Getting Hired as a Software Developer is Impossible 🙄

so all you hear about nowadays is how messed up the tech job market is and how it's impossible to find a job I saw this CEO write something on LinkedIn which kind of triggered me a little bit he said it's the worst time to join a boot camp it's a terrible investment and no one should do it I wrote a newsletter about this subject provided some facts articles statistics about why the job market is not great at all for really anybody but at the same time it's not like that bad that you should just never become a software developer which is a insane idea to me people didn't like that take at all and I got a lot of pretty mean emails from it but one of the things I noticed is from people that said hey I've applied to you know thousand jobs or I went to some free program and learned the basics of coding and now I can't find a job is that they had a few key things that were wrong across their whole strategy and I want to go over those things so hopefully you don't fall into this bucket or if you do at least you can do all these things and you can really say hey Brian you're an idiot none of this stuff works it really is true that zero people are getting hired for coding even with a quarter million jobs open and all the growth in the industry and the six fer salaries it's just zero people are getting hired like zero like zero none none at all I went to a boot camp my friend went through all the people that went none of them are hired I mean just generally when you think about that I want you do a mental exercise want you to think of the number of jobs are open um think about the future how many more jobs will will be open uh think about all the startups that are coming up think about all the AI tools that are getting built right now and out of all those jobs all the people all the people that going to older moving out of tech the average age of a software developer it's around 40 years old people tend to get into management other roles that don't involve Hands-On keyboard coding and you think that about all these jobs and all these massive salaries within the United States that there is zero chance that you will ever get a job sounds a little bit silly right I don't know come on on use your head man uh anyway I want to go over your resume gith up profile LinkedIn profile projects experience and why time and luck are important to hopefully save you some time for off the bat let's talk about your resumes and why they suck people that are coming from a different career outside of tech or CS grad or people that are from non-traditional backgrounds that maybe were French fry Chef or you know security or something that has nothing to do with coding and want to get into this profession their resumés generally don't tell me or anybody else why we should hire them or trust them which is really important I was an engineering manager and helping build out my team so I would look at rums pretty often actually went through at least a couple hundred just in the few years that I was doing it and every other company I've been I've also helped in hiring as well so I've seen a lot of people that have tried to transition into Tech and they generally make these mistakes where you don't trust them right you read their resume and there's like really nothing about coding except for in the summary where it's like take a chance on me essentially it follows this pattern of like I want you to take a chance on me I want you to provide me a learning opportunity and here's some really basic stuff I know and then that's kind of it and it says like first job you know I work at McDonald's and I'm like well this has made it insanely impossible to hire you so what your resume should do at a high level is tell the person about the Technologies you're using use really strong language about what you've done to paint a story rather than just saying I know AWS or I know Java or spring boot or I know typescript that's great you know that's kind of expected also what did you do with those things and why is that interesting so if you look at my resume which maybe not might not be the best I mean i' I've gone over this a lot of times using I follow this pattern what did I do using technology what was the outcome of using that technology when I was engineering manager at clar like here I introduced unit testing with this technology that did this thing and I follow that pattern throughout my resume I think that's a generally good pattern to follow and you might be thinking what about me I just went to you know some no-name Boot Camp or something like that or I selftaught and I don't know I I I went the free route and don't have anything that I can talk about you need to have something you can talk about and we'll get into that in just a bit because the kinds of project and experience you can get is what you're going to supplement your resume with now I personally feel that you don't need to have anything about your former life on your resumé unless it might be related for example maybe you're were a lawyer or doctor or maybe you worked in like some sort of field like education which might lend itself to a resume for software engineering like for example maybe you were a teacher and you're going for like Ed tech jobs so having that you're a teacher on there might be really really good or maybe you're a trucker going for like Logistics tech jobs that could be a really really good sale right there but if you did something like work in a warehouse or something like that I just don't know if I'd put that on there and who cares if it is like what are they going to say what did you do before I could you could just say well what I did before that wasn't particularly relevant to this job I did that if you look at my LinkedIn you'll see my job history only goes back down to 2013 and before that I don't have anything on there because I wasn't doing the kind of stuff you can put on LinkedIn during that time period I'm 40 years old so 2013 I was 30 right so before that I don't really have a life you can look at and I just told people straight up like yeah um I don't have you know all the stuff I did back then was not relevant we never really dug into it and people just kind of just went with that so I would follow that same pattern but it's really important that you have some experience on here whether it's freelancing or your projects talking about what you did how is it important what technologies you're using that's going to be really helpful now for ATS people have all these weird ideas of how you can beat the applicant tracking system I'm going to beat ATS by just pumping my resume full of keywords and stuff like that I don't doubt this could work but I just don't think it does because if it did I would assume that everybody would just be doing that I think generally you got to think who's your audience for these things probably going to be a recruiter probably going to be somebody that is not particularly technical so what they need to see here are some keywords so throughout the resume you should have the keywords and in the summary in the core competencies or the technology and then throughout the experience you should have those same keywords so if you use react node typescript Java python those should be in every single place there for higher SEO value for search engine optimization value or in this case applicant tracking system value or something like that but you want to have this Clarity and this consistency throughout it so it says yeah here I'm a software developer here are the Technologies I use stay away from things like I'm a junior developer I'm a learning developer I'm an aspiring developer that just needs a chance no one wants to take a chance on you at all now what about your GitHub profiles people love to put links to their GitHub profiles and I'll be completely honest I don't really check out people's GitHub profiles but when I do it's almost always not in their favor it's rarely in their favor that I look at a GitHub profile and be like oh man this this is killing it my big issue with having a GitHub profile that doesn't look really good it doesn't have a project immediately on there that tells me a lot about you is that I can just start poking around and if you have anything in there that you didn't want me to see like if I go to my site you know I don't share my GitHub profile by the way for this very reason because I don't really know what people want to see in here I mean what are they looking for do they think I'm a typescript developer do they think that as an engineering manager I should be able to write such type of code like let's go to a really bad repository have like if they just went in here and they saw the very first repository on here or maybe they went down to a random one they like oh this is from 2023 what is this let me let me check it out well this looks bad you know I don't know they could they could look in here and say oh what what this guy do he built he built this thing oh and he's using class components with component did Mount oh this is awful what what the hell kind of junk is this he has a VAR in here oh oh this guy what a terrible developer he is H we're never goingon to hire him he calls himself an engineering manager he he used VAR you see what I'm saying so in my my opinion if you're going to have this have it organized in a way that leads people directly to where you want them to see otherwise they can poke around and find things you might not want and immediately have a bad opinion of you so to me the risk is high the reward is very low because if they don't know much about you and they already like you from your resume and Linkedin profile they're probably just going to invite you in anyway so you know I know there's a lot of people out there that encourage having these really optimized GitHub profiles GitHub to me is what it is it's a repository to store my work so I can look have Version Control and other tools that I want to use to share my code and deploy it to the web it's not like meant to be like a living resume to me at least because I have a lot of junk projects in there because it's my GitHub I have a lot of personal projects in there all the projects I've worked on for companies you won't see in my personal GitHub because that's my personal GitHub what the hell where did they get this idea from that all your projects that you have out there should be these Stellar things that people can look at and get some sort of ins sight into you as a human in developer I think that's silly and I think you should be cautious of what you have out there one way you can get around this is by having private Repose for things that are really junky and just organizing it in a way there's tons of templates out there to do that that I'm not going to get into but there's tons of templates out there that can organize your profile in such a way that you say here's like my top three and you point them directly to only the ones you really want again to me personally I think this is more dangerous than it needs to be ah LinkedIn my favorite tool to use I really do like LinkedIn and I don't know why most of you don't you hate LinkedIn with a passion it's so fake and cringey and there's a guy wearing a black polo shirt talking about what you should do on LinkedIn such a corporate shill what a sellout here's the thing LinkedIn is where professionals that can't hide behind anonymity are and they have the real name out there along with the real company to me it's a no-brainer I mean tons of people on Twitter are the smartest dudes in the whole room so smart with all their super hot takes and I have the sneaking suspicion that most of them don't actually work as Developers in the first place your LinkedIn profile probably sucks here's one that doesn't I love Danny Thompson if you don't know him you really should I mean this guy is like the number one influencer SL developer out there that is helping people out find jobs in Tech I'm not sponsored or anything by Danny at this think he's really really good so this is going to be like a LinkedIn Deep dive but in general people suck at a few things on LinkedIn I look at their profiles and it doesn't immediately tell me what they do why I should trust them same issues that are with your resume generally apply to link Lin as well I think Danny has a really good profile even though he's an influencer he actually has one that's really more optimized for Tech which I think is awesome so it says up here he's a software engineer brand ambassador and then he has some of the top languages Frameworks technology that he's familiar with this is important this is all searchable recruiters want to find you they got to find you by having a searchable LinkedIn he has 500 plus connections which is really important you have to have 500 connections honestly in order to be discoverable at all but here here the other thing I know developers that have like zero connections and are always employed that's because they have been on the market for a while they have like enough cloud and respect that they don't really need to be out there like that so let's look at his about section so here I already knew he was going to do this but he has the same technologies that are here he has them in here really smart highly searchable search engine optimized here are his featured posts his featured posts are about him doing what he wants people to know about they're not super personal it's about getting the job at places it's about what he's doing it's about him leading things talking to things he's talking about react query he's talking about things a recruiter or somebody that's in Tech is going to say oh this person's a leader and they're talking about tech when I look at people's posts and I see people complaining about the job market or saying I filled out a thousand applications and everybody rejected me or oh this person sucks and all these negative things what do you think that does to any recruiter or person that sees it do you think they're going to want to take a chance on you at all absolutely not they don't know you and your brand of humor might be funny to you and your friends or family but to other people they're looking at this like I don't know you I don't want to take a chance you already are very Junior do I really want to then go out on the limb and assume you're going to be okay in an interview with my name on the line no absolutely not so the posts that you have the ones that should be pinned or featured are ones that talk about technology it doesn't matter if they have one like or zero likes they just need to be pinned up there so that way when a recruiter looks at this or somebody else that might want to hire you they can say oh this person talks about this technology it just helps build out your case and builds out your profile like yes I am a developer person right um the activity you have not so important but again stay away from the negativity this stuff is searchable people are looking on this thing you don't want to be a Negative Nancy out there because no one wants to hire negative people who the hell wants to work with that not anybody I want to work with at least now when we get down to his experience this is really good Del and he does the same thing I'm doing right he did the thing here's the result here's the technology thing technology result there's probably a way better acronym for that but that is the that is the pattern you really should be following migrated our codebase from react Redux to react query while maintaining code quality standards he has numbers here if you don't have numbers and that that's okay I mean this this is perfectly fine he did the thing with this thing and it led to higher quality or at least he maintained the code quality you don't need to have like a number for every single thing numbers are a little bit shady anyway like how do you really prove that something was improved 322 um if you're building something on your own so and his education free code Camp cool um and they got some licenses and things like that I think these are less important uh you know also here's the big thing if you're on the coasts of the United States or increasingly anywhere in the United States people don't really care about your education so if you have like really lame education or something you don't want people to know about just don't put it up there no one really cares in the first place they're going to go to an interview and they're going to interview you the exact same way they're going to interview the person that went to Harvard you're going to get the exact same interview my friend so I wouldn't worry too much about your education or lack thereof now when it comes to experience most of you don't have any experience so how do you get experience if you can't find a job that's willing to hire you or you can't find like an internship somewhere what do you do work there you go you work for free you find cousin Aunt sister uncle brother whatever Mom Dad somebody out there has a failed rap career some singer some artist some hairdresser somebody in your group that needs a website and build that website for them work for free deploy the website get it out there buy a URL not a rule buy a URL deploy it host it somewhere ask them for a recommendation on LinkedIn if you need to have them get an LLC maybe get your own LLC hire yourself call yourself a freelance web developer and then actually build a couple things build some stuff for free put it on LinkedIn say you're working at this place when people ask you what you're doing say oh I work for myself under this company and I have clients and they say is this a full-time job no it's not full-time just starting out which led me to want to look for employment here because I really want a more full-time thing but yes I've built a few sites you can check out it this URL and this URL yeah I mean this is not simple but it's also not impossible everybody wants free work and if you really don't know who to find for free work you can't find a single person that will that will let you work for free for them go to Reddit and go to entrepreneur there's a lot of broke entrepreneurs out there and they want to get uh free websites and things like that so you can even reach out to people here I mean I'm all about this kind of stuff I run a boot camp and this is actually literally what I've been doing I've been reaching out to people that have an LLC if you have a startup and you're like hey I have a startup and you need some some work I'm happy to reach out and say hey we have students that are that are hungry for this kind of stuff and would like to work there I've had some success doing this plus had a lot of weirdos and and people that are just not really about it or don't have an LLC if you don't have an LLC I will not work with you because we really want that badge on a person's LinkedIn to show yes they actually work for some company not just some dude out there and we also want a recommendation that would be my criteria for looking for for people that want free stuff is either they have a business some sort of LLC some sort of brand name or logo you can put on your LinkedIn that proves you work for somewhere and then have them give you a recommendation if your work is good that alone should get you your foot in the door and if nothing else that could actually start you on an actual path towards freelancing that I won't get into here because I'm not a freelance expert at all but I think that could be a really cool way to at least get some experience now what about projects you could build if you don't want to go the experience from out and get like some real world experience for a variety of reasons you maybe you just don't want to work free maybe you're super opposed to working for free or something like that or whatever um you need to have some sort of project that you can talk about that's a complex project what should that project be in my opinion it should be full stack it should be at a URL just like the other one it should basically follow all the same criteria as the free site but just be a project that's for you it should solve a real world problem and it should use third party apis yeah it needs to use all this kind of stuff that's what you're going to talk about in the interview and somebody says hey tell me about a complex project you worked on and you want to actually have a complex project you've worked on that you can speak about intelligently because it sucks when you get into an interview and they ask you and you say oh I used typescript one time or oh I had to learn um JavaScript and it was really tough that's not an interesting story say well I built and deployed a fullstack web application at this URL it used tripe and a couple other third party apis that I had to integrate and some of the difficulties I found was that when it was deployed it was different than when it was on my local machine and I had to debug it and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah interesting story the person immediately looks at you like oh I respect this person I know what they're talking about I get it now okay on to my last point this one is not such a fun one time and luck are important time is going to need to be spent doing all these things your time is going to be different than somebody else's time there's a lot of people that get hired really really quickly and they are the success stories we read about online there are other people that never get hired for a variety of reasons and I won't really bash these people at all because I feel really bad that they tried to get into this profession and have found zero luck but I'll be honest I don't think I've ever seen in my entire time doing this which is only 10 years but that's a significant amount of time I feel like I've never seen a person that was talented and didn't stop applying that couldn't find work I just have never seen it I I have not and you can call me a liar or think I'm just blowing smoke or because I don't a boot camp I'm here to lie to you it just doesn't happen um I've met people with very little talent that have been hired faster than people with cs degrees there is luck involved and it's an unfortunate reality that luck is involved now here's the thing you can't just be lucky and suck at what you're doing and expect to have a viable career you also can't expect to be somewhat talented and not do any of these other things and just like spend you know 6 months to even a year and and just quit at the end of it your timeline is ultimately going to be your timeline but what I really hate to see is when people do none of these things really and they don't improve and iterate on what's going on and they just fall off the math so how do you keep improving and iterating how do you know when your strategy is not working anymore I would say that after maybe a 100 applications and you get zero callbacks it's time to rethink your strategy and me personally I would just pay somebody that knows what they're doing to do some of this stuff for me whether that's hiring a resume writer or hiring a service that applies to jobs for you I'm all about that kind of stuff and it this is certainly Poss this is more possible than most of the things in life you know this isn't like talking about becoming a multi-millionaire or something like that overnight or starting a business with Drop Shipping to become a millionaire which a lot of people actually fall for it's about learning a skill and getting a job in an employable field it's not the craziest thing out there anyway I always hope that's helpful see you around

Channel: Brian Jenney

Views: 17,132

Keywords: Descript

Id: QcoVsvp4Fas

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2024