How To Actually Get Hired In 2024

if you've been trying to find a job as a junior web developer then you know how absolutely painful and difficult it is to find a job almost every single job posting you see is asking for senior level developers and it doesn't matter how many times you apply you're not getting any interviews at all well in this video I'm going to explain why this problem exists and what you can actually do to get around this problem and land more interviews and hopefully land more jobs welcome back to webdev simplified my name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner and this entire Tech job problem really started about 4 years ago in 2020 if you remember back to 2020 that was right when Co started and Co actually brought a lot of people home and brought a lot more people online so a lot of the big tech companies Google Facebook Netflix were seeing a huge surge in people using their site which meant that they needed to hire more Engineers to fill that need and have more developers on hand so these companies were constant conly hiring more and more developers more than they honestly really needed because they were making so much money they wanted to get the best people on their teams as possible so they were just hiring left and right so finding a job during this time period really wasn't too difficult for a developer if you're trying to find a job at a tech company now fast forward a couple years into 2022 2023 and now 2024 a lot of these companies that had those huge booms during the co period are now seeing a big decline because everybody's going back to work not as many people are at home so all these companies are seeing less and less money coming in and less users using their products which now means they can't afford all of these developers that they've hired which was why a lot of these big tech companies had relatively large layoffs where they were firing a lot of developers whether it's web developers or other types of development it really didn't matter what type of developer you were on top of that there's been a relatively large shakeup when it comes to tech companies I mean just take a look at Twitter which is now called X the entire ecosystem around Twitter has drastically changed lots of people were fired from Twitter and it honestly changed a lot of the social media environment there's also quite a few different legal things between lawsuits and new laws being passed that directly affected some of the largest tech companies out there which made it a little bit more uncertain for them which again led to the fact of more people being fired or less people being hired and all of this has really culminated into where we are now at the beginning of 2024 where finding a job as a junior developer is incredibly difficult so what is it that you can do to make it so you have a better chance of Landing a job the very first thing that you can do and you may have actually noticed this from the backstory I gave you is that I only talked about tech companies and large tech companies that Facebook's Google kind of like the Big Fang companies out there those are the ones that were hit the hardest laid off the most amount of people or are having the hardest time actually hiring new people CU they just don't have the money for it but when it comes to just normal everyday companies that you don't think of as like Tech or programming companies think like a bank for example Banks obviously need people to develop their website and their software so they need web developers and program rers think about like a grocery store they have their own website online shopping e-commerce they need developers to manage all of that all of these different companies they weren't really hit to the same degree that the companies like Google Facebook Netflix and so on were so if you're trying to find a job at one of those companies and they're not nearly as flashy or as like high prestige a lot of people just view them as like a normal job as opposed to these really cool fancy Fang companies but they still pay incredibly well they have great benefits it's a great job overall and these jobs were not hit nearly as hard so trying to find a job in those sector is about as easy as it was back you know 5 10 even 2 years ago so the very first thing you can do is just widen your search instead of looking just at Tech focused companies look at all of the different companies out there now in doing that you're going to open yourself up to more jobs but you're also going to notice there's still some problems the biggest problem you'll probably notice is that a lot of these jobs are asking for senior principal level high ranking Engineers with years and years of experience in development and you as a junior developer obviously don't have 5 to 10 years of experience to offer so what can you do well most of the time when these companies are asking for a senior level 5 to 10 years of experience they're not actually looking for someone with those exact qualifications they're looking for someone that can do the job for them and that does not require a lot of training and it's someone that they can trust to get the work done that they want because with most companies that are hiring developers the biggest expense for the thing they're developing is the developers themselves all of the different software they use and other things around that is a minuscule amount of money compared to just one develop salary for example assume you're paying someone $100,000 a year which is a relatively good salary that's massive compared to you know a 20 3040 $50 a month subscription that they have this is why almost always these companies are going to be willing to spend more money to hire someone with more experience because they trust that that person can actually bring value to their team and keep them rolling forward on all the stuff that they're trying to build while if they hire out a junior developer it's unsure whether or not that Junior developer is actually going to be able to contribute to the team and they're taking a huge risk even if you pay that Junior developer let's say $80,000 instead of $150,000 you're paying them essentially half but if they don't actually contribute anything to the team you waste 6 months of paying them that money you could have just hired a senior developer that you know would have gotten the job done for you and then you would had no issues at all so this is why a lot of companies are really hesitant to hire Junior developers so what you need to do as someone that's looking for a job as a junior developer is you need to be able to bring trust to the table you need to be able to have some way to show to these companies that you are going to be dependent and that you're going to actually accelerate their team instead of slowing them down and potentially having to get fired after not being able to bring the things that they want you to now when it comes to Bringing trust to a company the best thing you can do is know someone that works at the company this is why they say it's more important about who you know versus what you know and if you know someone at that company that can vouch for you that is going to put you immediately ahead of every single other applicant on the list but finding people at companies that you want to apply to is incredibly difficult especially if you're learning online you're kind of isolated from all these other people so things that you can do to try to help find people is to go to meetups whether it's an online Meetup or preferably a local Meetup and the reason a local Meetup is so powerful is because most of the companies that you're going to be applying for that have the best chance of you getting a job are going to be companies local to you and that's because there's much less people applying to those jobs than a job that's you know Global or a job that's online or remote or something like that they're going to have many more applicants so if you can find someone at a Meetup that you know that works at a company that you would like to work at that is a a great way to get your foot in the door so going to these meetups whether they're online or preferably in person and just making sure that you socialize meet people become friends with these people and then over time if you do this for a couple months you're hopefully going to have quite a few people that would consider you a friend and they're going to give you a recommendation at that company which is automatically going to put your foot in the door and pretty much guarantee that you at least get an interview now let's say that you're not a very social person and you don't really like going to meetups or maybe you're trying it and you're not really meeting people that jive well with you another thing you can do that can bring that trust instead of kn knowing someone is having some way to prove your actual worth and one of the best ways to do that is either to build out some software that people depend on or to actually take your skills and work on open-source software that other developers depend on so in the first case let's say that you build out an application and there's maybe 10 different users that use that application on a fairly consistent basis now immediately if you show that to an employer you're saying hey you know what I built out this software this software is depended on by 10 20 100 different people it doesn't matter what the number is but there are people that are depending on you and you are able to consistently give them what they're looking for and they are trusting you with their time money or whatever it is this project even works as a great portfolio piece because not only are you saying hey I built this really cool software but also these people are trusting me with that software so having software that other people use is really great now building out software that other people use is incredibly difficult so another thing you can do is to work on existing software that other people already use and this is almost more important in my opinion so if you're able to become a contributor or a maintainer for a open source our project that a lot of people are using it doesn't have to be like the biggest open source project you don't have to contribute to react for example but if you're contributing to something on a maybe somewhat regular basis and other people are using that software and you're actually making meaningful contributions to it this not only shows the employer that hey you're able to work in a large code base with other people but also there are people that are depending on the code changes that you make and that brings a ton of trust to the table and first of all being able to actually make these changes and have other people depend on the code shows you at least have some level of code quality but on top of that even more so being able to work on a team of other people and to be able to follow all the different protocols needed and there's certainly processes and code of conducts and so on you have to follow to work on large open source projects that's essentially the same process as working on a team inside of a company so they're able to see hey this junior developer they may not know all the technical stuff that there is out there but they've able to work with teams they're able to follow different rules they're able to contribute code that other people are using and depending on and they're just able to do all of that so even if they don't have the perfect skill set or super knowledgeable and everything that's easy to train the hard part is training people to be able to work on a team and to work with other developers so bringing that trust to the table that says hey you can trust and depend that I'm able to do these things is a huge bonus for these companies to be honest we're really past the phase where you can just go to a company and say you know what I'm a pretty good programmer you should hire me and the reason for that is because there are tons of programmers out there that are really good and really talented so the only thing you have to bring to the table is that you're a pretty good programmer you're going to be outclassed by everyone else that is also a pretty good or really good programmer what you need to do to really stand out is bring that level of trust make it so that they know that when they're hiring you that they have a much higher likelihood of you being able to succeed on their team and start making meaningful contributions to their code sooner rather than later because if they don't have that trust in you they'd rather just pay the extra money to hire a senior developer that they know can do that for you but if you can bring a similar level of trust as a senior level developer but at a low lower salary they may be willing to take that chance with you because you're able to offset that by saying you know what the likelihood I succeed is 90% instead of 50% like all these other candidates now obviously this isn't to say that you can be an absolute slop and not actually know how to code you obviously need to be a competent web developer on top of all of this so if you really want to make sure your web development skills are on par with what you need to know in 2024 I highly recommend checking out my full complete web dev road map it's going to be linked down in the description below it goes over full stack front endend and back end every single concept you need to know it has over 200 videos 100 plus different articles it's just loaded with content that you need to know I'll have that Linked In the description for you below so you can actually check it out and with that said thank you very much for watching and have a good day

Channel: Web Dev Simplified

Views: 158,534

Keywords: webdevsimplified, how to land a tech job, how to land a developer job, developer job, how to land a dev job, javascript job, web dev job, web developer job, how to become a web developer, how to get hired

Id: a6IIhwZv4ls

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 30 2024