The Broken Senior-Only Developer Market

imagine it's 2020 and life is good you just graduated college with zero years of experience and in technical interviews they're asking you to reverse an array in linear time or to solve three some but you've already practiced these questions over a hundred times on lead code you go on blind and ask the community if you should take your $300,000 Facebook offer with $100,000 sign on bonus or go to stripe where you hear the food is better you dream of being worth a million dollar in just a few years recruiting in 2020 was like playing life on easy mode every company Under the Sun was hiring and there weren't that many software Engineers so it honestly wasn't that hard to get a high pain Tech job those good old days are over and just like Andy Bernard I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them because I would have done things differently the overall Market has shifted to becoming much more senior heavy and I can vouch for this firsthand as someone who's recruited for most of last year 3 months in the spring and then 3 months in the fall at the senior and staff plus levels compensation is just about where it always was and for some Industries like AI even high higher than usual I read somewhere that engineers at open aai can make over a million dollars a year which is crazy so today I want to talk about the state of the software engineering Market why is it the way it is and then more importantly what are we going to do about it how can you remain competitive and stand out in an increasingly competitive market if you don't know who I am hi my name is num I graduated college in 2020 and then joined a fintech startup in San Francisco called bolt I was there for 3 years before I got laid off which puts me at just 3 years of experience much less than the 5 to 7 years of experience most software engineering jobs today require so trust me I have felt this pain how the turntables and I'm here to tell you how to overcome it this video is the first in a multi-part series documenting my entire recruiting experience part one this video explains why it's so hard to get a tech job right now part two walks you through every single interview question I ever got because yes I documented everything and then part three TBD if I get a job pray for me then we'll also talk about that now I'm not alone many people in the industry have been feeling the sentiment including software engine engering Diaries who posted this video just a couple months back let's start off by talking about why this is happening why is the market so biased towards seniority well let's go to LinkedIn right now if you search for entry-level software engineering jobs you'll be hardpressed to find anything even listings that don't have the word staff or senior require 3 to 5 years of experience and sometimes even graduate level degrees like Masters or phds in fact I can't remember the last time I saw the word new grad anywhere the lowest title I've seen is software engineering 2 which still means a mid-level software engineer with about three years of experience and this makes sense because a lot of my junior engineer friends are having so much trouble even getting interviews if we think about software Engineers more broadly as a pyramid then we have the more Junior inexperienced engineers at the very bottom and they make the bulk of this pyramid then we have some mid-level engineers then the senior staff and then the god tier engineers at the very top so this is the supply to get a rough idea of demand we can follow the general US economy and that usually means looking at an index fund like the S&P 500 which tracks the 500 largest companies and as you can see from 2020 to 2022 we saw a bull run like we've never seen before it was covid people were home spending more money online and software businesses were booming inflation was low and money was cheap so in such an economy companies adopt a growth at all cost mentality and the fastest way to show growth is to build more products and invest in new revenue streams which means you hire you hire a ton and you don't care about years of experience you just need Manpower you already have some tenur Engineers you have a road map so all you need is all Hands-On deck writing code so from 2020 to 2022 it was reasonably easy to get a high paying Tech job but then Co hit and companies started decreasing the perks and benefits they offered there was no in-person work anymore so no free food you couldn't really go anywhere so no happy hours and events and this is important because it started a trend of cost cutting because when you lower cost you instantly see a higher profit because profit is just Revenue Minus cost and that means analysts on Wall Street start looking more favorably at your company which means the stock price goes up now I'm simplifying a lot but hopefully you get the gist so then what happens in 2022 well Co starts ending and the world basically goes back to normal but not the good old days because we enter a recession since inflation is at an all-time high so companies scale back hiring sometimes even freezing it entirely and start laying people off and the tech industry comes to a halt and who do they lay off well it's not the god tier super senior Engineers it's a lot of the 1 to 5 years of experience the junior to senior folks now don't get me wrong a lot of super senior Engineers are also let go but often times because they're overcompensated for their market value maybe there's title inflation or their business line is no longer necessary which means they just get unlucky so let's go back to the pyramid the supply it's no longer balanced it's now bloated at the bottom with a lot more mid to senior Junior folks on the market looking for jobs what I'm trying to say is that there's an unsustainable amount of more inexperienced Engineers when the industry really biases towards expertise now we fast forward to late 2022 and the economy is recovering companies start hiring again but sparingly there are a few job openings but their buys towards senior Engineers which makes sense because one senior engineer can basically do the work of two to three Junior Engineers so even though they command to high salary it's still cheaper to get one versus three engineers and salaries are down anyway so if there's any time to get senior Engineers it's right now senior Engineers need less onboarding they have more experience they can lead teams and even better they can mentor existing Junior Engineers so they too one day can become senior so if it wasn't already clear senior Engineers are way more valuable to a company than any amount of Junior engineers and that's the reason companies like Netflix for a long time would only hire senior Engineers they're difficult to replace they build more things and they make the company more money and because I love analogy if you think of the tech industry like a Costco they break even or lose money on their junior engineers and they make their money on their senior Engineers so on a rational level this makes sense but just like you I'm still angry because when I apply to jobs I just don't get interviews and even if I do I'm competing with people with more years of experience which means they'll do better on system design interviews and they have bigger projects that they've LED so they just seem more competent but let's say for a second my destiny is in my control I brush up on my skills I do a bunch of practice and I Crush every single interview well I'll still get email rejections like like this where they'll basically say hey you did a great job but we ended up going with someone with more relevant years of experience I mean if I was the company I would do the same thing why take the dude with 3 years of experience when you can get the dude with 5 to S and pay them basically the same amount so by now hopefully I've proven to you that this trend does indeed exist and it's extremely frustrating so the question is what are we going to do about it keep watching because I'm going to tell you secret number one act like a senior engineer let's be honest no one really knows what they're doing we're all just trying to figure it out a senior engineer is just better about it they act like they know what they're doing even when they don't and if you remember nothing then remember this fake it till you make it if you're already employed and want to protect yourself from future layoffs or these General market conditions then you need to start specializing really understand your project and area of expertise deeply and become a subject matter expert this is going to require hard work but nothing in life comes easy and if you want to keep earning the big bucks then you're going to have to start doing this read and write more code ask teams probing questions and become the person people go to to get their questions answered so when there's a new question or issue don't go find the right person become that right person do the job and actually own it and then take it to the finish line and make sure it's successful this means you'll have to dive into the logs read and review more PRS and become an owner because companies cannot let go of people who are indispensible you have to become a person who either knows all the answers or knows how to get them and then goes and gets them and whenever you're not sure if you're doing enough or how you're being perceive just put yourself in your manager's shoes who would they want well it's obviously someone who needs little direction is a team player and just gets things done secret two build it's much easier to build something when you're already working somewhere just keep making progress on your projects suggest areas of improvement and then quietly improve the code base but what if you're not working right now you were recently laid off or just graduated college you might think there's no way to build and to show off your skills but that's where you're wrong stop watching those video tutorials and then cloning the repo and just hitting run and then feeling proud of yourself let's be honest you didn't do anything and yes a lot of software engineering is copy pasting and looking up answers on Google but it's still different pixel something you've always wanted to build and then just go build it for fun it's the age of AI if you need any inspiration then just go look at the thousands of AI projects out there pick some LM model or the chat GPT API and then go crazy worst case you just improve your skills and get better best case your app starts making money and you don't even need to keep looking for a job win win win secret number three be a people person in a market like this you get hired by knowing the right people or when a hiring manager thinks hm who'd be a good software engineer for this job they think of you it's a blackbox out there and applying online is like playing the slot machine mostly just luck to truly control your destiny you have to get out there and make a name for yourself so cold DM venture capitalist and Engineering managers on LinkedIn hit up your friends for referrals and show up to Fireside Chats and other in-person events so while everyone else is busy clicking some buttons on an online form you're out there meeting the decision makers we're all so well connected most of us are just afraid to leverage our existing Community to help us get to where we want to be stop being scared so in summary if you do these three things if you act like a senior engineer if you build more things and you become a people person well well then you'll be unstoppable and there's not a single doubt in my mind that you won't be able to get that dream job in just a couple of months the market is tough yes but it's not if you'll get a job it's when now the best way to learn software engineering doesn't take thousands of dollars or years of years of schooling it's 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soon

Channel: Namanh Kapur

Views: 151,825

Keywords: computer science, software engineering, software engineer, computer science major, computer science student, computer science degree, interns, internship, coding, programming, software development, shan rizwan, python, faang, namanh kapur, tech, citadel, microsoft, code, how to learn to code, interview, google, programmer, coder, what is computer science, harvard, students, questions, power couple, new york university, nyu, new york city, senior developer

Id: gSS98PI2GZU

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024