Why EVERYONE Is Struggling to Get a Software Job Now

The tech market is a mess. Let's talk.

social:

00:00 - What's going on?
03:49 - Lets look at the numbers
06:08 - Let's talk about what people are going through
06:30 - What can we do about it?

[darkdudironaji]

I graduated earlier this year, and started looking for jobs in November of last year. I worked on my leet code. I worked on personal projects. I applied to everything in my area. And I couldn't get an interview ever. Finally got an interview at a small company and got an offer. I start at the end of this month🎉

[sriramhs]

A 23' Graduate right now looking for a job in tech, This Video came out at the right time for someone who was feeling lost.

[hamblok]

I have 5 years of experience as a full stack developer and I still can't find a solid lead after losing my job 3 months ago. The market is absolutely brutal right now.

[meghpatel]

Multiple internships, bachelor's and masters degree and Microsoft certifications, yet couldn't find a job for the last 4 months. It feels hopeless, but thanks for the video, hopefully the big tide will come and carry us all!

[jackieyou]

My brother applied to over 200 applications for an internship. He is a CS major and I can definitely see how bad the situation is now.

[TheJacrespo]

The situation is rather simple: In recent years, an overhyped market and relentless marketing claiming that everyone must code to have a decent job have created zillions of coders, developers, and software engineers. Now that the bubble has burst, these hundreds of thousands who have been laid off must compete in a stagnant job market that adds a new batch of hopeless programmers by the thousands every few days. The IT market is running off the rails.

[alexaneals]

Concentrate on the small and medium size companies or companies whose product is not software. Examples are construction companies and transportation companies. They need developers and most of the time are overlooked by a majority of software devs. Also, learning legacy software can help since a lot of code out there is not written in the latest languages on the market. Personally, I ignore the requests I get from the so-called FANG companies. Their interview process takes way too long and they also have a reputation of burning out their devs.

[tirosc]

When I graduated 6 years ago from my CS degree, my first job was a job I hated which was to fix SQL complex queries. SQL workbench, given a query, reduce the complexity and repeat it for 9 hours a day. Even though I hated it, the knowledge helped me to eventually secure a graduate program and fast forward 6 years I now work in a major US tech company doing what I love.

Graduates, experience is experience. Some companies aren't looking for leetcoders. Apply your algorithmic knowledge into real world projects be it in a sample eshop project or other open source contributions and most importantly understand the language that you use.

[abrasp]

As a European who goes to a no-name university, I realized too late that in American companies, graduate jobs require you to apply 1 year before graduation with multiple internships under your belt. I am about to graduate with no job/internship experience whatsoever. This means that my only option is junior positions, where I must compete against profiles that obliterate mine in terms of experience and university prestige. Though times ahead.

[MyNiceguy]

My experience is very similar to yours. When I came out of my tiny university, I went into an entry level position at a tiny company that was understaffed. I worked my butt off. I got really good experience, and then I looked elsewhere. It is the best strategy IMO if you are willing to put the work in.

[Alex-hrdf]

A senior doesn’t start senior. They will start hiring junior back.

[boot-strapper]

It’s def like 20x harder to get a job now. Last year I could get and interview and offer all within a week or so. I had 5ish recruiters pinging me every day, now I get a recruiter ping ever couple months. It’s insane.

[Friskni]

Fresh graduates are viewed as a capacity drop. not a capacity gain, they are an investment rather than a throughput gain, and right now that matters, they are not willing to invest.
And it does not matter how many code camps, leet code, commits etc you do. The fact is coding to get a job is not enough, code is easy, its by far the easiest part of our job.

Engineering is where it gets tough. Aim to be a software engineer, not a software developer. Understand systems, distributed and monolithic, understand the cloud.
Take on projects that have separated components and deploy them using CICD of some kind.

Be able to deploy / update your backend / database / frontend independently, smoothly and as automatically as you can.

All the stuff I have just said is literally 70-80% of the job and no institution teaches it and if they do they are light years behind.

[michaellong]

I have a job, but boy was it difficult to get out of college. I applied to 250 jobs out of college over the span of 2 months. out of all of those I got 6-7 interviews and 2 offers. Also im not naive enough to not realize im not a perfect candidate, of course people are better than me. But if I attempt to look at myself as unbiased as reasonable, I have a pretty dang good resume.

I think the main problem is, as youve stated, the fact that everyone tells you how easy itll be. "oh youre in computers youre going to have companies begging you to work for them." is what everyone told me all throughout college. If I just had my expectations in check prior to all of it it would have still been stressfull, but fine.

Coming out of college expecting to land any job you apply to and then needing to apply as a full time job for a month takes a serious toll

[paolaanimator]

I studied animation and currently working in a small job. I'm studying coding in my own free time to absorb the material. To anyone in college, my biggest advice is to take on as many internships as possible, network, stay in touch with professors. Take an entry level job even if it’s low on pay, it will help you so much to build up experience. For me, it's like saying apply directly to Disney or DreamWorks after college, very few get hired right away at a large company. As you get more experience working in smaller companies, you will eventually get into large companies like Google, Amazon, etc. The news/media love to focus only on large companies. But the truth is there are so many small or medium companies that needs to hire people who is building up experience too.

[iAmCal_]

I'm part of tech community where mostly are self taught. We still see juniors get hired quite often. mostly everyone's success in the community comes from networking.

[codenamerishi]

When I was severely depressed I used to frequent depression subreddit and went into even more downward spiral. It was full of stories of people who have had depression for 10+ years and I felt as if this is my life now. I still visited the psychiatrist, started on meds and my depression started clearing away within 1 month, after 8 months I was completely off meds. I realized the folly of rabbit holes that reddit can send us that time.

[Ryan-wxbi]

I personally had to take low paying, mediocre helpdesk and tech support jobs at first. I applied to new jobs every week until someone finally gave me a shot at a better role. 2 years in the better position and it basically snowballed. Now i haven't had an issue getting a new job if i want to. Sometimes you just have get that low level experience until you can get your foot in the door.

[rilwanj]

I’m a Lead Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience, I remember when I graduated it took 400+ interviews before I got my first job, at a point I started looking for unpaid and way underpaying software jobs just to get some experience. My first job was Lockheed Martin (3 hour commute each way everyday).

[Websitedr]

I was laid off in May 2022 and felt it was kind of rough back then. It was NOTHING compared to 2008 when I got laid off for the first time. The first layoff was 56 weeks unemployed it was difficult to land. The layoff last year was only 4 months. Resume is crucial for interviews and working on a project keeps your mind active.