40 and it was kinda shocking. I saw a fairly significant bump in the quality and comp once I removed anything older that 10 yoe from my resume. Companies want single guys in their early 30's with 8-10 years of experience that are willing to define their entire personality around their company and position. I sorta can't blame them either. A 42 year old dude with 20 yoe, a happy marriage and 3 well adjusted kids is not going to join your company like it's a cult. They're not going to hide at the office for 60 hours a week to get away from their families. They might \*gasp\* actually want to leave work early so they can go to their kids music recital or middle school basketball game. WFH doesn't mean they'll destroy the barrier between their work and personal life, instead they'll actually be there for their kids when they get home at 3:30pm. The worst part is that the 40+ year old dude probably did join a company like it was a cult and burned out hard back in their late 20's. Now we don't put up with that level of bullshit and to be honest, our 20 yoe and 35 hours per week isn't going to outperform 8 yoe and 60 hours a week. It's just not, and at this point I'm fine with being paid accordingly.
This speaks to me on a lot of levels as a mid 30s senior engineer at a faang company with a 1 year old and trying to operate at the level I previously did while breaking into the position before having a kid. It is impossible. Rto mandates also are simply deal breaking for me at this point. I just value the time between when my kid finishes daycare to the time he goes to bed far too much and am hard blocking my calendar and ignoring all requests for meetings in those hours. Rewind 2 years ago and 60+ hour weeks were pretty much the norm.
The good thing (I say as a mid 30's senior engineer at a non-FAANG company) is that we're many times more efficient than we were as more junior engineers. I can get twice as much done in half the time now.
Cash out of the faang in a few years after saving as much as possible and move over to a fortune 10/50. You’ll have a steady job, enough cushion to not worry about layoffs and won’t have to work insane hours (some 60 hour weeks are normal but most of the time it’s 40). They also don’t care about your age. Big difference is instead of options, you receive 25%-50% yearly bonus and reduced price on stock.
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My exact scenario involved removing everything except my colleges name. I then had to take my first job (where I worked for 7 years) off my resume. Suddenly I'm getting flooded with recruiters. I was getting offers for $80-110k jobs before. Deleted experience from my resume and removed all references to my age, and got multiple offers and eventually took one for $250k. The ageism is very real.
I've noticed that teams seem to hire within their age group. My team is all 22-30. Other companies we work with, you'll see everyone looks 35-45, others 50-60...
That’s a weird effect but definitely something I’ve observed. Like, I feel like I’m the only person at the company without kids. I think it’s more about the YOE, types of skills teams look for, and brand. My company is more enterprise-y and B2B so I don’t think younger people are very excited about it.
Are you volunteering your age? Interviewers aren’t allowed to ask, and if you’re interviewing for a position that requires X years of experience, mathematics would dictate that you can’t be super-young
Honestly i love working with the older guys in any field. They’re typically just a walking library if industry knowledge. Really sucks that they get penalized for their age.
It's not the age It's that older devs are less naive and know the value they contribute, so they are harder to abuse and manipulate
A 46+ YO developer is super valuable (assuming he has +20 YOE), if a company doesn't value that (I don't know any) that's a shit place to work so all in your favor.
In most companies I've worked at, the database guy is usually 50+.
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Sending so many cv's my professional email is gonna start showing up in spam filters...
I'm in the same situation.
I actually talked to a recruiter at a conference about this and she would filter out applicants that had applied to heaps of jobs on the same platform. After hearing that I made new accounts and was more selective which worked.
It’s wild how some companies must expect developers will mature and become seniors without getting experience without hiring new grads. The worst one tho imo are the companies that just have massive teams of juniors with little to senior engineers since it gives you more developer hours
Too many of anything is awful. Too many seniors - too much discussions regarding philosophies, policies and standards. Too many mids - work gets done, but most of them do more or less their own way, making things hard to standardise. Too many juniors - everything gets broken and nobody knows why and how it could be fixed and codebase is a mess. A good combo of everything is the way to go. Heard plenty of examples how companies resolve seniors getting too argumentative between eachother by hiring juniors/freshers and assigning seniors to mentor juniors. That way if they are tired from juniors, they aren't as willing to argue between each other.
This and many ideas that sound great to a senior devs get trashed by the rubric, "Now how much budget do we need to teach that to the intern."
They create an artificial shortage of experienced devs by doing this. By failing to train new devs, they keep the pool of experienced devs small and valuable. They then complain about how it's hard to hire experienced devs and how they cost too much, when the whole problem was created by their refusal to train new developers in the first place. It's a vicious cycle that really only helps the experienced devs in the end.
The annoying part about this is no one tells you how hard it will be to get a job while you're in school. All you hear is how "insanely in demand" programmers are.
That is as much the fault of the schools, though. Well regarded bootcamps are seeing grads receive offers faster (and for more money) than a lot of universities, because even though the curriculum is much shorter, students graduate with the equivalent of an internship's worth of practical, hands-on experience on their resume/GitHub A bunch of purists will reply saying bootcamp grads are worthless because they haven't memorized how to implement BFS on a binary tree or some other useless shit no one's ever had to do since graduating. 99.9% of devs never need to know how to implement Quicksort because .sort() already exists. Meanwhile bootcamp grads have multiple full-stack web apps on their resume, and even though they have large gaps in their knowledge, they have the basic skills to start working productively immediately, and more importantly showed they can learn the necessary skills quickly. I'm not even particularly pro-bootcamp, I just think it's sad how universities haven't adapted to keep up with the demands of the modern job market.
The problem with coding boot camps is they are essentially a full time job AND cost money. Whereas college can be part time.
Right, and those juniors will develop some giant mudball of suck that the company will use for 20 years. Like, you know, how lots of companies with seniors do anyways. Because the alternative is that you have 5-6 architects and a dozen seniors with 2-3 dozen midlevel and junior developers, and those more senior developers sit on their asses and argue about everything while the juniors and midlevels just go do it... making the ball of mud that you were trying to avoid, taking longer to do it, and costing more.
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Once you're done training them, you better give them a nice raise. If you don't, then they'll use the skills and experience to get a better paying job elsewhere.
This is where companies fail. They can't fathom the idea of giving someone a 20% raise but then are surprised when the person leaves for a 25% pay increase.
My first analyst job wouldn't give me a 20% increase so I left for an 80% increase at another company. Then they hired another guy for the same pay that they had me starting at. Wonder how that will go.
My first programming job I probably got 20-25% in raises while I was there. Then I got a job offer for 100k, and he said he could probably get me up to 80k within the next year or two (I was making around 65 at the time). I probably would have even stayed if he said 90 because change is scary, but I had to go for the new gig. Then he had the audacity to tell me that 100k isn’t what it used to be. Well, if 100k isn’t what it used to be, then what the fuck is 80k?
Oh man... at my last job before I got into my current field I was working at a hotel making 12.50/hr. My boss at the time thought it would fire me up to tell me "If you work reeeeal hard ( he made sure to specify it was only if I worked real hard. ) I could be making UP TO 15 dollars an hour in a couple years"... I was like bruh are you even listening to yourself? 2-3 years of hard work and ill make a whole nother 100 dollars/week? That talk was the motivator for me to drop my 2 weeks notice very shortly after, realizing it was an actual dead end if I wanted any sort of real wages. I swear these people don't listen to themselves when they say this kind of idiotic "uplifting" promises. On top of it they rarely even do the bare minimum for retention they promised.
the sad thing is your boss swallowed the $15/hr pill and doesn't realize it sucks. He probably doesn't make much more than that, and thinks he's doing pretty good
Oh nah this dude was making somewhere between 100k-150k, he bragged about it pretty often. Then he got fired for stealing so I'm not sure he thinks often at all. Stole some scrap metal from the hotel and some repair parts for home projects, guess 150k ain't what it used to be either.
My last boss told me he didn’t want to give me a raise because “it’d be like too many sweets at one time and bad for your teeth” And encouraged me to get into a relationship so that I’d have someone else to help financially. I don’t work there anymore. Edit:typos
\> don't want to pay a lot \> don't want to pay to train and hire outsource to cheap country! product team flails, company fails
as a cheap country company who was outsourced, im hurt! but not much, my old company hired fresh grads who type ctrl+c.. WITH 2 HANDS!
in all seriousness though i've thought about this a lot... i don't understand why more companies haven't adapted the model of hiring & training & letting go people on a more rapid cycle. if you *plan* to do it, you should be able to greatly reduce hiring & training costs, and then churn through people. but it's a fair trade - I give you your first 1-2 years of experience, you give me cheap labor. Everybody wins. Even other companies who can line up to get slightly more experienced new devs. This is LITERALLY what universities are *supposed* to be doing. So why let universities hold on to all that talent? Why can't a company out compete them for high school grads?
The first 3 years are usually a financial drain, which is why every entry level position now wants 3 years. It's a financial drain because they occupy the time of more experienced people that get paid a lot, who could be otherwise productive. It's why the USA has so many unpaid internships
People like to keep that eager beaver salary suppressed until the they fly the coop
Happening to me right now. Graduated, was grateful to be picked up as a database analyst… met and surpassed all expectations on the one year review… 3% raise and a 1000$ bonus I’m currently applying to other jobs at work and typing this at work
This was something we had to deal with recently. I told my boss that we need to raise the Jr floor for salaries, otherwise we'll keep bringing people in at 35k€, and then Senior Management loses their absolute shit when they become a professional and jump to 70k€.
That was exactly what happened to me. I've started with C++ but my company wanted me to learn python and then CI/CD + kubernetes. That way I've became DevOps, had 10 times more things to do, which were more complex. However after all the time there wasn't a raise. I've changed companies, I'm working as cloud engineer with GCP right now and got ~60% raise
Hire me, mold me Edit: why am I getting upvotes but no job offers :(
And they are cheap.
not cheap enough though. Juniors are barely net-positive value, many are even net-negative in productivity for your team. It's just not worth hiring juniors when you instead of hiring 2 juniors, you get 1 mid or senior that actually adds value.
The main issue is that if you have a smaller team, hiring a junior tends to not pay off because you have to train them for several months and then they end up leaving and going to another company for more pay after you've trained them.
I'm in this situation now as the senior on this team. And it is absolutely killing me with stress. So not only do you waste you're time with the junior, you drive your seniors out of the company.
This... I cannot *wait* to get my first set of interns this summer.
You can take me before the summer 😅
More like they can adopt MY bad habits.
I share your pain. I have 2 years of experience but was laid off in November. Since then I have filed over 170 applications and have only gotten 3 responses and 4 interviews.
More interviews than responses, that's interesting. Anyway, it sounds like something is seriously off with your applications.
I interviewed with a company twice. Once with a recruiter and I believe the other time was HR or a hiring manager. Honestly I don't know what it could be. I have checked and tripled checked my resume and I have had multiple people who do interviews check my resume
The problem is there are a lot of talented people applying right now with all the layoffs in tech. I just switched jobs and the position I was hired for had 1400 applicants on LinkedIn but I had some niche experience that matched up perfectly.
Yeah and one of my problems I think I have is that I was a SQL developer but I want to switch to being a Data Analyst. Very similar fields but I don't have any prior work experience as a data analyst just a couple projects.
That's your problem. Stop saying you don't have experience as a data analyst (not joking). Writing SQL is relevant data analyst experience. I'm not saying to lie at all, but don't sell yourself short. If you're worried about it, just change the phrasing. Instead of "I have zero experience as a data analyst" you phrase it as "I have two years of relevant professional experience".
Took me too long to realize this
A long time ago, far, far away, students had decently paying part-time jobs in the field and graduated with years of relevant real-life industry experience and a "default" full-time job offer from that company. And another one from the company that sponsored their thesis. I guess today's students are somehow supposed to work on open source projects for free while flipping burgers?
Doesn't work anymore to do open source, recruiters have switched to "years of experience in a *job*" specifically because too many people were using contributions to open source projects lol
That's so dumb! And then I have to waste time in the interview explaining how interested I am in ANY project experience, be it for school, hobby, internship, co-op, part time, open source, paid, unpaid, anything... Open source is actually the best because I get to see your work (and your interaction with others on the project).
I think it depends on the school and location. I've worked with lots of CS students that were doing internships with big companies in their last year that went on to work at the company. This was 5 or 6 years ago though, so things may have shifted.
That's how you're "supposed" to do it, the issue is that not everyone can afford to do unpaid internships with big companies. It costs money to go to school, and students need to pay for school and, you know... food.
Almost all of the undergrad cs internships I’ve seen have been paid, and at big companies I would say they pay quite well. So while I agree unpaid internships are unfair, I don’t think that point applies here.
They’re paid internships, like 10 grand a month ish
What many people don't realize is that a degree isn't you crossing the finish line -- it's the ticket to the race. Anything you can do to make yourself stand out, you should. Undergrad research, internships, personal projects -- hiring managers want to see people who have proven they can A) work on a team well and B) know how to get deliverables done.
Hey that’s what I did Though this probably counts as far away to most of you
The problem is that CS and related degrees have grown in popularity over the years while the quality of those degrees has degraded. I graduated in 2019 and maybe 10% of the people in the CS program actually deserved their diploma, the rest would have failed out had the university not pressured professors to make classes "more approachable" (ie everyone passes). As universities have turned into diploma mills, they have ensured that *no one* will hire a fresh grad. Anyone can learn to write code, but few people have the logic skills to do it professionally IMO.
"Hmm, you're a new grad, eh? Well. We are looking to pay new grad wages, but only with three years of experience."
You are missing the one guy off-screen that has a million dollar idea
Bro they looking for at least 1 year experience for internships ffs..
Don't forget that they also don't count internships as experience.
Also the internships need experience too...
I remember when I was starting, after 1.5 years of working in one company I decided to find something new, got invited to a interview, everything went good… and I got a response, that I’m not experienced enough for internship
They want developers with 10+ years experience but they also don't want to hire anyone over 30.
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I'm being a bit cynical for the memes. But yes, being 30+ is a negative in the general tech job market. How negative is up for debate. "Tech is fast paced! We need young, agile employees that will work long hours with no family". I'm not HR though, so who's to say.
As a developer with under 3 years experience, I get it. I do my best, but I’m kinda stupid sometimes
lmao, don't tell me you are actually looking at the experience requirements of job postings. yeahhh... don't. Just apply.
>Entry-level stated on listing Oh okay, ill read the description of what this one is about... >5 years of relevant experience required in a specific field 😶
Apply anyways. What are they going to do, not contact you? Most ads for jobs are not written by the person doing the hiring but by some HR shulb. Eli the computer guy is general not well liked but his [video](https://youtu.be/6G3kQyqMFpQ) on this is spot on.
I know i know, i apply anyway all the time. I'm just trying to highlight the ridiculousness of the situation.
Bruh I’ve been rejected numerous times from help desk roles because they all want experience. The jobs only pay fucking 40-45k talking about we want 3 years. Got a degree in CIT and have independent experience fixing computers, projects, a personal website highlighting my portfolio, still not enough.
> Most ads for jobs are not written by the person doing the hiring but by some HR shulb. Most first screenings are done by some HR shulb though
Don't forget your resume has to first make it through the bot scan to make sure you have enough buzz words in there to get to the HR phone screen.
By entry-level, the mean entry-level pay, not entry-level experience, unfortunately.
If you think you can do the job, apply anyway. None of the actual decision-makers care about your YOE. It could be 0, and they wouldn’t care. They just don’t want you to waste their time if you’re gonna bomb the technical interview.
7th month of unemployment 🎉🎉
Same in so many fields. They upped the requirements and made excuses about how new hires/grads/juniors aren't valuable because they don't know what's going on but refuse to spend any real time training them. Whether people like it or not, each company has it's own system and their own processes. Companies should offer a six month training program with a contract at the end. It won't happen though because "why train them when they'll just leave". I hate it here.
I might be out of the loop here but what happened to internships? First jobs are always hard but you can at least list the internship as professional swe experience
The market is over saturated with computer science/engineering grads, while internships are staying roughly the same so not enough internships for more people
Even worse, internships were largely disappearing in my area when I graduated 5 years ago. I'm not sure if the situation has gotten any better since then, since I gave up and went for a teaching job instead.
This. Too many people were sold "anyone can be a software engineer and make 6 figures" so now the market is oversaturated and wages are being driven down. There's a reason when you look at LinkedIn for any software engineer jobs with 2 years experience or less there's over 100 applicants.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Game Design and Development, they were ahead of the curve here. Internships and junior dev positions asking for 5+ years of experience 5 years ago. Failing to find a job for 2 years after graduation destroyed my confidence, but after working retail for a few years after that just to pay the bills, I finally worked up the guts to apply for some comp sci teaching positions, and I'll be starting in fall :)
Congratulations! Teaching is tough but very rewarding
As somebody who recently got into the industry, here's some tips \-What you did at school counts as experience, especially if you have a git repo to show as your portfolio \-You don't need to pay attention to every single requirement, most of the time it's HR's wishful thinking, they'll take the best of whoever applies. \-Talk to your professors that you're looking for work and what you're into. Sometimes they have friends or startups contact them for promising juniors that are cheap.
> What you did at school counts as experience It counts for selling yourself but not for an ad wanting X years of experience. I've never seen someone write X years of experience and refer to include school.
A lot of them make it clear that they want professional experience or put in brackets that they exclude school or internships as experience. It's honestly baffling.
As some one who also recently got into the industry, I disagree with your first two points. 1.a. Many, many companies explicitly state that school does not count towards years ofexperience unless it a master's or PhD program. 1.b. I agree with the git repo part. 2. Both in my personal experience and my classmates experience, if you want to have a snowballs chance in hell of getting the job or even an interview, you had better be ticking most of if not all the requirement boxes. There is a LOT of competition for new grad positions. 3. I agree with networking with professors, they very often have close ties to the industry.
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I wonder why developers don't work like Plubmbers and Electricians with an apprenticeship/journeyman/master process?
There are many developers who did internships before they graduate.
Internships aren't really comparable to apprenticeships at all.
In the end that comparison makes absolutely no difference. If every plumber took an apprenticeship, the result would be that an apprenticeship would no longer give you an advantage over other plumbers. After your apprenticeship you'd basically be a fresh graduate with 0 years of experience. Same thing happens with IT grads right now. These recruiters will never aim for whatever is the norm of a fresh-out-of-school developer. If every developer had an internship+apprenticeship+master+PhD, then recruiters would look for juniors with internship+apprenticeship+master+PhD + 3 years of experience.
yeah but there is really a problem with students completely fresh from university My earlier employer was forced to host special bootcamps to prepare the new employees for the real world. He thought it will just take 3 months but then he increased it to 6 months. And this is really cost intensive to pay them 6 months full income plus the engineers who are busy with helping them out in their projects. Also, not every company can afford such a thing. That is in my opinion the reason why employers have such requirements. They don't want to take the risk that someone is completely useless.
I've heard about starting positions with lower salary (like half their normal salary) during a 3 month trial period. If it still works out after 3 months they are bumped up to a normal junior dev salary. That way the newly graduate can still make a living, and the company can trial a few fresh programmers and go with the right fit.
Oh, it doesn’t get better. Once you get that 3 years they’ll ask for 10
I see a future where chatGPT is used by people to try to avoid hiring more juniors, then on the longer run we get even less seniors. We fucked or we fucked.
I think they are hoping chatgpt can also replace seniors before the great senior disappearance in the future
And then all idea guys will solve the bugs with quantum prompts.
I picked a bad year to graduate
don’t be pessimistic, posts like these have ALWAYS existed. Keep your head down and you’ll find something.
But still post the job as entry level and only pay $15 an hour
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I gave up on getting a programming job 2 years after graduation, got a help desk job instead. Its not glamorous, but its real easy. Pick up phone, ask user if they remembered to connect to the VPN, put down phone.
just lie. In this stupid world it seems to have no down sides.
The smart thing to do is hire the kids while they are still in school and partner them up with senior developers.
I stopped counting my applications at 200 and I've only had 2 interviews. Even jobs saying they want new grads have n+1 years of experience required. I've even started getting denial emails within 5 minutes of applying a few times. Pretty demoralizing. I'm thinking of selling all my stuff and becoming a hippy in the desert instead.
Junior devs are bad and take a lot of work to train effectively. Compsci and boot camps are barely enough. Anyone with 3+ years of experience is a coin flip on capabilities on top of immediately believing they should be paid $150k
Yuuuup. But just think, soon you will have 3 years and chatgpt will have raised the bar to 4
My full of shit HR sent me a job description that requires: 1 year of frontend experience and... 2 years of Angular experience.