Back in 2016, I was working at Checkout.com and was one of the first developers working in their London office. Even back then the company had ambitious goals and as a result, I spent a lot of my time hiring new developers.
For any new developer, it can take 3 - 6 months to get them up to speed and during that time they will need help from the existing team. Given we already had a very small team with lots of work we couldn't afford to spend a lot of time hand-holding new developers. As a result, we exclusively hired senior developers and especially those with existing payment experience.
In London especially, there are quite a few companies working with .NET and they all have a similar tech stack (it seems C# is still very popular in the UK). As a result, there was no shortage of senior candidates to interview. Generally, a good senior developer is at least twice more productive (if not more) than a junior developer while often getting paid less than double the junior salary. It wasn't until the company got a lot larger (and more profitable) that we started branching out and hiring junior developers.
Often companies will see junior developers as an investment. If a junior developer shows good potential and is a fast learner, their output can be comparable to that of an OK senior developer. This is great for companies, as for the first few years at least, that developer isn't going to be earning as much as the senior developers.
So why does this matter now?
A lot of tech companies have seen massive layoffs this year and it doesn't appear to be over yet. It has definitely slowed down but combined with hiring freezes it is getting harder to get a job in tech.
Lots of engineering teams will be running as skeleton crews, overworked and staffed just enough to keep the lights on. Even though many teams have lost team members to the layoffs, the amount of work that is expected from them hasn't decreased.
With companies being a lot more selective with their hires, they expect any team member that joins to "hit the ground running" and that is just not something most junior developers are very good at. If you have the budget to hire a developer it makes more sense to spend that on an experienced developer than an inexperienced one.
It is not all doom and gloom though. Hiring in tech does seem to be increasing especially outside of Big Tech. I can see from my LinkedIn that many of those laid off at the beginning of the year have managed to find jobs.
My advice for those struggling is to put yourself out there. Share your knowledge on LinkedIn and on developer platforms so employers can see what you know. Put together a project to show off your skills and finally try applying for the lesser-known large companies that will likely have less competition for roles. Once you have some experience under your belt it is a lot easier to find new positions.
If you are a junior developer, let us know in the comments what your experience has been trying to get a job in the current market.
❤️ Picks of the Week
🛠️ Resource - GitHub Actions Conditional Cheatsheets. Next week's video uses GitHub Actions and while doing research I came across this great Cheat sheet for conditional for GitHub Actions. There are actually a lot of great cheatsheets on Michael's website so it is worth bookmarking.
💬 Forum - From 2D to 3D. Steam had their summer sales the other week and I have started to play Project Zomboid. It is a "realistic" zombie survival simulation (spoiler: everyone dies eventually). I was interested to see whether it was 2D or 3D as it has an isometric fixed camera angle. Turns out it used to be 2D but they moved it to 3D due to performance issues. There is an interesting forum post from the developers about the move.
🎓 Free Course - karanpratapsingh/system-design: Learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews. Karan Pratap Singh has put together a great free course on system design. You can also see it on his website as well. There is so much great content on here.
📝 Article - Create an advanced search engine with PostgreSQL. This is a great article on how to implement full-text search using PostgreSQL. I must admit I didn't know PostgreSQL was capable of this and I have always defaulted to Elasticsearch for these types of tasks.
👨💻 Latest from me
I feel bad that I haven't got a YouTube video out for 3 weeks. I have been putting together a more project-focused video that has taken longer than I wanted it to.
The code is all done now though and those of you who are on my paid plan will be able to see it on GitHub already. I am editing the video at the moment so it will be done by next Friday.
I am going to be mixing in some more project-based videos in between my explainer ones so there will be more projects to look forward to.
💬 Quote of the Week
"It's always good to have a hobby where there's no way to monetize it ... So follow your dreams, but right up to the point where they become your job, and then run in the other direction." - David Rees
From Keep Going (affiliate link) by Austin Kleon. Resurfaced with Readwise.
My unmonetizable hobby is playing the guitar. I know I technically could monetize it but I am just not that good 🤣.
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Top comments (7)
I am graduating with my degree in computer science at the end of this month. Over the past year I have applied for over 250 intern and entry-level positions. I've gone on over 15 interviews, and have not landed any of those jobs. I have made the decision to take three months off work in order for me to create three front end web applications for local businesses, and then a full stack scheduling app for one of these said businesses. College did a great job at helping me understand compilers, OS kernels, and Java multi threading, but you start talking about JavaScript frameworks or containerization software for example, I get lost, because I was only taught the fundamentals in school. With $100,000 in debt, I do feel some urgency in starting my career as a software engineer and paying back my loans. With the market being is dry as it is, I have decided to shoot my shot at the biggest target, which is web development. In order to achieve my goal of getting my first software engineering job I have set myself on a solo boot camp curated by myself. The technologies, I am learning are HTML, CSS, JavaScript, node.js, ESLint, Docker(not because I need it, but because I want to learn it) Tailwind, MongoDB, OAuth, React, and various AWS cloud services. I've set up my own Trello board, a 3 month long plan, comprised of 2 week sprints. Lastly, the only people I know in my class who have gotten a job as a software engineer are people who directly know the hiring manager. I do not know any hiring managers, but I do know that I refuse to give up and don't care if it takes another year, 3 years, or even 5 years before I get a job. if I need to do data entry or IT helpdesk in the mean time, so be it, I will not give up on my dream.
It does annoy me that a computer science degree doesn't actually teach you the skills you need to be a software developer. Yet without one, it is even harder to get a job. I did Physics at University which I think actually made me a better problem solver and therefore engineer as result. I am hoping for you and for everyone else that the market picks up again this year. You are doing the right thing by not just sitting around and waiting but actually but improving your skills where it is needed. Good luck to you and with that attitude I am sure you will go far.
The annual Stack Overflow surveys are usually an interesting glimpse into the industry. While they might not help directly in a job hunt, they show a general trend in what's popular.
For anyone interested, here's the link for 2023
I love looking at these surveys. Especially when I get comments such as "Javascript is dead", "No one uses Java anymore", "Forget C# why aren't you recommending Dart". That is just not what the majority developers are using on the job.
Yup - great for seeing real-world usage of technologies. It helps that they have some great looking diagrams too, e.g this circular dendrogram (I think that's the name for this type of diagram; happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).
It'd be nice if they broke it down by region too, but I guess that extra dimension might be difficult to capture/present.
Thanks for the post 😊... Now i know what to do
You’re welcome ☺️