Your degree does not mean anything. The classes you took are irrelevant. And the countless hours you spent learning the skills to do the job were meaningless. Because for all of that, you’re just another resume in a bottomless pit of resumes. That is what post searching as an entry-level engineer feels like right now. If you are feeling this way, trust me, you are not alone.
If you happen LinkedIn right now, I certify you, you are gonna see a lot more senior positions than entry-level ones. And when you finally come across that one position that doesn’t say senior, the minute you scroll down to the requirements, it turns out they’re looking for five years of experience. Now, this presents a challenging scenario. It is a bit of a dichotomy, really.
You must need experience to get a good job, but to get experience, you need a opportunity, which abandons you with one question. What do I do? Before we can get into that, we first have to answer another question. Why does it seem that the market is in high demand for software engineers, but then when entry-level engineers try to get a job, there doesn’t actually seem to be any? Let’s try and figure out where that disconnect is.
Right around the time you decided to get into tech, you probably saw that there was a high demand for engineers. Which engineers are actually in demand and why? Companies during COVID decided that they were going to grow and grow until their hearts content, not realizing that eventually that growth would come to a screeching halt.
Then they end up trying to keep their boat afloat in a recession with way too many passengers on board. Now you see where this is going, right? That’s how we ended up with so many layoffs just in the last year or so. So now you have to consider that there are experienced engineers currently in the job market competing with you, an inexperienced engineer looking for entry-level roles. Well, hang on. Actually, it might even be a little bit easier if I just show you. Check this out.
There’s a huge supply of junior engineers attempting to get into tech, but a lower demand for them. Meanwhile, senior engineers are drowning in emails from recruiters because they have one thing that you don’t Expertise. The ability to add value in a short amount of time. And in this business, time is money.
You see, companies don’t want to wait for a junior engineer to learn all the skills that they need to build the desired product. They want a senior engineer who has already built similar things before. Now, with thousands of engineers back on the job hunt, you end up pitting the engineer who has five to six years of experience against the engineer who has one to two years of experience for a job requiring at least three.
It becomes very obvious who wins in that exchange, even more so if you’re the poor sap looking for their first job.
Why your degree is meaningless?
Now, the reason that I said that is because the things that you may have learned in college might not actually be the things that are useful or valuable in today’s market. Now, unless you went to a really fancy school that teaches you React, you’re going to be job searching without that on your resume. And that, unfortunately, is going to work against you. This is a side effect of our poor excuse for an education system.
Ask any college graduate if they have used to anything they have ever learned in college on the job. If they say yes, they are either lying to you, or $50,000 in debt, because it is no secret that college curriculums are completely out of date with today’s job market. This is likely the most frustrating part of the job searching experience, seeing rows and rows of requirements you could never hope to meet.
Unless, of course, you’re already the prized senior engineer. But this actually makes sense. Think about it. A company can spend thousands of dollars investing in an engineer who’s just getting their feet wet and can’t add any value until later down the line, or they can spend that money up front and start pumping out features later, at least short term.
One of the things that I’ve always thought to myself was, isn’t it better to create senior engineers rather than hire them? No. The answer is no. And the reason is because money. The only reason junior devs get hired is because they’re cheaper. Unless you work at a company committed to its employees rather than its pockets, Those two things will always be at odds.
From the company’s perspective, it doesn’t really make sense to invest in engineers only for them to leave the company later down the line. Though, if every company made these kinds of investments, the quality of engineers in the market could increase. However, I don’t see this ever happening, especially during a recession.
What is mid-level vs entry-level developer?
A lot of times, the entry-level positions that you’re looking for might not be advertised as you’re expecting them to be. A lot of people are looking for entry-level software engineering positions. However, at your level, you should probably be looking for internships, apprenticeships, fellowships, those kinds of things. Because when you find those, then you’re finding the opportunities and the companies who actually want to hire people with less experience.
Rather than getting trapped in an infinite sea of paradoxical job listings, looking for senior levels of experience for junior levels of pay. So in a nutshell, look for this instead of this.
Is it hard to be a software engineer?
Listen, breaking into this industry is probably one of the hardest things you could ever task yourself with. It’s difficult. So in these trying times, try not to give yourself too much of a hard time. I think the best advice I could probably give you now is do your best to continue learning. And one of the best ways that I can think of to learn is actually to build things. So you’re going to want to try to spend your time building projects, maybe working on leak code if you have some interviews lined up, that kind of thing.
Just make sure you stay sharp because there are millions of people out there who are going to be sharper than you are. Remember, there’s always a bigger fish. You want to make sure you can at least keep up and you don’t have to be some super genius to get a job. You just have to be good at learning. And sometimes the best way to learn is actually to choose the hardest route. And so a lot of the projects that I actually did myself were some of the hardest things I’ve ever tasked myself with. When I decided to build my last project, I decided that I wanted to build something that nobody had ever taught me. The first thing I thought was machine learning.Thanks for reading!
