How I would learn to code in 2024 (a senior-only market)

early 2021 tech companies were struggling to find Qualified software engineering candidates to fill thousands of open roles that they have but just in the space of a few years the tech job landscape has completely shifted companies are now laying off a ton of employees hiring has massively slowed down and the entry-level software engineering rule is pretty much dead the last point is especially concerning if you are just learning to code or looking for a job with less than 5 years of experience and if that's you then you will need to adapt your skill set to what the industry now considers minimum qualifications for an level software engineer so in this video I'll outline the things that you will need to do differently as a new software engineer in order to stay competitive in the evolving Tech job market all right let's get started hi folks my name is utav I'm a software engineer based in Seattle I have about 20 years of experience in the industry where I've held diverse software engineering roles and created a few Tech startups and I'm currently at Microsoft if you're new to this channel my goal here is to help you get the best out of your career by mentoring you around five key pillars technical skills engineering efficiency mindset entrepreneurship and Financial Freedom so if that sounds interesting please consider subscribing and follow me at engineering with UTA for behind the scenes and monthly q&as but there are a few reasons for this shift first course correction from the overinvestment on cloud growth that was primarily driven by Co second to shift into engineering talents toward machine learning and Ai and third just based on General economic conditions where companies want to operate in a leaner fashion should there be a recession around the corner I went into much more detail about the why in my previous video where I talked about the driving force behind the recent layoffs so check that out if you're interested but the gist of it is that the industry is now biased towards experience previously companies would happily hire inexperienced Talent with the idea of investing on their growth as long as they met the company technical standard which was basically some core computer science Concepts and the ability to solve a few lad code problems so you could essentially graduate college and immediately have a high-paying job with insane perks those days seem to be gone now at least for the time being you'd be lucky to find a job out of college right now it's not that the jobs have completely vanished or the high salaries have gone down or the perks have been removed they're all still there they just have been reallocated towards Talent with more experience given the economic conditions and the Paradigm shifts companies don't want to take risks right now they want guarantees that generally come with experience not to mention AI tools have gotten to a point where they can perform the duties of an intern or entry-level College higher and one senior engineer can easily do the job of multiple Junior to mid- level software engineers and Senior Engineers also come with more experience and maturity and can get started right away with minimal handholding so that's where the market is delegate trivial work to Ai and hire experienced Engineers for more complex work that saves the companies a lot of money and they can get away with hiring much less Talent the Netflix model has essentially made its way to the industry and now is becoming a new standard where they hire only senior Engineers so if you are studying computer science or someone with less than 5 years of experience looking for a job what can you do to place yourself favorably in the current job market it does seem like a chicken or the egg situation where companies are looking for experience but you can't really get experience without getting a job for well the good news is that if you're smart about it you don't really have to have a job to gain experience in the field of software engineering this was true 20 years ago when I started and still holds true today you just have to understand what expectations companies have from a new hire today and alter your learning or prep strategy based on that and since tech companies are only hiring senior Engineers right now let's see what senior Engineers actually bring to the table and try to reverse engineer some of the steps that you can follow to stand out or dare I say even appear like a ior engineer in my opinion there are three things that sets an experienced engineer apart from one that doesn't have much experience those three things are experience scope and Alignment so let's look at each of them individually first up is experience so how much experience does an experienced engineer have let me share my own numbers I got my first job after my master's degree in January 2012 it's 2024 now and I did take one year off in 2020 so that means that I've been working in the industry as a software engineer for about 11 years I have had multiple Developer jobs before that and I started coding a long time before but let's just say that it's officially 11 years with a 40-hour work week that is a total of 21,1 120 hours in the industry even if only 50% of that was related to software engineering that's still about 10,000 hours even without factoring any startups or my side projects and the hours coincidentally reflect the 10,000 hour rule which was first introduced by Ericson in the 1990s and later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in book outliers where the gist is that you need about 10,000 hours of practice to master any skill how accurate that number is I don't know and in any case you will probably not be able to rack up 10,000 hours to get a job but the concept itself is useful because even if it's just 1,000 hours of experience it's still better than 500 so my advice here is not to rest on your laurels I'm sure all of you have academic projects and some past experience that you can call up during your interviews which is normally just fine but in today's market that is clearly not enough because even the few entry-level positions that are available are seeking for 3 to 5 plus years of experience so rack up those hours by getting hands-on experience gather a group of friends come up with the concept and build that into a fully freshed out product work on the entire stack participate in open source projects to grow your presence and influence there if you think that there's a tool or a feature missing build it your experience hours don't have to be for a company every minute you work on any project improves your skills and the more you do that the more you start acting like a senior engineer and that will show in your interviews and yes you can absolutely count on your own experience as work experience so put every minute you have towards gaining valuable [Music] experience the next thing that experienc Engineers have is scope while experience itself is great it's not really effective if it's all over the place say if I have 7 years of experience as a web developer and only 2 years of experience as a cloud engineer and I'm interviewing for a cloud engineer role those S years as a web developer don't really matter but when you have experience that is scoped to a very specific area that becomes expertise and expertise matters as someone just starting out you understand the fundamentals of software engineering or or computer science you understand the concepts and have a good knack for problem solving but you lack scope if you look at any experienced Engineers profile on LinkedIn you can easily identify the area they work on because the more experience they get the more scoped their work becomes they aren't building games one day then switching over to machine learning the next month and then designing iPhone apps the third month instead you'll see very scoped experience like building large scale distributed storage infrastructures or creating Advanced Data pipelines or working on rendering engines used by AAA titles and a great way to replicate that scope is to figure out what you are passionate about early on and honing your focus on that for example if you'd love to be doing game development your projects open source involvement readings should all revolve around that there's a classic behavioral question where do you see yourself in 5 years this is essenti that except that you're answering what do you see yourself working on as a senior engineer it is unfortunate that you don't get to try out various areas before settling on what you truly enjoy and I would have normally recommended trying out a few things first but such are the times and your first priority should be to land a good job in this tough Market once you have that you can always think about transitioning to other areas if the opportunity arises in the future also in 2024 you have to be full stack even if your focus is scoped into a specific area like infrastructure for example there is really no other way companies expect their Engineers to be comfortable with the entire stack and if you need help with that try simply learn they have many Great Courses and boot camps but the one that is relevant in this context is their full stack Java developer program which can help you get familiar with languages and Frameworks like Java JavaScript react spring boot hibernate JSP and mongod TV Java still ranks among the top three most sought out programming languages by hiring managers globally so this is a very useful stack to have in your skill set the course is 6 months long fully online taught by industry experts and you will get Hands-On industry experience through more than 20 relevant projects the course also covers the fundamentals like data structures and algorithms which you will need for your coding interviews and if you have interest in distributed systems and want to understand some key Concepts in system design they also have an elective that covers reactive microservices but you aren't limited to just this course they have a wide array of other courses as well for example they also have machine learning Ai and data science courses from some of the world's leading universities so yeah if you want to gain full stack engineering experience and go beyond just your college degree visit the link in the description below to check out this course thanks to Simply learn for sponsoring this video the final thing that experienced Engineers have is alignment you don't hire a senior engineer that is a jack of all trades and hope that they will succeed you hire senior Engineers with very specific experience to solve a very specific problem this is what I mean by alignment in a General sense alignment is just a function of matching interests you have a very specific skill set that a company needs and therefore you and the company are both in alignment so how does that concern you well the good news in the current market is that machine learning and artificial intelligence is a critical part of most tech companies business strategies right now so if you can build up that skill set you will be in alignment with the market a recent report from indeed showed that job openings with Gen terms have gone up 500% so even having a slight bias towards those areas in terms of of your projects in prep will make you stand out more anything you work on think of it from a machine learning angle can you automate it with supervised learning is the algorithm static or can the heuristic adapt Based on data you can add machine learning and AI elements to pretty much any Project without significantly altering the purpose or the outcome of that project so look times are tough and the market is heavily leaning towards hiring only senior Engineers entry-level jobs are very scarce and even the ones that pop up expect mid-level experience and there's not much else you can do other than adap adapt to this new hiring Trend and I believe that by racking up those experience hours and scoping those hours into a specific area you can align your Skillet with the hiring Trends and that should place you much more favorably in this tough and competitive job market the good news is that these shifts have historically been transitionary so they will eventually B you will just need to be a bit more strategic up until then and I hope that this video gave you a good start at that check out my top software engineering book recommendations for 2024 and also this other video where I explain the cause of recent layoffs and why you should stop worrying about them I'll see you the next one [Music] cheers

Channel: Engineering with Utsav

Views: 19,597

Keywords: software engineering, coding, developer, software engineer, programming, productivity, engineeringefficiency, entrepreneurship, leadership

Id: XnYK5F8fKkI

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024