After losing my job earlier this year (thanks, admin), I knew that my re-entry into the job market wouldn't be an easy one. While I have a ton of experience working with open-source deep learning tech (cough AI remains a huge buzzword in today's industry), and bottomless ambition to grow as a developer, the economic and geopolitical climate has many companies in the private sector clutching their pearls. The promising companies that my friends were once advertising to me have almost entirely gone under, and the ones I'd kept in mind are now in dire straits, with strong hiring freezes in effect due to an economy in turmoil. To top it all off, job listings today rarely make sense, as it seems every HR department is scrambling — with non-technical people attempting to describe / begin the recruitment process for technical positions — and relying increasingly on automated software for resume reviews.
Entry-Level Roles Are a Lie
There's another huge problem happening in the industry right now, which shouldn't take more than a few seconds on LinkedIn, HiringCafe, Indeed, or even company websites to notice: every day, more companies want to hire people with senior-level skills for entry-level salaries. This type of listing litters every entry-level search. And with the advent of AI in the workplace, junior-level positions are becoming increasingly difficult to find. Furthermore, from the few friends who've been lucky enough not to be laid off in the last couple years, it's becoming common practice to hire 5 developers who can do everything moderately well, rather than 10 who specialize in different areas.
The Stack Creep
When I graduated years ago, “junior” meant someone who was learning — someone companies were willing to take a chance on. Now, “junior” means a senior developer who costs less and asks fewer questions. There are hundreds of “Level 1” positions that expect you to be an expert in 3+ languages, 10+ frameworks, and familiar with build tools which haven't seen an update since 2009 — all so you can change the CSS on a WordPress site. Even unpaid internships are starting to ask for 2+ years of experience out of the gate, and won't even respond to you once you're rejected because you're not going to a university with tuition fees equivalent to the price of 3 homes.
For a little extra icing on the cake, let's not forget about the egregious hiring process — assuming you rolled a nat 20 to make it through the eyes of HR folks without a technical background, who are screening resumes:
- Submit your resume / CV
- Complete a coding challenge (unrelated to job responsibilities)
- Complete a second coding challenge (likewise)
- Complete a take-home assignment (who thought these were okay?)
- Perform well in 3 interviews (technical or otherwise — flip a coin)
- Get ghosted, with no feedback (because you're a number, not a person)
All for a job that pays less than the rate you'd need to be able to afford a place to live in the next 10–15 years ($50,000 tops, when cough my rent in 2024 was damn near ~$26,000), requires you to be in some stuffy cube farm 5 days a week, and instead of giving their employees bonuses, they pass out a shirt and coffee mugs once a year.
Hopeless as things can start to feel, I've started to consider teaching kids how to code. Hell, if I start to train them by the second grade, maybe they'll be able to find a junior-level job after becoming neck-deep in student loan debt with four to six years of university.
How to Swim
Jokes aside, the only way through is forward. While these listings can be unreasonable (to put it lightly), there's nothing wrong with junior-level individuals in today's world. It's the system that's broken — not the ambitious technophiles, not the students, and not the graduates who were promised a livable wage. Sure, the market is saturated, and many people have started to feel burned out before they've even gotten hired, but let me be an optimist for a second and assure you that the market goes in cycles.
The only way to grow is to keep building — not for the sake of getting hired, not by grinding out 500 LeetCode problems (unless that's your thing, I guess), but to make things for the sake of improving your own understanding. This can be simple tools that help you perform routine tasks in your day-to-day, or it could be an ambitious project just to see how far along you can get it. For me, I just like reading documentation and solving problems (that I admittedly create for myself), while trying to understand more about how these weird, modern-day magic mirrors work. Aimless as it may feel at times, I can at least tell that I'm growing by looking back on my notes and projects from the past — and that's gotta count for something.
Whether you're picking up a trade in the meantime, or putting fries in a bag, your commitment to learning more about your stack means everything for your improvement as a developer. When the market opens back up, or the vacuum caused by a lack of juniors in the workplace starts starving companies out of forward momentum, there will surely be opportunities for those who pushed through. Keep learning, keep pushing to the elephant graveyard that is GitHub, and be patient with yourself so you don't drown in the deep end.