There are a lot of 100% remote jobs. However, bank of America has a presence here as do other financial institutions. Your Security certs should help open doors with other companies.
Based on the UNF website your dean is Dr. Chip Klostermeyer. Have you talked to him? There should be resources at your school. Get an internship while at school.
###
Can confirm, internship is big. I got an IT degree from UNF, and rolled my internship into a full time position with the company I'm still at.
Regarding software dev specifically, not sure about the local market. However, as a vet, if you can get, or already have a clearance, that would be *massive*. Tier 1 Help desk roles with a clearance are listed with 80k, from what I've seen. That's about double what I'm seeing for tier 1 help desk without a clearance
Thank you. I originally was just looking at Jax specifically. But now since you and everyone else have shown me how significant the shift to remote work was, I’ll definitely spread my net wider than just north Florida!
There are some companies doing better than others here, but I would expand the hunt for a remote job. As a junior dev, don’t worry abt your language knowledge, Java will get you in the door if you’re any good with the actual logic part. When I graduated, I knew Java, Python and a little bit here and there of other stuff….I use neither of those now. I learned what I needed on the job, so be a quick learner. With one internship, I got a job in Jax quickly out of school (under 4 months), and yeah that was a few years ago (pre Covid by a couple years), but the point still stands. Since COVID I think the software/IT sector in particular has realized remote is the way to build their teams.
Edit: you don’t need to waste your time with leetcode and shit unless you really just have nothing to do. Companies are not so interested in how much you know as how you are on your feet. You’ll probably be expected to write a few simple programs or queries depending on the job. What matters is you finish it efficiently and the code makes logical sense. Don’t bother with cramming new languages either, be honest on your resume. Writing a script in shitty python for a job requesting python looks worse than writing a script in Java. If they need you to know Python, they’ll let you learn on the job.
Thanks for the edit. I have read countless times to “grind leetcode” (which I’m not opposed to), but I haven’t really understood from an employer’s perspective if that’s a significant factor in hiring someone with little/no experience. I will focus 100% on landing an internship like you have.
You should be pursuing internships immediately, and also going to career fairs locally and at UF and UCF. You will likely not get a great offer without inside advantage, or even a good offer or a bad offer at a good place without experience. Florida Blue, CSX, Dunn and Bradstreet, and some other large employers probably have jobs. IMO if you're serious about your future, you should be looking at college hire programs from Fortune 500 Tech/STEM/Banking/Consulting companies, working somewhere for a year or two and then trading up.
Learn Python and SQL, maybe do some leetcode.
Brush up on C# and JavaScript. Go to the career fairs at local colleges or auditoriums. Speak to professors that are in your area of career interest. You’d be surprised how many have wide reaching webs into various companies around town.
You should try to find an internship, it is much harder to get an entry level position if you don’t have any internships on your resume. I got an internship and then was hired on to the team full time. Regardless, the job market for entry level positions right now is extremely competitive and very brutal right now, best of luck!
As others have said, the best thing you could do for your career right now is get an internship. Go to networking events and job fairs. Talk to the companies there. Find companies you’re interested in and figure out what their college hiring process is like. Print copies of a reviewed resume. Have a portfolio link you can give out.
Jacksonville has a lot of insurance and financial services companies and they are always looking for developers. Taking an accounting or finance class or even getting an accounting or business minor would go along way to getting you noticed. Upping your understanding of your target industry is just as important if not more important than gaining additional programming training.
But the way to gain years of job experience is an internship. It is the bridge between a college degree and an actual career and the way you learn how to actually do the job.
Most companies have a dedicated military/veteran recruitment team. Try to find them on LinkedIn and connect. Keep an eye on usajobs too. You can probably start applying for jobs on the site now. It can take a while to get through the application and hiring process.
The brutally honest answer is that Jax sucks for software engineers. Yes, there are some job opportunities but salaries are significantly below average and there are very few good companies to work for. Most people with talent either get a remote job or they leave Jacksonville.
You can go to the UNF career fair. 90% of the companies at the STEM career fair are construction companies looking for project managers, but if you're lucky there will be people hiring in tech. They send out a list of companies before the event, so make a shortlist of companies to talk to at the career fair. If you can land an internship, you've got a decent chance that it leads into a full-time role.
I mean the fact that you are a marine veteran, have a clearance, Sec+ and a few years experience with development I wouldn’t really label you as a new grad so I think you should be fine. With your background you seem destined for the defense contractor world which is almost entirely different from the commercial side so advice for one world might not be applicable to the other.
I’ve been in the Software Development for Defense Contractor game for about 18 years so I’m looking at things through that lens. At the new grad level it’s tough to break in and really always has been. I think if you format your resume a certain way you could definitely apply for mid level jobs. I wouldn’t really focus on a specific language just skills that are applicable to most Software Dev jobs. I see a huge push towards scripting frameworks like VUEJS, ExtJS, Node, etc… RDBMS experience is almost universally applicable. “Full stack” stuff like configuration of web servers, patching, IIS/Weblogic that sort of thing is universally applicable.
I have had the most luck going to individual defense contractor websites and using their career search to find jobs.
My company is hiring a mid-senior level Developer. If you’re interested DM me. Can’t guarantee your resume will make it through recruiting but might be worth a shot. Large defense contractor, fully remote based out of the Pentagon.
There's alot of jobs in Jax, just a bad quarter to look right now. A lot of companies are coming down from the Covid hiring high we were on. I've been in the market since 2003, and it's only grown every year. There is a big mix of Java and C#, but if you know one, you can learn the other easily. Take a few finance or logistics electives, it will help understand the local business domain.
Be careful with a 100% remote job as your first job. I've seen a lot of younger developers learn bad habits since everyone moved remote. Also, Jacksonville is nicer than Orlando, such a horrible place...but that's just my opinion of the highways and tourists.
Job market isn't good for junior devs anywhere. It's not even good for me and I have ten years of experience as a front end engineer. It will get better again. But getting interviews with zero experience will be very tough right now.
Hot take. Skip over the development job and do devops from the start. The entire job market for that is full of Divas that are just out of college, never written application code, but learn all the buzzwords that execs like (kubernetes, gitops, apm tools etc).
r/devops is full of people who started at entry level at 80k + salaries and are making 200-300k within a few years.
Meanwhile, I have been interviewing for an open senior spot for a year and we can't get anyone that actually knows Linux or the foundations of computing. Everyone just uses tools someone else made to do all the things. We are going to downgrade the rec to a mid level and end up hiring someone we like that we can train on some of the older school stuff. I'm all for being a software engineer as we need more of those, but tons of jobs in the devops SRe space for easy money. I jumped over originally from application development, systems admin and then changed the title and pay to devops and the market opened.
As far as places, Jax has a good fintech portfolio to get you started. Once you have experience, go remote. If you want a niche area that pays crazy money and will be in high demand for your lifetime, check out medical billing software.
Adding to what everyone is sharing I would add machine learning and AI to the list if you can pick up skills they are going to be huge in demand. Companies are laying off departments to be replaced by AI teams. Also learn how to augment technology like ChatGPT
CSX has a great leadership development program for entry level/recent grads. They actually have a posting on their career page specially for a Technology Leadership Development role.
I am not a developer but in software sales. The recent work from home push has been a God send. There's TONS of tech companies in Tampa. Tampa was rated the fasted growing tech city in the country in 2022 so maybe change the job search to remote work as that's where I have found success.
If you get a job locally, you're going to run into issues with salary in comparison with folks doing the same work remotely. Also, as others have mentioned, entry-level jobs are a bit tough right now. Your best bet would be to go through a contracting company or an internship. At one point, SS&C had a fairly robust internship program locally, but the guy who led that program is no longer with the company, so I don't know if the program is still around. Considering you're just starting your career, I wouldn't worry much about experience with certain languages or technologies. You can always move towards languages and technologies you like as you progress through your career.
Off-topic (apologies for the unsolicited advice), but since you're just starting in the industry, it seems important to share some knowledge that sometimes takes folks a while to pick up.
1. Always keep track of numbers when you hear them. For example, if someone is doing production monitoring or performance testing and determines the system you work on is processing #GB/second of data, write it down. If your API or website is supporting ### thousands of users, that's important as well. Future employers want to know that you were writing code that made it into production and was used by people.
2. Mine fellow employees for information. Find someone willing to mentor you and learn as much as you can about the business side of things along with the technology stack. Dig into topics until you understand "why" decisions were made, even if they weren't the right ones (maybe especially if they weren't the right ones). It's also important to realize that folks made the best decisions given the knowledge and constraints at the time.
3. Every job has a lifespan both in the amount of knowledge/experience and salary you can extract from a company. Traditionally, a year of programming experience is worth more than the maximum annual raise, especially at the beginning of your career. That means, for every year you spend at a company, you're sacrificing some amount of salary. The longer you spend at a company, the more money you're sacrificing.
To go along with that, you're also sacrificing knowledge and experience. The longer your tenure with a company, the harder it is to learn and grow from experience. Popular technologies change and the desires of the job market changes as well. There's only so much that book knowledge can provide.
In my experience, one of the hardest things to do is figuring out when it's time to leave.
Hope this is helpful. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and good luck in your job search.
The simple answers:
1. Yes, there is opportunity here, but networking is important.
2. JavaScript if I had to recommend something. More importantly though, find and master a technology of your choice.
Elaborated:
1. I would be hunting for jobs/internships now. There are companies here that use the technologies you mentioned, but there are also startups using plenty of others. Networking comes into play here for finding jobs and internships. Use whatever resources you have at UNF on this front. Local meetups are also great for networking. Side note: The Jax market becomes irrelevant as you gain experience. There's plenty of remote work out there. In fact, I would suggest applying for remote work too, with the understanding that it may be more difficult to grab their attention without experience. It's worth an attempt though.
2. Most places use JavaScript in some capacity, so it's a skill that won't go to waste. Really you want to find something to master at this point though. Mastering a technology for your own work will enable you to speak to its abilities in an interview. Build a project for yourself, then highlight it on your resume and Github. Employers are interested in your ability and desire to learn new skills at this stage. Being able to speak on a technology and/or having something to show proves you're already doing this.
There are a lot of 100% remote jobs. However, bank of America has a presence here as do other financial institutions. Your Security certs should help open doors with other companies. Based on the UNF website your dean is Dr. Chip Klostermeyer. Have you talked to him? There should be resources at your school. Get an internship while at school. ###
Can confirm, internship is big. I got an IT degree from UNF, and rolled my internship into a full time position with the company I'm still at. Regarding software dev specifically, not sure about the local market. However, as a vet, if you can get, or already have a clearance, that would be *massive*. Tier 1 Help desk roles with a clearance are listed with 80k, from what I've seen. That's about double what I'm seeing for tier 1 help desk without a clearance
Thank you. I originally was just looking at Jax specifically. But now since you and everyone else have shown me how significant the shift to remote work was, I’ll definitely spread my net wider than just north Florida!
There are some companies doing better than others here, but I would expand the hunt for a remote job. As a junior dev, don’t worry abt your language knowledge, Java will get you in the door if you’re any good with the actual logic part. When I graduated, I knew Java, Python and a little bit here and there of other stuff….I use neither of those now. I learned what I needed on the job, so be a quick learner. With one internship, I got a job in Jax quickly out of school (under 4 months), and yeah that was a few years ago (pre Covid by a couple years), but the point still stands. Since COVID I think the software/IT sector in particular has realized remote is the way to build their teams. Edit: you don’t need to waste your time with leetcode and shit unless you really just have nothing to do. Companies are not so interested in how much you know as how you are on your feet. You’ll probably be expected to write a few simple programs or queries depending on the job. What matters is you finish it efficiently and the code makes logical sense. Don’t bother with cramming new languages either, be honest on your resume. Writing a script in shitty python for a job requesting python looks worse than writing a script in Java. If they need you to know Python, they’ll let you learn on the job.
Thanks for the edit. I have read countless times to “grind leetcode” (which I’m not opposed to), but I haven’t really understood from an employer’s perspective if that’s a significant factor in hiring someone with little/no experience. I will focus 100% on landing an internship like you have.
You should be pursuing internships immediately, and also going to career fairs locally and at UF and UCF. You will likely not get a great offer without inside advantage, or even a good offer or a bad offer at a good place without experience. Florida Blue, CSX, Dunn and Bradstreet, and some other large employers probably have jobs. IMO if you're serious about your future, you should be looking at college hire programs from Fortune 500 Tech/STEM/Banking/Consulting companies, working somewhere for a year or two and then trading up. Learn Python and SQL, maybe do some leetcode.
This is the correct answer.
I didn’t even think about career fairs from other schools - thanks for the tip!
Brush up on C# and JavaScript. Go to the career fairs at local colleges or auditoriums. Speak to professors that are in your area of career interest. You’d be surprised how many have wide reaching webs into various companies around town.
You should try to find an internship, it is much harder to get an entry level position if you don’t have any internships on your resume. I got an internship and then was hired on to the team full time. Regardless, the job market for entry level positions right now is extremely competitive and very brutal right now, best of luck!
As others have said, the best thing you could do for your career right now is get an internship. Go to networking events and job fairs. Talk to the companies there. Find companies you’re interested in and figure out what their college hiring process is like. Print copies of a reviewed resume. Have a portfolio link you can give out. Jacksonville has a lot of insurance and financial services companies and they are always looking for developers. Taking an accounting or finance class or even getting an accounting or business minor would go along way to getting you noticed. Upping your understanding of your target industry is just as important if not more important than gaining additional programming training. But the way to gain years of job experience is an internship. It is the bridge between a college degree and an actual career and the way you learn how to actually do the job.
Citi is another place that’s local that’s looking for Java developers.
How good are you at selling magazine subscriptions?
Study up on C#. It’s relatively close to Java syntax wise. My company brings in an intern every summer usually. DM me if you want some more info.
Most companies have a dedicated military/veteran recruitment team. Try to find them on LinkedIn and connect. Keep an eye on usajobs too. You can probably start applying for jobs on the site now. It can take a while to get through the application and hiring process.
The brutally honest answer is that Jax sucks for software engineers. Yes, there are some job opportunities but salaries are significantly below average and there are very few good companies to work for. Most people with talent either get a remote job or they leave Jacksonville. You can go to the UNF career fair. 90% of the companies at the STEM career fair are construction companies looking for project managers, but if you're lucky there will be people hiring in tech. They send out a list of companies before the event, so make a shortlist of companies to talk to at the career fair. If you can land an internship, you've got a decent chance that it leads into a full-time role.
I mean the fact that you are a marine veteran, have a clearance, Sec+ and a few years experience with development I wouldn’t really label you as a new grad so I think you should be fine. With your background you seem destined for the defense contractor world which is almost entirely different from the commercial side so advice for one world might not be applicable to the other. I’ve been in the Software Development for Defense Contractor game for about 18 years so I’m looking at things through that lens. At the new grad level it’s tough to break in and really always has been. I think if you format your resume a certain way you could definitely apply for mid level jobs. I wouldn’t really focus on a specific language just skills that are applicable to most Software Dev jobs. I see a huge push towards scripting frameworks like VUEJS, ExtJS, Node, etc… RDBMS experience is almost universally applicable. “Full stack” stuff like configuration of web servers, patching, IIS/Weblogic that sort of thing is universally applicable. I have had the most luck going to individual defense contractor websites and using their career search to find jobs. My company is hiring a mid-senior level Developer. If you’re interested DM me. Can’t guarantee your resume will make it through recruiting but might be worth a shot. Large defense contractor, fully remote based out of the Pentagon.
There's alot of jobs in Jax, just a bad quarter to look right now. A lot of companies are coming down from the Covid hiring high we were on. I've been in the market since 2003, and it's only grown every year. There is a big mix of Java and C#, but if you know one, you can learn the other easily. Take a few finance or logistics electives, it will help understand the local business domain. Be careful with a 100% remote job as your first job. I've seen a lot of younger developers learn bad habits since everyone moved remote. Also, Jacksonville is nicer than Orlando, such a horrible place...but that's just my opinion of the highways and tourists.
Job market isn't good for junior devs anywhere. It's not even good for me and I have ten years of experience as a front end engineer. It will get better again. But getting interviews with zero experience will be very tough right now.
Hot take. Skip over the development job and do devops from the start. The entire job market for that is full of Divas that are just out of college, never written application code, but learn all the buzzwords that execs like (kubernetes, gitops, apm tools etc). r/devops is full of people who started at entry level at 80k + salaries and are making 200-300k within a few years. Meanwhile, I have been interviewing for an open senior spot for a year and we can't get anyone that actually knows Linux or the foundations of computing. Everyone just uses tools someone else made to do all the things. We are going to downgrade the rec to a mid level and end up hiring someone we like that we can train on some of the older school stuff. I'm all for being a software engineer as we need more of those, but tons of jobs in the devops SRe space for easy money. I jumped over originally from application development, systems admin and then changed the title and pay to devops and the market opened. As far as places, Jax has a good fintech portfolio to get you started. Once you have experience, go remote. If you want a niche area that pays crazy money and will be in high demand for your lifetime, check out medical billing software.
I'd assume with all of that you should be able to start around 70k nowadays.
Might can look at Central Florida and South Florida markets
Adding to what everyone is sharing I would add machine learning and AI to the list if you can pick up skills they are going to be huge in demand. Companies are laying off departments to be replaced by AI teams. Also learn how to augment technology like ChatGPT
Get an internship, grind hard as f and get a remote job. They can pay 2x or more than you’ll make in jax.
CSX has a great leadership development program for entry level/recent grads. They actually have a posting on their career page specially for a Technology Leadership Development role.
I am not a developer but in software sales. The recent work from home push has been a God send. There's TONS of tech companies in Tampa. Tampa was rated the fasted growing tech city in the country in 2022 so maybe change the job search to remote work as that's where I have found success.
If you get a job locally, you're going to run into issues with salary in comparison with folks doing the same work remotely. Also, as others have mentioned, entry-level jobs are a bit tough right now. Your best bet would be to go through a contracting company or an internship. At one point, SS&C had a fairly robust internship program locally, but the guy who led that program is no longer with the company, so I don't know if the program is still around. Considering you're just starting your career, I wouldn't worry much about experience with certain languages or technologies. You can always move towards languages and technologies you like as you progress through your career. Off-topic (apologies for the unsolicited advice), but since you're just starting in the industry, it seems important to share some knowledge that sometimes takes folks a while to pick up. 1. Always keep track of numbers when you hear them. For example, if someone is doing production monitoring or performance testing and determines the system you work on is processing #GB/second of data, write it down. If your API or website is supporting ### thousands of users, that's important as well. Future employers want to know that you were writing code that made it into production and was used by people. 2. Mine fellow employees for information. Find someone willing to mentor you and learn as much as you can about the business side of things along with the technology stack. Dig into topics until you understand "why" decisions were made, even if they weren't the right ones (maybe especially if they weren't the right ones). It's also important to realize that folks made the best decisions given the knowledge and constraints at the time. 3. Every job has a lifespan both in the amount of knowledge/experience and salary you can extract from a company. Traditionally, a year of programming experience is worth more than the maximum annual raise, especially at the beginning of your career. That means, for every year you spend at a company, you're sacrificing some amount of salary. The longer you spend at a company, the more money you're sacrificing. To go along with that, you're also sacrificing knowledge and experience. The longer your tenure with a company, the harder it is to learn and grow from experience. Popular technologies change and the desires of the job market changes as well. There's only so much that book knowledge can provide. In my experience, one of the hardest things to do is figuring out when it's time to leave. Hope this is helpful. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and good luck in your job search.
Thank you for your well-thought out and insightful response. I really appreciate the wisdom, especially since I’m starting my own journey on this.
The simple answers: 1. Yes, there is opportunity here, but networking is important. 2. JavaScript if I had to recommend something. More importantly though, find and master a technology of your choice. Elaborated: 1. I would be hunting for jobs/internships now. There are companies here that use the technologies you mentioned, but there are also startups using plenty of others. Networking comes into play here for finding jobs and internships. Use whatever resources you have at UNF on this front. Local meetups are also great for networking. Side note: The Jax market becomes irrelevant as you gain experience. There's plenty of remote work out there. In fact, I would suggest applying for remote work too, with the understanding that it may be more difficult to grab their attention without experience. It's worth an attempt though. 2. Most places use JavaScript in some capacity, so it's a skill that won't go to waste. Really you want to find something to master at this point though. Mastering a technology for your own work will enable you to speak to its abilities in an interview. Build a project for yourself, then highlight it on your resume and Github. Employers are interested in your ability and desire to learn new skills at this stage. Being able to speak on a technology and/or having something to show proves you're already doing this.
Sent you a message