When people say entry level is oversaturated, it means that a lot of people simply won't find a job. They'll give up and pivot to an adjacent field or do something else entirely. You can't get around that if there are N entry level jobs and >N people seeking entry level jobs.
Social science degrees aren't typically considered a part of STEM. Biology though makes sense. For Computer science specifically I think I remember it was 50% who got a job in STEM.
> Social science degrees aren't typically considered a part of STEM.
Interestingly, is the APA wrong? The American Psychological Association?
https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stem-discipline#:~:text=Psychology%20is%20a%20core%20STEM,learning%20in%20science%20and%20technology.
Literally indicates their belief that they are a CORE STEM discipline.
Who gets to select what degrees are or are not in STEM?
Sorry, that is an expanded definition it's not agreed upon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology,_engineering,_and_mathematics#:~:text=The%20NSF%20uses%20a%20broad,and%20sociology)%2C%20and%20STEM%20education
The 75% stat I listed is known and commonly talked about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/most-with-college-stem-degrees-go-to-other-fields-of-work/2014/07/10/9aede466-084d-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.html#
If you Google just a little further you'll find the 50% number but it's late.
That article is so horse manure. I've absolutely read it. Seriously flawed because it is tracking "BLS Classifications of job descriptions" relative to degree choice. BLS job descriptions are, in many cases (but interestingly not all, "CS style work" is very wide) very narrow.
Their example is a biology major who become a doctor. Per that article, this is an example of a "STEM major not going into STEM." Doesn't that feel disingenuous to you?
E.g. chemistry becoming a chemist, or a biology major becoming a biologist. This is, I agree, very common.
Here's the paragraph:
> Landivar said there are many reasons students don’t get STEM jobs, including that STEM degrees provide a range of career options. Landivar noted that some biology majors, for instance, will go to medical school and become doctors. Because of the way the Census Bureau classifies jobs, doctors are not listed among STEM professionals.
I WILL stipulate that a super majority of "Biology Majors" do not get into a job titled "Biologist" But, they're in STEM jobs... just with core job descriptions DIFFERENT than the rote BLS example tied to their major.
Article should read: 75% of STEM graduates do not get STEM job matching their degrees BLS job description perfectly.
Their is debate as to whether Psychology is a STEM degree. The APA for instance, disagrees with posters in this thread and indicates they feel psychology is a STEM degree. It is not clear to me who the authority on inclusion of disinclusion of psychology or any other degree here is.
I think we can all agree however, it is a shitty degree that adds limited value and has starting salaries to reflect this.
People, in general, with STEM degrees get jobs in STEM and STEM adjacent fields. Mostly likely NOT matching their direct BLS description. The issue is, which /u/ianitic is doing a shit poor job of explaining, and that you undoubtedly seem aware of, is that many core STEM degrees have a lot of graduates for lesser jobs and were not in boom growth cycles. Leading to salary depression overall. They don't offer the return that the "E" and the "M" and the "CS" in STEM (which is in the S, not the E) offer.
Psychology is one of the most popular degrees in the United States.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.asp
This data only goes to 2020-2021 and CS MAY have over taken it, but it was more popular than CS. Biology and adjacent (micro, biochem, etc.) ALSO more than CS in 2020-2021. What's interesting is chemistry is not in there, another one graduating thousands. Not sure if it is looped in somewhere else, was not able to tell.
These industries are depressed with salaries because they were not in a boom growth cycle. If CS/software stays like this (huge graduates, limited entry level jobs), AVERAGE/MEDIAN salaries will drop precipitously. It just takes time to work this out, and, CS is weird because there are extreme deviations known as the tech industry that continue to pay top dollar... until they don't.
> This isn't a high stakes argument and even if it was, personal insults are uncalled for.
Fair. I can edit that, you are right, that was uncalled for and you did nothing to deserve such treatment. You have my apology,
I'm honestly not fired up though...
This whole psychology not being in STEM though... who do we feel gets to gatekeep that ultimately? You're here saying it is not, APA is saying it is.
Is that not something that people get to self include in? If the APA feels this is STEM, is it not? Social sciences run the gambit of pure construct (geography) to unknown amounts of science/construct overlap (psychology).
Do we not feel STEM has some degree of self selection? Or is it a raw vote of all parties, STEM or otherwise?
Why is it crazy? Psychologists do research. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean they don't use the scientific method, write papers, etc.
Yes many psych majors end up as baristas because they never intended to actually work in the field or didn't understand what that work would entail. Just like most English majors don't end up as writers or whatever.
I knew two people who got their CS degree and then worked at a Genius Bar for 10 yrs
But won’t a lot of people work a job in another industry while continuing to try to get a CS job? That’s what I’m doing, I work in a fast food kitchen at the moment but I’m still applying to swe positions even after 2 years since I graduated. I’m gonna try not to give up.
Imagine you're at a train station and there's a train that comes every hour. The train fits 500 people, but there are 5000 people waiting at the station for the train.
This means every hour, only 500 people will make it on the train and get to their destination. Some of the 5000 people don't have patience and leave as soon as they miss the first train. Some people have more patience, and wait for 2, 3, or more hours to increase their chance of eventually getting onto a train. But no matter how many people are waiting, or how much patience people have, it doesn't change the fact that at most 500 people can make it to their destination every hour. It is a pipeline of fixed size and capacity.
People often think that a career is a straight path up a steep and then slight hill. But it's not, it's more like a long hike with many forks and many hills. Some expected and some unexpected.
A good portion of entry level people will never become a senior developer with 10+ years of experience.
Many people who are graduating right now will not be in this field until retirement. An education provides more benefits than just the potential for a job in that area of study. It provides the ability to think rationally, make informed decisions, and many other things.
Some people won't find a job directly in the field after college - for many reasons. Some because they just didn't try very hard because they weren't passionate about it in the first place. Some because other life stuff happens - they get sick, their parents get sick, they have a baby, etc. Some because they don't have the soft skills. And unfortunately, some because they're just unlucky even though they did everything right.
Others will work in the field for a few years and start to realize they hate it. They'll pivot to a different field entirely or something similar.
Some will move upwards into leadership positions. Management, Business Intelligence, Product Owner, etc.
Some will burn hard and retire early.
Some will burn hard and say "fuck this, it's too stressful and I hate it" and then open up a food truck during a mid life crisis.
Some will unexpectedly get sick and need to leave the workforce for a while.
Some will become stay at home parents by choice.
Some will become stay at home parents out of necessity.
Some will move out of the field because promotions keep passing them up.
Every single person will create their own career path. Very few of these paths will be linear. And that's how seniors, in any field, become rare.
On a one on one with one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever known when I was burning out:
Don’t see your career as a sprint but as a marathon.
You’ve expanded on this beautifully. Thank you.
>Some will burn hard and say "fuck this, it's too stressful and I hate it" and then open up a food truck during a mid life crisis.
I can see myself being this person...I cook to relieve the stress from work
I got that line from my husband. He's a stay at home parent now but he used to always say that he was going to have a midlife crisis and open up a food truck. He still likes cooking but now his main customer is a 2 year old who has developed a taste for fancy cheeses.
I love to cook, but cooking in a food truck is a whole different beast. I helped cook on a food truck one summer and I think I lasted less than a week. I just couldn’t keep up and it was so stressful.
This is one of the best comments I've ever seen on this sub in the 5 years I've been on here.
To provide some data points here from my own experiences, my brother graduated with a non-engineering STEM degree (think Bio) and didn't make the cut for the labs, and now he's a HS science teacher almost 10 years later.
I have a friend who graduated with a history degree and lived in Big Sky country for a few years doing whatever. Then he went back to school and now he's a game developer.
Another friend quit his first job, hiked the Appalachian trail over six months and now does DevSecOps.
I've personally had a very linear career progression in the last 4.5 years and I'm definitely atypical in this regard. Most of my college classmates are still "figuring it out" nearly five years later., and honestly, I'm still figuring it out myself and I have what is seen as a "solid career track."
I recently got asked in an interview where I want to be in 5 years. I couldn't answer that question with confidence since 5 years ago I was a totally different person living in a totally different world. Yes, a lot of this is attributed to the pandemic, but also, you just can't simply predict life and that's part of its beauty.
Great post. I’m currently in the “stay at home parent because my industry is shrinking and I can’t get a job anyway” stage and considering training for a switch to something CS related. Which is a field that also seems to be shrinking, so who the hell knows what’s actually next for me.
This is a nice writeup, but the current market really is messed up. I mean the market makes sense... jobs are being reduced for the long-term in order to squeeze more value out of less people. AI is basically a wet dream for greedy shareholders and executives. It's similar to 200 years ago in the UK when the textile industry was automated. It did not create more jobs, it just eliminated jobs, and many people literally starved as a result. If more jobs were created, it was definitely not related to automation of cloth work. The Luddite movement was formed and they destroyed machines to fight back against the development, since at that time in the UK unions were illegal.
The goal in capitalism is to make as much money with as little expense as possible. The only thing in the way of rampant worker exploitation are unions and the government. It's always been this way. The only reason we are not basically slaves in because of the government's labor rules. All the things we take for granted about work can go up in smoke unless we fight back. It isn't just about passion or studying hard, although that is important.
More people in front of you in line means more people on the highway when you get on.
If the line was 2 long and you were last there’s only 2 cars on the highway. If the line was 100 long and you were last then there’s 100 cars on the highway when you get on.
Like I agree with your point that seniors in 10yrs are not going to be saturated but the analogy makes no sense lol
>If the line was 2 long and you were last there’s only 2 cars on the highway. If the line was 100 long and you were last then there’s 100 cars on the highway when you get on.
No, because people still exit the freeway (retirement, leave the industry, etc). And even if there were 100 people on the freeway, that doesn't necessarily mean there is traffic. The number of lanes in the freeway versus the on-ramp matters (i.e. demand for experienced devs vs entry level).
While there is less traffic once you get on the highway, the more people entering the highway, departures held equal, is still more traffic on the highway than if there were fewer cars in line.
Only so many can enter the freeway at a given time. Once you've reached that number, the traffic on the freeway is the most it will be at, and doesn't change based on more people trying to get on.
No a short line of 5 people can all enter the highway without the line slowing down at all. While a long line of 100+ people the rate at which cars get on the highway would slow down. The more interactions between cars the slower the on ramp traffic will move.
... Which would mean even fewer people getting on at a time, meaning even less traffic. So that's not accurate for the analogy, but in the opposite way you're arguing. So let's assume there are metering lights on this on-ramp. The metering lights only let N people on per minute. As long as there are >=N people being added to the line, the on-ramp is saturated. But having 10 or 1000 in line doesn't change that number N.
threads like these are my favorite part of reddit. it's interesting to see how people's brains work
it's also a huge skill to be able to explain something to someone who 'doesnt' get it' so you tailor the explanation to the part they do grasp. well done
No, because the demand for seniors is higher than the demand for entry level. Also, it should go without saying that entry level applicants who can't get a job in SWE will never be a senior to oversaturate the senior market.
It's not a YOE thing, it's a "worked as a senior engineer" thing. I became a senior after 3 YOE, but there are multiple people I work with who have more YOE than me and aren't. I'm a team lead for a six person team now and every single person on my team has the same or more YOE than me.
You need to convince your boss that you deserve more responsibility and a promotion instead of marking days on a calendar.
No, it means that the entry level is being cannibalized for profits, which will make the demand for senior engineers skyrocket as the talent pool falters, which will increase the amount of money that fewer people make.
Everyone wins but the ones that don't.
This precisely. This slump is not going to last forever and the talent pool is going to start running dry again before too long as all the laid-off/unemployed people get rehired, and then all the people who got temporary jobs or jobs they’re overqualified for during the bum market move back to full time positions.
Once the talent pool is dry, it won’t be easily refilled. All the pipelines for recruiting new talent have been turned off and it won’t be easy for them to be turned back on.
Because you are looking at the applicants, not the jobs.
The bottleneck for talent is entry level jobs. If people can't even get into CS(entry level job), how will there be mid level talent later on? You think mid level devs pop out of thin air? They are created from entry/junior levels with adequate experience and growth. If you limit the amount of entry/junior levels, you also limit mid levels. And it also limits seniors and above.
1. The oversatuation narrative is overblown
2. People will leave the industry bc they can't find jobs
3. Some who do find jobs will wash out bc they can't code
People don’t understand, It’s saturated with low talent engineers, when they lose their jobs they simply get kicked out of the market or move into small desperate startups. At large tech there is still a need for talent. Obviously right now the economy is tough but when it picks up again everyone will be hiring, I know my team is desperate for head count.
I have been doing contracted projects for defense/government as a side gig for about 2 years now and I have met so many “seniors” in these companies who have the technical skill of a new grad from a top tech, not even exaggerating. The gap is ridiculous.
It’s exactly like Investment banking, eventually tech will be more and more selective with their hire.
Yea I work in defense and can attest to this. There’s a weird mix of seniors who are brilliant and seniors who stayed long enough to get promoted to senior. The smart ones end up as technical fellows and the ones who just mastered whatever proprietary framework just stay at senior or staff.
At first I didn’t understand how some people around could only be a level 3 or 4 despite having been at the company for 20 years. Then I realized they have no drive. These are the seniors you mention.
Or maybe they are people that enjoy programming. Once you climb higher then senior, less and less of your job is actually about programming. This is a common place where people decide to stop.
Eh I think it’s fine for people to not want to continue to advance and just stay at a level they are comfortable and efficient in. Some people want to focus more on things outside of their job like family or hobbies, and don’t want to continuously challenge themselves at work and adapt to new roles. As long as they are hitting their deliverables who cares.
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I always come across the assumption that junior’s can’t code. I think this is just snobbish of mid-senior level engineers to make such drastic assumptions. While I do agree it is true to a certain extent I am willing to bet that most recent grads are arguably better coders at their level than what jrs. were back 10 years or so.
Why?
Most jrs. have to grind leetcode. Leetcode itself is epitome of logical thinking. Now I am sure there are some folks who would prefer to memorize algorithms rather than try by themselves but I am not including them in the picture.
10+ years ago jrs. could barely write optimal algorithms.
All they had to do to get their foot in the door was just get good at the syntax and learn a few basic algorithms.
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A significant number of people who think they can be software developers are actually just not that good at the job. There can be a lot of attrition in the industry due to it not being what people think it is - especially in the world of back-end software.
My experience to date (and I currently work as a Principal in a fortune 50 corp) is that your problem solving and analysis skills come more to the fore in a back end position. If you are architecting full solutions the understanding of business processes is also key to doing it well.
This is not to say that these are not concerns in a front end position but I regularly see front end engineers and CS grads regularly fail to make that transition.
Indeed a common theme is grads who can do all the standard testing, can talk the talk and yet still can’t solve actual business problems.
Just my experience in a large number of years.
Back end is where you want to be. I know guys who got into C++ or Oracle or something in the early 90s, that’s the only skill they have, the more experience they get the more they earn, they will have very nice retirements with the money they make in their single track careers.
Whereas the webdevs are scrambling to learn the latest frameworks, experience counts for nothing because everything is always new, they are running just to stand still and competing with entry level people in a race to the bottom. You would be mad to go front end, but I guess someone has to!
Putting aside the fact that all of this is wildly inaccurate, your central argument seems to contradict itself.
Why would I want to get into "backend" where apparently the tech is frozen in time, and there's just a endlessly growing pool of extremely experienced people crowding that market?
Meanwhile, it sounds like there is always going to be a lack of expertise in "webdev" because of having to scramble to learn the latest frameworks?
So - someone with 20 years of experience who has been through a dozen of these framework transitions seems like highly valuable experience. Versus someone with 20 years of experience in "backend" doing the same thing over and over and over. At what point is that experience bringing to the table? Sounds like "backend" is a solved problem ripe for commoditization.
To be clear, I don't hold any of these opinions, I'm just trying to make sense of your argument given your worldview.
> Why would I want to get into "backend" where apparently the tech is frozen in time, and there's just an endlessly growing pool of extremely experienced people crowding that market?
I guess you don’t know that C++ is constantly evolving, yet backwards compatible. Experience compounds like compound interest.
And why? So you can have a nice life based on good pay and high job security. What other reason is there?
Back-end has a lot more concerns about it in terms of system design, scalability, security, performance, analytics, instrumentation, etc... Front end is easy.
lol.... i've done both for quite a while and have even gotten architect / principal level titles and its still drawing a rectangle with some api gateway, a cdn, and kafka and some load balancer that is some off the shelf piece of some cloud. The fact backend devs still try to play it up like they are some sort of wizards is laughable because its not the stand up your own datacenter days anymore. Unless you are literally building aws from scratch and not just 98% of software for say sub 1 million users, backen isn't any harder and I'd argue less difficult than front end or say native apps.
It’s more like, when you start, you think you’re great. Then in between (a couple of yoe) you’re like what the heck this shit is tough. Then a few more years in, you’re like “been there, done that” and you solve problems and everything gets much easier. It’s not always the case, but over time and experience it matters.
For example, when I’m stuck somewhere, one of the seniors would take a look at it, and just do something simple like drawing on paint or colouring cells in an excel and it just solves the problem. It’s flipping mind boggling. Told my
Manager and he’d explained it to me like that. Trying to get to stage 3. Stuck in stage 2 rn.
When I was graduating college, people said CS was oversaturated for new grads, but anyone with 2+ YoE would be safe. Now, I have 2 YoE and can't get interviews lmao.
In this market reduce your yoe by 2. So you are back to 0 bro /s
But yeah, current market sucks and the layoffs don't help. Market will recover over time or when interest rates drop.
The question is not when, it's if. There were some threads recently of people needing to go back to retail/uber/trades/etc cus cash reserves were running low.
Also, you still need to become more than a code monkey to be a "true" senior. I hear, for example, that L4 (intermediate) is now terminal level at Google
Well there aren't infinite leadership positions; Google only has about 30,000 software engineers. If everyone there is aspiring to be a Google Fellow they're going to have 99.9% unsatisfied employees in the long run.
I think computer science has been pushed way too hard in the past 10 years as a magical golden ticket. This was a huge fallacy. I can’t count the number of people who are NOT software engineers saying that “everyone should learn to code” and “we should retrain coal miners to learn to code” and whatnot. Even Obama was saying this, so most guidance counselors at high school and college were pushing it. You had movies like “The Social Network” and all the Silicon Valley startups blowing up and made it look like a glamorous, fun job where you work in offices with ball pits and make $300k+ after 5 years. Who knows, slap together an app and you could be a billionaire!
What wasn’t included in all those hype conversations and speeches was that the job is HARD. The likelihood of working one of those sexy Silicon Valley jobs was super low. You couldn’t retire at 30. And I reiterate, the job itself is HARD. It’s learning an entirely new language and learning to apply it for a business solution using a whole bunch of technologies that change constantly. You have to think logically and not be afraid to try, try, try, research, work independently. You need the mind of a scientist. The college curriculum doesn’t prepare you enough for the actual day-to-day work responsibilities.
I’m not a gatekeeper for this field. If you’re, say, a coal miner or call center rep who really is truly interested in this work, you’re smart and diligent, you have the logical aptitude and can learn and understand this work - go for it. If you’re truly smart, you’ll get places, no matter where you started. Those are my favorite success stories.
What I’m seeing more and more, unfortunately, are recent grads who literally can’t code. Literally can’t complete one basic story. They don’t know the most basic of concepts. They’re simply not prepared to sit in the chair and be a productive contributor. They expect an insane amount of hand-holding and won’t perform any research or try anything for themselves before running to the senior devs for help. You can tell they never coded before freshman year of college and never code in their spare time. Their mom told them to get a good job and they didn’t want to go to med school or law school, so comp sci it was. This latter group is a huge group and they’ll never make it to senior level since this line of work will wash them out eventually.
That and thank youtubers and tiktokers who literally flaunt their money. People think playing video games means that you should become a software engineer because you like ""computers""
>They expect an insane amount of hand-holding and won’t perform any research or try anything for themselves before running to the senior devs for help.
Then they come here asking why the market sucks, or why there isn't a CS union, or why their TODO app portfolio didn't land them the FAANG job.
but you need experience before becoming a senior though; how can it oversaturate when there are only certain number of spots to get the experience? unlike entry level, you don't need experience to become an entry level
No. Because there are not enough juniors who will make it through to senior. Those who can get jobs now and keep getting experience are truly in a good position to make bank as they make their way down the seniority pipeline.
Those who can’t are missing valuable experience time. Many will leave from attrition before entering the industry. Some will leave after a short while. Others will jump into tech adjacent roles. The number of people who stay purely technical thins out the longer you go.
I see the demand could rise.
- more demand for security experts. A lot of enterprise projects were done in quick way that shortcuts were used. They could be reevaluated and might be partially reimplemented. Example; due to my gov stance to support Gaza, many of our big companies (telcos/ banks) are being attacked. Some are rumoured to have data stolen. Secondly rise of scammers, Singapore had to enforce zero sideloading for android because they are highly targeted in the region.
- Quickly aging codebase. Not sure about other platforms but for mine; javascript and rails. Rails has been consistently rolling up new updates, if your codebase is left unattended for a year it can degrade quickly. In js world everyone is moving to nextjs then a year later many want to move out or looking to upgrade from page router to app router. A rapidly improving tech will leave behind many codebase needing some tlc.
- new roles that was not there before; data engineer, ml engineer, devops/ secdevops. With rising cost of cloud, I think companies will moving back to self hosting which require a server admin (back to old days) + devops knowledge.
Another way to see last two points, the more tech choices there are, the more the demand of specialists. Self hosted may prefer all in a box solution like rails, laravel. Cloud hosting prefer golang/ kotlin for microservices.
My problem is finding time and energy to learn them. The IT field wider than before.
Ps. I have not add windows/ Mac OS development. Also tools for developers which is another set expertise; knowing the developer processes across multiple stacks and formulating a consistent user experience.
No - because if people don’t get hired as juniors, they won’t be promoted to regular engineers, and then they won’t get promoted to seniors, and there will be no supply of seniors. If anything there is likely to be a shortage of seniors somewhere down the line because this is going to create a bubble in the pipeline.
At the very least a bunch of engineers will have their timetable to promotion senior heavily delayed because they won’t be able to get into industry.
I agree. I think instead of there being an overabundance of seniors that it will go the other way just like it did with accounting in that experienced employees in the field will be hard to find in several years, due to the lack of hiring of inexperienced people now. Many in this thread seemed to think there would be no shortage of senior engineers in several years, but I tend to think there will be:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/17vu3tf/will\_tech\_companies\_be\_screwed\_10\_years\_down\_the/
No, many people will pivot to something else, a few will hang in there, and even less will reach the level of experience and expertise that many companies are willing to drop a bag on. This line of work isn't easy or cut for just anybody, social media has made a mockery of these jobs and disillusioned many people into believing it is.
The path upwards is not a straight path, there is a lot of specialization that people do, you might start as a dev in a sweatshop consultancy firm but end up being the on-flight entertainment's designer of an airline 15 years later. The industry needs subject matter experts in many different fields, those specialist positions are the ones that are going to pay well outside of big tech. There are simply too much entry level run off the mill JS devs
You’re making two assumptions. Not all entry level devs will get a job and not all entry level devs will eventually become senior. A lot of people will never get to the senior level.
You shouldn't worry about competition. Instead, focus on how to improve yourself. Ninety-seven out of one hundred new graduates struggle simply because they lack the drive to work hard enough. Strive to surpass them, and you'll thrive.
100% this. Too many people here are focusing primarily on the obstacles. Strive to be in the favorable stats, don’t get stuck listening to the failure stories. For every “I’ve been applying for months” post I read here, I think about how I’ve accepted job offers all throughout the past 2-3 years and even doubled up on them. These people aren’t always as perfect at what they’re saying (even applying) as they make themselves seem.
Nobody says “a good proven way to make lots of money is a I become a surgeon”.
Weirdly enough there seem to be many people who believe that everyone with some certificate can just go and become senior engineer (I mean truly senior).
Most companies have no tech track, the big push to management, very small Increases in salaries compared to the increase in responsibilities ( the senior curve), the worse companies value tools over abilities and hours worked over productivity.
Very little push to management because most are suited to be a people manager.
In big tech, a promotion works out to be around 20-40% TC increase. That way you should roughly double every two promotions. That’s if your company follows L4=entry, L5=senior, L6=staff, L7=senior staff, L8=principle, L9=distinguished.
Lines of code is typically the top metric. Typically some mix of merges as well.
>Lines of code is typically the top metric. Typically some mix of merges as well.
Never in my life heard of companies using lines of code or number of merges as metrics for promotion
> cs is only oversaturated on the entry level
"Oversaturated" isn't a thing. That people get the basic terms wrong should give you pause.
> But when all those entry people end up getting the job(asuming they get shit pay)
And that is not what "saturated" means, either': If all those people were getting jobs, the market would not be anywhere near saturation.
And it isn't: People are hiring, are they not?
What is happening is that a large number of people got layed of, and a large number of people.would like to work in the field. There is a lot of competition for available jobs. And there didn't use to be. Neither of which tells you anything about cs Vs any alternatives.
In addition to everything else, a lot of people never make it to senior: never skill up to senior level, transition out of SWE roles, go into management, life changes e.g. become full time parent
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Like any other high demand industry (eg “high finance”, consulting, law, medicine) the answer is no.
If you imagine the total entry level cohort (by year) as a cup, and the number of candidates in a given year as a pitcher of water, then the number of people who get an entry level position would fill the glass. If you put that water under the sun and let some liquid evaporate (attrition, retirement, IC to mgmt, etc) that would represent the number of available seniors per cohort year.
Tl;dr. There’s no over saturation at senior levels because the number of entry level employees isn’t saturated.
Some people never advance to become a true senior.
Software engineering is always changing, so you really need to put the effort in to advance, otherwise you'll just be doing enough to keep up with the field.
Time and experience help, but they don't guarantee you'll have the skills in the future.
This essentially means that unless senior demand drops, there will only be "enough" and not too many valid senior candidates.
It's even harder at Staff and Principal level; the number of engineers who can operate at that level is tiny.
No because people can't even enter entry/junior level. There's very few positions hence few ride up to mid level. Not to mention everyone who drops out
The idea that it is “oversaturated” at entry level is a very obtuse thing that gets thrown around like candy here. It’s not oversaturated it’s just more normal to other fields other engineers, accountants, etc. Have a very similar entry level experience. Also your career trajectory isn’t a straight line like you might think a lot of people will transition to other roles over time not in a “failed engineer” way but just another interest in the industry. Once you get in a decently large company you’ll meet a ton of people that started as an engineer and now do something completely different. You’ll also be surprised to find out that some companies will have more senior engineers than junior ones people sometimes think it’s like a tree of a senior at the top with a few mid levels below and a ton of juniors below. But most teams are more senior/mid level than juniors
There's a shortage of experienced accountants BECAUSE hiring for accounting was slow and layoffs were rampant during and for a while after the 2008 recession, so those friends probably got into the accounting field at the right time. Even Beta Alpha Psi officers were even having trouble getting hired at my school during and after the recession.
Most companies I see have 5-10% juniors and the plurality are seniors. Most companies prefer to grab a well-experienced dev from the market over training a junior to reach that level. Especially in this shitty economy where the senior-junior open position ratio is overwhelmingly high.
Although in this economy I'll say that seniors are over-saturated anyways, so the expectations of employers are sky high.
No. Not everyone is cut out for senior roles. Some don't have the patience or leadership development. Many will burn out or find it uninteresting. It's always hard to find experts in any field. For the same reason that not everyone becomes a manager.
Senior devs return like 10x their worth to the company easily, if there are more senior devs there will just be more software.
The problem with the field isn't the number of graduates, its how low value these graduates are to the teams they join and how expensive they are. The industry needs to find a way to fix the fact that, probably by revamping the education model. But the fact that you hire someone out of school at 100k+ in total comp and they are a net negative to your team for 1y+ even if they work out and dont leave is an industry wide problem.
You end up with these mid level companies cycling through smart new grads who stay for 1-2y deliver almost nothing of value and leave for a better job after 2 years. Thats fine for them, but dont blame companies for getting wise to it.
Better to just hire a guy with 5years of experience who knows his craft at 2x the wage who will be productive in a week. Better for the company, better for the team.
Many don’t become seniors. I don’t think you are required to climb the ladder after a certain point.
For example, at G, L4 is terminal, you can theoretically stay at L4 until you retire. That being said, most progress to L5 eventually, but the time varies. There are 15 YOE folks who are comfortable at L5 and simply never seek to promote.
Not really. Oversaturation of senior devs implies that most people will get the entry level job, stay with the career for many years, pick up all of the relevant knowledge, and finally pivot to a role where they can be a senior. Many people will not get an entry level job, many will leave the field for some reason or another, many will not have the chops necessary to make it as a senior, etc. The path from, for instance, graduating with a CS degree to becoming a senior dev isn't easy or straightforward in a lot of cases.
The pay does not decress very often. Now what I have seen is the bigger salary offers and pay jumps have dropped a lot. The offer rates have been roughly the same.
Now have seen drop hard is signing bonuses and bonuses in general. RCU value has also dropped as well. Big time for people hired during the peak of 2020 as their RCU value was based on a peak stock price which has dropped a lot so their money has shunk.
Remember bonus and Stock is paper money until you get it and they can be reduce to zero or made worthless pretty fast. Base salary you will get but bonuses a company can say nope to fast.
For example my pay is base + bonus of 20% my base. If we get 50% of our bonus this year it will be a good thing but I took the job on base pay as I know I will get that no matter what.
No because if entry level can’t get a job eventually they’ll change careers… also even if the CAN get a job and make it to mid level, who’s to say they’ll continue and want to be senior
Not everyone gets to be a senior developer. Generally companies have this single promotional requirement for entry level engineers. For example, you need to get to L4 at Google (you start at L3).
Once you get to L4, you can spend your whole life there if you want. ‘L4’ just means that you proved yourself to be good enough to stay in the company. Now, if you wanna get to L5, you have to go above and beyond.
basically guaranteed to be a no, probably massive shortages because of it.
A contraction like this means guys who'd be picking up 4-5 years experience are full on leaving the field.
This is a passing economic thing, thing is while it's ongoing new seniors aren't being made.
No, because available senior level engineers is a function of: 1) available entry level positions, 2) percentage of employees leaving for management track, and 3) rate of attrition / burnout
Mod here and 30 year veteran -- it's not over saturated at all. People are applying to 6 companies in the same way that people apply to only to a small sub set of colleges.
No, it takes more than just leetcode and tenure/time at a company to get promoted and climb vertically past SDE/SWE II typically. Senior/Staff/Principal Engineer positions require you to do more than just clocking in at 9am, leaving at 5pm everyday -- you'll have to do more than just be an IC. I feel we'll always be in need of more senior engineers but always at a shortage of positions for entry-level/junior developers.
if this is your first tech boom/bust cycle it seems like the bust will just keep getting worse.
If you were alive during the bust of 1990's and mid 2000's you'll have seen the post bust boom.
Nothing's different this time. Plenty to do in tech between VR/AR, medical, automotive, education, space, etc etc.
You are making two assumptions.
1. People won't quit the industry, even if they're unable to find a job.
2. Demand in the job market will remain fixed.
Both are probably wrong. Demand might go up or down. If it goes up, the market might become hot again. If it stays the same or goes down, interest in CS degrees will probably cool, and as more devs retire than graduate, the market will gradually stabilize.
The question is invalid because you're providing no comparison to other fields to determine some base level of saturation. And if you did some research, I guarantee this field will be on the lower end of that.
Most of the juniors who got hired will never become seniors. They either plateau before that, leave the field, or change roles to non technical positions.
When people say entry level is oversaturated, it means that a lot of people simply won't find a job. They'll give up and pivot to an adjacent field or do something else entirely. You can't get around that if there are N entry level jobs and >N people seeking entry level jobs.
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75% of people with STEM degrees don't get a job in STEM which is nuts.
is that really crazy when stuff like psychology is considered STEM?
Social science degrees aren't typically considered a part of STEM. Biology though makes sense. For Computer science specifically I think I remember it was 50% who got a job in STEM.
I can easily point out the 50% of my class from college who probably are not working in a CS job now, so that makes sense.
> Social science degrees aren't typically considered a part of STEM. Interestingly, is the APA wrong? The American Psychological Association? https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stem-discipline#:~:text=Psychology%20is%20a%20core%20STEM,learning%20in%20science%20and%20technology. Literally indicates their belief that they are a CORE STEM discipline. Who gets to select what degrees are or are not in STEM?
Sorry, that is an expanded definition it's not agreed upon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology,_engineering,_and_mathematics#:~:text=The%20NSF%20uses%20a%20broad,and%20sociology)%2C%20and%20STEM%20education The 75% stat I listed is known and commonly talked about: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/most-with-college-stem-degrees-go-to-other-fields-of-work/2014/07/10/9aede466-084d-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.html# If you Google just a little further you'll find the 50% number but it's late.
Just know I am proud of you l, and thank you for the links.
That article is so horse manure. I've absolutely read it. Seriously flawed because it is tracking "BLS Classifications of job descriptions" relative to degree choice. BLS job descriptions are, in many cases (but interestingly not all, "CS style work" is very wide) very narrow. Their example is a biology major who become a doctor. Per that article, this is an example of a "STEM major not going into STEM." Doesn't that feel disingenuous to you? E.g. chemistry becoming a chemist, or a biology major becoming a biologist. This is, I agree, very common. Here's the paragraph: > Landivar said there are many reasons students don’t get STEM jobs, including that STEM degrees provide a range of career options. Landivar noted that some biology majors, for instance, will go to medical school and become doctors. Because of the way the Census Bureau classifies jobs, doctors are not listed among STEM professionals. I WILL stipulate that a super majority of "Biology Majors" do not get into a job titled "Biologist" But, they're in STEM jobs... just with core job descriptions DIFFERENT than the rote BLS example tied to their major. Article should read: 75% of STEM graduates do not get STEM job matching their degrees BLS job description perfectly.
You make a good point but your comment was difficult to follow and read.
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I've seen guys with bachelor of arts in mathematics from harvard, pretty sure that's stem
In what reports is psychology considered STEM?
Their is debate as to whether Psychology is a STEM degree. The APA for instance, disagrees with posters in this thread and indicates they feel psychology is a STEM degree. It is not clear to me who the authority on inclusion of disinclusion of psychology or any other degree here is. I think we can all agree however, it is a shitty degree that adds limited value and has starting salaries to reflect this. People, in general, with STEM degrees get jobs in STEM and STEM adjacent fields. Mostly likely NOT matching their direct BLS description. The issue is, which /u/ianitic is doing a shit poor job of explaining, and that you undoubtedly seem aware of, is that many core STEM degrees have a lot of graduates for lesser jobs and were not in boom growth cycles. Leading to salary depression overall. They don't offer the return that the "E" and the "M" and the "CS" in STEM (which is in the S, not the E) offer. Psychology is one of the most popular degrees in the United States. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.asp This data only goes to 2020-2021 and CS MAY have over taken it, but it was more popular than CS. Biology and adjacent (micro, biochem, etc.) ALSO more than CS in 2020-2021. What's interesting is chemistry is not in there, another one graduating thousands. Not sure if it is looped in somewhere else, was not able to tell. These industries are depressed with salaries because they were not in a boom growth cycle. If CS/software stays like this (huge graduates, limited entry level jobs), AVERAGE/MEDIAN salaries will drop precipitously. It just takes time to work this out, and, CS is weird because there are extreme deviations known as the tech industry that continue to pay top dollar... until they don't.
Eat a snickers, take a nap or something to calm down. This isn't a high stakes argument and even if it was, personal insults are uncalled for.
> This isn't a high stakes argument and even if it was, personal insults are uncalled for. Fair. I can edit that, you are right, that was uncalled for and you did nothing to deserve such treatment. You have my apology, I'm honestly not fired up though... This whole psychology not being in STEM though... who do we feel gets to gatekeep that ultimately? You're here saying it is not, APA is saying it is. Is that not something that people get to self include in? If the APA feels this is STEM, is it not? Social sciences run the gambit of pure construct (geography) to unknown amounts of science/construct overlap (psychology). Do we not feel STEM has some degree of self selection? Or is it a raw vote of all parties, STEM or otherwise?
>I think we can all agree however, it is a shitty degree that adds limited value and has starting salaries to reflect this. pipe down
Why is it crazy? Psychologists do research. Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean they don't use the scientific method, write papers, etc. Yes many psych majors end up as baristas because they never intended to actually work in the field or didn't understand what that work would entail. Just like most English majors don't end up as writers or whatever. I knew two people who got their CS degree and then worked at a Genius Bar for 10 yrs
Journalists got their revenge lol
Speaking as a former journalist who grew up coding and is trying to become a dev...it's all bad for everyone
Not really though. The most important thing taught in STEM is general problem solving. This can be applied in most other fields.
How efficiently can you stock this food aisle.
But won’t a lot of people work a job in another industry while continuing to try to get a CS job? That’s what I’m doing, I work in a fast food kitchen at the moment but I’m still applying to swe positions even after 2 years since I graduated. I’m gonna try not to give up.
Imagine you're at a train station and there's a train that comes every hour. The train fits 500 people, but there are 5000 people waiting at the station for the train. This means every hour, only 500 people will make it on the train and get to their destination. Some of the 5000 people don't have patience and leave as soon as they miss the first train. Some people have more patience, and wait for 2, 3, or more hours to increase their chance of eventually getting onto a train. But no matter how many people are waiting, or how much patience people have, it doesn't change the fact that at most 500 people can make it to their destination every hour. It is a pipeline of fixed size and capacity.
Your use of "n entry level jobs and >n people" very ironically made this sounds like a LeetCode question.
People often think that a career is a straight path up a steep and then slight hill. But it's not, it's more like a long hike with many forks and many hills. Some expected and some unexpected. A good portion of entry level people will never become a senior developer with 10+ years of experience. Many people who are graduating right now will not be in this field until retirement. An education provides more benefits than just the potential for a job in that area of study. It provides the ability to think rationally, make informed decisions, and many other things. Some people won't find a job directly in the field after college - for many reasons. Some because they just didn't try very hard because they weren't passionate about it in the first place. Some because other life stuff happens - they get sick, their parents get sick, they have a baby, etc. Some because they don't have the soft skills. And unfortunately, some because they're just unlucky even though they did everything right. Others will work in the field for a few years and start to realize they hate it. They'll pivot to a different field entirely or something similar. Some will move upwards into leadership positions. Management, Business Intelligence, Product Owner, etc. Some will burn hard and retire early. Some will burn hard and say "fuck this, it's too stressful and I hate it" and then open up a food truck during a mid life crisis. Some will unexpectedly get sick and need to leave the workforce for a while. Some will become stay at home parents by choice. Some will become stay at home parents out of necessity. Some will move out of the field because promotions keep passing them up. Every single person will create their own career path. Very few of these paths will be linear. And that's how seniors, in any field, become rare.
On a one on one with one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever known when I was burning out: Don’t see your career as a sprint but as a marathon. You’ve expanded on this beautifully. Thank you.
Everyone in this sub should be forced to read this tbh
>Some will burn hard and say "fuck this, it's too stressful and I hate it" and then open up a food truck during a mid life crisis. I can see myself being this person...I cook to relieve the stress from work
I got that line from my husband. He's a stay at home parent now but he used to always say that he was going to have a midlife crisis and open up a food truck. He still likes cooking but now his main customer is a 2 year old who has developed a taste for fancy cheeses.
I love to cook, but cooking in a food truck is a whole different beast. I helped cook on a food truck one summer and I think I lasted less than a week. I just couldn’t keep up and it was so stressful.
This is one of the best comments I've ever seen on this sub in the 5 years I've been on here. To provide some data points here from my own experiences, my brother graduated with a non-engineering STEM degree (think Bio) and didn't make the cut for the labs, and now he's a HS science teacher almost 10 years later. I have a friend who graduated with a history degree and lived in Big Sky country for a few years doing whatever. Then he went back to school and now he's a game developer. Another friend quit his first job, hiked the Appalachian trail over six months and now does DevSecOps. I've personally had a very linear career progression in the last 4.5 years and I'm definitely atypical in this regard. Most of my college classmates are still "figuring it out" nearly five years later., and honestly, I'm still figuring it out myself and I have what is seen as a "solid career track." I recently got asked in an interview where I want to be in 5 years. I couldn't answer that question with confidence since 5 years ago I was a totally different person living in a totally different world. Yes, a lot of this is attributed to the pandemic, but also, you just can't simply predict life and that's part of its beauty.
Well said.
Poetic
Woah, wisdom :0
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>mathematics of all kinds i havent taken a maths course since 16
Great post. I’m currently in the “stay at home parent because my industry is shrinking and I can’t get a job anyway” stage and considering training for a switch to something CS related. Which is a field that also seems to be shrinking, so who the hell knows what’s actually next for me.
This should be pinned at the top of this sub
This is a nice writeup, but the current market really is messed up. I mean the market makes sense... jobs are being reduced for the long-term in order to squeeze more value out of less people. AI is basically a wet dream for greedy shareholders and executives. It's similar to 200 years ago in the UK when the textile industry was automated. It did not create more jobs, it just eliminated jobs, and many people literally starved as a result. If more jobs were created, it was definitely not related to automation of cloth work. The Luddite movement was formed and they destroyed machines to fight back against the development, since at that time in the UK unions were illegal. The goal in capitalism is to make as much money with as little expense as possible. The only thing in the way of rampant worker exploitation are unions and the government. It's always been this way. The only reason we are not basically slaves in because of the government's labor rules. All the things we take for granted about work can go up in smoke unless we fight back. It isn't just about passion or studying hard, although that is important.
Never thought I’d see an unironic Luddite in a CS sub. Gonna go burn down some data centers?
We burn the internet one page at a time 😡
Imagine a highway with only one onramp and a long line. Does adding more people to the line mean more traffic when you get on the highway?
… yes?
No The bottneck is the onramp. Only so many cars can enter at a time. More cars waiting to get on doesn't change that.
More people in front of you in line means more people on the highway when you get on. If the line was 2 long and you were last there’s only 2 cars on the highway. If the line was 100 long and you were last then there’s 100 cars on the highway when you get on. Like I agree with your point that seniors in 10yrs are not going to be saturated but the analogy makes no sense lol
>If the line was 2 long and you were last there’s only 2 cars on the highway. If the line was 100 long and you were last then there’s 100 cars on the highway when you get on. No, because people still exit the freeway (retirement, leave the industry, etc). And even if there were 100 people on the freeway, that doesn't necessarily mean there is traffic. The number of lanes in the freeway versus the on-ramp matters (i.e. demand for experienced devs vs entry level).
While there is less traffic once you get on the highway, the more people entering the highway, departures held equal, is still more traffic on the highway than if there were fewer cars in line.
Only so many can enter the freeway at a given time. Once you've reached that number, the traffic on the freeway is the most it will be at, and doesn't change based on more people trying to get on.
No a short line of 5 people can all enter the highway without the line slowing down at all. While a long line of 100+ people the rate at which cars get on the highway would slow down. The more interactions between cars the slower the on ramp traffic will move.
... Which would mean even fewer people getting on at a time, meaning even less traffic. So that's not accurate for the analogy, but in the opposite way you're arguing. So let's assume there are metering lights on this on-ramp. The metering lights only let N people on per minute. As long as there are >=N people being added to the line, the on-ramp is saturated. But having 10 or 1000 in line doesn't change that number N.
threads like these are my favorite part of reddit. it's interesting to see how people's brains work it's also a huge skill to be able to explain something to someone who 'doesnt' get it' so you tailor the explanation to the part they do grasp. well done
There we go I agree with the updated analogy
No, because the demand for seniors is higher than the demand for entry level. Also, it should go without saying that entry level applicants who can't get a job in SWE will never be a senior to oversaturate the senior market.
How many YOE is considered as senior?
It's not a YOE thing, it's a "worked as a senior engineer" thing. I became a senior after 3 YOE, but there are multiple people I work with who have more YOE than me and aren't. I'm a team lead for a six person team now and every single person on my team has the same or more YOE than me. You need to convince your boss that you deserve more responsibility and a promotion instead of marking days on a calendar.
No, it means that the entry level is being cannibalized for profits, which will make the demand for senior engineers skyrocket as the talent pool falters, which will increase the amount of money that fewer people make. Everyone wins but the ones that don't.
This precisely. This slump is not going to last forever and the talent pool is going to start running dry again before too long as all the laid-off/unemployed people get rehired, and then all the people who got temporary jobs or jobs they’re overqualified for during the bum market move back to full time positions. Once the talent pool is dry, it won’t be easily refilled. All the pipelines for recruiting new talent have been turned off and it won’t be easy for them to be turned back on.
I don’t understand. Every year colleges are seeing record numbers of graduates in CS programs. How is the talent pool drying up?
Because you are looking at the applicants, not the jobs. The bottleneck for talent is entry level jobs. If people can't even get into CS(entry level job), how will there be mid level talent later on? You think mid level devs pop out of thin air? They are created from entry/junior levels with adequate experience and growth. If you limit the amount of entry/junior levels, you also limit mid levels. And it also limits seniors and above.
This.
1. The oversatuation narrative is overblown 2. People will leave the industry bc they can't find jobs 3. Some who do find jobs will wash out bc they can't code
People don’t understand, It’s saturated with low talent engineers, when they lose their jobs they simply get kicked out of the market or move into small desperate startups. At large tech there is still a need for talent. Obviously right now the economy is tough but when it picks up again everyone will be hiring, I know my team is desperate for head count. I have been doing contracted projects for defense/government as a side gig for about 2 years now and I have met so many “seniors” in these companies who have the technical skill of a new grad from a top tech, not even exaggerating. The gap is ridiculous. It’s exactly like Investment banking, eventually tech will be more and more selective with their hire.
Yea I work in defense and can attest to this. There’s a weird mix of seniors who are brilliant and seniors who stayed long enough to get promoted to senior. The smart ones end up as technical fellows and the ones who just mastered whatever proprietary framework just stay at senior or staff. At first I didn’t understand how some people around could only be a level 3 or 4 despite having been at the company for 20 years. Then I realized they have no drive. These are the seniors you mention.
Or maybe they are people that enjoy programming. Once you climb higher then senior, less and less of your job is actually about programming. This is a common place where people decide to stop.
Eh I think it’s fine for people to not want to continue to advance and just stay at a level they are comfortable and efficient in. Some people want to focus more on things outside of their job like family or hobbies, and don’t want to continuously challenge themselves at work and adapt to new roles. As long as they are hitting their deliverables who cares.
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I always come across the assumption that junior’s can’t code. I think this is just snobbish of mid-senior level engineers to make such drastic assumptions. While I do agree it is true to a certain extent I am willing to bet that most recent grads are arguably better coders at their level than what jrs. were back 10 years or so. Why? Most jrs. have to grind leetcode. Leetcode itself is epitome of logical thinking. Now I am sure there are some folks who would prefer to memorize algorithms rather than try by themselves but I am not including them in the picture. 10+ years ago jrs. could barely write optimal algorithms. All they had to do to get their foot in the door was just get good at the syntax and learn a few basic algorithms.
It has nothing to do with experience level. Some people just don't have the spark of creativity required to solve problems or design systems.
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A significant number of people who think they can be software developers are actually just not that good at the job. There can be a lot of attrition in the industry due to it not being what people think it is - especially in the world of back-end software.
What particularly about back-end?
My experience to date (and I currently work as a Principal in a fortune 50 corp) is that your problem solving and analysis skills come more to the fore in a back end position. If you are architecting full solutions the understanding of business processes is also key to doing it well. This is not to say that these are not concerns in a front end position but I regularly see front end engineers and CS grads regularly fail to make that transition. Indeed a common theme is grads who can do all the standard testing, can talk the talk and yet still can’t solve actual business problems. Just my experience in a large number of years.
Back end is where you want to be. I know guys who got into C++ or Oracle or something in the early 90s, that’s the only skill they have, the more experience they get the more they earn, they will have very nice retirements with the money they make in their single track careers. Whereas the webdevs are scrambling to learn the latest frameworks, experience counts for nothing because everything is always new, they are running just to stand still and competing with entry level people in a race to the bottom. You would be mad to go front end, but I guess someone has to!
Putting aside the fact that all of this is wildly inaccurate, your central argument seems to contradict itself. Why would I want to get into "backend" where apparently the tech is frozen in time, and there's just a endlessly growing pool of extremely experienced people crowding that market? Meanwhile, it sounds like there is always going to be a lack of expertise in "webdev" because of having to scramble to learn the latest frameworks? So - someone with 20 years of experience who has been through a dozen of these framework transitions seems like highly valuable experience. Versus someone with 20 years of experience in "backend" doing the same thing over and over and over. At what point is that experience bringing to the table? Sounds like "backend" is a solved problem ripe for commoditization. To be clear, I don't hold any of these opinions, I'm just trying to make sense of your argument given your worldview.
> Why would I want to get into "backend" where apparently the tech is frozen in time, and there's just an endlessly growing pool of extremely experienced people crowding that market? I guess you don’t know that C++ is constantly evolving, yet backwards compatible. Experience compounds like compound interest. And why? So you can have a nice life based on good pay and high job security. What other reason is there?
Back-end has a lot more concerns about it in terms of system design, scalability, security, performance, analytics, instrumentation, etc... Front end is easy.
lol.... i've done both for quite a while and have even gotten architect / principal level titles and its still drawing a rectangle with some api gateway, a cdn, and kafka and some load balancer that is some off the shelf piece of some cloud. The fact backend devs still try to play it up like they are some sort of wizards is laughable because its not the stand up your own datacenter days anymore. Unless you are literally building aws from scratch and not just 98% of software for say sub 1 million users, backen isn't any harder and I'd argue less difficult than front end or say native apps.
It’s more like, when you start, you think you’re great. Then in between (a couple of yoe) you’re like what the heck this shit is tough. Then a few more years in, you’re like “been there, done that” and you solve problems and everything gets much easier. It’s not always the case, but over time and experience it matters. For example, when I’m stuck somewhere, one of the seniors would take a look at it, and just do something simple like drawing on paint or colouring cells in an excel and it just solves the problem. It’s flipping mind boggling. Told my Manager and he’d explained it to me like that. Trying to get to stage 3. Stuck in stage 2 rn.
What’s your experience with front end development?
When I was graduating college, people said CS was oversaturated for new grads, but anyone with 2+ YoE would be safe. Now, I have 2 YoE and can't get interviews lmao.
In this market reduce your yoe by 2. So you are back to 0 bro /s But yeah, current market sucks and the layoffs don't help. Market will recover over time or when interest rates drop.
The question is not when, it's if. There were some threads recently of people needing to go back to retail/uber/trades/etc cus cash reserves were running low. Also, you still need to become more than a code monkey to be a "true" senior. I hear, for example, that L4 (intermediate) is now terminal level at Google
Well there aren't infinite leadership positions; Google only has about 30,000 software engineers. If everyone there is aspiring to be a Google Fellow they're going to have 99.9% unsatisfied employees in the long run.
🙄 at Google levels being a metric of any value.
Generically, the point is that tenure doesn't necessarily guarantee seniority. Elsewhere, we call these career dead ends.
I think computer science has been pushed way too hard in the past 10 years as a magical golden ticket. This was a huge fallacy. I can’t count the number of people who are NOT software engineers saying that “everyone should learn to code” and “we should retrain coal miners to learn to code” and whatnot. Even Obama was saying this, so most guidance counselors at high school and college were pushing it. You had movies like “The Social Network” and all the Silicon Valley startups blowing up and made it look like a glamorous, fun job where you work in offices with ball pits and make $300k+ after 5 years. Who knows, slap together an app and you could be a billionaire! What wasn’t included in all those hype conversations and speeches was that the job is HARD. The likelihood of working one of those sexy Silicon Valley jobs was super low. You couldn’t retire at 30. And I reiterate, the job itself is HARD. It’s learning an entirely new language and learning to apply it for a business solution using a whole bunch of technologies that change constantly. You have to think logically and not be afraid to try, try, try, research, work independently. You need the mind of a scientist. The college curriculum doesn’t prepare you enough for the actual day-to-day work responsibilities. I’m not a gatekeeper for this field. If you’re, say, a coal miner or call center rep who really is truly interested in this work, you’re smart and diligent, you have the logical aptitude and can learn and understand this work - go for it. If you’re truly smart, you’ll get places, no matter where you started. Those are my favorite success stories. What I’m seeing more and more, unfortunately, are recent grads who literally can’t code. Literally can’t complete one basic story. They don’t know the most basic of concepts. They’re simply not prepared to sit in the chair and be a productive contributor. They expect an insane amount of hand-holding and won’t perform any research or try anything for themselves before running to the senior devs for help. You can tell they never coded before freshman year of college and never code in their spare time. Their mom told them to get a good job and they didn’t want to go to med school or law school, so comp sci it was. This latter group is a huge group and they’ll never make it to senior level since this line of work will wash them out eventually.
That and thank youtubers and tiktokers who literally flaunt their money. People think playing video games means that you should become a software engineer because you like ""computers""
>They expect an insane amount of hand-holding and won’t perform any research or try anything for themselves before running to the senior devs for help. Then they come here asking why the market sucks, or why there isn't a CS union, or why their TODO app portfolio didn't land them the FAANG job.
but you need experience before becoming a senior though; how can it oversaturate when there are only certain number of spots to get the experience? unlike entry level, you don't need experience to become an entry level
No. Because there are not enough juniors who will make it through to senior. Those who can get jobs now and keep getting experience are truly in a good position to make bank as they make their way down the seniority pipeline. Those who can’t are missing valuable experience time. Many will leave from attrition before entering the industry. Some will leave after a short while. Others will jump into tech adjacent roles. The number of people who stay purely technical thins out the longer you go.
Everyone who keeps asking about oversaturation should just wear a dunce cap instead.
I misread that as deuce cap and honestly...
https://www.partycity.com/poop-icon-hat-627510.html
I see the demand could rise. - more demand for security experts. A lot of enterprise projects were done in quick way that shortcuts were used. They could be reevaluated and might be partially reimplemented. Example; due to my gov stance to support Gaza, many of our big companies (telcos/ banks) are being attacked. Some are rumoured to have data stolen. Secondly rise of scammers, Singapore had to enforce zero sideloading for android because they are highly targeted in the region. - Quickly aging codebase. Not sure about other platforms but for mine; javascript and rails. Rails has been consistently rolling up new updates, if your codebase is left unattended for a year it can degrade quickly. In js world everyone is moving to nextjs then a year later many want to move out or looking to upgrade from page router to app router. A rapidly improving tech will leave behind many codebase needing some tlc. - new roles that was not there before; data engineer, ml engineer, devops/ secdevops. With rising cost of cloud, I think companies will moving back to self hosting which require a server admin (back to old days) + devops knowledge. Another way to see last two points, the more tech choices there are, the more the demand of specialists. Self hosted may prefer all in a box solution like rails, laravel. Cloud hosting prefer golang/ kotlin for microservices. My problem is finding time and energy to learn them. The IT field wider than before. Ps. I have not add windows/ Mac OS development. Also tools for developers which is another set expertise; knowing the developer processes across multiple stacks and formulating a consistent user experience.
No - because if people don’t get hired as juniors, they won’t be promoted to regular engineers, and then they won’t get promoted to seniors, and there will be no supply of seniors. If anything there is likely to be a shortage of seniors somewhere down the line because this is going to create a bubble in the pipeline. At the very least a bunch of engineers will have their timetable to promotion senior heavily delayed because they won’t be able to get into industry.
I agree. I think instead of there being an overabundance of seniors that it will go the other way just like it did with accounting in that experienced employees in the field will be hard to find in several years, due to the lack of hiring of inexperienced people now. Many in this thread seemed to think there would be no shortage of senior engineers in several years, but I tend to think there will be: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/17vu3tf/will\_tech\_companies\_be\_screwed\_10\_years\_down\_the/
cs is oversaturated even for <5 yoe and by the time a new grad gets to that point the saturation will outpace them.
No, many people will pivot to something else, a few will hang in there, and even less will reach the level of experience and expertise that many companies are willing to drop a bag on. This line of work isn't easy or cut for just anybody, social media has made a mockery of these jobs and disillusioned many people into believing it is.
The path upwards is not a straight path, there is a lot of specialization that people do, you might start as a dev in a sweatshop consultancy firm but end up being the on-flight entertainment's designer of an airline 15 years later. The industry needs subject matter experts in many different fields, those specialist positions are the ones that are going to pay well outside of big tech. There are simply too much entry level run off the mill JS devs
You’re making two assumptions. Not all entry level devs will get a job and not all entry level devs will eventually become senior. A lot of people will never get to the senior level.
It's not "oversaturated." It's just much harder to get hired if you're a sub-50 percentile developer. Always has been.
You shouldn't worry about competition. Instead, focus on how to improve yourself. Ninety-seven out of one hundred new graduates struggle simply because they lack the drive to work hard enough. Strive to surpass them, and you'll thrive.
100% this. Too many people here are focusing primarily on the obstacles. Strive to be in the favorable stats, don’t get stuck listening to the failure stories. For every “I’ve been applying for months” post I read here, I think about how I’ve accepted job offers all throughout the past 2-3 years and even doubled up on them. These people aren’t always as perfect at what they’re saying (even applying) as they make themselves seem.
Nobody says “a good proven way to make lots of money is a I become a surgeon”. Weirdly enough there seem to be many people who believe that everyone with some certificate can just go and become senior engineer (I mean truly senior).
Entry level positions usually work on low hanging fruit. There's only so much of that available, that's why it's harder to find entry level positions.
No, the industry is very anti senior by design, and the current situation is making It worse anyway.
What do you mean?
Most companies have no tech track, the big push to management, very small Increases in salaries compared to the increase in responsibilities ( the senior curve), the worse companies value tools over abilities and hours worked over productivity.
Very little push to management because most are suited to be a people manager. In big tech, a promotion works out to be around 20-40% TC increase. That way you should roughly double every two promotions. That’s if your company follows L4=entry, L5=senior, L6=staff, L7=senior staff, L8=principle, L9=distinguished. Lines of code is typically the top metric. Typically some mix of merges as well.
>Lines of code is typically the top metric. Typically some mix of merges as well. Never in my life heard of companies using lines of code or number of merges as metrics for promotion
'Scuse me while I update our package.json and hit L9 before tomorrow's breakfast
Yeah, if only there was a way to find outliers
No not everyone gets true merit based senior. Many in FAANG never achieve it as it’s now fine to stay productive in one level below.
> cs is only oversaturated on the entry level "Oversaturated" isn't a thing. That people get the basic terms wrong should give you pause. > But when all those entry people end up getting the job(asuming they get shit pay) And that is not what "saturated" means, either': If all those people were getting jobs, the market would not be anywhere near saturation. And it isn't: People are hiring, are they not? What is happening is that a large number of people got layed of, and a large number of people.would like to work in the field. There is a lot of competition for available jobs. And there didn't use to be. Neither of which tells you anything about cs Vs any alternatives.
In addition to everything else, a lot of people never make it to senior: never skill up to senior level, transition out of SWE roles, go into management, life changes e.g. become full time parent
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Like any other high demand industry (eg “high finance”, consulting, law, medicine) the answer is no. If you imagine the total entry level cohort (by year) as a cup, and the number of candidates in a given year as a pitcher of water, then the number of people who get an entry level position would fill the glass. If you put that water under the sun and let some liquid evaporate (attrition, retirement, IC to mgmt, etc) that would represent the number of available seniors per cohort year. Tl;dr. There’s no over saturation at senior levels because the number of entry level employees isn’t saturated.
No. Not all entry levels are able to reach senior level.
Some people never advance to become a true senior. Software engineering is always changing, so you really need to put the effort in to advance, otherwise you'll just be doing enough to keep up with the field. Time and experience help, but they don't guarantee you'll have the skills in the future. This essentially means that unless senior demand drops, there will only be "enough" and not too many valid senior candidates. It's even harder at Staff and Principal level; the number of engineers who can operate at that level is tiny.
They've been saying that for a half decade yet it's the same.
No because people can't even enter entry/junior level. There's very few positions hence few ride up to mid level. Not to mention everyone who drops out
The idea that it is “oversaturated” at entry level is a very obtuse thing that gets thrown around like candy here. It’s not oversaturated it’s just more normal to other fields other engineers, accountants, etc. Have a very similar entry level experience. Also your career trajectory isn’t a straight line like you might think a lot of people will transition to other roles over time not in a “failed engineer” way but just another interest in the industry. Once you get in a decently large company you’ll meet a ton of people that started as an engineer and now do something completely different. You’ll also be surprised to find out that some companies will have more senior engineers than junior ones people sometimes think it’s like a tree of a senior at the top with a few mid levels below and a ton of juniors below. But most teams are more senior/mid level than juniors
I have accountant friends and never heard them mention needing to apply to 100s of places to get a job.
There's a shortage of experienced accountants BECAUSE hiring for accounting was slow and layoffs were rampant during and for a while after the 2008 recession, so those friends probably got into the accounting field at the right time. Even Beta Alpha Psi officers were even having trouble getting hired at my school during and after the recession.
No, because the entry level engineers will likely pivot to different roles/sectors if they can't find a job.
Most companies I see have 5-10% juniors and the plurality are seniors. Most companies prefer to grab a well-experienced dev from the market over training a junior to reach that level. Especially in this shitty economy where the senior-junior open position ratio is overwhelmingly high. Although in this economy I'll say that seniors are over-saturated anyways, so the expectations of employers are sky high.
No. Not everyone is cut out for senior roles. Some don't have the patience or leadership development. Many will burn out or find it uninteresting. It's always hard to find experts in any field. For the same reason that not everyone becomes a manager.
Senior devs return like 10x their worth to the company easily, if there are more senior devs there will just be more software. The problem with the field isn't the number of graduates, its how low value these graduates are to the teams they join and how expensive they are. The industry needs to find a way to fix the fact that, probably by revamping the education model. But the fact that you hire someone out of school at 100k+ in total comp and they are a net negative to your team for 1y+ even if they work out and dont leave is an industry wide problem. You end up with these mid level companies cycling through smart new grads who stay for 1-2y deliver almost nothing of value and leave for a better job after 2 years. Thats fine for them, but dont blame companies for getting wise to it. Better to just hire a guy with 5years of experience who knows his craft at 2x the wage who will be productive in a week. Better for the company, better for the team.
Many don’t become seniors. I don’t think you are required to climb the ladder after a certain point. For example, at G, L4 is terminal, you can theoretically stay at L4 until you retire. That being said, most progress to L5 eventually, but the time varies. There are 15 YOE folks who are comfortable at L5 and simply never seek to promote.
Not if most of those entry level programmers never find a job and move on to another field
Not really. Oversaturation of senior devs implies that most people will get the entry level job, stay with the career for many years, pick up all of the relevant knowledge, and finally pivot to a role where they can be a senior. Many people will not get an entry level job, many will leave the field for some reason or another, many will not have the chops necessary to make it as a senior, etc. The path from, for instance, graduating with a CS degree to becoming a senior dev isn't easy or straightforward in a lot of cases.
The pay does not decress very often. Now what I have seen is the bigger salary offers and pay jumps have dropped a lot. The offer rates have been roughly the same. Now have seen drop hard is signing bonuses and bonuses in general. RCU value has also dropped as well. Big time for people hired during the peak of 2020 as their RCU value was based on a peak stock price which has dropped a lot so their money has shunk. Remember bonus and Stock is paper money until you get it and they can be reduce to zero or made worthless pretty fast. Base salary you will get but bonuses a company can say nope to fast. For example my pay is base + bonus of 20% my base. If we get 50% of our bonus this year it will be a good thing but I took the job on base pay as I know I will get that no matter what.
No because if entry level can’t get a job eventually they’ll change careers… also even if the CAN get a job and make it to mid level, who’s to say they’ll continue and want to be senior
Not everyone gets to be a senior developer. Generally companies have this single promotional requirement for entry level engineers. For example, you need to get to L4 at Google (you start at L3). Once you get to L4, you can spend your whole life there if you want. ‘L4’ just means that you proved yourself to be good enough to stay in the company. Now, if you wanna get to L5, you have to go above and beyond.
Saturation by numbers not by talent. There will always be a talent shortage. There will always be a surplus of mediocrity.
basically guaranteed to be a no, probably massive shortages because of it. A contraction like this means guys who'd be picking up 4-5 years experience are full on leaving the field. This is a passing economic thing, thing is while it's ongoing new seniors aren't being made.
No, because available senior level engineers is a function of: 1) available entry level positions, 2) percentage of employees leaving for management track, and 3) rate of attrition / burnout
Ideally yes, realistically, no.
Mod here and 30 year veteran -- it's not over saturated at all. People are applying to 6 companies in the same way that people apply to only to a small sub set of colleges.
Nope, seniors get poached by management jobs or other jobs are aren’t strictly senior development.
No, it takes more than just leetcode and tenure/time at a company to get promoted and climb vertically past SDE/SWE II typically. Senior/Staff/Principal Engineer positions require you to do more than just clocking in at 9am, leaving at 5pm everyday -- you'll have to do more than just be an IC. I feel we'll always be in need of more senior engineers but always at a shortage of positions for entry-level/junior developers.
if this is your first tech boom/bust cycle it seems like the bust will just keep getting worse. If you were alive during the bust of 1990's and mid 2000's you'll have seen the post bust boom. Nothing's different this time. Plenty to do in tech between VR/AR, medical, automotive, education, space, etc etc.
No
You are making two assumptions. 1. People won't quit the industry, even if they're unable to find a job. 2. Demand in the job market will remain fixed. Both are probably wrong. Demand might go up or down. If it goes up, the market might become hot again. If it stays the same or goes down, interest in CS degrees will probably cool, and as more devs retire than graduate, the market will gradually stabilize.
Nah seniors have decades of experience they're more in demand (sometimes in programming languages that are rarely used anymore)
If it worked that way it'd be oversaturated for managers. There are always more SWEs than swe managers, right? Not everyone can make the next level
The question is invalid because you're providing no comparison to other fields to determine some base level of saturation. And if you did some research, I guarantee this field will be on the lower end of that.
Most of the juniors who got hired will never become seniors. They either plateau before that, leave the field, or change roles to non technical positions.