I Genuinely Feel Bad for New Developers
I Genuinely Feel Bad for New Developers
The industry is so utterly fucked right now. My heart truly goes out to you guys.
Our industry has changed a lot over the years. Of course, that’s to be expected — tech is a growing and ever-changing industry, after all. If you get into this field with the expectation of only having to learn a handful of things and not ever having to continue your learnings… well, my friend, you’ve already doomed yourself for failure. Change course immediately.
However, I for one never would have expected the job market to be what it is today. Of course, that might also simply be due to the fact that I’m still comparatively young. I haven’t had to work through recessions, or at least through any that effected me to a point where I noticed. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s age, maybe it’s something else entirely, but the ride has been smooth thus far.
Every so often, I’ll load up Indeed and take a peek at how the job market’s doing. Dust off my resume, send out a dozen applications, then bury my face back into whatever I was working on prior to my Indeed doom-scroll. You know, totally normal behaviour.
Now, I need to preface this by saying that I’m not taking my job search seriously right now, kinda just putting out feelers. Seeing what’s out there. Testing the waters. But every single application I sent out has received that time-old classic response of “Thank you for applying! Unfortunately—” like a broken record. What gives?
Lemme just do a bit of Googling and— oh.
OH.
Oh NO that’s not good.
There are so many huge tech companies conducting mass layoffs despite increased revenue. So now there’s a sudden flood of solid talent in the market. No wonder almost all of these job listings say they have “thousands” of applicants now instead of the usual “hundreds” I saw when I first broke into this field.
Add to this the staggering number of bootcamp graduates that were churned out over the years, all chasing that shiny promise of a six-figure salary. It’s absolute Hell. This is Hell. We’re in Hell.
Yikes.
I’m incredibly fortunate to have gotten through my bootcamp phase and broken into the industry when I did, because jesus hoobastank bumblefuck I can’t imagine trying to land a programming job in the market today. There’s too much competition, and there are too many companies that would rather utilize the power of corporate greed to pad the wallets of their exec teams.
Like, juniors now have to go up against an army of laid-off senior developers, and these companies are really only hiring senior devs right now. I challenge you to find a single company that’s actively looking for junior developers (and paying them properly — none of that $20/hr apprenticeship bullshit). And before you come running to me with a “gotcha” listing, apply to it first. Go ahead, dust off that resume and apply. I’m willing to bet my brother-in-law’s left testicle that the response you’ll get is that they’re looking for someone “with more experience”.
Sure, you’ll get the generic canned auto-response of “going in a different direction” or “moved forward with other applicants”, but if you manage to get an ACTUAL answer from an ACTUAL human (not this AI-generated crap) it’ll almost always be that they’re looking for someone with “more experience”.
The fuck you mean “more experience”?!
It’s a JUNIOR ROLE.
HIRE JUNIORS.
To anybody in a hiring position that may be reading this, I mean this with every ounce of disrespect I can muster: junior means junior — if your desired candidate needs more than 2+ years of experience, that’s not a junior, so fix the job listing to reflect that, and pay them for their experience.
Oh and that’s a whole other thing, what the Hell is going on with your pay scales?? Why is it that I’m finding job listings for senior developers in one of the most populated cities in the States, in a tech hub, that are only offering $70k-90k ranges?!
Bro.
In my field, in my location, that’s a junior-level salary. So again, fix the job listing. At that salary range, you should be hiring juniors. Not “juniors with 5+ years of experience” because those don’t exist. But actual juniors. Stop trying to get senior-level talent for junior-level wages.
Greedy bastards.
I fully realize that my levels of scathing may be career suicide (because let’s be real here for a moment, no sane hiring manager reading this would consider me (but for the ones crazy enough to do so, DM me — you’re the kind of chaos I enjoy), but I really don’t care because I’m not here to cater to them, I’ve got my own table to build), but goddammit I’m passionate about what I believe in. SOMEONE has to be.
This is all to say that, of course, that brand new junior developers have an astoundingly rough fight ahead of them in order to break into the market, and I genuinely feel sorry for them. I can’t imagine being in their position, facing what they’re having to face right now. It’s insane. I’m pouring one out for y’all as we speak.