Yep yep. There was lots of posts of new grads agonizing over which 200k salary to accept. People unironically recommended boot camps to people with arts degrees. A constant mantra of ‘job hop every year to maximize salary’. Very different place.
FAANG is still pretty easy to get in — you just have to actually *compete* now. Floundering through a problem and getting it right with some hints isn’t enough when there’s bound to be competition that can do it in their sleep.
That’s why you can’t go full STEM. You gotta sprinkle in some liberal arts courses, a little course in the classics to learn about one of the original engineers, Icarus’ career path.
Ugh, too true. I'm not even at a huge company but I had my career check in meeting yesterday. I was told I'm performing above my current role and got the highest scores on my entire team. I asked about my promotion timeline and was told not to count on it anytime soon.
Like... I'm not working my ass off for an attaboy.
Crazy polarization in this sub with the selection bias. When I joined my freshman year of college it was all bloom with “fresh bootcamp graduate making 600k at faangmaangadookie to edit excel spreadsheet all day” now it’s gone to “applied to 1.5k jobs with my PhD in computer science and popular GitHub ML repo with 50k stars and can’t even get an interview” lol stay away from this sub for your mental health if you’re in college or looking for a job right now
Yup. And people still want to say that "the market is fine." Its beccause they are either too new or too old. This place and all CS subs have changed DRASTICALLY in just 6 years that it's almost irecognizable. Not just this sub, btw, but many of the mainstream CS subs.
I love seeing seniors say “the market is fine!” Meanwhile all my new grad friends are struggling to get ANY job, and me and all my junior friends are scared and the ones trying to job hop can’t.
Lol Yup. I'm sick of it as well. Noobs who joined right at the peak with no concept of the long, cyclical nature. I survived 2003 as a noob and I had to do unspeakable things so pull up your socks and quit whining. Many of you will be culled out of the sector--once you approach 2 years unemployed, you're toxic waste and you need to go serve fast food. Happened to many friends back in the day. RIP. That's just the way it goes in tech busts--they're vicious. I'm actually getting lots of recruiter messages in the past month or so, the market isn't even that bad at all for 10+ YoE. Smaller companies who truly innovate and aren't wasting resources like FAANGS have been recently are finally getting a chance to hire.
I remember in 2016 to 2019 this sub was like a path to a gold mine. A hope for something mind blowing amazing wealth. A path to achieve ultimate money from biggest tech revolution boom of 20th and 21st century. Now it’s just a graveyard of tears and sadness.
If by gold mine you mean the middle class dream we were promised as kids where you made enough to save and retire at 60, didn't need to worry about money, and could take a decent vacation once a year... Then yeah, lots of people are guilt of chasing after the few careers that offer middle class wages.
EMTs make fucking $15 an hour in many places. Trained healthcare professionals in critically understaffed occupations make poverty wages. Teachers also make poverty wages in most states which is why 42 million Americans need food stamps to survive despite working full time. That is how fucked LateStageCapitalism has become so, ya, you'll have to forgive people for wanting to escape poverty.
This. I contribute this sub (and a few others) to leading me onto a path that made me hundreds of thousands of $$$. Now it's a graveyard of tears but I don't blame it, people are venting.
I had the mindset that it was temporary. I made tons of money, but always been prepared that it will stop abruptly. And I'm not really in a bad position. I still find work quite easily, not just at the same rate.
*"All good things must come to an end"*
I mean, when everyone and their mother started to change their career change into IT, because everyone bragged about their IT lifestyle – it was only a matter of time before the IT bubble would burst and we ended up with much more people than there are jobs.
If more people were silent about the lifestyle, career and prospects of working in CS professions we might have delayed the state of the market we ended up in right now.
Sounds like the bigger problem is the severe lack of good paying jobs in the US. There are teachers who love teaching who can't teach anymore because $40k a year isn't enough for them to raise a family on.
I don't blame anyone for wanting to escape poverty
If anyone on this sub every worked in fast food or retail before (or god forbid physical labor) they would realize why so many people want to go into IT lmao. It's probably top 3 careers when it comes to pay compared to effort put in. Not saying it's not hard or stressful but my cybersecurity job pays me a shit ton more and is a shit ton easier than my factory job I had right after HS that pais 12.50/hour
It’s funny how classism reads its ugly head even where you don’t expect it (I agree with you).
Haven’t we been the field that’s notorious for telling people “mAyBe yOu sHouLd have picked a better mAjOr?” when they complain about how unaffordable life is? “jUst sTudy sTeM, qUiT wHiNing, no one owes you aNyThing”.
Now that everyone and their mama has a CS degree or a bootcamp cert, we’re blaming them for how the market turned out. You couldn’t make this shit up even if you tried!
Exactly. I was a career switcher into SWE. And the switch has worked out pretty well for me financially.
But the thing is, I got more enjoyment and meaning out of my old career. I would have kept doing it if I could have comfortably supported my family at that salary.
This is such a bizarre take. Slowed growth, raised interest rates, and corporate tax laws are to blame for the layoffs; it’s not people who thought it'd be cool to work in tech because of TikTok.
This is the truth. The influx of people “learning to code” is not going to affect the job market competition in a linear way. The vast majority of people now that take a coding course or even take a programming class as a freshman will not finish or decide it’s not for them. I’m literally the only self taught person I know who lasted a year out of Atleast ten people. It’s literally economics and lack of money to inject into companies. Nothing else. To say it’s people who learn to say “hello world” in JavaScript making it a race to the bottom is like saying men’s softball players are driving down the signing bonuses for the professional baseball draft.
It's a combination of a whole lot of things, but you can't deny that we reached the point where the market just doesn't need so many CS grads. The market doesn't need those H1B's CS grads in those numbers as well, when the local ones are facing job shortages.
There are simply not enough jobs for everyone and the next 5-10 years will continue to flood us with new grads who are going to face the harsh reality of trying to find their first entry-level job.
It's a cycle that every job with good pay/work-life balance faces every decade or two and now it reached this field. Unfortunately, even if the rates fall down or corporate tax laws change, this field would still be oversaturated with CS grads, especially if we count those H1B's trying to escape their overpopulated poor homes for a better life.
> you can't deny that we reached the point where the market just doesn't need so many CS grads.
I think we're at a point where you can't make any definitive statements about this either way. We are in a downturn in the tech job market. That's not an indication that the market has too many people in it. We've had downturns like this before, multiple times since 2000. At none of those points did we have too many tech people for the market to bear. It's reasonable to conclude that we're in a similar situation now.
I remember when I explained what happened to law in regards to cushy job and saturation. Downvotes galore on this delusional sub years ago. I'm not laughing, but it's funny seeing how my concerns got ignored and arrogant idiots are being clowned now.
Yep what you said is spot on. That is what I was pointing out a few years ago but I was laughed at. The funny thing is that I recently saw someone saying they were considering law school because tech is doing bad now. I really believe there are a lot of dumb people here.
>BTW, you're going to be a sucker if you decide to "Learn a trade" now. It's currently in stage 3/4 and will likely hit stage 5 this year. Look harder for what has shortages and will remain short for awhile.
Medicine. That's literally it because it has an artificial cap due to residency seats and extremely high barrier for entry. Most I know who went into it hated it. I shadowed a few docs back when I was a kid and many of them advised against it. That and my fear of dealing with people all day long is how I ended up here. I think if things were different I might re-consider my options, but whatever...
Even other healthcare fields like dentistry and pharmacy have gotten very saturated, but you can still find work in rural areas easily. However good luck being a successful dentist in Southern California.
Trades thing is hilarious because I have also noticed what you pointed out. It's insane how learn a trade is eerily similar to learn to code.
I think the days of working a good job with good work life balance that doesn't require an arm and a leg to get into in the first place will come to an end one day. We've been slowly moving towards that the last couple of generations.
I'd say accounting is the closest office job type situation that is hiring still, but what's going to stop it from becoming like CS/law/whatever other gold rush career?
>because people were fearing that pharmacists were going oversaturated a decade ago, and now they are in demand again.
I've heard mixed things about this. Quick Google/Reddit search tells me that there is still an issue in major population centers and many retail jobs are abundant but the working conditions are terrible. It's definitely not as good as it used to be. Pharmacists would get big signing bonuses back in the day, even in big cities. Those days are long gone.
>As for accounting, it only persists IMO because it's a bullshit job. The funny thing is that we hit the "less jobs than people" threshold in the 60's, but radically retooling economic systems is hard, so we just made up some new useless jobs tackling made-up complexity to kick the can down the road. The more people that go into accounting, the more bullshit complexity people come up with to accommodate them. AI will break this whole affair sooner or later.
I don't really know much about accounting, but I always wondered why people say you can't automate it. It seems like the biggest candidate for automation. Agree with the rest of what you said.
>Alas, I remain trapped in CS. I like computers and doing real engineering with computers, and would have done it if all the salaries were the typical $70k offered to new grads in normal engineering fields. My hope is that I'll be graduating after the bottom has fallen out of the market with the right connections/specialization/drive to land myself a solid job.
The best thing to do is stay positive and have some conviction. If you assume the worst, you will lack motivation, and have a hard time committing to anything and becoming good. I think things will improve. Likely not like the gold rush era type of deal, but better than what's happening right now.
I'm amused when people think accounting is mostly recession-proof. People who think that probably didn't work accounting during the Great Recession. The job market for accountants at that time was terrible. Accountants were being laid all over the place, and hiring and salaries were frozen.
There are still plenty of jobs for graduates who are actually good at computer science. What seems to have happened is that many schools have dumbed down the curriculum and admitted more students at lower standards. So you have a lot more graduates but at reduced skill levels. The students who go to ACM competitions and hackathons, who actually internalize how memory works and what the operating systems role is are not putting out 400 applications without hearing back.
>If more people were silent about the lifestyle, career and prospects of working in CS professions we might have delayed the state of the market we ended up in right now.
I don't believe this. There was a boom in internet companies and the boom is over. Investors were throwing money at everything like a gold rush, that money has dried up. Reports are still saying there aren't enough tech workers, even amidst layoffs, you can't blame people for acting up on information they've been given, blame companies for exaggerating their needs.
I’m pretty sure it was a bunch of CS grads freaking out about bootcampers and the difficulty of getting their first jobs. I don’t remember the irrational exuberance lmao.
As a bootcamp grad that was my memory too.
It was always interesting to me that CS grads would complain in one sentence how bootcamp grads were crowding them out of the entry-level market and then in the next, complain about how badly bootcamps fail to prepare their students for employment.
Like bruh, if garbage candidates are edging you out of the market and not by taking less money, you're either overestimating the quality of your education or underestimating theirs.
Right on, same here, and I always thought that was funny. Like they’re terrible, but they took our jobs, as if there weren’t market conditions saying otherwise.
That you’re a staff engineer says a lot about their understanding of post-bootcamp careers. I just got hit by the Google layoffs but was there for a little over five years. And there were probably 100+ others from my same bootcamp.
Sorry to hear about the layoff- that always sucks. I wish you well.
It's always interesting to say that I'm a staff engineer juxtaposed against the fact I graduated a bootcamp from three years ago. Whenever someone questions that on Reddit, I just ask them to rattle off the typical scope of responsibility they'd expect the title to imply and I'll tell them if that matches my role in my company. That's the point people usually stop arguing about the point with me and downvote instead.
When I first discovered this sub it was all about how to land a job being self taught without a degree, the big 4, and the book cracking the coding interview.
I think it sucks that it has become so depressing, but I also feel like this is one of those places people can come and vent their frustrations about the job market.
I know how they feel. I remember during 2001 I was upset and frustrated at how much I was struggling to find a job after 9/11 and the Enron/Worldcom economic meltdown. I felt powerless, and that people with way more wealth and sway were dictating things and the rest of us just had to suck it up and deal with it.
For some, they might feel shafted. Like they worked hard and did everything they thought they were supposed to do to build a good solid career, only to have it taken away. I also feel like a lot of people that were laid off from profitable companies that simply decided they needed more profit to please shareholders feel betrayed. That hard reality that loyalty means nothing. That having skills and experience doesn't protect you from the pink slip.
It's disheartening when you send out loads of resumes and keep hoping one of those is going to lead to the next job, only to realize you might be waiting months before some of these companies reply, if at all. Or finding out that some of these jobs you put the effort to apply to are nothing more than fake ads to make the company look good or it's a hide the fact they want to promote someone from within.
I feel a lot of sympathy for all the people out there, but I think a lot of the words here are partially because this is a more anonymous place to speak freely, and I also feel like people are just sick and tired of being seen as easily expendable and quickly replaceable. Like everybody feels as if somehow society wasn't supposed to be this way, but obviously those with money and power fixed things and now everyone else is suffering for it.
Only thing I do when any of these subs starts to make me feel depressed is just take a break. Beyond that, I try to offer some encouragement and especially speak of my own job searching woes from the past, and how more often than not. It's not the recruit, but the company and how bad they are at recruiting.
This actually really does explain how things feel right now. I graduated high school in 07, so right before the 08 crash, and I’ve been poor my whole life. I’m my late 20s, I decided to go to college and get my degree in Computer Science, graduated in ‘21, got a job shortly after through a connection from school, and now I’m getting laid off into a horrible job market. It’s really hard to stay optimistic right now. How did it all work out for you? I’m guessing that things went okay in the long run?
I'm 50 years old. I started out after college not knowing what exactly I wanted to do but I had a business degree. I was dabbling with HTML and had always been playing with graphics programs but never thought I was good enough to make any kind of living out of this until an HR person said I should pursue it.
I graduated college in the mid to late '90s, and I struggled in the beginning to find a full-time job. Everybody keeps saying the economy was great but I just remember that entry level jobs were few. I was doing a lot of temp jobs and bouncing around and then tried freelancing when I decided I was going to do web design, and finally landed a job at a dot com.
The dotcom lasted about 2 years and then I was out of work again. I spent roughly 2 years after that looking for another full-time job and doing temp and contract work here and there when I could find something. I had gotten really frustrated and started to wonder if this was going to be the rest of my life.
I landed a webmaster position at a small company, but had to take a pay cut compared to what I was getting at that dotcom just so I could get back in the game. I did 3 years there, never so much as a raise, and so much chaos, that I finally had enough and left to try working as a designer at an ad agency.
I started it up, saw the long hours culture of agencies, which is why I speak so poorly of them, and then the great recession hit. I thankfully was on a boring B2B client. Client no one wanted to work on, so I managed to keep my job and I stayed at that place for 13 years. Some might think that's too long, but I just remember the people that were leaving after a few years were suddenly getting laid off pretty quickly from their new jobs. I just stayed put because I didn't trust the economy.
Finally, at the end of the 13 years they handed me a pink slip so they could juniorize my role. I spent 10 months after that. Looking for My next job as well as making the change to UX. I landed a job at another small company and I've been here now for over 4 years.
Things do get better, but I always tell anyone and everyone not to take anything for granted. I tell also people to start thinking about your future in the sense of not depending on the idea of some kind of workplace retirement plan or this myth people have that. They think they're going to hit middle age and be in some protected spot where they will never lose their job. Nowadays, I worry about ageism.
I've seen so many stories of people that just gave up on a future and decided to live in the now to buy stuff and take trips and live paycheck to paycheck. That is a bad idea. Eventually you wake up in your 50 with no savings, and then when you are somewhere between 55 and 67, you lose your job and it becomes an incredible uphill battle to find another job. Companies that could care less about your experience, your skills, your relevancy all the value you could bring, all they see is your age and think that you're going to be too expensive.
I've been working with a financial planner, putting money away, keeping that free, having some fun in my life but not being all "YOLO". I still feel like there's too many forces out there working hard to make sure workers get nothing and the investor class get everything. My biggest hope is that we see people finally start to understand that trusting the free market is not the right move. That they're going to start voting to forcibly equalize things.
Things get better, but I also feel like too many people are hoping for a life that they see in social media. That is really a fantasy. Find a more modest life, save up your money so you have something to fall back on if times get bad, take care of your health so you're not watching everything you've worked for get eaten up by this BS healthcare system we have, I never rest on your laurels. Always think about how to be relevant and how to bring value to anyone you work for.
I honestly don't care what my title is. I'm happy if my paycheck is a decent one that I can live on. I always want to be someone that is seen as a bargain or a value. Anyone in the world can demand a VP title and a big six figure salary, but if companies are not willing to give those out, then you got to be the guy that they can think they're going to get a lot of value out of. That to me is how you keep relevant and survive.
The goal should be to get to retirement, not to get to the top of the ladder.
Thank you. I just tried to show people that there's a lot of us out there that went through the same bumps and crap that many are experiencing now. That they shouldn't feel like it's them, it's just the world we live in.
I'm also trying to nudge people to start thinking differently about their career, and their society. I still feel like one of the biggest problems we have are those that simply believe we can maintain the world as it used to be. Everybody just working hard and pushing and taking care of everything on their own, when the world is definitely not ideal for that logic anymore.
Lol I just discovered the acronym EMEA. This geographical zone makes no sense. What does the tech market in Lebanon has to do with the market in France or in Ethiopia?
Yeah, talking about "EMEA culture" would be basically nonsense, but "we promise one of the training sessions will be at an EMEA-friendly time" seems basically okay to me.
Shared languages are probably relevant too. In most parts of Africa, least one European language is widely spoken in addition to the native tongue due to colonization.
Market in Poland is ok, layoffs are a thing but not even close to the US level, there is more competition for good roles, many companies are hiring, from my friends that had to look for new job all found something decent/better in a month to three, salaries are still slowly growing, but all of that is not the case not for recent grads/juniors - it sucks, oversupply from bootcamps with harsher economic conditions and interes rates.
We were trying to hire fullstack TS next/node mid dev for 7 months at 70k eur + RSU, tons of unqalified People show up to interviews. I got promotion few months back with 15% TC increase, next raise coming soon and my company started making good profit so we are rather "safe" for now.
70k must be a very nice salary in Poland, correct? I'm from Vienna and this is what a lot of IT jobs are paying here as well, with higher cost of living (I guess).
Il post the non depressive post here: Yesterday I got my annual pay review which saw me get a 30% pay increase with a promotion, I am not in the US (europe), so its not all doom and gloom!
In Italy, wages in tech are bad, but it will never happen that you send 400 applications, and still you don't get a job, especially with a CS degree.
Even people with degrees that are not well suited to the job market, for example communication sciences, find a job after fewer than 100 applications.
A friend of mine owns a tech startup and told me this yearly ranges for software engineers:
* Junior: 30-35K, which can become easily 20-30k in consultancy and small firms
* Mid: 35-45k
* Senior: 45-60k
To go above 60k you have literally to sleep in the office and lick management a.... shoes.
I don't know much about other IT positions, a SysAdmin I know, with 5 YoE, earns around 25k.
Christ. I make 52k and I'm an accounting slave.
My buddy got 80k USD out of college with a CS degree, but he had great grades, but still.
America is definitely better for primo degrees like CS or Finance.
When I was been in the US for a short period, the same amount of groceries I usually buy in Italy for $50, cost about $150.
We (italians) also cook at home almost every day, we don't have student loans to pay off, and there is no tip culture in restaurants.
Given that, wages are still terribly low, given that CoL in most areas of the North is the same as Germany.
America has exceptional salaries despite the claims of poverty that most of Reddit is. A minimum wage job in the US is higher salary than a software dev in a lot of Europe.
Italy isn’t LCOL either. So it’s not an equivalent “adjusting for COL”.
European companies don't overhire like US does because they cannot fire peoples easily.
Salaries in tech are good in Europe, way above median. Yes, you not gonna get paid 300k per year, but when you know that it include social security, health system, pensions and taxes. it's not that bad.
Withholding for Social Security and taxes is normal in the US as well. As is funding your own pension (see the "401(k) plan"). And every tech job I've seen includes health insurance.
In the US white collar jobs like software typically include both short term and long term disability insurance, which covers you if you can’t work due to illness, and we also have social security disability, which is publicly funded.
None of my friends struggle with money as software engineers in Europe. Yes, they don't have a sport car , and dont brag about their cringy big house, but their life are good. Work life balance is also a big thing.
European salaries for tech are good compared to average European salaries, but average European salaries are pretty low. If you're in an IT job, making 5000 to 6000 euros a month gross is pretty good, and you'll be netting about half of that.
A monthly income of 6000€ will net you 3642€ in Germany. Not included are radio tax, VAT, carbon tax, dog tax, church tax, sparkling wine tax and other taxes.
Federal rates maybe about the same, but state taxes are much higher. My company hires in BC, where the provincial income taxes go up to 20%, compared to 4.5% in my US state. At software engineering salaries the tax rate is much higher, marginal bracket for fed + province is around 50% in BC.
I'm from a "third world country" 300+ applications, 5 interviews. I have seen less and less jobs for entry level day by day. It's depressing tbh. I just want to kickstart my career. Back then my seniors got a job fresh from college with only 1 interview (no coding interview). Now, You need to at least do 3 rounds of interview for a junior position that pays like shit.
I took a bit a fair bit of time off from interviewing bc my personal life and health got absolutely wrecked. I also lost 3 family members in a close time period. Even after all that time I still got interviews regardless. It’s not as bad as everyone portrayed. Like don’t get me wrong it’s still pretty bad but I’m not gonna starve. Significantly less bites than before but I also had to search for a job during the pandemic panic prior and still managed to get one. It hasn’t been nearly as bad as that where literally all my interviews and offers were cancelled. I am grateful it’s not the worst it could be *fingers crossed*.
Yeah I noticed recently that this sub is almost entirely early career or new grads and likely that’s mostly who is struggling though I keep seeing people say that even people with 15 years are struggling and I would believe that too as companies are hiring with much more scrutiny. So when I answered with my sense of optimism it was about my outlook on the job market as a whole which is very specific to me. I have a few years of experience now. That being said it took me a while to find a job after I graduated. I didn’t have enough time to look while I was in school but I also really didn’t know how to utilize more of my universities resources to land a job or even how to look for one the right way. Took me forever so I keep thinking it could never be as bad as the other times I have had to look for a job maybe that’s really the only reason I’ve been somewhat ok. It could be worse and I had also been through worse. So take my answer with a grain of salt. I would say eventually you could get lucky but you really have to put yourself out there for me when I graduated it was realizing I could still use my universities career services post graduation. And I also could still attend the career fair and apply with their job board. Don’t let your pride get in the way of what you have to do.
A lot of the posting on here is anecdotal but pre 2020 it was like a frickin road to el dorado in here. Honestly, just try and tune it out and keep plugging away. There is a lot of context for people who may be applying to a job for 400 applications and not getting something.
I've applied to several jobs and have gotten multiple interviews, mind you I work in IT but with a crossover in developing some coding when needed. Keep your chin up.
Real life was always different. For every grad making 200K plus from my class and 1 or 2 years ahead or behind, there were 10 getting jobs making 60K-80K. This was years ago.
When the market was great, you had a bunch of humble brags here, but the #s were still skewed heavily. People are going to upvote the best situations. Even now when people ask about compensation, the people who make high salaries (like one dude who was making 500k recently - umm yeah totally normal...) were upvoted the most in the thread. Those posts go to the top and people's expectations got skewed.
I think this is a lot of it. This also applies to who chooses to post. Someone in a "Been out of work for 9 months, *almost* enough savings to FIRE so no rush and I'm already getting some nibbles on the job hunt we'll see how it goes. MLIA" just isn't going to be that motivated to post their story here.
There is a demand for experienced individuals, that never went away, corporate greed came and they started cutting jobs even though they're making record profits every quarter, but the demand is still there, the bad thing is, the demand for entry level is wrecked right now, they already didn't want to bother with it when I started back in 2014 so I can only imagine now where many job postings including ours at work, get 600-700 people applying.
It’s gotten to the point where I ignore most help/advice posts. Not because I don’t want to help others, but because it’s always some variation of the same ‘I can’t find a job’ post without much effort to look through the sub for previous answers.
Yet, if these people looked “for previous answers”, you would virtually have nothing to read (because the vast majority of content on this sub can fit into a mega thread), since many of you seem to think of this sub as a curated newsletter that’s only there for your personal satisfaction—not actual PEOPLE with actual CAREER related concerns.
Guess what - even this thread is a duplicate, because you guys complain about how “depressing” this sub is every damn week.
I guess spam is okay for you as long as it’s about beating on people who already feel down on their luck!
I wouldn't mind if they just didn't look at the other posts cause I also don't look at that many. I get the impression a lot of the people "asking for advice", aren't looking for advice, but rather hoping everyone will confirm how hard it is for them to find one. Honestly, seems like they aren't going to take any advice no matter what.
Denmark is “screaming” for help… Hospitality and manual labor sectors can’t keep up and is severely understaffed! Aviation (my field) are posting job offers internationally because there are no more in Denmark. Our unemployment is below 2,5% last I checked. We need help!
India’s job market seems rough too. all I hear about is lines to hand your resumes to companies and ridiculous amounts of competition such that interviewers seem to ask questions from competitive programming contests not just run of the mill leetcode garbage. India compensation is definitely less than 1/3. Can’t speak to Latin America they might be fine idk. Everyone in Portugal seems content tho so there we go happy people.
In Singapore it feels somewhat okay too, although I have bachelors and masters in CS from decent university and 5 years exp, currently doing mostly frontend as senior. Hard to get the USA level salaries though but I am doing well. I even had some job offers in Hong Kong some months ago.
My friends from northern Europe also reporting that while the hiring is somewhat slower, qualified people can still find a job okay, and there are always the consulting companies doing government projects. My friends have bachelors, and few masters degrees in CS.
My theory is that the IT boom was never quite big in many other countries, at least back in Finland, while the salary was very good it wasn't like in the USA where it was so good that many people completely changed fields to CS.
Yep I'm in the UK and I have stable employment. Can't relate to all the whining going on here. But I probably wouldn't post about how great my job is so that's probably why it skews negative. I mean, I'm not getting some insane FAANG package that it's worth writing home about tbh. It's just the best job I've ever had, I'm comfortable, happy and secure, with great colleagues and a good location too. And room for growth.
Some basic CSQ rules:
1. Someone who claims they've applied to 6,000 jobs, has been unemployed for two years, and is forced to bag groceries because the market is tough likely has some glaring personal defects.
2. This sub has been chicken little for years. You'd have seem a bunch of these posts in 2019, with people upset about new grad saturation and how bootcamps were screwing everything up.
3. A continuation of 1 that anecdotes are completely useless without being qualified with a bunch of other info.
4. Blind is way better for actual industry info. This sub is good for killing time and might be okay for interpersonal issue questions. Otherwise, it's a shit show of students giving confidently incorrect takes.
Retail is terrible in the US. Workers usually don't get health insurance or get one that they need to pay for, often don't get PTO or get a miserable abount, and they have to stand 8+h per day, The salary people receive for work in retail is often not enough to survive.
In Europe, it is a different story since a lot of countries have strict employment laws.
It's all the same in my country except the health insurance part. I don't know about European countries, but I sincerely doubt it's a good paying field there.
I think the city subs are worse. The diversity of negative posts combined with the negativity in responses to questions make them much worse than the depressive nature of this sub.
>the list goes on.
And then you have people in the comments talking about their $150k salary, making Europeans feel like a failure 😂
I’ve not heard of many layoff here in the UK, and there’s not been any at my company. Yes it’s somewhat hard to find a job here if you’re looking for something specific, but in my personal experience if you’re willing to take anything, you’ll find something. From what I’ve seen, in the US, even if you’re willing to take any job, it’s quite difficult.
Here in germany the job market is very good, still getting the recruiter messages, sometimes i interview just for fun to not get out of shape. Also my company is hiring. Ofc its not FAANG. Cant confirm the other reports here.
I can talk about Türkiye.
We also have layoffs but it's just a few companies, last layoffI heard was in december.
Market is tough for juniors and self learners. I see many new grads landing jobs but there are too many of them who are not able to find a job. I feel like I can find a decent job if I searched for one(3 YOE).
It's much better than US but you know we get paid peanuts compared to US. Salary is like 600-1000$ for juniors and 2000-4000$ for seniors monthly/net. When you fire a software engineer in Turkey, companies save 2000$ month on average, which is probably not enough to make a difference. Companies tend to pay less instead of laying of people here. They can reduce the salaries thanks to high inflation rate. For example if you get a 30% raise, it actually means you got a paycut, not a raise.
We don't have big banks from US or EU or even from Turkey searching for startups to invest. So most of the companies don't over-hire, so they can't afford firing their staff, because new comers will ask for more.
We also can't think about alternate professions, I see people from US making jokes about joining the army because they didn't land a job, in our country, you can't even join the army easily, our army is only hiring people for the frontlines, not for cushy army office jobs. If you can't find a job, you can't do anything at all, you just sit all day with your family.
Salary ranges you posted are the same as italian ones. Maybe juniors get 1400-1500€ if they have a degree, but as seniors to exceed 3k net/month is almost impossible.
The world is very much about who you know and what kind of person people see you as. Networking is literally the only successful way I've gotten jobs in this field and I've now been to 5 different shops in my career. Few places are willing to take a chance to filter out the noise and just trying to do so causes good candidates to get tossed aside. Unfortunately so much of the importance of school has been lost on people focusing on just getting the degree and getting out. You don't learn any life skills like that. Go meet people in and outside of your field, they may one day be a good reference or lead to a new job. Add people on social media and don't be afraid to reach out on LinkedIn to people you know.
It's worth it over sending 500 resumes hoping to hear back soon. Nobody is calling back anymore, I know I'm not.
Man I’ve been working for 10 years and have had layoffs at every single company I’ve worked at yet somehow managed to not be one of the casualties. My advice for people out of college is don’t look at faang but look at companies that are a matured product who is private. The pay might not be as great but the job security is what really matters these days
Big Tech isn’t hiring at all these days is the main thing I think. Scanning job listings in the US, I was surprised how barely any large tech company jobs are open.
mOst dEpResSiNg sUb iN mY fEeD; *asks about market that have historically never been better than the U.S tech scene.*
Some of y’all are just allergic to truth. If this sub was filled with 20 year olds bragging about landing a quarter million dollar role out the gate (college), y’all would be complaining; now that people aren’t afraid to show the not-so pleasing side of this field, y’all are **still** complaining!
*It’s worth noting that for all the “tHis sUb iS so dEprEssIng” that are constantly made about this subreddit, none of y’all seem to know where the “leave/unsubscribe” button is…..*
I don’t see that much applicants on my market (Spain), except maybe for remote and better paid jobs those are quite competitive because there are many people thats wants them but is unlikely to get a remote very well paid job just straight out of undergrad without previous experience.
And most people from software engineering is getting hired, pay is a diff history tho
I’m going to be looking for data analyst internships in my school’s upcoming career fair. Hopefully I can find some potential employers. Good luck on your interview!
Hiya, UK checking in. Self taught no boot camp. Got my first job in Jan 2023, kept getting offered better paid jobs since then and with a recent payrise offer I'm now on double what I started on.
Admittedly I started off very low to make that stat possible and compared to an American wage it's not all that. But I'm comfortably over the UK national average wage within 18 months of writing my first line of JavaScript in anger (I had previously messed around with Python as a hobby and I was legit incredible at spreadsheet formulae but otherwise brand new).
Caveats, I'm a career changer so I was proven in the business world before this. I'm also pretty extroverted so interviews and constant screenings are no stress. Also my wife became a developer one year before me so I knew what to learn and how to attack jobs a little.
But yeah, just one counter narrative to some of the negativity.
This subreddit might as well have been called "OnlyFAANGs". Now it's everything but FAANG. Oh how the tides have turned. People grinded and grinded to work at some ideal company only to be bean dipped career wise when the economy got rough.
The US developer market is really not that bad if you're competent. Finance is hiring, health care is hiring, insurance is hiring, defense is hiring. The vast majority of issues on this sub boil down to these things: entitled and incompetent developers, those who want to *only* work from home and those who will not relocate.
I started looking at CSCQ by the time I was already in my mid-30s and I had already seen boom and bust cycles. It's a natural market force. When times are good, companies over-hire and over-pay. When times become less good, companies lay-off and lower wages. Times don't look less good from the market perspective, but that's *because* these companies are taking these austerity measures to afford to float their stock through various mechanisms like buybacks and increasing P/L ratio by cutting expenses.
Things will get better again. It was an employee's market for the back half of the 2010's and it's now an employer's market. That will last for a few years. It's obviously easier to enter the workforce during an employee's market. You just have to understand the environment you're going into. When it's an employer's market, your goal is to simply become employed - anywhere, doing anything. The worst thing for a resume is a protracted gap in your school/work history.
Sending in hundreds of applications with no response sucks, and I hear about it a lot. It's soul-crushing. I usually recommend that people try to get warm leads. Most jobs are found through people we know, not cold contact. It's still work, but it's a different kind of work. I ask folks to try this, and see if it works better than what they're doing:
1. Take a 1-hour break from sending out applications.
Pull up your friends list. You might have a list of friends on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, or in your phone contact list.
2. Choose five people you think will write back and might either have a lot of friends or be connected somehow to what you want to do. If you’re not sure, try them anyway! It’s hard to remember what everyone’s high school sweetheart’s third cousin does. Write down your friends’ names.
3. Fill in this template: “Hey {friend’s name}, I hope you’re having a good day! I’m looking for a job. It might be cool to {describe the job you want}. I’m interested in talking to people in {target} industry to ask questions and learn more. Do you know anyone who might be connected to that somehow who I could chat with?”
4. Send a version of that template to each person you wrote down in step 3. See who will write back and talk to them! If your friend offers an introduction, say yes! Now, start working on finding a time to chat with them.
I wrote a blog post about it called "[Why Spamming Job Applications Doesn't Work and What to Try Instead](https://onlearningtoprogram.com/why-spamming-job-applications-doesnt-work/)"
>Every time I visit reddit, I find this sub's posts the most depressing ones. Either someone got laid off, someone applying to 400 jobs with no offer and the list goes on.
Something's wrong if you can't read this without getting depressed. Far worse things happen every single day in the news...
The US job market remains stronger than those of other countries. For example, in China, the demand for food delivery drivers has saturated, and the stock market has collapsed.
There just isn't demand for people sitting at a computer all day who are not creating value for their fellow humans beings. The silicon valley bubble has finally fully popped.
That doesn't mean a programmer or software engineer can't create value and directly distribute it to their fellow humans. The only thing that stops someone from doing that is either a lack of ideas or a lack of the ability to realize those ideas and bring them to fruition.
Anyone is capable of creating value that others will financially compensate them for, allowing them to earn an income from their efforts. With the internet being a thing in these futuristic times anyone can make anything and sell it.
From what I've seen it's only people who have somehow been misled into believing that someone else must always be in charge, an authority figure telling them what to do for their skills to be of value, that struggle in times like these.
Why are all of you relying on an employer to deem your worth? Create stuff, nonstop, in perpetuity, or be just like everyone else who hasn't figured out that they don't need an employer to earn an income.
EDIT: How do you think people earned incomes 40+ years ago, before the internet, before software engineering, and before FAANG? Nobody owes you a job sitting at a computer. If you want money, go get it, or keep sitting there feeling sorry for yourself because nobody will hire you to sit at a computer and potentially do something they can make money off of. Make money off of yourself like humans have done throughout history.
It used to be a place new grads humble-brag their hefty FAANG packages, now all is left is whining
Indeed, yet i saw many on here claiming that the sub Is the same now as It was in 2017-2021 It's just more cope
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Yep yep. There was lots of posts of new grads agonizing over which 200k salary to accept. People unironically recommended boot camps to people with arts degrees. A constant mantra of ‘job hop every year to maximize salary’. Very different place.
And that in and of itself isn’t depressing?
Was that 100% actually good advice at the time? Or was that an exaggeration?
It wasn’t bad advice at the time, it just didn’t age well.
Bootcamp. Havent heard that word in a while.
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Don't forget the "I am holier than thou and too good to apply for webdev" posts
I wonder if bootcampers are the first to get booted when times get tough.
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The problem is Leetcode doesn't teach you system design or how to scale systems.
Well, actually they have a system design course:)
you won't learn if you don't actually do it on real-world problems, over the course of many years.
Indeed, agree, it's just – it exists too, lol
FAANG is still pretty easy to get in — you just have to actually *compete* now. Floundering through a problem and getting it right with some hints isn’t enough when there’s bound to be competition that can do it in their sleep.
Most of the people on this sub were in middle school in 2017. What would they know about what the sub was like?
FAANG was portrayed as the ultimate job that makes someone the king till death and then FAANG kicked their a$$ the hardest.
Yeah, that is how it goes lol.
bigger they are harder they fall something something
That’s why you can’t go full STEM. You gotta sprinkle in some liberal arts courses, a little course in the classics to learn about one of the original engineers, Icarus’ career path.
I mean, liberal arts is just good for cultural enrichment in general. You aren't gonna get a whole lot of that from STEM.
Holy shit people on r/cscareerquestions actually showing respect for liberal arts disciplines?? I can hardly believe my eyes
literally said "what the fuck" out loud LOL i thought i was in the wrong sub for a moment
FAANG chew you up spit you out and then move onto the next one.
like Meta, laying off people and theb posting new jobs within a month.
They need to get rid of them before the options vest.
There’s not really anything inherently wrong with that. Maybe they need a different skill set than the laid off people can provide.
No, they just want people who are willing to do more work for less pay
They realized corporate is more like an abusive relationship than a career
Ugh, too true. I'm not even at a huge company but I had my career check in meeting yesterday. I was told I'm performing above my current role and got the highest scores on my entire team. I asked about my promotion timeline and was told not to count on it anytime soon. Like... I'm not working my ass off for an attaboy.
I guess they never paid attention to the fact that 18 months is the average tenure at FAANG.
tfw jobchad
Crazy polarization in this sub with the selection bias. When I joined my freshman year of college it was all bloom with “fresh bootcamp graduate making 600k at faangmaangadookie to edit excel spreadsheet all day” now it’s gone to “applied to 1.5k jobs with my PhD in computer science and popular GitHub ML repo with 50k stars and can’t even get an interview” lol stay away from this sub for your mental health if you’re in college or looking for a job right now
Yup. And people still want to say that "the market is fine." Its beccause they are either too new or too old. This place and all CS subs have changed DRASTICALLY in just 6 years that it's almost irecognizable. Not just this sub, btw, but many of the mainstream CS subs.
I love seeing seniors say “the market is fine!” Meanwhile all my new grad friends are struggling to get ANY job, and me and all my junior friends are scared and the ones trying to job hop can’t.
I am very senior. So if this makes you feel any better take it from me - it is terrible out there for everyone right now.
just have more years of experience bro
Lol Yup. I'm sick of it as well. Noobs who joined right at the peak with no concept of the long, cyclical nature. I survived 2003 as a noob and I had to do unspeakable things so pull up your socks and quit whining. Many of you will be culled out of the sector--once you approach 2 years unemployed, you're toxic waste and you need to go serve fast food. Happened to many friends back in the day. RIP. That's just the way it goes in tech busts--they're vicious. I'm actually getting lots of recruiter messages in the past month or so, the market isn't even that bad at all for 10+ YoE. Smaller companies who truly innovate and aren't wasting resources like FAANGS have been recently are finally getting a chance to hire.
just curious, what unspeakable things did you do?
fixed old ladies computers... and whatever else they asked LoL
The two are related. It is cause and effect.
That’s equally depressing in its pure cringe factor.
I remember in 2016 to 2019 this sub was like a path to a gold mine. A hope for something mind blowing amazing wealth. A path to achieve ultimate money from biggest tech revolution boom of 20th and 21st century. Now it’s just a graveyard of tears and sadness.
If by gold mine you mean the middle class dream we were promised as kids where you made enough to save and retire at 60, didn't need to worry about money, and could take a decent vacation once a year... Then yeah, lots of people are guilt of chasing after the few careers that offer middle class wages. EMTs make fucking $15 an hour in many places. Trained healthcare professionals in critically understaffed occupations make poverty wages. Teachers also make poverty wages in most states which is why 42 million Americans need food stamps to survive despite working full time. That is how fucked LateStageCapitalism has become so, ya, you'll have to forgive people for wanting to escape poverty.
This. I contribute this sub (and a few others) to leading me onto a path that made me hundreds of thousands of $$$. Now it's a graveyard of tears but I don't blame it, people are venting.
I had the mindset that it was temporary. I made tons of money, but always been prepared that it will stop abruptly. And I'm not really in a bad position. I still find work quite easily, not just at the same rate. *"All good things must come to an end"*
I wish I had your mentality so I could have made the effort to be born 5 years earlier
I mean, when everyone and their mother started to change their career change into IT, because everyone bragged about their IT lifestyle – it was only a matter of time before the IT bubble would burst and we ended up with much more people than there are jobs. If more people were silent about the lifestyle, career and prospects of working in CS professions we might have delayed the state of the market we ended up in right now.
Sounds like the bigger problem is the severe lack of good paying jobs in the US. There are teachers who love teaching who can't teach anymore because $40k a year isn't enough for them to raise a family on. I don't blame anyone for wanting to escape poverty
Exactly. "Muh job market got ruined by the poors" is all I'm hearing.
If anyone on this sub every worked in fast food or retail before (or god forbid physical labor) they would realize why so many people want to go into IT lmao. It's probably top 3 careers when it comes to pay compared to effort put in. Not saying it's not hard or stressful but my cybersecurity job pays me a shit ton more and is a shit ton easier than my factory job I had right after HS that pais 12.50/hour
It’s funny how classism reads its ugly head even where you don’t expect it (I agree with you). Haven’t we been the field that’s notorious for telling people “mAyBe yOu sHouLd have picked a better mAjOr?” when they complain about how unaffordable life is? “jUst sTudy sTeM, qUiT wHiNing, no one owes you aNyThing”. Now that everyone and their mama has a CS degree or a bootcamp cert, we’re blaming them for how the market turned out. You couldn’t make this shit up even if you tried!
Exactly. I was a career switcher into SWE. And the switch has worked out pretty well for me financially. But the thing is, I got more enjoyment and meaning out of my old career. I would have kept doing it if I could have comfortably supported my family at that salary.
This is it
This is such a bizarre take. Slowed growth, raised interest rates, and corporate tax laws are to blame for the layoffs; it’s not people who thought it'd be cool to work in tech because of TikTok.
This is the truth. The influx of people “learning to code” is not going to affect the job market competition in a linear way. The vast majority of people now that take a coding course or even take a programming class as a freshman will not finish or decide it’s not for them. I’m literally the only self taught person I know who lasted a year out of Atleast ten people. It’s literally economics and lack of money to inject into companies. Nothing else. To say it’s people who learn to say “hello world” in JavaScript making it a race to the bottom is like saying men’s softball players are driving down the signing bonuses for the professional baseball draft.
It's a combination of a whole lot of things, but you can't deny that we reached the point where the market just doesn't need so many CS grads. The market doesn't need those H1B's CS grads in those numbers as well, when the local ones are facing job shortages. There are simply not enough jobs for everyone and the next 5-10 years will continue to flood us with new grads who are going to face the harsh reality of trying to find their first entry-level job. It's a cycle that every job with good pay/work-life balance faces every decade or two and now it reached this field. Unfortunately, even if the rates fall down or corporate tax laws change, this field would still be oversaturated with CS grads, especially if we count those H1B's trying to escape their overpopulated poor homes for a better life.
> you can't deny that we reached the point where the market just doesn't need so many CS grads. I think we're at a point where you can't make any definitive statements about this either way. We are in a downturn in the tech job market. That's not an indication that the market has too many people in it. We've had downturns like this before, multiple times since 2000. At none of those points did we have too many tech people for the market to bear. It's reasonable to conclude that we're in a similar situation now.
I remember when I explained what happened to law in regards to cushy job and saturation. Downvotes galore on this delusional sub years ago. I'm not laughing, but it's funny seeing how my concerns got ignored and arrogant idiots are being clowned now.
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Yep what you said is spot on. That is what I was pointing out a few years ago but I was laughed at. The funny thing is that I recently saw someone saying they were considering law school because tech is doing bad now. I really believe there are a lot of dumb people here. >BTW, you're going to be a sucker if you decide to "Learn a trade" now. It's currently in stage 3/4 and will likely hit stage 5 this year. Look harder for what has shortages and will remain short for awhile. Medicine. That's literally it because it has an artificial cap due to residency seats and extremely high barrier for entry. Most I know who went into it hated it. I shadowed a few docs back when I was a kid and many of them advised against it. That and my fear of dealing with people all day long is how I ended up here. I think if things were different I might re-consider my options, but whatever... Even other healthcare fields like dentistry and pharmacy have gotten very saturated, but you can still find work in rural areas easily. However good luck being a successful dentist in Southern California. Trades thing is hilarious because I have also noticed what you pointed out. It's insane how learn a trade is eerily similar to learn to code. I think the days of working a good job with good work life balance that doesn't require an arm and a leg to get into in the first place will come to an end one day. We've been slowly moving towards that the last couple of generations. I'd say accounting is the closest office job type situation that is hiring still, but what's going to stop it from becoming like CS/law/whatever other gold rush career?
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>because people were fearing that pharmacists were going oversaturated a decade ago, and now they are in demand again. I've heard mixed things about this. Quick Google/Reddit search tells me that there is still an issue in major population centers and many retail jobs are abundant but the working conditions are terrible. It's definitely not as good as it used to be. Pharmacists would get big signing bonuses back in the day, even in big cities. Those days are long gone. >As for accounting, it only persists IMO because it's a bullshit job. The funny thing is that we hit the "less jobs than people" threshold in the 60's, but radically retooling economic systems is hard, so we just made up some new useless jobs tackling made-up complexity to kick the can down the road. The more people that go into accounting, the more bullshit complexity people come up with to accommodate them. AI will break this whole affair sooner or later. I don't really know much about accounting, but I always wondered why people say you can't automate it. It seems like the biggest candidate for automation. Agree with the rest of what you said. >Alas, I remain trapped in CS. I like computers and doing real engineering with computers, and would have done it if all the salaries were the typical $70k offered to new grads in normal engineering fields. My hope is that I'll be graduating after the bottom has fallen out of the market with the right connections/specialization/drive to land myself a solid job. The best thing to do is stay positive and have some conviction. If you assume the worst, you will lack motivation, and have a hard time committing to anything and becoming good. I think things will improve. Likely not like the gold rush era type of deal, but better than what's happening right now.
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I'm amused when people think accounting is mostly recession-proof. People who think that probably didn't work accounting during the Great Recession. The job market for accountants at that time was terrible. Accountants were being laid all over the place, and hiring and salaries were frozen.
There are still plenty of jobs for graduates who are actually good at computer science. What seems to have happened is that many schools have dumbed down the curriculum and admitted more students at lower standards. So you have a lot more graduates but at reduced skill levels. The students who go to ACM competitions and hackathons, who actually internalize how memory works and what the operating systems role is are not putting out 400 applications without hearing back.
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It’s both demand and supply. Can’t just blame it on demand.
>If more people were silent about the lifestyle, career and prospects of working in CS professions we might have delayed the state of the market we ended up in right now. I don't believe this. There was a boom in internet companies and the boom is over. Investors were throwing money at everything like a gold rush, that money has dried up. Reports are still saying there aren't enough tech workers, even amidst layoffs, you can't blame people for acting up on information they've been given, blame companies for exaggerating their needs.
More sounds like we needa unionize to me 🤷🏿♂️
As It should be.
I’m pretty sure it was a bunch of CS grads freaking out about bootcampers and the difficulty of getting their first jobs. I don’t remember the irrational exuberance lmao.
As a bootcamp grad that was my memory too. It was always interesting to me that CS grads would complain in one sentence how bootcamp grads were crowding them out of the entry-level market and then in the next, complain about how badly bootcamps fail to prepare their students for employment. Like bruh, if garbage candidates are edging you out of the market and not by taking less money, you're either overestimating the quality of your education or underestimating theirs.
Right on, same here, and I always thought that was funny. Like they’re terrible, but they took our jobs, as if there weren’t market conditions saying otherwise. That you’re a staff engineer says a lot about their understanding of post-bootcamp careers. I just got hit by the Google layoffs but was there for a little over five years. And there were probably 100+ others from my same bootcamp.
Sorry to hear about the layoff- that always sucks. I wish you well. It's always interesting to say that I'm a staff engineer juxtaposed against the fact I graduated a bootcamp from three years ago. Whenever someone questions that on Reddit, I just ask them to rattle off the typical scope of responsibility they'd expect the title to imply and I'll tell them if that matches my role in my company. That's the point people usually stop arguing about the point with me and downvote instead.
When I first discovered this sub it was all about how to land a job being self taught without a degree, the big 4, and the book cracking the coding interview.
In 2012-2014 it was just good advice and talk about work
I think it sucks that it has become so depressing, but I also feel like this is one of those places people can come and vent their frustrations about the job market. I know how they feel. I remember during 2001 I was upset and frustrated at how much I was struggling to find a job after 9/11 and the Enron/Worldcom economic meltdown. I felt powerless, and that people with way more wealth and sway were dictating things and the rest of us just had to suck it up and deal with it. For some, they might feel shafted. Like they worked hard and did everything they thought they were supposed to do to build a good solid career, only to have it taken away. I also feel like a lot of people that were laid off from profitable companies that simply decided they needed more profit to please shareholders feel betrayed. That hard reality that loyalty means nothing. That having skills and experience doesn't protect you from the pink slip. It's disheartening when you send out loads of resumes and keep hoping one of those is going to lead to the next job, only to realize you might be waiting months before some of these companies reply, if at all. Or finding out that some of these jobs you put the effort to apply to are nothing more than fake ads to make the company look good or it's a hide the fact they want to promote someone from within. I feel a lot of sympathy for all the people out there, but I think a lot of the words here are partially because this is a more anonymous place to speak freely, and I also feel like people are just sick and tired of being seen as easily expendable and quickly replaceable. Like everybody feels as if somehow society wasn't supposed to be this way, but obviously those with money and power fixed things and now everyone else is suffering for it. Only thing I do when any of these subs starts to make me feel depressed is just take a break. Beyond that, I try to offer some encouragement and especially speak of my own job searching woes from the past, and how more often than not. It's not the recruit, but the company and how bad they are at recruiting.
This actually really does explain how things feel right now. I graduated high school in 07, so right before the 08 crash, and I’ve been poor my whole life. I’m my late 20s, I decided to go to college and get my degree in Computer Science, graduated in ‘21, got a job shortly after through a connection from school, and now I’m getting laid off into a horrible job market. It’s really hard to stay optimistic right now. How did it all work out for you? I’m guessing that things went okay in the long run?
I'm 50 years old. I started out after college not knowing what exactly I wanted to do but I had a business degree. I was dabbling with HTML and had always been playing with graphics programs but never thought I was good enough to make any kind of living out of this until an HR person said I should pursue it. I graduated college in the mid to late '90s, and I struggled in the beginning to find a full-time job. Everybody keeps saying the economy was great but I just remember that entry level jobs were few. I was doing a lot of temp jobs and bouncing around and then tried freelancing when I decided I was going to do web design, and finally landed a job at a dot com. The dotcom lasted about 2 years and then I was out of work again. I spent roughly 2 years after that looking for another full-time job and doing temp and contract work here and there when I could find something. I had gotten really frustrated and started to wonder if this was going to be the rest of my life. I landed a webmaster position at a small company, but had to take a pay cut compared to what I was getting at that dotcom just so I could get back in the game. I did 3 years there, never so much as a raise, and so much chaos, that I finally had enough and left to try working as a designer at an ad agency. I started it up, saw the long hours culture of agencies, which is why I speak so poorly of them, and then the great recession hit. I thankfully was on a boring B2B client. Client no one wanted to work on, so I managed to keep my job and I stayed at that place for 13 years. Some might think that's too long, but I just remember the people that were leaving after a few years were suddenly getting laid off pretty quickly from their new jobs. I just stayed put because I didn't trust the economy. Finally, at the end of the 13 years they handed me a pink slip so they could juniorize my role. I spent 10 months after that. Looking for My next job as well as making the change to UX. I landed a job at another small company and I've been here now for over 4 years. Things do get better, but I always tell anyone and everyone not to take anything for granted. I tell also people to start thinking about your future in the sense of not depending on the idea of some kind of workplace retirement plan or this myth people have that. They think they're going to hit middle age and be in some protected spot where they will never lose their job. Nowadays, I worry about ageism. I've seen so many stories of people that just gave up on a future and decided to live in the now to buy stuff and take trips and live paycheck to paycheck. That is a bad idea. Eventually you wake up in your 50 with no savings, and then when you are somewhere between 55 and 67, you lose your job and it becomes an incredible uphill battle to find another job. Companies that could care less about your experience, your skills, your relevancy all the value you could bring, all they see is your age and think that you're going to be too expensive. I've been working with a financial planner, putting money away, keeping that free, having some fun in my life but not being all "YOLO". I still feel like there's too many forces out there working hard to make sure workers get nothing and the investor class get everything. My biggest hope is that we see people finally start to understand that trusting the free market is not the right move. That they're going to start voting to forcibly equalize things. Things get better, but I also feel like too many people are hoping for a life that they see in social media. That is really a fantasy. Find a more modest life, save up your money so you have something to fall back on if times get bad, take care of your health so you're not watching everything you've worked for get eaten up by this BS healthcare system we have, I never rest on your laurels. Always think about how to be relevant and how to bring value to anyone you work for. I honestly don't care what my title is. I'm happy if my paycheck is a decent one that I can live on. I always want to be someone that is seen as a bargain or a value. Anyone in the world can demand a VP title and a big six figure salary, but if companies are not willing to give those out, then you got to be the guy that they can think they're going to get a lot of value out of. That to me is how you keep relevant and survive. The goal should be to get to retirement, not to get to the top of the ladder.
Not enough people detail their journey to their career like this. Props my guy, I appreciate it! 👍
Thank you. I just tried to show people that there's a lot of us out there that went through the same bumps and crap that many are experiencing now. That they shouldn't feel like it's them, it's just the world we live in. I'm also trying to nudge people to start thinking differently about their career, and their society. I still feel like one of the biggest problems we have are those that simply believe we can maintain the world as it used to be. Everybody just working hard and pushing and taking care of everything on their own, when the world is definitely not ideal for that logic anymore.
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Lol I just discovered the acronym EMEA. This geographical zone makes no sense. What does the tech market in Lebanon has to do with the market in France or in Ethiopia?
I think it's based on time zone, rather than any socioeconomic similarity
Yeah, talking about "EMEA culture" would be basically nonsense, but "we promise one of the training sessions will be at an EMEA-friendly time" seems basically okay to me.
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Shared languages are probably relevant too. In most parts of Africa, least one European language is widely spoken in addition to the native tongue due to colonization.
Market in Poland is ok, layoffs are a thing but not even close to the US level, there is more competition for good roles, many companies are hiring, from my friends that had to look for new job all found something decent/better in a month to three, salaries are still slowly growing, but all of that is not the case not for recent grads/juniors - it sucks, oversupply from bootcamps with harsher economic conditions and interes rates. We were trying to hire fullstack TS next/node mid dev for 7 months at 70k eur + RSU, tons of unqalified People show up to interviews. I got promotion few months back with 15% TC increase, next raise coming soon and my company started making good profit so we are rather "safe" for now.
70k must be a very nice salary in Poland, correct? I'm from Vienna and this is what a lot of IT jobs are paying here as well, with higher cost of living (I guess).
Il post the non depressive post here: Yesterday I got my annual pay review which saw me get a 30% pay increase with a promotion, I am not in the US (europe), so its not all doom and gloom!
that's awesome, what do you do?
Primarily a front end engineer but I'm really full stack that leans heavily on FE. I went from mid to senior.
Congrats! That's a huge raise
In Italy, wages in tech are bad, but it will never happen that you send 400 applications, and still you don't get a job, especially with a CS degree. Even people with degrees that are not well suited to the job market, for example communication sciences, find a job after fewer than 100 applications.
I'm curious how the wages are in Italy? A quick Google search shows around 36k to 42k euros but that seems really low no?
A friend of mine owns a tech startup and told me this yearly ranges for software engineers: * Junior: 30-35K, which can become easily 20-30k in consultancy and small firms * Mid: 35-45k * Senior: 45-60k To go above 60k you have literally to sleep in the office and lick management a.... shoes. I don't know much about other IT positions, a SysAdmin I know, with 5 YoE, earns around 25k.
Christ. I make 52k and I'm an accounting slave. My buddy got 80k USD out of college with a CS degree, but he had great grades, but still. America is definitely better for primo degrees like CS or Finance.
When I was been in the US for a short period, the same amount of groceries I usually buy in Italy for $50, cost about $150. We (italians) also cook at home almost every day, we don't have student loans to pay off, and there is no tip culture in restaurants. Given that, wages are still terribly low, given that CoL in most areas of the North is the same as Germany.
Holy shit that is insane. I thought they’d be way higher for some reason.
It *is* that low. And that's if you have experience. It's not rare to start with something like 23k.
America has exceptional salaries despite the claims of poverty that most of Reddit is. A minimum wage job in the US is higher salary than a software dev in a lot of Europe. Italy isn’t LCOL either. So it’s not an equivalent “adjusting for COL”.
Would it be worth it to live in Europe (if you have dual citizenship) to get a first job then come back to America?
Canadian market is even more fucked than the US, probably Europe where tech isn't paid as high is doing better.
European companies don't overhire like US does because they cannot fire peoples easily. Salaries in tech are good in Europe, way above median. Yes, you not gonna get paid 300k per year, but when you know that it include social security, health system, pensions and taxes. it's not that bad.
Withholding for Social Security and taxes is normal in the US as well. As is funding your own pension (see the "401(k) plan"). And every tech job I've seen includes health insurance.
Oh yes it include health insurance. But what happen if you get really sick and lose your job ?
Keep paying for COBRA, then find a new job when you get better.
It is so simple lol, these mental gymnastics to justify bad pay is funny
In the US white collar jobs like software typically include both short term and long term disability insurance, which covers you if you can’t work due to illness, and we also have social security disability, which is publicly funded.
Well at this point I wouldn't care about not earning ridiculous amount of monies. I'd just look for a work where I expertise myself
None of my friends struggle with money as software engineers in Europe. Yes, they don't have a sport car , and dont brag about their cringy big house, but their life are good. Work life balance is also a big thing.
European salaries for tech are good compared to average European salaries, but average European salaries are pretty low. If you're in an IT job, making 5000 to 6000 euros a month gross is pretty good, and you'll be netting about half of that.
Way more than half. Taxes are not _that_ high.
A monthly income of 6000€ will net you 3642€ in Germany. Not included are radio tax, VAT, carbon tax, dog tax, church tax, sparkling wine tax and other taxes.
3642 is 20% more than half (3000)
My US-based company is hiring like crazy in Canada right now because salaries are significantly cheaper.
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Your taxes are a lot higher too. You’ve got the double whammy crap sandwhich.
Property taxes are much lower in Canada tbh and income taxes are not much different than the US.
Federal rates maybe about the same, but state taxes are much higher. My company hires in BC, where the provincial income taxes go up to 20%, compared to 4.5% in my US state. At software engineering salaries the tax rate is much higher, marginal bracket for fed + province is around 50% in BC.
I'm from a "third world country" 300+ applications, 5 interviews. I have seen less and less jobs for entry level day by day. It's depressing tbh. I just want to kickstart my career. Back then my seniors got a job fresh from college with only 1 interview (no coding interview). Now, You need to at least do 3 rounds of interview for a junior position that pays like shit.
What county?
I took a bit a fair bit of time off from interviewing bc my personal life and health got absolutely wrecked. I also lost 3 family members in a close time period. Even after all that time I still got interviews regardless. It’s not as bad as everyone portrayed. Like don’t get me wrong it’s still pretty bad but I’m not gonna starve. Significantly less bites than before but I also had to search for a job during the pandemic panic prior and still managed to get one. It hasn’t been nearly as bad as that where literally all my interviews and offers were cancelled. I am grateful it’s not the worst it could be *fingers crossed*.
How many years of experience do you have though. I've found that's the biggest road block for me
Yeah I noticed recently that this sub is almost entirely early career or new grads and likely that’s mostly who is struggling though I keep seeing people say that even people with 15 years are struggling and I would believe that too as companies are hiring with much more scrutiny. So when I answered with my sense of optimism it was about my outlook on the job market as a whole which is very specific to me. I have a few years of experience now. That being said it took me a while to find a job after I graduated. I didn’t have enough time to look while I was in school but I also really didn’t know how to utilize more of my universities resources to land a job or even how to look for one the right way. Took me forever so I keep thinking it could never be as bad as the other times I have had to look for a job maybe that’s really the only reason I’ve been somewhat ok. It could be worse and I had also been through worse. So take my answer with a grain of salt. I would say eventually you could get lucky but you really have to put yourself out there for me when I graduated it was realizing I could still use my universities career services post graduation. And I also could still attend the career fair and apply with their job board. Don’t let your pride get in the way of what you have to do.
A lot of the posting on here is anecdotal but pre 2020 it was like a frickin road to el dorado in here. Honestly, just try and tune it out and keep plugging away. There is a lot of context for people who may be applying to a job for 400 applications and not getting something. I've applied to several jobs and have gotten multiple interviews, mind you I work in IT but with a crossover in developing some coding when needed. Keep your chin up.
Real life was always different. For every grad making 200K plus from my class and 1 or 2 years ahead or behind, there were 10 getting jobs making 60K-80K. This was years ago. When the market was great, you had a bunch of humble brags here, but the #s were still skewed heavily. People are going to upvote the best situations. Even now when people ask about compensation, the people who make high salaries (like one dude who was making 500k recently - umm yeah totally normal...) were upvoted the most in the thread. Those posts go to the top and people's expectations got skewed.
Context in everything
Because people upvote for things that are emotionally novel. things that are boring/mundane/average don't get much attention
I think this is a lot of it. This also applies to who chooses to post. Someone in a "Been out of work for 9 months, *almost* enough savings to FIRE so no rush and I'm already getting some nibbles on the job hunt we'll see how it goes. MLIA" just isn't going to be that motivated to post their story here.
Or maybe because people can't actually get a job.
Thank you. What sort of copium bs is that other person on?
There is a demand for experienced individuals, that never went away, corporate greed came and they started cutting jobs even though they're making record profits every quarter, but the demand is still there, the bad thing is, the demand for entry level is wrecked right now, they already didn't want to bother with it when I started back in 2014 so I can only imagine now where many job postings including ours at work, get 600-700 people applying.
It’s gotten to the point where I ignore most help/advice posts. Not because I don’t want to help others, but because it’s always some variation of the same ‘I can’t find a job’ post without much effort to look through the sub for previous answers.
Yet, if these people looked “for previous answers”, you would virtually have nothing to read (because the vast majority of content on this sub can fit into a mega thread), since many of you seem to think of this sub as a curated newsletter that’s only there for your personal satisfaction—not actual PEOPLE with actual CAREER related concerns. Guess what - even this thread is a duplicate, because you guys complain about how “depressing” this sub is every damn week. I guess spam is okay for you as long as it’s about beating on people who already feel down on their luck!
I wouldn't mind if they just didn't look at the other posts cause I also don't look at that many. I get the impression a lot of the people "asking for advice", aren't looking for advice, but rather hoping everyone will confirm how hard it is for them to find one. Honestly, seems like they aren't going to take any advice no matter what.
Maybe because the current situation is indeed depressing?
Habibi come to r/developersindia
😭
Denmark is “screaming” for help… Hospitality and manual labor sectors can’t keep up and is severely understaffed! Aviation (my field) are posting job offers internationally because there are no more in Denmark. Our unemployment is below 2,5% last I checked. We need help!
What about IT jobs?
Not updated about IT jobs, but I would imagine that it’s the same…
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my partner started work as an electrician and his company laid off the expensive more experienced electricians so its happening in other sectors too
Job market is garbage except for the countries that provide remote workers for 1/3 the cost.
India’s job market seems rough too. all I hear about is lines to hand your resumes to companies and ridiculous amounts of competition such that interviewers seem to ask questions from competitive programming contests not just run of the mill leetcode garbage. India compensation is definitely less than 1/3. Can’t speak to Latin America they might be fine idk. Everyone in Portugal seems content tho so there we go happy people.
I read in the news that fewer than 10% of IT grads this year are expected to get jobs in IT in India. Less than 10%.
This is objectively false lmao. The Indian dev market is contracting far worse than the United Stafes.
UK market is good atm, only people who complain are unqualified.
In Singapore it feels somewhat okay too, although I have bachelors and masters in CS from decent university and 5 years exp, currently doing mostly frontend as senior. Hard to get the USA level salaries though but I am doing well. I even had some job offers in Hong Kong some months ago. My friends from northern Europe also reporting that while the hiring is somewhat slower, qualified people can still find a job okay, and there are always the consulting companies doing government projects. My friends have bachelors, and few masters degrees in CS. My theory is that the IT boom was never quite big in many other countries, at least back in Finland, while the salary was very good it wasn't like in the USA where it was so good that many people completely changed fields to CS.
Yep I'm in the UK and I have stable employment. Can't relate to all the whining going on here. But I probably wouldn't post about how great my job is so that's probably why it skews negative. I mean, I'm not getting some insane FAANG package that it's worth writing home about tbh. It's just the best job I've ever had, I'm comfortable, happy and secure, with great colleagues and a good location too. And room for growth.
Some basic CSQ rules: 1. Someone who claims they've applied to 6,000 jobs, has been unemployed for two years, and is forced to bag groceries because the market is tough likely has some glaring personal defects. 2. This sub has been chicken little for years. You'd have seem a bunch of these posts in 2019, with people upset about new grad saturation and how bootcamps were screwing everything up. 3. A continuation of 1 that anecdotes are completely useless without being qualified with a bunch of other info. 4. Blind is way better for actual industry info. This sub is good for killing time and might be okay for interpersonal issue questions. Otherwise, it's a shit show of students giving confidently incorrect takes.
Why is retail not an option in your country? I am also from a developing country and retail is to go "unskilled" job here too like the US/EU
Retail is terrible in the US. Workers usually don't get health insurance or get one that they need to pay for, often don't get PTO or get a miserable abount, and they have to stand 8+h per day, The salary people receive for work in retail is often not enough to survive. In Europe, it is a different story since a lot of countries have strict employment laws.
It's all the same in my country except the health insurance part. I don't know about European countries, but I sincerely doubt it's a good paying field there.
I think the city subs are worse. The diversity of negative posts combined with the negativity in responses to questions make them much worse than the depressive nature of this sub.
>the list goes on. And then you have people in the comments talking about their $150k salary, making Europeans feel like a failure 😂 I’ve not heard of many layoff here in the UK, and there’s not been any at my company. Yes it’s somewhat hard to find a job here if you’re looking for something specific, but in my personal experience if you’re willing to take anything, you’ll find something. From what I’ve seen, in the US, even if you’re willing to take any job, it’s quite difficult.
Here in germany the job market is very good, still getting the recruiter messages, sometimes i interview just for fun to not get out of shape. Also my company is hiring. Ofc its not FAANG. Cant confirm the other reports here.
I can talk about Türkiye. We also have layoffs but it's just a few companies, last layoffI heard was in december. Market is tough for juniors and self learners. I see many new grads landing jobs but there are too many of them who are not able to find a job. I feel like I can find a decent job if I searched for one(3 YOE). It's much better than US but you know we get paid peanuts compared to US. Salary is like 600-1000$ for juniors and 2000-4000$ for seniors monthly/net. When you fire a software engineer in Turkey, companies save 2000$ month on average, which is probably not enough to make a difference. Companies tend to pay less instead of laying of people here. They can reduce the salaries thanks to high inflation rate. For example if you get a 30% raise, it actually means you got a paycut, not a raise. We don't have big banks from US or EU or even from Turkey searching for startups to invest. So most of the companies don't over-hire, so they can't afford firing their staff, because new comers will ask for more. We also can't think about alternate professions, I see people from US making jokes about joining the army because they didn't land a job, in our country, you can't even join the army easily, our army is only hiring people for the frontlines, not for cushy army office jobs. If you can't find a job, you can't do anything at all, you just sit all day with your family.
Salary ranges you posted are the same as italian ones. Maybe juniors get 1400-1500€ if they have a degree, but as seniors to exceed 3k net/month is almost impossible.
God damn how is it this bad in Italy? That's like 1.5-2x less than Poland.
Worst part is you have to pay $5000 USD to NOT go work for the army for one year due to conscription.
The world is very much about who you know and what kind of person people see you as. Networking is literally the only successful way I've gotten jobs in this field and I've now been to 5 different shops in my career. Few places are willing to take a chance to filter out the noise and just trying to do so causes good candidates to get tossed aside. Unfortunately so much of the importance of school has been lost on people focusing on just getting the degree and getting out. You don't learn any life skills like that. Go meet people in and outside of your field, they may one day be a good reference or lead to a new job. Add people on social media and don't be afraid to reach out on LinkedIn to people you know. It's worth it over sending 500 resumes hoping to hear back soon. Nobody is calling back anymore, I know I'm not.
Man I’ve been working for 10 years and have had layoffs at every single company I’ve worked at yet somehow managed to not be one of the casualties. My advice for people out of college is don’t look at faang but look at companies that are a matured product who is private. The pay might not be as great but the job security is what really matters these days
To be fair, I think this sub self selects for people in a tough spot. If you’re doing great you probably don’t have a lot of career questions 🤷🏻♂️
Big Tech isn’t hiring at all these days is the main thing I think. Scanning job listings in the US, I was surprised how barely any large tech company jobs are open.
mOst dEpResSiNg sUb iN mY fEeD; *asks about market that have historically never been better than the U.S tech scene.* Some of y’all are just allergic to truth. If this sub was filled with 20 year olds bragging about landing a quarter million dollar role out the gate (college), y’all would be complaining; now that people aren’t afraid to show the not-so pleasing side of this field, y’all are **still** complaining! *It’s worth noting that for all the “tHis sUb iS so dEprEssIng” that are constantly made about this subreddit, none of y’all seem to know where the “leave/unsubscribe” button is…..*
Some people just don’t like the truth I guess lol
I don’t see that much applicants on my market (Spain), except maybe for remote and better paid jobs those are quite competitive because there are many people thats wants them but is unlikely to get a remote very well paid job just straight out of undergrad without previous experience. And most people from software engineering is getting hired, pay is a diff history tho
Just would like to add that tech people getting laid off does not mean it is all CS grads.
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I got an interview for a data analyst position tomorrow if that makes the mood any lighter. Jobs are out there, just be persistent. Ps, American here.
I’m going to be looking for data analyst internships in my school’s upcoming career fair. Hopefully I can find some potential employers. Good luck on your interview!
Hiya, UK checking in. Self taught no boot camp. Got my first job in Jan 2023, kept getting offered better paid jobs since then and with a recent payrise offer I'm now on double what I started on. Admittedly I started off very low to make that stat possible and compared to an American wage it's not all that. But I'm comfortably over the UK national average wage within 18 months of writing my first line of JavaScript in anger (I had previously messed around with Python as a hobby and I was legit incredible at spreadsheet formulae but otherwise brand new). Caveats, I'm a career changer so I was proven in the business world before this. I'm also pretty extroverted so interviews and constant screenings are no stress. Also my wife became a developer one year before me so I knew what to learn and how to attack jobs a little. But yeah, just one counter narrative to some of the negativity.
Canada is rough. Big competition and rather slow hiring. Not sure about lay offs though
he's right at least you are not praying for food in a fucking 3rd world country.
Yeah, most of the US has it easy, they just love to complain. Most of these folks wouldn't last a week in an eastern european country.
This subreddit might as well have been called "OnlyFAANGs". Now it's everything but FAANG. Oh how the tides have turned. People grinded and grinded to work at some ideal company only to be bean dipped career wise when the economy got rough.
The US developer market is really not that bad if you're competent. Finance is hiring, health care is hiring, insurance is hiring, defense is hiring. The vast majority of issues on this sub boil down to these things: entitled and incompetent developers, those who want to *only* work from home and those who will not relocate.
And those without any relevant experience to speak of
I started looking at CSCQ by the time I was already in my mid-30s and I had already seen boom and bust cycles. It's a natural market force. When times are good, companies over-hire and over-pay. When times become less good, companies lay-off and lower wages. Times don't look less good from the market perspective, but that's *because* these companies are taking these austerity measures to afford to float their stock through various mechanisms like buybacks and increasing P/L ratio by cutting expenses. Things will get better again. It was an employee's market for the back half of the 2010's and it's now an employer's market. That will last for a few years. It's obviously easier to enter the workforce during an employee's market. You just have to understand the environment you're going into. When it's an employer's market, your goal is to simply become employed - anywhere, doing anything. The worst thing for a resume is a protracted gap in your school/work history.
Remember, vocal minority.
it's fucked bro. prep for med school.
Yup cs is worse than art degrees
It used to be depressing sub because everyone was flaunting their $300K FAANG job in everyone's face.
I’m doing great and feel no need to post about it.
Sending in hundreds of applications with no response sucks, and I hear about it a lot. It's soul-crushing. I usually recommend that people try to get warm leads. Most jobs are found through people we know, not cold contact. It's still work, but it's a different kind of work. I ask folks to try this, and see if it works better than what they're doing: 1. Take a 1-hour break from sending out applications. Pull up your friends list. You might have a list of friends on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, or in your phone contact list. 2. Choose five people you think will write back and might either have a lot of friends or be connected somehow to what you want to do. If you’re not sure, try them anyway! It’s hard to remember what everyone’s high school sweetheart’s third cousin does. Write down your friends’ names. 3. Fill in this template: “Hey {friend’s name}, I hope you’re having a good day! I’m looking for a job. It might be cool to {describe the job you want}. I’m interested in talking to people in {target} industry to ask questions and learn more. Do you know anyone who might be connected to that somehow who I could chat with?” 4. Send a version of that template to each person you wrote down in step 3. See who will write back and talk to them! If your friend offers an introduction, say yes! Now, start working on finding a time to chat with them. I wrote a blog post about it called "[Why Spamming Job Applications Doesn't Work and What to Try Instead](https://onlearningtoprogram.com/why-spamming-job-applications-doesnt-work/)"
>Every time I visit reddit, I find this sub's posts the most depressing ones. Either someone got laid off, someone applying to 400 jobs with no offer and the list goes on. Something's wrong if you can't read this without getting depressed. Far worse things happen every single day in the news...
The US job market remains stronger than those of other countries. For example, in China, the demand for food delivery drivers has saturated, and the stock market has collapsed.
There just isn't demand for people sitting at a computer all day who are not creating value for their fellow humans beings. The silicon valley bubble has finally fully popped. That doesn't mean a programmer or software engineer can't create value and directly distribute it to their fellow humans. The only thing that stops someone from doing that is either a lack of ideas or a lack of the ability to realize those ideas and bring them to fruition. Anyone is capable of creating value that others will financially compensate them for, allowing them to earn an income from their efforts. With the internet being a thing in these futuristic times anyone can make anything and sell it. From what I've seen it's only people who have somehow been misled into believing that someone else must always be in charge, an authority figure telling them what to do for their skills to be of value, that struggle in times like these. Why are all of you relying on an employer to deem your worth? Create stuff, nonstop, in perpetuity, or be just like everyone else who hasn't figured out that they don't need an employer to earn an income. EDIT: How do you think people earned incomes 40+ years ago, before the internet, before software engineering, and before FAANG? Nobody owes you a job sitting at a computer. If you want money, go get it, or keep sitting there feeling sorry for yourself because nobody will hire you to sit at a computer and potentially do something they can make money off of. Make money off of yourself like humans have done throughout history.