The Reality Of Tech Jobs in 2024

I'm going to be honest getting a job sucks right now I'm really lucky that I'm not on the market in any traditional sense now that I run my own company I have the YouTube channel and I do a lot of advising for other companies the more I see it from the perspective both of people hiring as well as people looking for a new job or even their first job the market is in a weird and really scary State I've never seen it quite like this before especially with the layoffs and it's not that senior Engineers don't have jobs or opportunities it's that they're now competing for positions they weren't before and the despiration to find Engineers on the company side isn't quite what it used to be either what happened we could go in depth on the economic state of things the interest rates changing and the reasons why companies are being tighter with their budgets but there's plenty of other YouTubers doing that better than I would companies are tightening their spend both short-term and longterm and if you've never run a team or a company before you might not know this but the vast majority of spend for the vast majority of companies with Engineers is the engineers because their salaries are big their benefits are bigger offices are expensive filling them with people is expensive and no service you're paying for costs as much as most of the teams at your company and when you're talking upwards of like $200 to $400,000 per person having fewer of them is really beneficial but what if you're a new engineer your salary is going to be a lot smaller right even in the US markets it's like 80 to 110k yeah after benefits and everything we're closer to like 120 to 130 and Junior Engineers take so long to onboard that you're not getting much value out of that money initially in fact new Engineers often have to be onboarded which means times being spent by other Engineers that could be spent on the product instead being spent helping someone else get faster if I had a team with four people on it and I hired a junior enge productivity is going to go down by 10 to 20% when they join period and after some amount of time we might go up and be a little bit closer to like 120% of the previous productivity so a little bump in the positive direction but it takes a while to get there it's also a gamble because not all Junior Engineers will ever figure it out it's not because they're bad it's because the environment might not be the right place for them to learn the tech stack might not jive with them or their interests they might just be in a weird place in life that makes it harder for them to produce and as such it's harder to make these gambles it's a really challenging bet to make to say hey we're going to pull this person in and our team's going to move slower for a bit but if it works out we might move slightly faster for only $140,000 a year that's really scary and as a result fewer companies are making those bets and instead choosing to spend their money on guaranteed wins what's a guaranteed win in this market and in this industry I'd make the argument that the closest thing we have to a guaranteed win is a team where things are going well where the people on the team know others from other companies they've worked with in the past and know the capabilities of that they can pull in to do specific understood earmarked work if we are working on a front-end product and we need the back end to be changed but we don't have a person to contribute to that backend on our team and it exists at another team at the company but I know somebody who has worked with the people who built that backend who already knows the language who knows the framework who knows all the things they're doing and I've worked with them in the past and I trust them as a cooworker I could vouch for them on my team as a person to bring in and at that point their previous role and title barely matters their degree doesn't matter their GitHub doesn't matter what matters is I brought trust to the table and that's the thing the vast majority of new developers are missing when they're hunting for jobs they don't have trust yet it's really really hard to build trust as a new developer in the industry there's a lot of things that help with trust like quality experience at other companies like co-workers that can for you this is why referrals and recommendations on things like LinkedIn are so valuable but in the end the only way you're going to get a job right now is if you have some amount of trust to build on top of how you build that is hard you can go through contributions on GitHub you can prove your high scores on leak code but the best thing you can do by far is make friendships and connections with other people in the industry this is the real reason I push going to college it's not about having a degree although obviously having that on your resume makes you a little more trustable it's the connections you make with other people who might make those other connections at other places I can't tell you how many times I'm the linking factor between some person getting their first job and some company that doesn't want to hire another engineer that takes 2 years to train and I'll be honest a lot of the junior engineers in this community don't need much time to be trained y'all kill it there are some really talented younger folk in this community and I can confidently recommend you to companies that wouldn't normally hire somebody under 25 and yes that job listing up on LinkedIn or whatever might say 25 plus it might say senior on it it might even say principal on it they're saying that because those titles are an exchange they have made they're willing to spend more money to have less risk but that doesn't always mean anything what they're looking for is less risk and more trust and finding ways to provide that primarily through connections with others is the best win you can have so surround yourself with other Engineers that are at where you're at some will go faster some will go slower some of them will find really cool opportunities and the more you stay in touch with them the more likely you are to find those opportunities yourself I can't recommend just cold applying to a bunch of jobs it might be good practice but it's going to give you the wrong signals because you're going to fail a lot of interviews that's the nature of the field but this isn't about interviews this isn't about your resume this is about how you've proven yourself in an industry that isn't looking to make bets anymore and when the market changes the way it has the willingness of these companies to take risk and make bets has gone down a ton and it's important to recognize how risky of a bet you are as an engineer if you have 5 years working at Netflix or Amazon you're a much less risky bet than somebody who just graduated from school and has two projects on their GitHub but if one of those projects is used by somebody on the team you're interviewing with that risk goes away immediately so think deeply about how you've proven yourself and the relationships you have and what do it take to make more of those if you don't have an in-person group to hang out with that also codes and is also learning with you find some online there's lots of really cool communities with people in things like Twitter space is people in our very own Discord which you can join with the link in the description there are so many opportunities to network and meet the other people who you can build this trust with but it's so important to understand that that is the core of hiring right now and that's the thing you probably don't have if you're struggling to find a job so go Network make friends don't go at this alone the myth of the solo programmer who goes to a really nice School cold applies to 10 companies and gets offers from two of them just isn't as much a thing anymore and God don't get me started on internships right now what do you think how's your experience been trying to hunt for a job if you want to hear more about growing as an engineer I'll pin a video in the corner here all about that and if you're not interested you're already seen it YouTube thinks you like the video below it thank you guys as always appreciate you all a ton peace NS

Channel: Theo - t3․gg

Views: 325,156

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Id: j6DG1NqgkSU

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 28 2023