Jayson Liang | 梁晉偉

I wouldn’t say mentoring, but for the past year or so I’ve been giving my fair share of advice and guidance to coding boot camp new grads on how to get hired for junior dev positions. Most of them were already half-way there. They had a working web app that they’d built in camp, and a solid resume that featured their skill set. All I had to do was get them to send out more applications, follow up on more companies, boost their confidence for interviews, and they’d have a foot in the door.

For 2024 though there’s just one little problem: there are no doors.

I know the market is bad. My last employer shut down over 90 previously open positions at the start of last year and reopened only 10 this year with zero junior dev positions. Many of my friends that started as a junior dev job hopped this year, only to find that their previous companies never filled their spots. So I can just about imagine how much the demands have dipped compared to when I started out.

But hearing how Shane, a 2024 coding boot camp new grad who has better performance and a stronger portfolio than when I just started out in 2021, still looking for a junior frontend position after three whole months, made me realize the market looks even grimmer for those that are kicking against locked doors. At one point, Shane was even gaslit into considering a position that offered barely above Taiwan’s minimum wage because “no other companies are hiring juniors and you should be grateful that we’re even offering you a job.”

I know job hunts are no picnics, but it shouldn’t have to feel like navigating a minefield. I can only speculate why this year is so much tougher than the previous years to land an entry-level dev job:

The Great Maybe: Post-Pandemic Hiring

When Covid was at its peak, companies rolled out work from home policies to prioritize employee safety and well-being. For many of these companies, it was meant to be a temporary measure to ensure business continuity amidst the turmoil.

As the dust settled, while some companies scuttled their workers back to office, many discovered benefits of remote work such as heightened morale, lower turnover rates and potentially improved productivity. This led to a shift in the hiring process where recruiters are encouraged to look for candidates beyond the local talent pool, and prioritize hiring professionals with experience to mitigate the increased cost of remote on-boarding processes.

Despite the wider talent pool, companies are now casting a wider nets with larger mesh to prioritize cost-effective developers with some experience, leaving out entry-level candidates with little to no experience.

Double-Edged Sword: The Rise of LLMs

While we’re generally optimistic that large language models (LLM) aren’t replacing developers any time soon, it’s hard to say the same for devs that has only recently acquired the skill of programming and has little understanding in data structures and system design.

Let me quickly tell you that I wouldn’t fully entrust ChatGPT to write business logic and complex implementation. I would need to review the code meticulously, make a few tweaks and then let someone else review it before I let it into the codebase.

But couldn’t the same be said about junior devs?

Of course I know that with adequate nurture, junior devs may one day flourish to become outstanding tech leads. But from the corporates’ perspective, there’s also nothing stopping the same devs from becoming outstanding tech leads somewhere else, which makes companies more hesitant of hiring for “potential”.

It’s not just tech either, this phenomenon has been observed in professions outside of tech as well: Attorneys are becoming less dependent on associate attorneys for conducting legal research, sales executives no longer look to sales assistants to draft their cold email templates, and junior graphic designers aren’t tasked to come up with concepts.

Despite all this, I firmly believe that LLM induced hiring freeze is only transitory.

LLMs are just tools. They can spark inspiration in creative tasks and empower teams to innovate faster, but they’ll always be more effective when wielded in the hands of experts. And the sooner companies realize that all expertise starts out as a struggle in an entry-level position, the faster the hiring freeze will thaw.

Flooded Market: The Price of Over Hiring

For a long time, the tech industry held a reputation of being accessible only to the intellectual elite, the smartest of the smarts. To become a software engineer, you had to prove that you’re worthy by either holding a CS degree or having a track record of hacking the Pentagon since you were 14.

As computers became smaller, they went from sitting on your lap to fitting in your pockets. Software became ubiquitous and people realized you could build a billion-dollar company out of a single app. The world saw a shortage in programmers for the first time in 80 years, and had no choice but lower the barrier of entry (again). Rather than spending four years on a CS degree, you could pick up the bare minimum and become tech worthy in just six months at coding boot camps.

For years the boom seemed unstoppable, not even the pandemic could stop it, if not making it even more explosive. The world was on fire while tech companies were high on its fumes.

Eventually the fire smoldered and the high died down, there came economic downturns, shifts in consumer behavior, political emphasis on privacy. Consequently, companies found themselves either falling out of favor with shareholders or are no longer profitable. In 2023, business analysts probably discovered “The Mythical Man-Month” by Fred Brooks and many programmers were not pushed, but teleported back into the job market by their big corporate employer. Smaller companies on the other hand opted to having their entrance barred to applicants.

This year, it seems that things are looking up as developer jobs are back on the menu, with a bit of a twist: many companies are now seeking junior-level developers with at least two years of experience.

I’ve always regarded these sorts of job postings as haha programming memes, but seeing them now on LinkedIn rather than r/ProgrammerHumor really killed the joke.

Keep Moving Forward

It’s certainly a depressing year to be a tech rookie trying to break into the industry. I honestly don’t know if I would make it this year, rather than three years ago. But I just want whoever’s reading this who’s struggling to get into the industry, or looking back on the year 2024, to know that it’s not your fault. I’m sure you did your best, but the circumstances just weren’t in your favor.

Years ago, I aspired to become a marketing specialist or a business analyst dealing in international commerce. I took business and marketing classes in college, worked overseas for a short period to prime my resume, and even took a sales job in attempt to expand my network. And then Covid happened, job postings halved in the span of a month. The other half were postings that companies put out and forgot about. I didn’t know how long this would go on, all I knew was I had to find a way out and at the time tech seemed like a more promising industry than commerce or manufacturing. So I took the leap and signed up for free Android app development classes offered by The Taiwan Ministry of Labor, and the rest is history.

Career path are seldom linear. Sometimes shit happens, life throws curves balls that casually swerves into your face, but it usually narrows down just three paths:

1. Wait it out: If things are manageable for you, wait it out. In the meantime, fill your time with things you can bring up in your interviews when you’re asked about the employment gaps.
2. Get aggressive: Reach out, follow up, expand your area of search, make connections, whatever it takes. The more lottery tickets you have, the higher your chances are of winning the lottery.
3. Explore other possibilities: The time and money spent on learning will always be an investment, not a sunk cost. There’s nothing wrong with deviating from the path you set out to take.

As Walt Disney said: “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Godspeed.

comments powered by Disqus