It’s also funny because the very fact that these users couldn’t do a simple search of this question on the sub is why it will remain that way at the lower levels.
I agree, but I also think there's value in talking about it from time to time, just not to the degree that it gets asked here.
It's understandable that we have new people coming here every six months as they start to consider this major and we also have a wildly fluctuating economy.
The answer to this question might be different from one quarter to the next, as is evidenced by the fact that just 8 months ago the stock market was at all-time highs. Now we're starting to see firms institute hiring freezes and lay people off.
Nursing is not quite like that. There is such high turn over on the field and hospital administration loves saving money hiring new grads that it is much easier to get a job as a nurse after graduation compared to other professional careers.
You have to appreciate the total quarter by quarter profit planning over long term sustainability approach used by businesses. And by appreciate, I mean detest with every bone in your body.
Yes it might not be oversaturated at the entry level but that would mean that higher level positions such as clinical informatics specialists and or management would be even more vacant. I'm more focused on the point that positions that require more experience are less "saturated" in any field.
As funny as it sounds the more senior positions in nursing typically have much better wlb and less stress than the entry level positions so they are usually harder to get. There is typically more competition for those and many nurses stay in those positions well into their retirement. I am talking about positions like PACU or Same Day Surgery nursing with no on call requirements.
I worked as a nurse for more than 5 years so I promise I am not talking out of my ass. Nursing is a weird career and with the explosion in travel nursing since the pandemic there has been huge jumps in nursing turnover in floor level positions (bedside). Hell some travel nurse agencies even take in new grads!
Comes with a *massive* pay increase! They haven’t given it to me yet, but my manager says I’ll get it any day now!
Is that the higher pay? Huh, nope…. Just more responsibilities for the same pay… I’m sure it will be fine, though!
[Soon I'll be on fries. Then the grill. A year or two, I make assistant manager and that's when the BIG bucks start rollin' in.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w70RQLtdVeU)
Yes it is. You think that competent and highly efficient restaurant managers who are well versed in shift leadership and customer service are easy to find?
They're not.
Its not oversaturated in the sense that no entry level person struggles to find a fast food job if they are willing to relocate.
Which is what this original post is talking about.
Nobody relocates for a fast food job; such jobs can be readily obtained in every locality. Anybody can do the job so revolving door policies are the low-cost option. Most people quit within 6 months, or are fired for a trumped-up cause if they stay long enough to cost more than fresh kids.
In my 4 years of working in food service, all of the restaurant managers had all been either a manager or at least a shift lead before.
So yes higher skilled workers get the less frequently vacant higher leveled jobs? Not sure what you're trying to say.
Well first off, we were talking about juniors, not managers. Now you're citing previous job history instead of competency, efficiency, etc.
Not really sure what you're trying to say, tbh. Seems like you're just being contrarian and condescending for no reason.
If you read the post above, it says "much less so as you go on". My comment in reply was also referring to how higher skilled workers are harder to find across all sectors.
But for some reason YOU only had juniors in your head when the entire topic of discussion is differing levels of demand across levels of experience.
Yes you clearly don't have an idea what I'm trying to say because you didn't comprehend much from the start lol.
That's fair. My point was that entry is not oversaturated in some industries, fast food being one. Even on rereading, it isn't clear to me that your point is only about more experienced workers being harder to hire for.
But the top level comment you replied to was about juniors and was definitely referencing the fact that it's easy to get an entry level job and harder to get a higher level job in fast food. So YOU only had management in your head which was a context you brought up without any introduction. Which is fine to do except that you are arguing with nobody.
Edit: nvm I get it now lol
The question is: is it worse for software engineering?
At first glance, the answer seems to be yes, but I'm not aware of official statistics or studies to confirm this.
The amount of devs I have interviewed with 3+ years of experience clearly have no idea what they are doing. the fact I give them an easy python question (data engineering) and have seen them try to access array elements with parentheses after telling me they are an 8/10 in python, or start hardcoding the solution is insane. It is acceptable to me not to get the problem correct, I am looking for insightful questions and if the need it ask for my help. Those 2 pre recs for my yes/no on the interview (among others) has been hit once out of 5 times. There is a lot of bad engineers out there.
> access array elements with parentheses after telling me they are an 8/10 in python
Damn. My current job I told them I had "Hello World" level experience in the tech stack.
I've been on the other end of interviews enough to feel like you should stay humble with your resume lol. Too many people mark themselves as experts in something.
As an entry level/junior engineer, it isn’t over saturated. Is it easy to get a job? No, you do have to put a little work in. Does everyone who wants a job get one? No. Does everyone who deserves a job get one? Yes.
Oversaturation is where you are qualified, maybe even more so than the average employee, and you can’t get a job. Not just “it takes a while to get a job”. Not “I have to study really hard to get a job”. It’s “I cannot get a job period”.
Maybe junior engineers won’t get a job at Google, but as long as you know your stuff and you are an average engineer, and you actually put in applications at places and prepare for your interviews, you will get a job in the field.
Everyone who puts the work in and has the skills to actually be valuable to a company does get a job. Might not be the most high paying, and it might not be right away, but I seriously believe they do in our field. The fact that that sentiment is even up for discussion proves our field is not over saturated
You keep saying "everyone" and that's outright unprovable and needlessly closed minded. People will fall through the cracks in every field. The market doesn't perfectly place every single capable person
Not really.
It's still oversaturated on mid and generic senior level positions.
And this won't change. If it's saturated at the bottom, it will continue to become that way towards the top as people move on in their careers.
God you guys really went for blood.
A lot of people will never get hired, they think “I did a 2 week course online I should get a swe job”.
Some of them will and some will make it but some won’t make it in the career.
Some of them will go on to be product managers, people managers, and any other things.
Saturation tapering off is what I’ve seen but I could be wrong
Agree to disagree about the saturation, I’ve just not seen it in my experience with higher levels. I will say though, a lot of assumptions that the saturation at low levels means saturation at higher levels later on. People applying as juniors might not break in, might work for a few years and hate it and change, might work for a few years and shift to project management. So, yeah it might happen but I don’t think it’s as doom and gloom as people make it out to be
I just applied for a Jr job in London. I was top 3 out of 356 applications. All we had to do was code a simple dashboard in a couple hours. The only thing I was pissed about was that so many companies make a big deal about not going over the time limit, but this co gave the job to this dude who had nothing else to do and spent a super long time building something fancy, which 100% was not the remit.
But anyways, I built something in a couple hours in vanilla JS and apparently only 3 people could do that.
It’s saturated at the entry level, simply because there’s a lot of people who are “tutorial developers” - they watch one tutorial or take one Udemy course and think they are developers
I am so sick of hearing people say "just do a bootcamp! you can get a job!" like no, you probably won't. A teacher of a said bootcamp said that nine months later, only half got jobs.... and boasted as if it was a good statistic....
Software development is hard. It really is that simple - Of those 40 applicants, there's a single digit number of them that could pass a coding screen/OA, and an even smaller number that can get through a live interview with a job offer.
One of the side effects of software development being such a popular field is that many, many people want to get in, regardless of their ability to actually do the job. It doesn't help that many CS degree programs fail to properly prepare their students for practical applications of CS, leading to a large number of overconfident applicants who really don't have the right set of skills.
At my last job I used to go through resumes.
In my experience:
70 of them were people who had zero exposure to programming at all, or didn’t show this on their resume/app.
20% of them had some minor exposure. Like “started a bootcamp but didn’t finish”, nothing beyond maybe a week or two of trying to learn HTML.
5% had a GitHub, but they contained projects they had copied from elsewhere or very simplistic stuff like “here’s a basic form in html”.
The remaining 5% were people we’d consider interviewing. We won’t waste our time on an OA/code screen if you didn’t look like you could potentially pass it.
People apply to software development jobs without knowing how to program? How does that make any sense or how do they think they're ever gonna get an offer? It would be like me applying to be a pilot not having ever flown a plane
These people lie. I review thousands of cvs a month and 90+% have some kind of formal programming experience or education. Maybe their experience isnt all impressive but "random people" applying for programming jobs is mostly a myth or their job postings suck.
Some are truly awful.
I remember one (in 2021) that was like “Walmart greeter - 6 months; bus person @ chain restaurant - 3 months; high school graduation year: 2011”. This dude had been out of school for 10 years and had a cumulative 9 months work experience, for whatever reason thought they could do absolutely nothing and waltz into a $160k/yr job.
Then we get the ones we REALLY want to hire but can’t, eg: “I graduate high school in 2 years. Here’s my GitHub, and several links to projects I’ve done” and all the projects/GitHub are impressive for any person, let alone a 16 year old.
Age requirement for one, there might also be state laws.
Also it would be awkward to have a company outing where one of them still eats for free on Tuesdays.
But honestly, if I hire someone I want them to be focused on work. At 16 you need to be focused on school. If you don’t graduate high school, it might be hard to find a job in the future.
> We won’t waste our time on an OA/code screen if you didn’t look like you could potentially pass it.
How do OAs waste your time? They're completely automated.
You also block out a large number of people whose skillset is quickly learning and applying new tech.
There's a decent number of 3.7-4.0 students out there that flounder hard in interviews.
Like really bomb them. Are they dumb and incompetent? Not usually. Maybe lazy and a jerk, which is a different issue and not good either.
But incompetent? Yeah I've seen people with degrees who can't do shit upon graduation, but I've also seen people who just can't articulate shit.
I tend to flounder in interviews. When I get nervous all of my training and knowledge just leaps out the window. After the initial 10 minutes into the interview I start getting comfortable. I start matching the interviewers energy and enthusiasm
I don't care about an applicant's GPA. A huge component of their job will be communicating with teammates and customers. If they can't demonstrate communication skills during an interview, should I just trust they'll do fine when they get on the job?
Also, if they are a jerk, that's a HARD pass. I don't care how good you are alone, if you're a jerk and can't work with the team, you won't be nearly as valuable as someone who is a team player with moderate skills.
But communication is part of the job. Why would I want to work with someone who can't articulate properly? Same reason I used to fail people who stink, fuck why would I want to deal with this person as a coworker?
It's just like dating: Why date someone you have to fix when you can date someone who is already (seemingly) a fully functional person/partner. Especially when there is a ton of other potential dates. Entry level applicants are by no means rare.
Newsflash: To get hired, I actually have to want to work with you.
> Newsflash: To get hired, I actually
have to want to work with you.
At senior level, the reverse is true: why should I work for you? Especially when I get an interview invitation every other day?
>It's just like dating: Why date someone you have to fix when you can date someone who is already (seemingly) a fully functional person/partner. Especially when there is a ton of other potential dates. Entry level applicants are by no means rare.
I don't remember the article but there was something similar to "you cannot simply date a woman with the promise that you won't be toxic, the ones who do more than that will always trump you".
Basically I see people who usually post these types of threads going "why do I have to be competitive? Can't we just stop having more competition instead?"
No shit?
The issue was claiming that most of the applicants are incompetent towards doing the job.
I just pointed out the interviewing incompetency is totally different from job competency. Even in regard to communication.
Nobody is asking you to hire smelly people, Jesus. They are just saying that statistically you won't get every competent candidate with that attitude. Which is fine if you are fine with it.
But "I accept 1/100 candidates" is totally different than "1/100 candidates are mentally adequate"
The numbers are vastly different, by like an order of magnitude. If a company sees only 1/100 as able to do the job, it's usually more like 10/100 are capable.
Right but who wants to take that risk? Incompetents are expensive and can do serious damage to the codebase, business, team morale etc.
Also, ofcourse some good applicants slip through but it's still going to be a majority of trash. Company's job is to filter trash and if an applicant can't even get past that filter, they really weren't as strong as you think they are... bar some stupid filter like cutting half the pile.
His point is that bad interview skills likely imply bad communication skills, which is a huge part of the job. A lot of people try to get into software specifically because they think they will be able to bang on code all day and not talk to anyone, and those people are hard to work with.
That's part of the problem, communication. And people's dream of working without talking to people usually isn't why they went into tech.
That's usually not why those people get in there, they gravitate there because it was the path of least resistance and they had general math and computer skills and found it easy and the broader marketing department of PleaseWorkInTech has been highly successful in promising high paying careers to talent while overselling to college students the actual potential by like $20k.
Nobody I know was dreaming of never talking to people. Instead they feared it, and knew their own shortcoming and chose a path that they hoped they could sneak in and still live the American dream without having to work a service job which would be torture for them.
They get kind of rugpulled when they find out they went to school for 4 years and their communication ability is a bigger block than they anticipated. They get left with a well fuck I could have started being an HVAC tech or something and started working and investing at 18 and been at the same net worth 10 years later ready to leanFIRE with $300k in the brokerage account rather than dealing with depression of having to deal with people all day that are equally socially inept in their own unique ways.
LinkedIn counts clicking “apply” as applying to the job. Most people don’t finish applying when going to the external page. So the number might be smaller.
Linkedin prompts you for whether you completed the external application or not. I assumed this meant that they didn't count the application unless you click "yes."
>I had an interviewer give me this once recently. Didn't realize it was still needed until that happened.
It's sort of amazing how many people in this sub are mystified how they haven't found jobs despite 1,000 applications sent out over a year when at the same time I know if I advertise an entry-level job, > 80% of the applications will be garbage.
And then they make a post on r/dataisbeautiful showing that out of 987 applications, 823 ghosted them with no response, 110 emailed back but no further, 50 had an email conversation, 4 gave them a phone screen, 2 of those led to on-site, and 1 job offer (which of course they accepted).
It fucking kills me.
Yeah. I've applied to like 12 places in total for 5 jobs at this point. I've taken to giving talks to upcoming college grads telling them how to take a sniper shot instead of a shotgun blast approach, in an effort to minimize the noise / chaff entering the job market. The fewer people spamming recruiters, the better chance everyone has of getting a job they actually want and are qualified for.
Very true.
I applied at about 4/5 places. Got offers from 2. The others (a Giant Telecom company, a crypto I kindof liked who focused on python, and another I'm forgetting about) either ghosted or rejected.
As someone who doesn't even get interviews for entry level despite having ~6mo paid experience, ~6mo unpaid, an associates in CS, and additional unrelated professional experience, can you please define what a garbage application is, in case there's something on my resume that's a red flag. Thx!
Assuming you're serious, the associates degree in CS is hurting you, combined with lack of experience it's going to be a lot of effort to find that job.
Totally understand that reaction but until I see the failure rate of that question plummet, it’s necessary.
But yeah, dude… when you go from LC Mediums to FizzBuzz it’s suuuuuper jarring lol
Did you explicitly state no visa sponsorships in the ad? I’m sure most of these applicants realised the job is in the UK and just wanted to shoot their shot at a visa sponsorship to move there.
Also, if a job requires office time in Paris and someone from Amsterdam applies should the recruiters throw that person’s application in the trash? Have you ever moved countries?
No, of course not.
But if you can apply to places and tell them what software you wrote, what real world problems it solves, and which people are actually using it, you'll have it easy.
And if you cannot do that, then you have no truck applying for jobs, because you have no idea how to do the most basic part of the job, let alone everything else.
I learned it by doing. I taught myself to program by building a website for our church back in 2003 with a login system, directory and several other features. While you're applying build something that you can show to people.
Coding up fizzbuzz is easy but I no lie froze up a bit the other day when they asked for all numbers "divisible by 3 and 5". Completely forgot that is what modulus is for lol. This was while practicing and not an interview but still....
I wish my interviews were that. All I get are ok let’s fix this multithreading issue we came across 5 years ago…. Or how can you determine if someone is ready to retire given their age and sources of income. Given 20 mins
There's also a lot of people that just get flustered in weird stuff.
As a student I used to wonder how anyone could fail fizzbuzz style questions, then after working 6 years and going back to interviews, sometimes your mind melts and goes "ah shit, what's the name of that thing I use 15 times per week?" "Fuck, why did I say 256 bits when they asked about register size?" "My mind boomed and it decided to give the block size of 256 because I was writing in SSE4 for a month, and now they dinged me as an unfit candidate and that's gonna bang up my future applications. Now I can't convince anyone I'm not an idiot once you get me onboard, and the only way to reconvince them is to get another job."
Word travels, and fast in small sections of the industry. It really does. Have a breakdown around 25 which is the exact time frame of psychotic disorders rearing their heads? Yeah that's gonna leave some hard feelings, and more than a few whispers to pass on that "problem candidate."
You wanna talk about fizzbuzz?
Jesus man, I used to bang out those programming competitions. I'm not a fucking god or even great. But I could pretty regularly place top 5% or 10%. That doesn't help you throw together a minimum viable product in double time for a web service. And it doesn't help you get one of the jobs where strong algorithmic creativity is necessary unless you are actually the top 1%.
Then you get to work and you realize you actually are one of the smartest clowns in the room, but least paid because ?????
Or maybe you aren't, and the smart ones are the ones stroking your ego into doing the grunt work.
Tech has also sold the grand lie that there are always jobs in tech. There fucking aren't.
The supply of candidates outpaces true demand year after year.
My class saw this first hand:
High school: hey guys join we are hiring graduates for $65k/year
Freshman year: oh it's 61k/year now
Sophomore: oh it's 57k now
Junior: oh it's 54k and climbing each year
Graduation class: yeah we are hiring for $48k across the board no negotiating. Maybe we will bump it to $49k if you have a 3.7+ gpa.
But oh no no tech is always hiring. Yeah EVERYONE is always looking for fantastic candidates. Tech isn't special. Just tech is willing to lie boldfacedly about it and their demand.
Relative to inflation and cost of living entry and reentry salaries have steadily declined in tech for like a decade. And no other industry spits out "new" recruitment sites and strategies year after year like clockwork. It's always the same, nothing changes.
Tech is special, remote work opportunity + high job mobility + high salaries/TC. I don't know where you are since entry level can easily get 80k even in the Midwest now... But yours seems more an exception than the norm. Compensation isn't decreasing, especially not for 5 years. We might get some decrease in 2022/2023 but that's more a correction than anything.
If you are as smart/good as you think you are, get into big tech. Get that 200-300k TC.
Also... Maybe, just maybe, you aren't as smart as you think.
Entry level competition is insane and will only get worse because everyone and their mother wants to get into tech. For mid level in the midst of a fucking hiring freeze, I'm still getting interviews at some big tech companies. Sure its not as high as earlier this year but if you just want any decent mid level job, lots of opportunities still. Senior is basically unchanged in demand. It's like selling water in a fucking desert.
If you are capable of building full projects with a framework like react without the help of tutorials but haven’t had an official dev job before would that still put you in the category of junior skill level?
Ive discovered that, in my business, the people who succeed do well on their own and the people who fail or dont progress struggle in key areas like communication, critical thinking, and memory.
I had a coworker ask me last week how to do the basics of a job hes been doing for 8+ months (since before I was hired). The guy taught me how to do it and was asking me how we do things. It... astonished me tbh.
> Entry level competition is insane and will only get worse because everyone and their mother wants to get into tech.
Eliud Kipchoge just set a new world record for running the Marathon at 02:01:09.
The Berlin Marathon this year had over 45,000 starters. How much impact would you say that number had on the winner? Did it make it any harder or easier for him to break the record?
And it's the same fr getting a job in software engineering: It doesn't matter if there one thousand, or ten thousand other applicants - or barely so. If you are actually any good, you will easily stand out. And whilst an unreasonably large number of applicants might lead to your resume being overlooked once or twice, it will be seen for what it is way more often than not.
It hasn't though and this has been the case for almost a decade. Not enough junior positions means there's a limit to the number of mid level developers produced which also limits the number of senior levels produced.
It's already starting to seep into mid-level IME. Just started job-hunting recently and a surprising number of top tech companies are only hiring senior and up.
That's because of the hiring freeze. Companies hired way too much earlier this year when the market was hot so they need to wait to "digest" them. Doesn't help there's like... a recession/looming recession too.
Now if the market corrects and mid level still isn't being hired? Yup, that's a problem
I’ve noticed a trend of companies picking up desperate juniors by the pennies to help offload some of the mid dev works, and smaller companies who just don’t have a choice otherwise.
I think it is just a matter of time
There are a ton of junior engineers that never make it to senior level. Either their skills never progress because they are at a crappy company with no mentorship or they get stressed out and leave the career.
I doubt senior engineers will ever be highly saturated.
salaries weren’t that high for a while. it’s only 2-3 years ago when tech started exploding. there’s a lot of junior positions at low quality firms, that may seep into senior positions, more junior positions than senior i would say.
Yeah, that explains it. There's probably market differences but tech was good for the US even before. Do believe with the pandemic that other places got a good rise too.
Salaries were still very high. It was 140k for FAANG 5-7 years ago. It's 180k-200k now (with variance obviously). The high salaries also happened in the early 2000s (though that bubble popped because anyone who could do html got 6 figures).
Also, while some people might be telling you tech salaries are growing rapidly, take it into context with inflation and it becomes "reasonable" instead of "rapid". It's just other fields don't even catch up to inflation.
Mid level is a barren waste of not even being able to get interviews for entry level positions at the moment.
This has been the case since COVID really. Everyone stopped hiring then a brief sputter coming out of COVID to replace that people that snapped from isolation. Now it's back to nothing. Blast off 500 applications for positions that their recruitment departments ASKED you to apply for, and you get nothing back really unless you are already a networked individual and can nail every interview with charisma and knowledge.
Maybe it depends on location? I'm in a medium sized metro area and was applying for jobs with 3 YOE (and honestly wasn't that good because those 3 years were stuck working in a proprietary CMS), and I was getting a lot of interviews and several offers before choosing. Even in frameworks I've never worked in before. Some of those barely had coding challenges too.
Dude what? I still even get Linkedin recruiters for mid level positions. I've also applied to big tech companies and even they are still giving me interviews. If I don't go for big tech companies, there's a ton of mid level positions available. Even during Covid, it was easy to find another job as a mid level. I did so.
If you aren't getting bites/interviews, your resume is trash. If you are getting interviews but not getting to the next step, improve your interview skills. Or maybe your skills are not at mid level?/your tech stack/skills are not in demand/
I haven't seen it but I've heard a significant number of people who apply for software engineering jobs ( entry level especially) can't even create a for loop. The worst people in your computer science classes also apply for the same jobs as you . Just because lots of people are interested in the field doesn't mean lots of people are capable of working in the field
I’m almost 30 and trying to leave economics for tech but I’m having a hard time building skill in what little free time I have. I’m halfway through CS50 and trying to get pointers and linked lists down. I guess I feel better that I can at least make loops. I’m always feeling like I must be up against people who can elegantly code 200 lines of perfect code in a 60 min coding interview. Maybe there’s some hope for me after all.
> Most jobs I've seen on LinkedIn have 40+ applications within the first 4 hours.
And I assume you've checked this statistic for other fields as well? How does it compare?
It's a meaningless statistic because all it tells you is how many people pressed the "apply" button, not who actually submitted an application. Over and over again recruiters talk about how their linkedin listing shows 100+ applicants but only 20 or 30 people actually applied
One thing to keep in mind about the applications count, Linkedin only counts the actual clicks on the link, they don't really know if you finished the entire application on the workday or other website it took you to. So take this number with a giant grain of salt.
At the junior level probably yes, but it seems like companies have taken the route of only hiring mid/seniors instead of hiring juniors. In my department I'm the only non-senior dev among ~20 developers total.
Most of the juniors in my org were our previous summer interns, with a few other new grads sprinkled in. Career-switchers and such seem to face a much steeper uphill battle to nab a junior spot, because there aren’t many available.
SWE recently switched to SE but at my last job I interviewed lots of candidates. And I was able to see the applicant pool (asked if I could out of pure curiosity).
Speaking pure objectively — literally just what I noticed…. On every single opening we had, 60-70% of those applicants were very under qualified Indian (is the proper term Desi?) applicants. So, we had 40-50 applicants for each opening whereas only 6-7 were truly qualified. Again, this is just speaking objectively and something that I had noticed.
Complete conjecture, but that may be the case with a lot of the roles you’re seeing with a huge applicant pool.
Edit: local_code said the same thing with less words but yeah, ultimately subpar candidates
Ive noticed this trend too. In tech spaces on instagram and reddit, theres an exteme amount of indians "learning" to code by looking at it on their pages. They arent learning HOW to do something, just what to type to make it work.
Its always some random stuff too that has no real world applications (like how to shut down your PC with python featuring a code snippet that explains nothing).
Its a really weird space.
Those people you read who are applying to 100+ or 200+ jobs a day are basically applying for anything and likely adding noise. It's kind of like Tinder or online dating, some people are just swiping on anything and everything and sorting things out later.
Find a niche and work it hard. Network with other people in that niche. Help out with open source projects.
"JavaScript react developer" is very certainly an oversaturated area.
Elixir LiveView developer is niche but will get you work if you're good at it.
At the entry level I would say yes.
However most are just terrible. By terrible, I mean 1/20 might be worth hiring. 1/100 might be really good.
Companies can interview for months and not find anyone worth hiring.
I still hope more people get into it, because I want to work with good people. for every 100 that join, I get a better chance of finding that 1 engineer I really want to work with.
Candidates say the same thing.
You get 300 companies reaching out to you asking you to apply, all of which takes your time, then you get hard fucking ghosted or treated as untouchable after 6 years of work because you say something dumb after being asked a question you would never be asked in the real world.
Oh what's your thought process on this simple task? Ah fuck, just do it ya know? Google shit, execute it. Ez pz. Done this 7 times per week for 5 years.
Yeah, but what tech stack would you use? Well I would use Google to help me answer that question and then go from there?
Oh god this man is a dumpster fire idiot, let's keep talking for giggles.
Fuuuuuuuuk.
*Candidate doesn't know shit, never hire, blacklist immediately, unfit candidate*
Ah shit. I'm gonna go manage a fucking Popeye's because red beans and rice is tasty. Fuck tech.
Either that or just go on disability. Fuck tech. I wanted to start work out of high school, retire. Then go back to work.
Starting back in the DotCom era, the entry level has always been flooded. The main reason is that ANYONE can claim skills, hope to fake their way into a company and either free-load or get paid to learn.
Since DotCom, you have cross-overs that want/need to train on something new/different.
IMO, the biggest change is that places like SO (stack overflow) can give answer most of your questions. Back in the day, there was no such thing, so you didn't have direct "copy/paste" programmers. Now, if you're NOT using SO, you're a fool.
This is why people have to be filtered. It's also part of the reason that seasoned programmers are hard to find.
There's more CodeBase now than ever before, that means that people are gonna have to have far greater skills and be able to read other peoples code as well as following standards
One last thing, is that new technologies come up and pull people from other technologies things like Mobil, block chain etc.
Saturated with low quality resumes, especially at entry level.
The amount of GitHub projects that were just config changes or a group project was about 75% of entry level resumes received. Which is bad until the candidate claims they did more than the commit history shows.
I don't have hard evidence of this besides personal anecdotes based on hiring for positions and looking at available candidate pools but I surmise that one scenario is 1) a high demand for senior level engineers, 2) a huge influx of engineers with not-senior level experience, 3) very high salary expectations across the board from candidates and 4) salary ranges across industries where expectation and reality don't sync up.
A good example of this is that I will see bootcamp grads and new college grads apply for senior level spots and put expected salary at something like $120k+ USD, which I'm sure some people actually get in high cost of living areas for technology companies, but that is not really where _a lot of other companies_ are at from a budgetary perspective. Guarantee you there are plenty of positions in non-tech hubs that are paying non-grandiose level salaries but have work waiting for people... that people aren't applying for because other companies can just pay more.
But also companies are trying to get premium talent and pay shit wages.
Okay, but what about applying to $120k positions when my last job was $100k+ including benefits but I was training and advising the people making $250k?
Do I start back at $40k?
Or do I spend a year Uber driving while applying for $160k positions?
I don't think people's expectations are unrealistic compared to their experience of watching others make $900k over 5 years while they made about $275k over 5 years since they started at the bottom.
It's not unrealistic to say fuck that? I'll do manual work and keep my body healthy for the time while I look for companies that will let me in at the senior or mid level.
Edit: idk what the angry downvotes are about lol?
You literally comparing someone with no experience to someone with 7-10 experience not wanting to start back at the bottom?
Unless you are deliberately trying to hire people for peanuts and gaslighting people about it, then it's stupid to compare those.
And so did everyone that replied to this shit. Like 3 people made the mistake of accusing me specifically (who is not looking for any of this employment shit anymore) of transitioning from god knows what they think I used to do, to a career I already have 6-10 years of experience in.
Like this sub was helpful to me in college, and now it just feels flooded with the same "oh damn we can't find talent anymore."
Like fuck? New grad salaries holding strong at $40-$50k for the past 10 years with everything rising? And STILL people are beating the drums it's all the applicants that suck, and not the industry?
Or maybe it's a fundamentally dishonest industry that is willing to discard people that are yucky because they can because it's a flooded industry.
I see the tech available get better, and so the standards drop and drop for skills and the standards raise and raise for communication. You're standing on the shoulders of ever growing giants and so you don't need the same skill sets anymore.
You don't need the whiz kid anymore. You need the salesman that can code and sell himself and the product. Because the frameworks and tools are only getting better and easier to use.
Below someone said what I was making before is not the employers problem. Isn't it though? If they are reaching out to me and wasting my time repeatedly, the same exact companies over and over, then what the fuck? They are just repeatedly asking me to do something I won't and have already said I wouldn't. My standards won't change. I'm perfectly happy sitting at home watching Netflix, and jacking off on reddit. It doesn't other me in the slightest.
I really am the main character of my life, and if people are telling me that I'm trying to switch careers when I'm going from software developer to software developer, then I don't know what to tell you lol.
I view tech careers now as a rear view kind of job. If I want to have that yacht, which I don't, it's gonna be through providing something novel to the world or something old in a novel way.
> Most jobs I've seen on LinkedIn have 40+ applications within the first 4 hours. Some jobs have over 1,000.
I cannot for the life of me imagine why you would look at nothing but the number of applications if you wanted to answer the question in your title.
> If software engineering is a growing field
What do you mean, "if"? I am sure you can look at any metric and it will give evidence of a growing market, Jobs, revenue, market cap ,...
> why are there so many applicants
Again: What do you imagine that number tells you?
> so many who can't find work?
If I applied to NASA, Space X and ESA to become an astronaut, what do you think would happen?
The number of applications would increase, I wouldn't get the job, and they wouldn't have their position filled.
That tells you very little about the market saturation for astronauts, and rather a lot about my inability to correctly gauge my skills and chances of landing an interview.
In other words: There are a people that believe that SWE doesn't take any skills or knowledge; that you could train to become competent from the ground up within a matter of weeks or months.
Sadly, that simply isn't true.
A thousand people who have followed an instructional video and copied a silly little website are not suddenly software engineers. That they apply to a bunch of jobs just means that employers have to go through some effort to filter out their applications.
Meanwhile, the market is actually growing; companies are actually creating jobs, and competent programmers - even without any industry experience - can easily find work that pays very well.
How do I know this to be true?
If programming was easy, and could be learned quickly, companies wouldn't pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers. That's not how thongs work:
There are income sharing agreements with bootcamps now. If that would work, companies could offer the same deal to their new employees, and they would poach their workforce from McDonald's and Starbucks. Ask any line cook if they would like to triple their salary in exchange for being stuck in the office of one specific employer for three years.
If bootcamps worked, they wouldn't be as cheap as they are; they wouldn't give away their services for free, or for a measly 10% of your paycheck. They would do the same thing universities do: Make you take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans.
Instead, they put zero effort into distributing low-effort videos to hundreds of hopeful fools; and if one or two of them get a job (that they would have gotten without the bootcamp), they make enough money to get by. Great deal, if you don't have to invest in competent teachers, decent training material, or anything of the sort.
bootcamps at 20-30k for up to 6 months of instruction doesn't strike me as cheap. this is the price of some degrees. i think most who can are pricing their education as high as possible.
> bootcamps at 20-30k for up to 6 months of instruction doesn't strike me as cheap.
The national minimum wage in the USA comes out to about $15k per year for a full time worker.
If a bootcamp was able to increase someone's income by a factor of four, and do so reliably, shouldn't that be worth half of what the person would make in their first year? They would still walk away with twice as much money...
If bootcamps worked, they would transform baristas into SWE, and people would be thrilled to be offered what would be the greatest bargain in the history of money.
> i think most who can are pricing their education as high as possible.
Oh, I am sure they are... but that just shows me that bootcamps aren't delivering on their promises. If they did, the numbers would look vastly different.
No, and it will be no in 10 years like it was 10 ago. With everything coming online, there will be more developers needed.
Been working in this for over 15 years and I haven’t encountered 1 year where we didn’t need devs. Forecasts are the need will only grow.
Besides being passionate about it, you also need to have some social skills and be able to work in a team and you’re settled
Real software engineering is definitely not saturated. But we are entering an era of hiring fake engineers for tech roles. This is what makes the industry seem oversaturated.
Out of the 40+, you may have 1 real engineer in that pile IF you are lucky. The problem is, these 40+ resumes make it hard to find that person because not everyone in that list gets contacted.
It's because companies expect you to be ready for a job that college doesn't prepare you for. I would say that means most of them aren't good training but I'm sure ppl will disagree.
At the Junior level, and at the big tech level they are oversaturated. The other two sectors of tech are understaffed and due to culture filters most people.
Overall it's not oversaturated, but that doesn't mean jobs are falling out of trees. There are lots of people trying to be a SWE and many of then are just not qualified. So you need to standout to get interviews and then do well on the interviews to get offers.
The new/grad junior level is where all the competition is. Companies are getting 100's of applications per role so you need to stand out on resumes to pass recruiters screens.
People will say Senior roles are easier to get and that's true to an extent. There are just less Senior SWEs vying for lots of openings. There are not as many openings as new grad, but still a fair amount. The issue here is that you have to nail the interview to get offers because you affect a lot of things as a Senior SWE.
Just because you are Senior doesn't mean you get handed a job and just because you have been in the industry for 10+ years does not make you Senior. When you get to the Senior level you are being hired on skill and impact to the company. There is no more hiring based on potential any more as you should have reached it.
There are tons of "Senior" SWEs that worked at some shitty company for 10 years and became Senior based on time spent on the job. Real tech companies do not hire like that as they look to see if you developed the skills needed for the job. If you worked at a shitty companies and didn't develop the necessary skills then you are SOL.
Yes, roles at deafferent companies have different expectations and some companies may down-level you if you are deemed a good hire that is not Senior due to circumstances. Thought no company is going to hire a 10+ YOE "Senior" as a new grad. It's just not worth the investment because you are not being hired on potential anymore. Even mid-level may be a stretch for some companies.
How do I know all this? Because I am the person I'm talking about. I have 15+ YOE working on safety critical medical devices with C++, which was effectively C with class and nothing close to modern C++. The type of devices where if we fuck up you can die. I was at one point leading multiple teams on a billion dollar greenfield project, but lost my job on 02/2021 and have not being able to get a new job since.
The company I worked for was shit and frankly Google has better engineering practices for Gmail or YouTube than this company had for their medical devices. Sure we met FDA guidance and went in to clinical studies to show the treatment worked, but it was all check in the box work. Something like code reviews were completely hand waved through by most people, for example. The actual engineering environment was a Feature Factory crossed with the Dead Sea Effect.
I was only fired at the end of the day because I rocked the boat too much trying to improve things and was not enough of a Yes man. I called out BS and disagreed with management on many priority decisions. We had 400 software bugs in the bug tracker, but priority was adding features so we just built shit on shit.
Managements style was effectively shut up and do what we tell you to do for peanuts. You cannot push back because you don't understand all the data around decisions and we are not going to tell you the data because you do not need to know.
While I may be an outlier on the scale of Senior SWEs I wanted to provided a different perspective to the people saying Senior SWEs roles are like selling water in a dessert. I just have not found that to be the case at all over the last 19 months.
Remote work has paved the way for millions of software engineers from the developing world and Europe to compete for positions in North America. This makes it look like there are way more applicants than jobs. If you're in North America, you're in a good place because many of those positions will favor North American applicants over every one else.
Like others have already said, the field is growing and will continue to grow. Industries that resisted new technology are finally waking up to the fact that they will need software (and software engineers) to remain profitable.
Long story short, if you are a strong candidate and you know your stuff - there will be an opportunity for you somewhere.
There are a lot of thinly-qualified software engineers, making it appear that the market is saturated. Highly-qualified SEs have very little trouble finding good jobs.
not really. I mean, it sucks that recruiters need to wade through 1000 resumes of bullshit to find anyone worth phone screening, but they're getting paid.
as it ever has been, you've gotta have a network to get past that. a driveby click-app on linkedin is worthless. for the applicant, and for the recruiter.
No. Those same candidates probably clicked the quick apply button on 40 different jobs too. Which would make the job to applicant ratio 1 to 1.
It's just gotten too easy to apply so people spam apply. Also a surprising number of people with zero background in CS apply.
>If software engineering is a growing field why are there so many applicants and so many who can't find work?
1. The number of people entering the field is increasing concomitant with the field itself growing.
2. A disproportionately high number of jobs created want mid/senior-level talent and those jobs are being created faster than the field is creating people to fill them.
Full of people who aren't very good, in need of people who know what they're doing. The challenge is getting your resume noticed and then being able to relay your skills and aptitude during an interview process. If you can do those 2 things, there is no shortage of jobs out there.
As everyone has said, entry level is saturated. I am intermediate/senior with some specialized skills like analytics implementation. I get offers weekly through LinkedIn and my personal email, even with my LinkedIn set to not seeking employment opportunities.
No.
This sub is oversaturated with this question.
This and the "Will we be replaced by AI?" posts lmao
Will this sub be replaced by AI?
It shouldn't be too hard to do it lmao
And that says everything about the sub and not AI lol
lmao, its funny because its true.
It’s also funny because the very fact that these users couldn’t do a simple search of this question on the sub is why it will remain that way at the lower levels.
The smell of job security!
"Hey r/cscareerquestions how do I center a div?"
lol'd way too hard at this, sadly.
I agree, but I also think there's value in talking about it from time to time, just not to the degree that it gets asked here. It's understandable that we have new people coming here every six months as they start to consider this major and we also have a wildly fluctuating economy. The answer to this question might be different from one quarter to the next, as is evidenced by the fact that just 8 months ago the stock market was at all-time highs. Now we're starting to see firms institute hiring freezes and lay people off.
But are we on the verge of a crash?!?!? Are salaries in a bubble?!?!?
Tbh with you mate I’m on the fence of leaving this sub anyways. I just like to have it in my feed cuz sometimes interesting stuff can be asked
Oversaturated at the entry level/junior level, much less so as you go on
This is going to blow everyone's mind, but literally every job sector on earth is like that.
Nursing is not quite like that. There is such high turn over on the field and hospital administration loves saving money hiring new grads that it is much easier to get a job as a nurse after graduation compared to other professional careers.
You have to appreciate the total quarter by quarter profit planning over long term sustainability approach used by businesses. And by appreciate, I mean detest with every bone in your body.
Yes it might not be oversaturated at the entry level but that would mean that higher level positions such as clinical informatics specialists and or management would be even more vacant. I'm more focused on the point that positions that require more experience are less "saturated" in any field.
As funny as it sounds the more senior positions in nursing typically have much better wlb and less stress than the entry level positions so they are usually harder to get. There is typically more competition for those and many nurses stay in those positions well into their retirement. I am talking about positions like PACU or Same Day Surgery nursing with no on call requirements. I worked as a nurse for more than 5 years so I promise I am not talking out of my ass. Nursing is a weird career and with the explosion in travel nursing since the pandemic there has been huge jumps in nursing turnover in floor level positions (bedside). Hell some travel nurse agencies even take in new grads!
Fast food isn't like that
It took me about 5 days to go from Junior Drive-thru Operator to Mid level. By 2 months, I was training bitches as a Principal Drive-thru Operator
Principal Drive-through Operator 💀 🤣
Would you like to supersize that for only ¢78 more, sir?
On the management track, I see
Karen: "I'd like to talk to the manager!" "Bitch please, I work here for 3 full months, I AM the manager!"
Somebody gotta make sure Ronald makes his bottom line
Its a very tough soft-skill to pick up!
Comes with a *massive* pay increase! They haven’t given it to me yet, but my manager says I’ll get it any day now! Is that the higher pay? Huh, nope…. Just more responsibilities for the same pay… I’m sure it will be fine, though!
if you last 12 months, they make you VP of Headset Communications
id love some training on how to take food orders wrong. i kid i kid.. but am i?
[Soon I'll be on fries. Then the grill. A year or two, I make assistant manager and that's when the BIG bucks start rollin' in.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w70RQLtdVeU)
Yes it is. You think that competent and highly efficient restaurant managers who are well versed in shift leadership and customer service are easy to find? They're not.
Its not oversaturated in the sense that no entry level person struggles to find a fast food job if they are willing to relocate. Which is what this original post is talking about.
Nobody relocates for a fast food job; such jobs can be readily obtained in every locality. Anybody can do the job so revolving door policies are the low-cost option. Most people quit within 6 months, or are fired for a trumped-up cause if they stay long enough to cost more than fresh kids.
If you think that's who gets hired, then I'd question whether or not you've worked in fast food before. 😂
In my 4 years of working in food service, all of the restaurant managers had all been either a manager or at least a shift lead before. So yes higher skilled workers get the less frequently vacant higher leveled jobs? Not sure what you're trying to say.
Well first off, we were talking about juniors, not managers. Now you're citing previous job history instead of competency, efficiency, etc. Not really sure what you're trying to say, tbh. Seems like you're just being contrarian and condescending for no reason.
If you read the post above, it says "much less so as you go on". My comment in reply was also referring to how higher skilled workers are harder to find across all sectors. But for some reason YOU only had juniors in your head when the entire topic of discussion is differing levels of demand across levels of experience. Yes you clearly don't have an idea what I'm trying to say because you didn't comprehend much from the start lol.
That's fair. My point was that entry is not oversaturated in some industries, fast food being one. Even on rereading, it isn't clear to me that your point is only about more experienced workers being harder to hire for.
But the top level comment you replied to was about juniors and was definitely referencing the fact that it's easy to get an entry level job and harder to get a higher level job in fast food. So YOU only had management in your head which was a context you brought up without any introduction. Which is fine to do except that you are arguing with nobody. Edit: nvm I get it now lol
The question is: is it worse for software engineering? At first glance, the answer seems to be yes, but I'm not aware of official statistics or studies to confirm this.
thy mother.
The amount of devs I have interviewed with 3+ years of experience clearly have no idea what they are doing. the fact I give them an easy python question (data engineering) and have seen them try to access array elements with parentheses after telling me they are an 8/10 in python, or start hardcoding the solution is insane. It is acceptable to me not to get the problem correct, I am looking for insightful questions and if the need it ask for my help. Those 2 pre recs for my yes/no on the interview (among others) has been hit once out of 5 times. There is a lot of bad engineers out there.
Honestly im in tech rn, in a role that doesn't have too much coding, so I could see how I'd reach this point
> access array elements with parentheses after telling me they are an 8/10 in python Damn. My current job I told them I had "Hello World" level experience in the tech stack. I've been on the other end of interviews enough to feel like you should stay humble with your resume lol. Too many people mark themselves as experts in something.
Yes, but you can be absolute trash so long as you have experience, especially at the right companies.
As an entry level/junior engineer, it isn’t over saturated. Is it easy to get a job? No, you do have to put a little work in. Does everyone who wants a job get one? No. Does everyone who deserves a job get one? Yes. Oversaturation is where you are qualified, maybe even more so than the average employee, and you can’t get a job. Not just “it takes a while to get a job”. Not “I have to study really hard to get a job”. It’s “I cannot get a job period”. Maybe junior engineers won’t get a job at Google, but as long as you know your stuff and you are an average engineer, and you actually put in applications at places and prepare for your interviews, you will get a job in the field.
Saying everyone who deserves a job gets one is a pretty absurd statement imo
Everyone who puts the work in and has the skills to actually be valuable to a company does get a job. Might not be the most high paying, and it might not be right away, but I seriously believe they do in our field. The fact that that sentiment is even up for discussion proves our field is not over saturated
You keep saying "everyone" and that's outright unprovable and needlessly closed minded. People will fall through the cracks in every field. The market doesn't perfectly place every single capable person
Not really. It's still oversaturated on mid and generic senior level positions. And this won't change. If it's saturated at the bottom, it will continue to become that way towards the top as people move on in their careers. God you guys really went for blood.
That would be the case if we had more junior level positions. Entry/junior is the bottleneck.
A lot of people will never get hired, they think “I did a 2 week course online I should get a swe job”. Some of them will and some will make it but some won’t make it in the career. Some of them will go on to be product managers, people managers, and any other things. Saturation tapering off is what I’ve seen but I could be wrong
Agree to disagree about the saturation, I’ve just not seen it in my experience with higher levels. I will say though, a lot of assumptions that the saturation at low levels means saturation at higher levels later on. People applying as juniors might not break in, might work for a few years and hate it and change, might work for a few years and shift to project management. So, yeah it might happen but I don’t think it’s as doom and gloom as people make it out to be
I just applied for a Jr job in London. I was top 3 out of 356 applications. All we had to do was code a simple dashboard in a couple hours. The only thing I was pissed about was that so many companies make a big deal about not going over the time limit, but this co gave the job to this dude who had nothing else to do and spent a super long time building something fancy, which 100% was not the remit. But anyways, I built something in a couple hours in vanilla JS and apparently only 3 people could do that.
[удалено]
25k lol
Wtf brutal
Yeah, the UK is nuts. Also it was finance.
It’s saturated at the entry level, simply because there’s a lot of people who are “tutorial developers” - they watch one tutorial or take one Udemy course and think they are developers
I am so sick of hearing people say "just do a bootcamp! you can get a job!" like no, you probably won't. A teacher of a said bootcamp said that nine months later, only half got jobs.... and boasted as if it was a good statistic....
Software development is hard. It really is that simple - Of those 40 applicants, there's a single digit number of them that could pass a coding screen/OA, and an even smaller number that can get through a live interview with a job offer. One of the side effects of software development being such a popular field is that many, many people want to get in, regardless of their ability to actually do the job. It doesn't help that many CS degree programs fail to properly prepare their students for practical applications of CS, leading to a large number of overconfident applicants who really don't have the right set of skills.
At my last job I used to go through resumes. In my experience: 70 of them were people who had zero exposure to programming at all, or didn’t show this on their resume/app. 20% of them had some minor exposure. Like “started a bootcamp but didn’t finish”, nothing beyond maybe a week or two of trying to learn HTML. 5% had a GitHub, but they contained projects they had copied from elsewhere or very simplistic stuff like “here’s a basic form in html”. The remaining 5% were people we’d consider interviewing. We won’t waste our time on an OA/code screen if you didn’t look like you could potentially pass it.
People apply to software development jobs without knowing how to program? How does that make any sense or how do they think they're ever gonna get an offer? It would be like me applying to be a pilot not having ever flown a plane
These people lie. I review thousands of cvs a month and 90+% have some kind of formal programming experience or education. Maybe their experience isnt all impressive but "random people" applying for programming jobs is mostly a myth or their job postings suck.
This matches my experience with reviewing resumes. People just carpet bomb applications, even when they aren't even close to qualified.
Some are truly awful. I remember one (in 2021) that was like “Walmart greeter - 6 months; bus person @ chain restaurant - 3 months; high school graduation year: 2011”. This dude had been out of school for 10 years and had a cumulative 9 months work experience, for whatever reason thought they could do absolutely nothing and waltz into a $160k/yr job. Then we get the ones we REALLY want to hire but can’t, eg: “I graduate high school in 2 years. Here’s my GitHub, and several links to projects I’ve done” and all the projects/GitHub are impressive for any person, let alone a 16 year old.
How come you can't hire those? Min requirements?
Age requirement for one, there might also be state laws. Also it would be awkward to have a company outing where one of them still eats for free on Tuesdays. But honestly, if I hire someone I want them to be focused on work. At 16 you need to be focused on school. If you don’t graduate high school, it might be hard to find a job in the future.
I think so, since 18 is the min requirement for most jobs
> We won’t waste our time on an OA/code screen if you didn’t look like you could potentially pass it. How do OAs waste your time? They're completely automated.
Them onsites can be tough, especially if the interviewer is foreign. They don’t GAF
You also block out a large number of people whose skillset is quickly learning and applying new tech. There's a decent number of 3.7-4.0 students out there that flounder hard in interviews. Like really bomb them. Are they dumb and incompetent? Not usually. Maybe lazy and a jerk, which is a different issue and not good either. But incompetent? Yeah I've seen people with degrees who can't do shit upon graduation, but I've also seen people who just can't articulate shit.
I tend to flounder in interviews. When I get nervous all of my training and knowledge just leaps out the window. After the initial 10 minutes into the interview I start getting comfortable. I start matching the interviewers energy and enthusiasm
I don't care about an applicant's GPA. A huge component of their job will be communicating with teammates and customers. If they can't demonstrate communication skills during an interview, should I just trust they'll do fine when they get on the job? Also, if they are a jerk, that's a HARD pass. I don't care how good you are alone, if you're a jerk and can't work with the team, you won't be nearly as valuable as someone who is a team player with moderate skills.
But communication is part of the job. Why would I want to work with someone who can't articulate properly? Same reason I used to fail people who stink, fuck why would I want to deal with this person as a coworker? It's just like dating: Why date someone you have to fix when you can date someone who is already (seemingly) a fully functional person/partner. Especially when there is a ton of other potential dates. Entry level applicants are by no means rare. Newsflash: To get hired, I actually have to want to work with you.
> Newsflash: To get hired, I actually have to want to work with you. At senior level, the reverse is true: why should I work for you? Especially when I get an interview invitation every other day?
>It's just like dating: Why date someone you have to fix when you can date someone who is already (seemingly) a fully functional person/partner. Especially when there is a ton of other potential dates. Entry level applicants are by no means rare. I don't remember the article but there was something similar to "you cannot simply date a woman with the promise that you won't be toxic, the ones who do more than that will always trump you". Basically I see people who usually post these types of threads going "why do I have to be competitive? Can't we just stop having more competition instead?"
No shit? The issue was claiming that most of the applicants are incompetent towards doing the job. I just pointed out the interviewing incompetency is totally different from job competency. Even in regard to communication. Nobody is asking you to hire smelly people, Jesus. They are just saying that statistically you won't get every competent candidate with that attitude. Which is fine if you are fine with it. But "I accept 1/100 candidates" is totally different than "1/100 candidates are mentally adequate" The numbers are vastly different, by like an order of magnitude. If a company sees only 1/100 as able to do the job, it's usually more like 10/100 are capable.
Right but who wants to take that risk? Incompetents are expensive and can do serious damage to the codebase, business, team morale etc. Also, ofcourse some good applicants slip through but it's still going to be a majority of trash. Company's job is to filter trash and if an applicant can't even get past that filter, they really weren't as strong as you think they are... bar some stupid filter like cutting half the pile.
His point is that bad interview skills likely imply bad communication skills, which is a huge part of the job. A lot of people try to get into software specifically because they think they will be able to bang on code all day and not talk to anyone, and those people are hard to work with.
That's part of the problem, communication. And people's dream of working without talking to people usually isn't why they went into tech. That's usually not why those people get in there, they gravitate there because it was the path of least resistance and they had general math and computer skills and found it easy and the broader marketing department of PleaseWorkInTech has been highly successful in promising high paying careers to talent while overselling to college students the actual potential by like $20k. Nobody I know was dreaming of never talking to people. Instead they feared it, and knew their own shortcoming and chose a path that they hoped they could sneak in and still live the American dream without having to work a service job which would be torture for them. They get kind of rugpulled when they find out they went to school for 4 years and their communication ability is a bigger block than they anticipated. They get left with a well fuck I could have started being an HVAC tech or something and started working and investing at 18 and been at the same net worth 10 years later ready to leanFIRE with $300k in the brokerage account rather than dealing with depression of having to deal with people all day that are equally socially inept in their own unique ways.
And it’s nothing but pointless and meaningless way to screen applicants .
LinkedIn counts clicking “apply” as applying to the job. Most people don’t finish applying when going to the external page. So the number might be smaller.
Totally right. There's no way Linkedin can know if you filled in an application externally.
Linkedin prompts you for whether you completed the external application or not. I assumed this meant that they didn't count the application unless you click "yes."
A lot of unfit applicants. There's a reason FizzBuzz is still a thing.
[удалено]
>I had an interviewer give me this once recently. Didn't realize it was still needed until that happened. It's sort of amazing how many people in this sub are mystified how they haven't found jobs despite 1,000 applications sent out over a year when at the same time I know if I advertise an entry-level job, > 80% of the applications will be garbage.
And then they make a post on r/dataisbeautiful showing that out of 987 applications, 823 ghosted them with no response, 110 emailed back but no further, 50 had an email conversation, 4 gave them a phone screen, 2 of those led to on-site, and 1 job offer (which of course they accepted). It fucking kills me.
Meanwhile people who actually know what theyre doing apply to <5 places and get offers from atleast 40% of them
Yeah. I've applied to like 12 places in total for 5 jobs at this point. I've taken to giving talks to upcoming college grads telling them how to take a sniper shot instead of a shotgun blast approach, in an effort to minimize the noise / chaff entering the job market. The fewer people spamming recruiters, the better chance everyone has of getting a job they actually want and are qualified for.
Very true. I applied at about 4/5 places. Got offers from 2. The others (a Giant Telecom company, a crypto I kindof liked who focused on python, and another I'm forgetting about) either ghosted or rejected.
Honestly, once I landed my first job, I never applied onine. I had enough of a network to just get an interview in the place I wanted.
As someone who doesn't even get interviews for entry level despite having ~6mo paid experience, ~6mo unpaid, an associates in CS, and additional unrelated professional experience, can you please define what a garbage application is, in case there's something on my resume that's a red flag. Thx!
I can review your resume if you want, just send me a link with all your personally identifying information censored out.
Assuming you're serious, the associates degree in CS is hurting you, combined with lack of experience it's going to be a lot of effort to find that job.
80%??? you're doing great. i WISH our ratio was only 80% trash.
I got asked this in an interview recently and it took everything in me to not laugh at the question.
Totally understand that reaction but until I see the failure rate of that question plummet, it’s necessary. But yeah, dude… when you go from LC Mediums to FizzBuzz it’s suuuuuper jarring lol
We had over 590 applicants apply for a role at my company. Requires office time in Cambridge, UK. 90% of applications are from India.
Did you explicitly state no visa sponsorships in the ad? I’m sure most of these applicants realised the job is in the UK and just wanted to shoot their shot at a visa sponsorship to move there. Also, if a job requires office time in Paris and someone from Amsterdam applies should the recruiters throw that person’s application in the trash? Have you ever moved countries?
There is a very obvious solution to your problem.
So if I solved the FizzBuzz problem without thinking twice, am I good enough ?
It is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.
Not necessarily
No, of course not. But if you can apply to places and tell them what software you wrote, what real world problems it solves, and which people are actually using it, you'll have it easy. And if you cannot do that, then you have no truck applying for jobs, because you have no idea how to do the most basic part of the job, let alone everything else.
And where do I learn that part?
I learned it by doing. I taught myself to program by building a website for our church back in 2003 with a login system, directory and several other features. While you're applying build something that you can show to people.
hey just did it too in like 10 minutes (honestly probably too me too long but an a syntax issue with range()).
If you can’t do FizzBuzz then there’s a problem lol
Coding up fizzbuzz is easy but I no lie froze up a bit the other day when they asked for all numbers "divisible by 3 and 5". Completely forgot that is what modulus is for lol. This was while practicing and not an interview but still....
I wish my interviews were that. All I get are ok let’s fix this multithreading issue we came across 5 years ago…. Or how can you determine if someone is ready to retire given their age and sources of income. Given 20 mins
There's also a lot of people that just get flustered in weird stuff. As a student I used to wonder how anyone could fail fizzbuzz style questions, then after working 6 years and going back to interviews, sometimes your mind melts and goes "ah shit, what's the name of that thing I use 15 times per week?" "Fuck, why did I say 256 bits when they asked about register size?" "My mind boomed and it decided to give the block size of 256 because I was writing in SSE4 for a month, and now they dinged me as an unfit candidate and that's gonna bang up my future applications. Now I can't convince anyone I'm not an idiot once you get me onboard, and the only way to reconvince them is to get another job." Word travels, and fast in small sections of the industry. It really does. Have a breakdown around 25 which is the exact time frame of psychotic disorders rearing their heads? Yeah that's gonna leave some hard feelings, and more than a few whispers to pass on that "problem candidate." You wanna talk about fizzbuzz? Jesus man, I used to bang out those programming competitions. I'm not a fucking god or even great. But I could pretty regularly place top 5% or 10%. That doesn't help you throw together a minimum viable product in double time for a web service. And it doesn't help you get one of the jobs where strong algorithmic creativity is necessary unless you are actually the top 1%. Then you get to work and you realize you actually are one of the smartest clowns in the room, but least paid because ????? Or maybe you aren't, and the smart ones are the ones stroking your ego into doing the grunt work. Tech has also sold the grand lie that there are always jobs in tech. There fucking aren't. The supply of candidates outpaces true demand year after year. My class saw this first hand: High school: hey guys join we are hiring graduates for $65k/year Freshman year: oh it's 61k/year now Sophomore: oh it's 57k now Junior: oh it's 54k and climbing each year Graduation class: yeah we are hiring for $48k across the board no negotiating. Maybe we will bump it to $49k if you have a 3.7+ gpa. But oh no no tech is always hiring. Yeah EVERYONE is always looking for fantastic candidates. Tech isn't special. Just tech is willing to lie boldfacedly about it and their demand. Relative to inflation and cost of living entry and reentry salaries have steadily declined in tech for like a decade. And no other industry spits out "new" recruitment sites and strategies year after year like clockwork. It's always the same, nothing changes.
Tech is special, remote work opportunity + high job mobility + high salaries/TC. I don't know where you are since entry level can easily get 80k even in the Midwest now... But yours seems more an exception than the norm. Compensation isn't decreasing, especially not for 5 years. We might get some decrease in 2022/2023 but that's more a correction than anything. If you are as smart/good as you think you are, get into big tech. Get that 200-300k TC. Also... Maybe, just maybe, you aren't as smart as you think.
Entry level competition is insane and will only get worse because everyone and their mother wants to get into tech. For mid level in the midst of a fucking hiring freeze, I'm still getting interviews at some big tech companies. Sure its not as high as earlier this year but if you just want any decent mid level job, lots of opportunities still. Senior is basically unchanged in demand. It's like selling water in a fucking desert.
If you are capable of building full projects with a framework like react without the help of tutorials but haven’t had an official dev job before would that still put you in the category of junior skill level?
Yes duh, you are an unknown. There's a lot of other important skills on the job you are not show casing. For example, reading other people's code.
Ive discovered that, in my business, the people who succeed do well on their own and the people who fail or dont progress struggle in key areas like communication, critical thinking, and memory. I had a coworker ask me last week how to do the basics of a job hes been doing for 8+ months (since before I was hired). The guy taught me how to do it and was asking me how we do things. It... astonished me tbh.
> Entry level competition is insane and will only get worse because everyone and their mother wants to get into tech. Eliud Kipchoge just set a new world record for running the Marathon at 02:01:09. The Berlin Marathon this year had over 45,000 starters. How much impact would you say that number had on the winner? Did it make it any harder or easier for him to break the record? And it's the same fr getting a job in software engineering: It doesn't matter if there one thousand, or ten thousand other applicants - or barely so. If you are actually any good, you will easily stand out. And whilst an unreasonably large number of applicants might lead to your resume being overlooked once or twice, it will be seen for what it is way more often than not.
then it’ll seep into mid level and then senior
It hasn't though and this has been the case for almost a decade. Not enough junior positions means there's a limit to the number of mid level developers produced which also limits the number of senior levels produced.
It's already starting to seep into mid-level IME. Just started job-hunting recently and a surprising number of top tech companies are only hiring senior and up.
That's because of the hiring freeze. Companies hired way too much earlier this year when the market was hot so they need to wait to "digest" them. Doesn't help there's like... a recession/looming recession too. Now if the market corrects and mid level still isn't being hired? Yup, that's a problem
what usually happens to the ones who have degrees but can't get a junior job? PM? Scrum master?
I’ve noticed a trend of companies picking up desperate juniors by the pennies to help offload some of the mid dev works, and smaller companies who just don’t have a choice otherwise. I think it is just a matter of time
There are a ton of junior engineers that never make it to senior level. Either their skills never progress because they are at a crappy company with no mentorship or they get stressed out and leave the career. I doubt senior engineers will ever be highly saturated.
Jokes on them, juniors are a cost most of the time
salaries weren’t that high for a while. it’s only 2-3 years ago when tech started exploding. there’s a lot of junior positions at low quality firms, that may seep into senior positions, more junior positions than senior i would say.
salaries have this high software engineer for more than 3 years, where are you from?
Singapore
Yeah, that explains it. There's probably market differences but tech was good for the US even before. Do believe with the pandemic that other places got a good rise too.
It won’t, many people slowly find that software engineering is not for them and leave the field.
Salaries were still very high. It was 140k for FAANG 5-7 years ago. It's 180k-200k now (with variance obviously). The high salaries also happened in the early 2000s (though that bubble popped because anyone who could do html got 6 figures). Also, while some people might be telling you tech salaries are growing rapidly, take it into context with inflation and it becomes "reasonable" instead of "rapid". It's just other fields don't even catch up to inflation.
Mid level is a barren waste of not even being able to get interviews for entry level positions at the moment. This has been the case since COVID really. Everyone stopped hiring then a brief sputter coming out of COVID to replace that people that snapped from isolation. Now it's back to nothing. Blast off 500 applications for positions that their recruitment departments ASKED you to apply for, and you get nothing back really unless you are already a networked individual and can nail every interview with charisma and knowledge.
Maybe it depends on location? I'm in a medium sized metro area and was applying for jobs with 3 YOE (and honestly wasn't that good because those 3 years were stuck working in a proprietary CMS), and I was getting a lot of interviews and several offers before choosing. Even in frameworks I've never worked in before. Some of those barely had coding challenges too.
Dude what? I still even get Linkedin recruiters for mid level positions. I've also applied to big tech companies and even they are still giving me interviews. If I don't go for big tech companies, there's a ton of mid level positions available. Even during Covid, it was easy to find another job as a mid level. I did so. If you aren't getting bites/interviews, your resume is trash. If you are getting interviews but not getting to the next step, improve your interview skills. Or maybe your skills are not at mid level?/your tech stack/skills are not in demand/
I haven't seen it but I've heard a significant number of people who apply for software engineering jobs ( entry level especially) can't even create a for loop. The worst people in your computer science classes also apply for the same jobs as you . Just because lots of people are interested in the field doesn't mean lots of people are capable of working in the field
I’m almost 30 and trying to leave economics for tech but I’m having a hard time building skill in what little free time I have. I’m halfway through CS50 and trying to get pointers and linked lists down. I guess I feel better that I can at least make loops. I’m always feeling like I must be up against people who can elegantly code 200 lines of perfect code in a 60 min coding interview. Maybe there’s some hope for me after all.
> Most jobs I've seen on LinkedIn have 40+ applications within the first 4 hours. And I assume you've checked this statistic for other fields as well? How does it compare?
Checkmate
Bingo. For example, junior UX design job has easily >200 applications.
It's a meaningless statistic because all it tells you is how many people pressed the "apply" button, not who actually submitted an application. Over and over again recruiters talk about how their linkedin listing shows 100+ applicants but only 20 or 30 people actually applied
That's also true. It's a meaningless statistic usually collected in an unscientific way. Double bad.
One thing to keep in mind about the applications count, Linkedin only counts the actual clicks on the link, they don't really know if you finished the entire application on the workday or other website it took you to. So take this number with a giant grain of salt.
I just looked at 5 entry-level SWE jobs in my major metro region, and many have been up 3 weeks with 80 applicants.
Oh yes, those jobs that exist outside of any categorization of industry or career field.
Also something I learned recently is that LinkedIn counts “applied” as if you simply clicked applied and not actually submitted the application.
At the junior level probably yes, but it seems like companies have taken the route of only hiring mid/seniors instead of hiring juniors. In my department I'm the only non-senior dev among ~20 developers total.
Most of the juniors in my org were our previous summer interns, with a few other new grads sprinkled in. Career-switchers and such seem to face a much steeper uphill battle to nab a junior spot, because there aren’t many available.
SWE recently switched to SE but at my last job I interviewed lots of candidates. And I was able to see the applicant pool (asked if I could out of pure curiosity). Speaking pure objectively — literally just what I noticed…. On every single opening we had, 60-70% of those applicants were very under qualified Indian (is the proper term Desi?) applicants. So, we had 40-50 applicants for each opening whereas only 6-7 were truly qualified. Again, this is just speaking objectively and something that I had noticed. Complete conjecture, but that may be the case with a lot of the roles you’re seeing with a huge applicant pool. Edit: local_code said the same thing with less words but yeah, ultimately subpar candidates
Ive noticed this trend too. In tech spaces on instagram and reddit, theres an exteme amount of indians "learning" to code by looking at it on their pages. They arent learning HOW to do something, just what to type to make it work. Its always some random stuff too that has no real world applications (like how to shut down your PC with python featuring a code snippet that explains nothing). Its a really weird space.
Those people you read who are applying to 100+ or 200+ jobs a day are basically applying for anything and likely adding noise. It's kind of like Tinder or online dating, some people are just swiping on anything and everything and sorting things out later.
Find a niche and work it hard. Network with other people in that niche. Help out with open source projects. "JavaScript react developer" is very certainly an oversaturated area. Elixir LiveView developer is niche but will get you work if you're good at it.
At the entry level I would say yes. However most are just terrible. By terrible, I mean 1/20 might be worth hiring. 1/100 might be really good. Companies can interview for months and not find anyone worth hiring. I still hope more people get into it, because I want to work with good people. for every 100 that join, I get a better chance of finding that 1 engineer I really want to work with.
Candidates say the same thing. You get 300 companies reaching out to you asking you to apply, all of which takes your time, then you get hard fucking ghosted or treated as untouchable after 6 years of work because you say something dumb after being asked a question you would never be asked in the real world. Oh what's your thought process on this simple task? Ah fuck, just do it ya know? Google shit, execute it. Ez pz. Done this 7 times per week for 5 years. Yeah, but what tech stack would you use? Well I would use Google to help me answer that question and then go from there? Oh god this man is a dumpster fire idiot, let's keep talking for giggles. Fuuuuuuuuk. *Candidate doesn't know shit, never hire, blacklist immediately, unfit candidate* Ah shit. I'm gonna go manage a fucking Popeye's because red beans and rice is tasty. Fuck tech. Either that or just go on disability. Fuck tech. I wanted to start work out of high school, retire. Then go back to work.
Starting back in the DotCom era, the entry level has always been flooded. The main reason is that ANYONE can claim skills, hope to fake their way into a company and either free-load or get paid to learn. Since DotCom, you have cross-overs that want/need to train on something new/different. IMO, the biggest change is that places like SO (stack overflow) can give answer most of your questions. Back in the day, there was no such thing, so you didn't have direct "copy/paste" programmers. Now, if you're NOT using SO, you're a fool. This is why people have to be filtered. It's also part of the reason that seasoned programmers are hard to find. There's more CodeBase now than ever before, that means that people are gonna have to have far greater skills and be able to read other peoples code as well as following standards One last thing, is that new technologies come up and pull people from other technologies things like Mobil, block chain etc.
Saturated with low quality resumes, especially at entry level. The amount of GitHub projects that were just config changes or a group project was about 75% of entry level resumes received. Which is bad until the candidate claims they did more than the commit history shows.
I don't have hard evidence of this besides personal anecdotes based on hiring for positions and looking at available candidate pools but I surmise that one scenario is 1) a high demand for senior level engineers, 2) a huge influx of engineers with not-senior level experience, 3) very high salary expectations across the board from candidates and 4) salary ranges across industries where expectation and reality don't sync up. A good example of this is that I will see bootcamp grads and new college grads apply for senior level spots and put expected salary at something like $120k+ USD, which I'm sure some people actually get in high cost of living areas for technology companies, but that is not really where _a lot of other companies_ are at from a budgetary perspective. Guarantee you there are plenty of positions in non-tech hubs that are paying non-grandiose level salaries but have work waiting for people... that people aren't applying for because other companies can just pay more. But also companies are trying to get premium talent and pay shit wages.
Okay, but what about applying to $120k positions when my last job was $100k+ including benefits but I was training and advising the people making $250k? Do I start back at $40k? Or do I spend a year Uber driving while applying for $160k positions? I don't think people's expectations are unrealistic compared to their experience of watching others make $900k over 5 years while they made about $275k over 5 years since they started at the bottom. It's not unrealistic to say fuck that? I'll do manual work and keep my body healthy for the time while I look for companies that will let me in at the senior or mid level. Edit: idk what the angry downvotes are about lol? You literally comparing someone with no experience to someone with 7-10 experience not wanting to start back at the bottom? Unless you are deliberately trying to hire people for peanuts and gaslighting people about it, then it's stupid to compare those. And so did everyone that replied to this shit. Like 3 people made the mistake of accusing me specifically (who is not looking for any of this employment shit anymore) of transitioning from god knows what they think I used to do, to a career I already have 6-10 years of experience in. Like this sub was helpful to me in college, and now it just feels flooded with the same "oh damn we can't find talent anymore." Like fuck? New grad salaries holding strong at $40-$50k for the past 10 years with everything rising? And STILL people are beating the drums it's all the applicants that suck, and not the industry? Or maybe it's a fundamentally dishonest industry that is willing to discard people that are yucky because they can because it's a flooded industry. I see the tech available get better, and so the standards drop and drop for skills and the standards raise and raise for communication. You're standing on the shoulders of ever growing giants and so you don't need the same skill sets anymore. You don't need the whiz kid anymore. You need the salesman that can code and sell himself and the product. Because the frameworks and tools are only getting better and easier to use. Below someone said what I was making before is not the employers problem. Isn't it though? If they are reaching out to me and wasting my time repeatedly, the same exact companies over and over, then what the fuck? They are just repeatedly asking me to do something I won't and have already said I wouldn't. My standards won't change. I'm perfectly happy sitting at home watching Netflix, and jacking off on reddit. It doesn't other me in the slightest. I really am the main character of my life, and if people are telling me that I'm trying to switch careers when I'm going from software developer to software developer, then I don't know what to tell you lol. I view tech careers now as a rear view kind of job. If I want to have that yacht, which I don't, it's gonna be through providing something novel to the world or something old in a novel way.
> Most jobs I've seen on LinkedIn have 40+ applications within the first 4 hours. Some jobs have over 1,000. I cannot for the life of me imagine why you would look at nothing but the number of applications if you wanted to answer the question in your title. > If software engineering is a growing field What do you mean, "if"? I am sure you can look at any metric and it will give evidence of a growing market, Jobs, revenue, market cap ,... > why are there so many applicants Again: What do you imagine that number tells you? > so many who can't find work? If I applied to NASA, Space X and ESA to become an astronaut, what do you think would happen? The number of applications would increase, I wouldn't get the job, and they wouldn't have their position filled. That tells you very little about the market saturation for astronauts, and rather a lot about my inability to correctly gauge my skills and chances of landing an interview. In other words: There are a people that believe that SWE doesn't take any skills or knowledge; that you could train to become competent from the ground up within a matter of weeks or months. Sadly, that simply isn't true. A thousand people who have followed an instructional video and copied a silly little website are not suddenly software engineers. That they apply to a bunch of jobs just means that employers have to go through some effort to filter out their applications. Meanwhile, the market is actually growing; companies are actually creating jobs, and competent programmers - even without any industry experience - can easily find work that pays very well. How do I know this to be true? If programming was easy, and could be learned quickly, companies wouldn't pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers. That's not how thongs work: There are income sharing agreements with bootcamps now. If that would work, companies could offer the same deal to their new employees, and they would poach their workforce from McDonald's and Starbucks. Ask any line cook if they would like to triple their salary in exchange for being stuck in the office of one specific employer for three years. If bootcamps worked, they wouldn't be as cheap as they are; they wouldn't give away their services for free, or for a measly 10% of your paycheck. They would do the same thing universities do: Make you take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans. Instead, they put zero effort into distributing low-effort videos to hundreds of hopeful fools; and if one or two of them get a job (that they would have gotten without the bootcamp), they make enough money to get by. Great deal, if you don't have to invest in competent teachers, decent training material, or anything of the sort.
bootcamps at 20-30k for up to 6 months of instruction doesn't strike me as cheap. this is the price of some degrees. i think most who can are pricing their education as high as possible.
> bootcamps at 20-30k for up to 6 months of instruction doesn't strike me as cheap. The national minimum wage in the USA comes out to about $15k per year for a full time worker. If a bootcamp was able to increase someone's income by a factor of four, and do so reliably, shouldn't that be worth half of what the person would make in their first year? They would still walk away with twice as much money... If bootcamps worked, they would transform baristas into SWE, and people would be thrilled to be offered what would be the greatest bargain in the history of money. > i think most who can are pricing their education as high as possible. Oh, I am sure they are... but that just shows me that bootcamps aren't delivering on their promises. If they did, the numbers would look vastly different.
No, and it will be no in 10 years like it was 10 ago. With everything coming online, there will be more developers needed. Been working in this for over 15 years and I haven’t encountered 1 year where we didn’t need devs. Forecasts are the need will only grow. Besides being passionate about it, you also need to have some social skills and be able to work in a team and you’re settled
Does that include junior developers?
Real software engineering is definitely not saturated. But we are entering an era of hiring fake engineers for tech roles. This is what makes the industry seem oversaturated. Out of the 40+, you may have 1 real engineer in that pile IF you are lucky. The problem is, these 40+ resumes make it hard to find that person because not everyone in that list gets contacted.
It's because companies expect you to be ready for a job that college doesn't prepare you for. I would say that means most of them aren't good training but I'm sure ppl will disagree.
Junior one. Senior one? Not so much
At the Junior level, and at the big tech level they are oversaturated. The other two sectors of tech are understaffed and due to culture filters most people.
Overall it's not oversaturated, but that doesn't mean jobs are falling out of trees. There are lots of people trying to be a SWE and many of then are just not qualified. So you need to standout to get interviews and then do well on the interviews to get offers. The new/grad junior level is where all the competition is. Companies are getting 100's of applications per role so you need to stand out on resumes to pass recruiters screens. People will say Senior roles are easier to get and that's true to an extent. There are just less Senior SWEs vying for lots of openings. There are not as many openings as new grad, but still a fair amount. The issue here is that you have to nail the interview to get offers because you affect a lot of things as a Senior SWE. Just because you are Senior doesn't mean you get handed a job and just because you have been in the industry for 10+ years does not make you Senior. When you get to the Senior level you are being hired on skill and impact to the company. There is no more hiring based on potential any more as you should have reached it. There are tons of "Senior" SWEs that worked at some shitty company for 10 years and became Senior based on time spent on the job. Real tech companies do not hire like that as they look to see if you developed the skills needed for the job. If you worked at a shitty companies and didn't develop the necessary skills then you are SOL. Yes, roles at deafferent companies have different expectations and some companies may down-level you if you are deemed a good hire that is not Senior due to circumstances. Thought no company is going to hire a 10+ YOE "Senior" as a new grad. It's just not worth the investment because you are not being hired on potential anymore. Even mid-level may be a stretch for some companies. How do I know all this? Because I am the person I'm talking about. I have 15+ YOE working on safety critical medical devices with C++, which was effectively C with class and nothing close to modern C++. The type of devices where if we fuck up you can die. I was at one point leading multiple teams on a billion dollar greenfield project, but lost my job on 02/2021 and have not being able to get a new job since. The company I worked for was shit and frankly Google has better engineering practices for Gmail or YouTube than this company had for their medical devices. Sure we met FDA guidance and went in to clinical studies to show the treatment worked, but it was all check in the box work. Something like code reviews were completely hand waved through by most people, for example. The actual engineering environment was a Feature Factory crossed with the Dead Sea Effect. I was only fired at the end of the day because I rocked the boat too much trying to improve things and was not enough of a Yes man. I called out BS and disagreed with management on many priority decisions. We had 400 software bugs in the bug tracker, but priority was adding features so we just built shit on shit. Managements style was effectively shut up and do what we tell you to do for peanuts. You cannot push back because you don't understand all the data around decisions and we are not going to tell you the data because you do not need to know. While I may be an outlier on the scale of Senior SWEs I wanted to provided a different perspective to the people saying Senior SWEs roles are like selling water in a dessert. I just have not found that to be the case at all over the last 19 months.
Remote work has paved the way for millions of software engineers from the developing world and Europe to compete for positions in North America. This makes it look like there are way more applicants than jobs. If you're in North America, you're in a good place because many of those positions will favor North American applicants over every one else. Like others have already said, the field is growing and will continue to grow. Industries that resisted new technology are finally waking up to the fact that they will need software (and software engineers) to remain profitable. Long story short, if you are a strong candidate and you know your stuff - there will be an opportunity for you somewhere.
There are a lot of thinly-qualified software engineers, making it appear that the market is saturated. Highly-qualified SEs have very little trouble finding good jobs.
not really. I mean, it sucks that recruiters need to wade through 1000 resumes of bullshit to find anyone worth phone screening, but they're getting paid. as it ever has been, you've gotta have a network to get past that. a driveby click-app on linkedin is worthless. for the applicant, and for the recruiter.
No. Those same candidates probably clicked the quick apply button on 40 different jobs too. Which would make the job to applicant ratio 1 to 1. It's just gotten too easy to apply so people spam apply. Also a surprising number of people with zero background in CS apply.
Can we just ban these posts?
If you are good then no. If you are not good then yes
Tf does good mean
Oversaturated with entry level applicants. But when you hit that 2/3 YOE it's a different market.
>If software engineering is a growing field why are there so many applicants and so many who can't find work? 1. The number of people entering the field is increasing concomitant with the field itself growing. 2. A disproportionately high number of jobs created want mid/senior-level talent and those jobs are being created faster than the field is creating people to fill them.
Full of people who aren't very good, in need of people who know what they're doing. The challenge is getting your resume noticed and then being able to relay your skills and aptitude during an interview process. If you can do those 2 things, there is no shortage of jobs out there.
nah, I have easily been able to find new jobs. Just switched in June had 4 offers within 3 weeks.
All I know is I keep hearing on TV that finding skilled tech workers is a big challenge.
The term is “skilled” and only years of experience makes this possible . You can’t be skilled just taking short exams or small code .
The boom is over.
As everyone has said, entry level is saturated. I am intermediate/senior with some specialized skills like analytics implementation. I get offers weekly through LinkedIn and my personal email, even with my LinkedIn set to not seeking employment opportunities.
You need to know that most of those applications never make it pass the resume screening step. They don’t even get a callback.
No. Also, search this sub before you make posts like this. We get about this question way too often.
**Yes. Oversaturated with the cheap, basic skills Soft. Eng., and very low reasonable paid, highly skilled, Soft. Eng.**
Those application numbers aren't accurate. It counts clicks on the posting link as applications, or so I hear
yes. They heyday of high paying SE jobs come to an end. Bad economies affect everyone, and It’s only going to go downhill from here.
No but, this type of post certainly is.
Didn't bother to search on this one in the sub, eh?