Getting A Tech Job In 2023

getting a job in Tech has always been hard but man it's rough right now doesn't matter how long you've been in the field you'll be brand new or 10 years in still is a lot weirder than it used to be let's talk a bit about the market and how you can be sure you land your next job before the layoff started there was so much opportunity companies were making new teams and expanding them stocks were going up jobs were plentiful generally it used to feel like there were more roles than there were people and hiring the right person for the job was hard because of that we were more willing to hire less qualified people we could take someone in who might not be quite ready for the role but if we could get them there in six months to a year that was better than desperately fighting to find the right person and if it didn't work out you can find something that works for them and if you can't you can let them go because of that this ratio here of people who are qualified for jobs and hunting for them compared to the number of available roles generally resulted in more opportunity it was still hard to get in especially as a junior because if you weren't qualified then you had to convince the company you could be or they had to convince themselves it was worth taking someone that's qualified that's changed and that's changed for two big reasons those reasons are both of these bars so first adjustment we need to make is the number of jobs available budgets and stocks are plummeting and head count is getting slashed as a result so I would say at most half the roles that were available last year still are the new roles appearing and being hired for are going down huge companies like Microsoft and Amazon are doing full-on hiring freezes what they're also doing is laying people off and what that does is it increases the size of this section now we have people who are very qualified some people in this box have been working for 10 plus years and just due to the structure of the company are now out of a gig there are more people looking for jobs more qualified people looking for jobs and there are less jobs available this ratio flip sucks so hard because there was so much room in this range here this section between the number of qualified people available and the number of roles this is where the opportunity was to break into the market to get a job you might not be qualified yet for to get your first gig out of college this section doesn't exist anymore it's just gone because the number of qualified job Hunters has gone up a lot and the number of roles has gone down a lot it just absolutely sucks but if you understand how these roles are filled there are still ways in let's talk a bit about that let's say this is the available jobs bar we're going to go down top to bottom and see how this gets cut up as roles get filled so I'm a team we have five roles available at our company what do we do first the first thing so we look internally oh we start the hunt internal team transfers will fill a lot of roles especially right now because some teams might be getting folded so if I'm at a company and I'm working on ads let's say we're hiring more people on our ads team and there are three other teams that just started doing layoffs rather than immediately starting to hire outside makes a lot of sense to look at the company see who's getting laid off whose roles are going to make it into this next quarter can I snag some of those people previously team transfers would fill a lot of roles at companies now it's way more though because the number of teams and the number of total rolls is going down so team transfers are now taking up a increasingly big chunk of roles being filled after team transfers we don't immediately go to posting online though usually the next step is going to be referrals referrals have always made up a large portion of roles being filled but now way more than ever if you have a friend who worked at Google who just got laid off you have another friend who just got out of college recently which one makes more sense to refer let's be honest and this is no shade to recent grads I've worked with so many incredible people but if I'm a company making a decision right now and I have the choice between someone fresh out of college who's never worked in a company before or someone who just got laid off from Google they're gonna jump in front of the new grads and this once again hurts people without as much experience because you don't have the same opportunities to get a referral as others do previously referrals were a lot but now that everyone has a friend who's been laid off everyone has a friend who could fill the role next to them so if you're in the industry and you do have available roles on your team the likelihood you know people who could fill those roles is way higher than it's ever been and the result now is this tiny little section left over that is what's left for recruiting so of the way smaller number of available jobs which as we've seen here is way less you have half the available jobs you lose a bunch of Team transfers which are happening more than they've ever happened before you're losing more to referrals which are happening more than they've ever happened before and what you're left with is this tiny little bit that is recruiting and this is why so many companies are shrinking their recruiting teams as well because the few roles left are getting filled more easily this is where you would break in as a new grad and this is where you would break in as someone who doesn't have connections in the field so how does this compare to the way things used to be well it's not looking great the reason that we saw so much advice around applying to every job possible hitting up every company you could sending your applications in on every website you could find and working on your lead code interview stuff that all happens here the way you in here is stuff like cold applications University degrees leak code skills and generally grit and resilience or the way you would get in in this path is by trying really hard and that was kind of how it was meant to work because the people who got in here who we weren't as confident in because if you came in through a referral or through a transfer we're pretty confident you know what you're doing but if you come in this way we're not so we need to know you can work really hard probably too hard and do things that make no sense because we told you to and that's why leap code is still used for this style of interview because if you're willing to sit there and learn something as silly as lead code you're probably going to be willing to sit there and spin whatever gear is your job to play with and that's why Google still does leap code interviews they need to make sure that if you're on this side that you'll get qualified fast enough to do well so if you come in through this side they're going to make you jump through some hoops so they know you're willing to level up in the ways they're looking for however that's not how it works anymore and this advice is no longer great because this only helps if you're in this section and this section is way smaller and the number of people trying to get a job this way is just as high as it ever has been so this path sucks now what works on the team transfer and referral side this is where the stuff we like comes in a lot OSS contributions are a huge one if you're involved in open source and you're contributing a lot of the other people who are in open source still have jobs it might even be at places that are still hiring and if you're remembered as the person who fixed that bug into your PC and I work at a company that's using trpc and we need a new engineer you might be the first person to come to mind as a result of that open source is a huge way to get in this way more so though is communities I know a lot of people who have gotten jobs just from hanging out in my Discord and meeting people that way I've personally referred a handful of people who stood out in the Discord based on the things that they were involved in I keep an eye on a lot of the channels and the people who are in the questions Channel answering questions the best and the most I keep a mental note and when I need to hire in the future like if I ever need someone to help with Community Management for an engineering project those people are at the top of my list just by being around and involved in these communities you're proving to me that you're pretty qualified and if I had the choice between someone who hangs out in my Discord and someone who went to Harvard but never put anything on their GitHub I'm picking the person in this community every single time so get involved in these communities also this one's generally the case it doesn't matter as much on the recruiting side but it matters a lot here impact I'm keeping it vague intentionally because impact can mean so many different things it can mean you're the person who made the blog post that helped me fix my Prisma deployment or it can mean you're the person who kept your company's code base from falling apart an example of this for me was when I was at twitch I built the system for mod view where we can just drag and drop widgets all over the place and other teams we're using similar stuff in particular the Creator team for the dashboard so I started working with that team to share code and a lot of the the stuff I did impacted them and helped them build a better project that impact was what led to me switching over to their team in the future when you have impact you make an impression you take up part of somebody's mind the next time they're looking to bring someone onto their team you're high up on that list and that's the way to think of this side it's not about how can you prove you know what you're doing it's how can you be on the mind of the person who might be hiring in the future because your goal is to get them at the start of their hiring process not at the end ideally if you're looking for a job someone will hit you up about a job before they even post it online because you come to mind before Greenhouse does and before LinkedIn does the goal here is to be at the top of the mind of the people who could be hiring and if you are there and you are someone that the people hiring think about you're gonna have jobs coming in left and right the front door approach here where you walk up and say hey I think I'm qualified for this here are my qualifications give me a job the front door is closing fast this is not a path anymore this was a path for a long time and I think a lot of the advice online is focused around this path because of how reliable it wasn't because it was the majority of jobs for a long time if I looked at 100 jobs 70 of them used to be filled this way which is why it made a lot of sense to recommend this path that's not the case anymore though now it's going to be less than 25 at best I would argue are going to be filled in this way the jobs that were able to be filled in this generic way have been destroyed the harsh reality is people on this side will always be safe if you're making impact you're part of these communities and you're making cool stuff happen you will get noticed and you will succeed I'm not saying that everyone can do this and I'm not saying it's easy to do this is hard it's really hard it's not even the path that I personally took but there are so many awesome people in the community who are taking this path right now and are absolutely killing it that I feel like I'm doing them a disservice telling you to go this way especially now that this path is less sure than it's ever been in a world where the cold applications were the way most jobs were filled that advice made sense but that's not how the world works anymore and you should be considerate of that as you hunt for your first gigs go out there make some impact do some cool stuff and you'll be surprised what opportunities start to appear even if you haven't been laid off there's a lot to think about right now I have a video that's going to pop up over there to give you some advice on how to keep your job so you don't get laid off but for those who have been those who might be and those who might not have a job at all this should be a very helpful video

Channel: Theo - t3․gg

Views: 186,098

Keywords: web development, full stack, typescript, javascript, react, programming, programmer, theo, t3 stack, t3, t3.gg, t3dotgg

Id: Kte-t1pQQ3I

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023