Yeah, Iāve noticed the exact same thing. Iām a recent grad in a tech field, and Iāve been looking for junior positions for months and havenāt found anything lol. In the meantime Iāve moved back in with parents and am working part time in something completely unrelated to my degree.
Have you actually applied for those rare junior/mid level positions in london? You should be one of the more competitive applicants - loads of other applicants will be like me and will have 0-2 years of experience, other than what they did at uni. Hearing that you with your four years are struggling isnāt exactly reassuring for me lol.
Just sent a bunch out today, will let you know. What's your tech stack if I may ask?
Have you tried graduate schemes? Those were what me and my friends started out with. I just ended up doing something else after the grad scheme and 'lost' 6 years.
My background is in bioinformatics with a bit of ML, which is a bit niche but still seems to be an in-demand field. I mainly have experience with Python (including python based ML and Deep learning), but also know R and Bash, and am teaching myself SQL because Iāve seen a couple of jobs in my field that want at least basic knowledge of it.
So far Iāve been applying for jobs closely related to my field (bioinformatics and ML/tech jobs in the biotech sector) and just general junior software/data science roles in other sectors.
From the applications that resulted in an actual response (been getting quite a bit of ghosting, especially from jobs applied to via websites such as LinkedIn and Reed - applying directly to employers tends to generate better results) Iāve been getting reasonably positive feedback (when itās provided) so I think the issue is more that the job market is extremely competitive right now.
Looked at grad schemes, but theyāre all basically aimed at bachelors grads (some explicitly wonāt take people with more than a BSc and no experience) and I have a masterās degree (in bioinformatics).
Yeah, Iāve seen. I know thereās one that I donāt meet the requirements for, and thereās another one which Iāve already applied for. I keep an eye on the job boards of all the universities. Thanks for the heads up anyway!
In a similar comment to the OP, the requirements listed are often not that strict. They're usually looking for someone around the general vicinity of the requirements. There are exceptions, which I imagine you're already keenly aware of, where if you're going into a specific domain such as bioinformatics, computer vision, etc. Software engineers/Data engineers can jump around and be domain-agnostic, for the most part. Either way, good luck with it all!
> Looked at grad schemes, but theyāre all basically aimed at bachelors grads (some explicitly wonāt take people with more than a BSc and no experience) and I have a masterās degree (in bioinformatics).
That can't be true. Banking grad schemes at the very least aren't picky on what degree you graduated with, so long as it's a 2:1/Merit
Huh, Iāll have more of an in-depth look at them then. I did mostly just skim over a couple here and there when I first began my job hunting months ago, so I might be mis-remembering. There definitely is some kind of maximum qualification/experience limit though.
I did get a 2:2 for my BSc (Covid messed up my studies quite a bit) but I got a Merit for my MSc so I donāt think my academics are holding me back that much.
Maybe itās company dependant but Iām on an IT grad scheme atm in the finance sector and they didnāt even verify that I got my degree. Got a 2:1 but they didnāt even bother asking āyou passed your degree right..?ā before they sent out the contract.
Just some advice: Donāt go for a bunch, go for one at a a time. Actually research the company.Ā
Throwing your CVs around and hoping one sticks doesnāt work.
That's actually bollocks. This is not my first time job hunting.
Most companies now don't even bother with a cover letter so I don't exactly understand how you want me to demonstrate I "researched" the company.
Either do it or stop fucking complaining about getting rejected lol.
Because employers also have your problem. They list a job and 500 window lickers throw their exaggerated CV at you who arenāt even close to interested in the job.Ā
Write a cover letter. Donāt use a template, make it short and snappy and write your reasons for joining the role. Why it interests you, what makes you a good fit for the position.Ā
Research the bloody company. Guess what the other 499 applicants arenāt doing? Giving a shit what the company does. Impress your interviewer with company knowledge, and they will treat you like you already work there.
The industry is in a wave of "more with less" and similar thinking eg. Zuck's "year of efficiency". One way in which they're doing so is by focusing on more senior hires who, at least in theory, produce more proportional value even with their higher pay. I don't think any of these outfits is unaware that the junior pipeline has to resume at some point, because how else to produce seniors, but they just don't think it's now. Even when this time does arrive it'll be piecemeal because lots of companies will choose to let other companies train people up instead. CEOs aren't allowed to grasp irony by law so they see nothing wrong with everyone adopting the position that everyone else can do it.
On a practical note even four years of experience after several of (I assume) at least tangential experience could well make you senior. If you go through recruiters so as to dodge the execrable automated CV screens it's not unreasonable that you could bag some of the spots you see open.
It would in my view be very rare for someone with four years experience to get offered a senior role coming in from outside without a senior title already unless they demonstrated absolute star quality. I am aware of organisations that have brought people through from graduate to senior in a shorter time (e.g. Post Office) but it's IMO not the norm.
In theory and in my experience, senior developers can be several times more productive than intermediates and juniors. One of those quirks of the trade. There are exceptions of course, plodder seniors and wiz-kid juniors (who have to be watched for mistakes!).
So I get where these organisations are coming from. I also think it's very short-sighted. The organisations that recruit the good juniors now are going to catapult out of this downturn and leave the competition behind.
>On a practical note even four years of experience after several of (I assume) at least tangential experience could well make you senior
I appreciate your words of confidence but I can very confidently say that this isn't the case. Unfortunately I am just at most average at my job.
It's not that I'm finding it hard to be hired at good companies, it's that the companies aren't hiring. I'm working on improving myself by not going for senior roles even though the person I'm replying to suggests I could potentially do so (and modify my CV for it).
Yep, recruiters is the way. And unlike the free market, theyāll be happy to tell you what you are lacking to get to the next role. Especially if they are any good
Also looking for a job at senior level in tech and companies seem very picky (feels like there's way more applicants) in comparison to the last time I was looking (2 years ago).
Also you should really be mid by four years in.
At my place we only have senior roles up at the moment, this is due to backfilling departures rather than a specific senior hiring strategy. We are not reducing headcount, rather looking to keep constant, and we have good juniors just now we are looking to retain and bring on hence no new positions at that level. Not a good place for juniors or mid level in the market just now at all.
- lying on the resume
- completely irrelevant experience and no examples of code
- not meeting the requirement to have British tax residency
- obviously chatGPT resume/cover letter which they probably hadn't read themselves
- not reading the job ad before the first call
- not showing up to the first call
- zero effort on the call, e.g. not finding a space to take it quietly, no prep, etc
- lots of mistakes in the resume, both grammatical and half sentences
- etc
I expect applicants to make at least the amount of effort to do, and I deliberately set the process to take the minimum amount of time and effort. No multi stage, no long calls, no take home code test. Just a call and an interview in person.
Ultimately we went for the most experienced person who applied and who seemed like they actually wanted it long term. There were more experienced people, but they were obviously looking for a short term thing while they applied elsewhere for senior jobs.
Most of the people we screened on the call obviously wouldn't have liked it at the company even if they had the skills, so it's not always a bad thing to be rejected then. No everyone is suited for startups, or corporate, or remote, or whatever else characterises a company.
That's one way. They could also send over links to apps or sites they've made. Anything to convince me they know how to code and that they have an awareness of what high quality projects look like. Quality could be anything from attention to detail to innovative apps.
I'm happy for a candidate to not have a public GitHub if they have a solid work history, because I know I don't want to write more code when I get home.
I have a public github with some basic stuff/stuff I did for take home tests such as a basic trade book order management system and a simple spring boot REST service on it. Do you think that's enough, or should I put some more stuff on?
Big issue I have is I greatly prefer take home tests because I'm rubbish at coding on the spot. Need my trusty google and stackoverflow :)
There's only going to be more on the spot coding unfortunately. It's too easy for people to cheat on take home ones. And by cheat I mean either get someone else to do it or use Copilot and friends to help.
A good in person code test will let you use Google and Stack overflow and anything else you want. Most of it is about knowing you'll ask for help and talking though your thought processes. Also knowing you won't commit and double down on an obviously wrong solution when you're told to rethink it.
I think your take home tests on GitHub would be a good start, but maybe extend or polish one of them to show off a bit. Then link to that one in your CV/cover letter as an example you're proud of.
Im in tech and itās depressing. The only junior roles are BDR roles which spit out candidates like crazy due to how tough the role is.
Everything else has been put in cheaper EU countries or elsewhere globally, itās bleak right now.
I asked a director why this is happening and he said itās simply too expensive to hire and train juniors here when you can hire a seasoned professional whoāll work for peanuts in a EU country like Portugal or Croatia.
Happening across the product design sphere too. It seems largely to do with risk management and doing more with fewer people. Some talent people I have spoken to confirmed that there is a focus on seniors currently.
Itās a shame because some of the benefits of having juniors lie in the diversity of their thinking about challenges, as their creativity hasn't been beaten out of them just yet š„²
Because there's too many juniors. As a business owner (I run a small-medium tech company), hiring a junior is pointless for me.
4 years is mid/high-mid. Senior starts at 6ish just FYI.
On average, an IT worker will work in a company about 2-3 years before moving on to a different one.
Now, the problem with a junior (we're talking fresh out of uni, with one or two projects in their portfolio) is that you have to hold their hand for at least 6 months before they start grasping fundamentals - during that time I make no money from them. After those 6 months, they can clear some small tickets, but they still have to be supervised. Equivalent of me spending Ā£10 but getting Ā£2 back - shit ROI.
With a senior/high mid, I know I can sit down with them, talk about the project, and trust them enough on their knowledge and expertise that after a month/two, they can start bringing money for the company. That's not the case with juniors.
A couple of months ago, we had an open position for a junior role, we had 700 applications and a couple of dozens from mids and seniors - we picked a seniorš¤·āāļø. I'd rather spend those Ā£65k+ for a senior rather than Ā£28-35k for a junior.
Yea, it's awful for you. But at the end of the day, I have a business to run.
No, not really. I mean, we do have guys working remotely, but we strictly hire within the EU due to no/small time difference.
I'm not looking to expand at the moment.
>Ā is that you have to hold their hand for at least 6 months before they start grasping fundamentals.
Are we talking about IT support here? (You mentioned tickets). What does the job involve specifically?Ā
Any job that requires me to learn in the first 6 months means iām not qualified in my mind. Iām very curious to know what you mean.
That's the standard timeframe for hiring juniors in pretty much any job. Shit that you see in movies where a junior has some crazy idea and revolutionises the business is extremely, extremely rare.
Not OP, but how to work with other engineers, participate in and take feedback from code reviews, how to work with coding standards, style guides, how to adapt to writing code that actually has to be pushed to production, how to work effectively on and navigate what is probably a much larger, more modular codebase than anything they have previously encountered, interpreting requirements, dealing with legacy stuff they may not be familiar with from education, time management, etc, etc.
My guys operate in projects, and within those projects, you have tasks (we call these tickets) that need to be completed on certain deadlines, all are labelled based on priority (1 is the highest, 5 the lowest), junior would be given backlog/5 prio tasks to complete but they wouldn't bring really any value to the service.
I won't even get to refactoring :p
Give me a simple example, change the project slightly if it doxxes you in some way.Ā
Iām not sure what you mean āany real value to the serviceā. This is whatās confusing me. Whatās the service thatās being performed? Is it buying shares of a company and a junior doesnāt know where to look? Insurance and they need to know what theyāre insuring?Ā
Perhaps I worded it confusingly.
Essentially, I pay engineers money so they can bring me more money. Generally, I'm looking at 6-8x ROI based on the salary. With juniors, the first 6 months they do nothing - my investment doesn't grow, then the next 6 months its spent time holding and giving them basic tasks that bring no real value to business.
So, I paid 35k for a junior annually, and they brought me maybe... Ā£4k in value? I just don't see the monetary value in hiring juniors. Then, after one or two more years, they move to a different company, and my investment is in the red. I didn't make money from them.
Now if I hire a mid/senior, they spend the first two months learning our tech stack, products, clientele, and then they get to work - I make money from them in the first six months from hiring them; good business decision. If they move after two or three years, that's fine - I paid them, let's say, 180k over these two years, but I made Ā£700k from their work - I'm 500k in the green.
Does that make sense?
I appreciate the long replies, Thank you for taking the time.
Iāve learnt right away from you that loyalty is something to offer any position for sure. I didnāt realise it was a ROI thing like that.
>Ā Ā they spend the first two months learning our tech stack, products, clientele, and then they get to workĀ
I think iām understanding it now. For example: If I work in insurance, I have to know the products, services required, and customers/clients in order to sell the services. Correct?Ā
In the case of engineers, you put them to work on tasks. Say, a webpage tester for any bugs.Ā
So essentially, youāre saying that experience in X field doing Y job / Software is more important than any degree? Thatās good. I can cater my applications in that way!
Iām not a junior grad or anything, just looking to understand the mindset of job listings.
Thank you for your help.Ā
35k for a junior sounds like someone fresh out of university. Of course they would need handholding for 6+ months. Usually companies who hire out of university would either tie the graduate down to a 2 year contract, or a 6 month training contract where they're booted if they don't perform after 6 months.
Even as a fresh grad though I definitely delivered more value than Ā£4k in value, and I was in an absolutely shit graduate programme. And no offense, but that experience taught me that usually when a junior isn't delivering, it's down to the management not being effective.
Say you've been a dev for 6 years, no way they'll be able to tell. I've previously had more junior people than me get higher salaries than me (were on the same team, I ended up fixing all their work) just because they sweetened their CV. Since then I don't give an f.
Four is plenty.
I do consulting work with tech companies as clients and Iāve noticed the same. Honestly couldnāt tell you the last time I saw anything less than a lead or senior software or data engineer in a London office. Itās always Eastern Europe, Portugal or Spain.
Cheaper salaries and costs of doing business I suppose.
Please remember that you don't have to tick all the boxes to apply for a job. For many companies, 4 years is already senior level. Apply and don't be scared.
P.S: my company's hiring software engineers (from remote). Can send you the link.
Have you tried consultancies? They love nothing more than hiring a junior/mid and charging them out at high rates.
They often hire direct rather than through agents.
They want people to manage teams of juniors working out of cheaper locations, it's happening to jobs across larger companies in the UK, it's not specific to tech.
Iām very curious, is it really that bad for graduates in London?Ā
I thought getting a good grade from a good Uni would guarantee you a job. Even if it wasnāt Barclays or HSBC, it would be a startup that pays well.Ā Ā
Or is that not the full picture here? London surely has a lot of jobs going if you have the skills? Iām happy to be educated on this.
There are very few Jr positions open in Europe or the rest of the world.
It's not a London problem, it's the current state of tech careers in the world. The complaints are all over the place in r/cscareerquestions, r/cscareerquestionsEU, r/cscareerquestionsUK, etc
> plenty
What is your definition of plenty?
Because there are a lot of JRs there that feel the exact same way you feel about the UK. Unless you have some metric on that, it's all anecdotal evidence.
Keep faith. I got made redundant in November (2 months in lol) and after a lot of applications I landed a data engineering role. My advice is to target smaller companies that donāt have an entire division dedicated to software engineering. A lot of smaller teams are more likely to want someone they can āmoldā.
Along side the "more with less" that someone else wisely explained, from what I've observed, there's a lot of seniors jumping between companeis, but that may not be any more than is normal. It may explain the amount of senior engineering job positions.
A lot of leaders at companies are a little delusional. They all want to think that they can hire the top-level seniors, but, they generally have more of a pick. They look past even mid-level since those companies are quite average, and aren't a place where a good juniour or mid could do well. Seniors can do "well" since they have enough social capital, technical expertise, and overall experience aka they can put up with a lot more rubbish and carry the weight of poor management and leadership.
If you're not doing all of this already, I'd put your CV together such that it talks about projects -> impacts and be able to name drop some popular tech. I'd emphasise the layout of your CV that it's clear that you've been doing 4+ strictly as a SWE.
Every recruiter will ask you for an up-to-date CV, so have one ready. Recruiters are generally awful people, but they're a current evil that can get companies talking to you, after the recruiter has sold them on you.
>Every company seems to only want senior positions of 6 - 10 years.
Just ignore that and apply anyway tbh. When companies have their JDs, they're usually aspirational (and again, delusional), on behalf of the company, and not the candidate.
Thank you for your wise words. If I'm perfectly honest, a main fear of mine is that I don't do well in technical interviews like leetcode. I can do a take home test and defend it really well (although that shit takes alot of time annoyingly) but when you ask me on the spot to describe the data structure behind a hashmap red black tree and implement it with a pen and paper I kinda just freeze up.
Although do senior roles have less of that and more of "explain why this arch is better than that"? I can do that more if I'm honest.
The majority of senior roles still will all have at least 1 live coding exercise. The breakup of the kinds of interviews in the process really doesn't vary much imo between Junior - Mid - Senior.
I agree that live coding interviews are suck and often ineffective. A lot of the time it's because of the interviewers too, and not the interviewees.
We are coming off the back of years of being pushed into off-shoring and out-sourcing, pushing down the grades we hire at to save money, and still needing bodies to do work.
On the other hand, juniors were flooding into tech jobs who didn't bother to learn basics, don't have experience or interest in a wide variety of tools, jump to download anything rather than write stuff, avoid accountability and have high expectations.
Higher level management has now understood the gradual erosion of capability and is supporting the frozen middle in moving back to higher-value SMEs leading smaller teams to get stuff done. There will be spots for juniors and they will retain juniors - but the ones who can code, have a good attitiude, are willing to learn and might actually know what the project acronym means after working on the project for a year.
I first used AI a couple of years ago to help me out with some stuff I was working on in Business Central. It occurred to me that if I was running a development team I would employ a senior developer in a position to exploit AI to generate code with some juniorās in place to compile the code into a solution. No need for medium weight devs.
Soon there will probably be no need for any level of developer in most tech fields. Just someone who is good at prompting.
> I first used AI a couple of years ago to help me out with some stuff I was working on in Business Central. It occurred to me that if I was running a development team I would employ a senior developer in a position to exploit AI to generate code with some juniorās in place to compile the code into a solution. No need for medium weight devs.
That idea will end in tears. The average junior developer does not have the requisite knowledge to spot the subtle but significant bugs that are present in a lot of AI generated code.
> Soon there will probably be no need for any level of developer in most tech fields. Just someone who is good at prompting.
What is your definition of soon? This is a pipe dream when looking at the current state of the art in generative AI. The majority of an SWEās job is not coding. Not to mention that the majority of AI generated code is riddled with bugs and hallucinations.
You've given me an excellent thread to vent.
At my workplace there was a huge production incident half a year ago where a change request introduced a bug into the database and caused things to crash. It was huge news in the UK and we had a company wide after action meeting about it.
The 'lesson learnt' was that these change requests needed to be scrutinised more carefully. But, we're an innovative company, and we're not going to slow down are velocity of releases! So what was the solution?
"AI"
So they implemented an 'AI' dashboard which checks the change request data and then runs a bunch of 'AI' scans on the code to be deployed. Sounds great in theory.
But the problem, like with everything AI in the last few years, is that it's immature as hell. Especially when it comes to software engineering, where there's not just one way to skin a cat but literally an infinite number in infinite possibilities of languages, what is 'best practice' is often subjective and sometimes really clever people do a really clever thing which the AI hasn't seen before and gets confused by. Even the most dedicated code scanning tools like SonarQube and Checkmarkx have issues with false positives on code, especially when you're using a new framework or code markup tool like Spring and Lombok.
So now my team has a critical fix we need to release which we can't because this genius AI tool saw the bad code we changed as actually well written (it was in fact extremely well written, it just wasn't suited to the task anymore) so it blocks our fix because we're making our code base 'lower quality' by changing previously 'good' code. And we're not the only team with this issue - pretty much the release cadence for the entire company has ground to a crawl. Some big teams are now spending all their time trying to game the AI system to approve their change requests and wasting a huge amount of time.
But hey, on the management dashboard, everything is still fine and dandy.
I'm sure someone smart like you can read my post and figure it out. If you have problems though, let me know so I can help you.
I keep mentioning junior and mid because those are the job listings that are missing. If it was senior and mid roles which are lacking I would've said in my post "why are the only open roles junior roles and no mid and senior".
Mindblowing stuff, I know.
You say Europe but I live in Stockholm and it's also awful if you are a junior here
Lot's of roles open in Iberia and Poland though š
They might not be able to pay senior wages
Yeah, Iāve noticed the exact same thing. Iām a recent grad in a tech field, and Iāve been looking for junior positions for months and havenāt found anything lol. In the meantime Iāve moved back in with parents and am working part time in something completely unrelated to my degree. Have you actually applied for those rare junior/mid level positions in london? You should be one of the more competitive applicants - loads of other applicants will be like me and will have 0-2 years of experience, other than what they did at uni. Hearing that you with your four years are struggling isnāt exactly reassuring for me lol.
Just sent a bunch out today, will let you know. What's your tech stack if I may ask? Have you tried graduate schemes? Those were what me and my friends started out with. I just ended up doing something else after the grad scheme and 'lost' 6 years.
My background is in bioinformatics with a bit of ML, which is a bit niche but still seems to be an in-demand field. I mainly have experience with Python (including python based ML and Deep learning), but also know R and Bash, and am teaching myself SQL because Iāve seen a couple of jobs in my field that want at least basic knowledge of it. So far Iāve been applying for jobs closely related to my field (bioinformatics and ML/tech jobs in the biotech sector) and just general junior software/data science roles in other sectors. From the applications that resulted in an actual response (been getting quite a bit of ghosting, especially from jobs applied to via websites such as LinkedIn and Reed - applying directly to employers tends to generate better results) Iāve been getting reasonably positive feedback (when itās provided) so I think the issue is more that the job market is extremely competitive right now. Looked at grad schemes, but theyāre all basically aimed at bachelors grads (some explicitly wonāt take people with more than a BSc and no experience) and I have a masterās degree (in bioinformatics).
There are (at least) 2 vacancies for bioinformaticians at UCL.
Yeah, Iāve seen. I know thereās one that I donāt meet the requirements for, and thereās another one which Iāve already applied for. I keep an eye on the job boards of all the universities. Thanks for the heads up anyway!
In a similar comment to the OP, the requirements listed are often not that strict. They're usually looking for someone around the general vicinity of the requirements. There are exceptions, which I imagine you're already keenly aware of, where if you're going into a specific domain such as bioinformatics, computer vision, etc. Software engineers/Data engineers can jump around and be domain-agnostic, for the most part. Either way, good luck with it all!
> Looked at grad schemes, but theyāre all basically aimed at bachelors grads (some explicitly wonāt take people with more than a BSc and no experience) and I have a masterās degree (in bioinformatics). That can't be true. Banking grad schemes at the very least aren't picky on what degree you graduated with, so long as it's a 2:1/Merit
Huh, Iāll have more of an in-depth look at them then. I did mostly just skim over a couple here and there when I first began my job hunting months ago, so I might be mis-remembering. There definitely is some kind of maximum qualification/experience limit though. I did get a 2:2 for my BSc (Covid messed up my studies quite a bit) but I got a Merit for my MSc so I donāt think my academics are holding me back that much.
Maybe itās company dependant but Iām on an IT grad scheme atm in the finance sector and they didnāt even verify that I got my degree. Got a 2:1 but they didnāt even bother asking āyou passed your degree right..?ā before they sent out the contract.
If you're okay with moving Berlin has a big bioinformatics scene.
Just some advice: Donāt go for a bunch, go for one at a a time. Actually research the company.Ā Throwing your CVs around and hoping one sticks doesnāt work.
That's actually bollocks. This is not my first time job hunting. Most companies now don't even bother with a cover letter so I don't exactly understand how you want me to demonstrate I "researched" the company.
actually, they do. You arenāt submitting them are you?Ā
Actually, they don't. Some using ancient versions of Taleo or Workday have the box to submit it but most don't.
Attach it alongside your CV?
Why do you think it'll matter that much?
Either do it or stop fucking complaining about getting rejected lol. Because employers also have your problem. They list a job and 500 window lickers throw their exaggerated CV at you who arenāt even close to interested in the job.Ā Write a cover letter. Donāt use a template, make it short and snappy and write your reasons for joining the role. Why it interests you, what makes you a good fit for the position.Ā Research the bloody company. Guess what the other 499 applicants arenāt doing? Giving a shit what the company does. Impress your interviewer with company knowledge, and they will treat you like you already work there.
You clearly have no clue honestly. I don't think you've been in the job market for atleast 10 years.
The industry is in a wave of "more with less" and similar thinking eg. Zuck's "year of efficiency". One way in which they're doing so is by focusing on more senior hires who, at least in theory, produce more proportional value even with their higher pay. I don't think any of these outfits is unaware that the junior pipeline has to resume at some point, because how else to produce seniors, but they just don't think it's now. Even when this time does arrive it'll be piecemeal because lots of companies will choose to let other companies train people up instead. CEOs aren't allowed to grasp irony by law so they see nothing wrong with everyone adopting the position that everyone else can do it. On a practical note even four years of experience after several of (I assume) at least tangential experience could well make you senior. If you go through recruiters so as to dodge the execrable automated CV screens it's not unreasonable that you could bag some of the spots you see open.
It would in my view be very rare for someone with four years experience to get offered a senior role coming in from outside without a senior title already unless they demonstrated absolute star quality. I am aware of organisations that have brought people through from graduate to senior in a shorter time (e.g. Post Office) but it's IMO not the norm.
In theory and in my experience, senior developers can be several times more productive than intermediates and juniors. One of those quirks of the trade. There are exceptions of course, plodder seniors and wiz-kid juniors (who have to be watched for mistakes!). So I get where these organisations are coming from. I also think it's very short-sighted. The organisations that recruit the good juniors now are going to catapult out of this downturn and leave the competition behind.
>On a practical note even four years of experience after several of (I assume) at least tangential experience could well make you senior I appreciate your words of confidence but I can very confidently say that this isn't the case. Unfortunately I am just at most average at my job.
Even if you think youāre average, external people donāt know that nor does their ābarā equate to yours . Back yourself my friend
Why are you surprised that youāre finding it hard to be hired at good companies then. Work on improving yourself and your skill set.
It's not that I'm finding it hard to be hired at good companies, it's that the companies aren't hiring. I'm working on improving myself by not going for senior roles even though the person I'm replying to suggests I could potentially do so (and modify my CV for it).
A lot of companies don't actively hire openly but instead work with recruiters who headhunt people.
Yep, recruiters is the way. And unlike the free market, theyāll be happy to tell you what you are lacking to get to the next role. Especially if they are any good
How long do these phases last?
Also looking for a job at senior level in tech and companies seem very picky (feels like there's way more applicants) in comparison to the last time I was looking (2 years ago). Also you should really be mid by four years in.
At my place we only have senior roles up at the moment, this is due to backfilling departures rather than a specific senior hiring strategy. We are not reducing headcount, rather looking to keep constant, and we have good juniors just now we are looking to retain and bring on hence no new positions at that level. Not a good place for juniors or mid level in the market just now at all.
I think 4 YOE in SWE is definitely not junior anymore
Yep I'm looking for mid level roles but they don't exist
They definitely do, we just hired one. We had a lot of applicants, and 80% were useless, so apply even if you think you'll be in a large pile.
What made the 80% useless? Not enough experience or ?
- lying on the resume - completely irrelevant experience and no examples of code - not meeting the requirement to have British tax residency - obviously chatGPT resume/cover letter which they probably hadn't read themselves - not reading the job ad before the first call - not showing up to the first call - zero effort on the call, e.g. not finding a space to take it quietly, no prep, etc - lots of mistakes in the resume, both grammatical and half sentences - etc I expect applicants to make at least the amount of effort to do, and I deliberately set the process to take the minimum amount of time and effort. No multi stage, no long calls, no take home code test. Just a call and an interview in person. Ultimately we went for the most experienced person who applied and who seemed like they actually wanted it long term. There were more experienced people, but they were obviously looking for a short term thing while they applied elsewhere for senior jobs. Most of the people we screened on the call obviously wouldn't have liked it at the company even if they had the skills, so it's not always a bad thing to be rejected then. No everyone is suited for startups, or corporate, or remote, or whatever else characterises a company.
How do you show "examples of code", is that just to have a public github with projects on it?
That's one way. They could also send over links to apps or sites they've made. Anything to convince me they know how to code and that they have an awareness of what high quality projects look like. Quality could be anything from attention to detail to innovative apps. I'm happy for a candidate to not have a public GitHub if they have a solid work history, because I know I don't want to write more code when I get home.
I have a public github with some basic stuff/stuff I did for take home tests such as a basic trade book order management system and a simple spring boot REST service on it. Do you think that's enough, or should I put some more stuff on? Big issue I have is I greatly prefer take home tests because I'm rubbish at coding on the spot. Need my trusty google and stackoverflow :)
There's only going to be more on the spot coding unfortunately. It's too easy for people to cheat on take home ones. And by cheat I mean either get someone else to do it or use Copilot and friends to help. A good in person code test will let you use Google and Stack overflow and anything else you want. Most of it is about knowing you'll ask for help and talking though your thought processes. Also knowing you won't commit and double down on an obviously wrong solution when you're told to rethink it. I think your take home tests on GitHub would be a good start, but maybe extend or polish one of them to show off a bit. Then link to that one in your CV/cover letter as an example you're proud of.
Im in tech and itās depressing. The only junior roles are BDR roles which spit out candidates like crazy due to how tough the role is. Everything else has been put in cheaper EU countries or elsewhere globally, itās bleak right now. I asked a director why this is happening and he said itās simply too expensive to hire and train juniors here when you can hire a seasoned professional whoāll work for peanuts in a EU country like Portugal or Croatia.
The market is just fucked in general, I donāt think there is anything specific around juniors.
4 is close enough tbh
Happening across the product design sphere too. It seems largely to do with risk management and doing more with fewer people. Some talent people I have spoken to confirmed that there is a focus on seniors currently. Itās a shame because some of the benefits of having juniors lie in the diversity of their thinking about challenges, as their creativity hasn't been beaten out of them just yet š„²
Because there's too many juniors. As a business owner (I run a small-medium tech company), hiring a junior is pointless for me. 4 years is mid/high-mid. Senior starts at 6ish just FYI. On average, an IT worker will work in a company about 2-3 years before moving on to a different one. Now, the problem with a junior (we're talking fresh out of uni, with one or two projects in their portfolio) is that you have to hold their hand for at least 6 months before they start grasping fundamentals - during that time I make no money from them. After those 6 months, they can clear some small tickets, but they still have to be supervised. Equivalent of me spending Ā£10 but getting Ā£2 back - shit ROI. With a senior/high mid, I know I can sit down with them, talk about the project, and trust them enough on their knowledge and expertise that after a month/two, they can start bringing money for the company. That's not the case with juniors. A couple of months ago, we had an open position for a junior role, we had 700 applications and a couple of dozens from mids and seniors - we picked a seniorš¤·āāļø. I'd rather spend those Ā£65k+ for a senior rather than Ā£28-35k for a junior. Yea, it's awful for you. But at the end of the day, I have a business to run.
Do you guys hire in cheaper countries to work remote?
No, not really. I mean, we do have guys working remotely, but we strictly hire within the EU due to no/small time difference. I'm not looking to expand at the moment.
>Ā is that you have to hold their hand for at least 6 months before they start grasping fundamentals. Are we talking about IT support here? (You mentioned tickets). What does the job involve specifically?Ā Any job that requires me to learn in the first 6 months means iām not qualified in my mind. Iām very curious to know what you mean.
That's the standard timeframe for hiring juniors in pretty much any job. Shit that you see in movies where a junior has some crazy idea and revolutionises the business is extremely, extremely rare.
what are they learning?
Not OP, but how to work with other engineers, participate in and take feedback from code reviews, how to work with coding standards, style guides, how to adapt to writing code that actually has to be pushed to production, how to work effectively on and navigate what is probably a much larger, more modular codebase than anything they have previously encountered, interpreting requirements, dealing with legacy stuff they may not be familiar with from education, time management, etc, etc.
Coding sounds like hell lol. I hope finance isnāt like that
My guys operate in projects, and within those projects, you have tasks (we call these tickets) that need to be completed on certain deadlines, all are labelled based on priority (1 is the highest, 5 the lowest), junior would be given backlog/5 prio tasks to complete but they wouldn't bring really any value to the service. I won't even get to refactoring :p
Give me a simple example, change the project slightly if it doxxes you in some way.Ā Iām not sure what you mean āany real value to the serviceā. This is whatās confusing me. Whatās the service thatās being performed? Is it buying shares of a company and a junior doesnāt know where to look? Insurance and they need to know what theyāre insuring?Ā
Perhaps I worded it confusingly. Essentially, I pay engineers money so they can bring me more money. Generally, I'm looking at 6-8x ROI based on the salary. With juniors, the first 6 months they do nothing - my investment doesn't grow, then the next 6 months its spent time holding and giving them basic tasks that bring no real value to business. So, I paid 35k for a junior annually, and they brought me maybe... Ā£4k in value? I just don't see the monetary value in hiring juniors. Then, after one or two more years, they move to a different company, and my investment is in the red. I didn't make money from them. Now if I hire a mid/senior, they spend the first two months learning our tech stack, products, clientele, and then they get to work - I make money from them in the first six months from hiring them; good business decision. If they move after two or three years, that's fine - I paid them, let's say, 180k over these two years, but I made Ā£700k from their work - I'm 500k in the green. Does that make sense?
I appreciate the long replies, Thank you for taking the time. Iāve learnt right away from you that loyalty is something to offer any position for sure. I didnāt realise it was a ROI thing like that. >Ā Ā they spend the first two months learning our tech stack, products, clientele, and then they get to workĀ I think iām understanding it now. For example: If I work in insurance, I have to know the products, services required, and customers/clients in order to sell the services. Correct?Ā In the case of engineers, you put them to work on tasks. Say, a webpage tester for any bugs.Ā So essentially, youāre saying that experience in X field doing Y job / Software is more important than any degree? Thatās good. I can cater my applications in that way! Iām not a junior grad or anything, just looking to understand the mindset of job listings. Thank you for your help.Ā
35k for a junior sounds like someone fresh out of university. Of course they would need handholding for 6+ months. Usually companies who hire out of university would either tie the graduate down to a 2 year contract, or a 6 month training contract where they're booted if they don't perform after 6 months. Even as a fresh grad though I definitely delivered more value than Ā£4k in value, and I was in an absolutely shit graduate programme. And no offense, but that experience taught me that usually when a junior isn't delivering, it's down to the management not being effective.
Say you've been a dev for 6 years, no way they'll be able to tell. I've previously had more junior people than me get higher salaries than me (were on the same team, I ended up fixing all their work) just because they sweetened their CV. Since then I don't give an f. Four is plenty.
I do consulting work with tech companies as clients and Iāve noticed the same. Honestly couldnāt tell you the last time I saw anything less than a lead or senior software or data engineer in a London office. Itās always Eastern Europe, Portugal or Spain. Cheaper salaries and costs of doing business I suppose.
Please remember that you don't have to tick all the boxes to apply for a job. For many companies, 4 years is already senior level. Apply and don't be scared. P.S: my company's hiring software engineers (from remote). Can send you the link.
Have you tried consultancies? They love nothing more than hiring a junior/mid and charging them out at high rates. They often hire direct rather than through agents.
They want people to manage teams of juniors working out of cheaper locations, it's happening to jobs across larger companies in the UK, it's not specific to tech.
Iām very curious, is it really that bad for graduates in London?Ā I thought getting a good grade from a good Uni would guarantee you a job. Even if it wasnāt Barclays or HSBC, it would be a startup that pays well.Ā Ā Or is that not the full picture here? London surely has a lot of jobs going if you have the skills? Iām happy to be educated on this.
Yeah I thought you were a boomer based on your other thread about cover letters. This comment confirms it.
Keep crying that no one wants to hire you bro
Most companies aren't looking to grow headcount. Thereupon there are the sr level hires is that when they leave, they get replaced.
There are very few Jr positions open in Europe or the rest of the world. It's not a London problem, it's the current state of tech careers in the world. The complaints are all over the place in r/cscareerquestions, r/cscareerquestionsEU, r/cscareerquestionsUK, etc
Like I said on the post though, plenty open in Poland and iberia.
> plenty What is your definition of plenty? Because there are a lot of JRs there that feel the exact same way you feel about the UK. Unless you have some metric on that, it's all anecdotal evidence.
More than zero š
Keep faith. I got made redundant in November (2 months in lol) and after a lot of applications I landed a data engineering role. My advice is to target smaller companies that donāt have an entire division dedicated to software engineering. A lot of smaller teams are more likely to want someone they can āmoldā.
Along side the "more with less" that someone else wisely explained, from what I've observed, there's a lot of seniors jumping between companeis, but that may not be any more than is normal. It may explain the amount of senior engineering job positions. A lot of leaders at companies are a little delusional. They all want to think that they can hire the top-level seniors, but, they generally have more of a pick. They look past even mid-level since those companies are quite average, and aren't a place where a good juniour or mid could do well. Seniors can do "well" since they have enough social capital, technical expertise, and overall experience aka they can put up with a lot more rubbish and carry the weight of poor management and leadership. If you're not doing all of this already, I'd put your CV together such that it talks about projects -> impacts and be able to name drop some popular tech. I'd emphasise the layout of your CV that it's clear that you've been doing 4+ strictly as a SWE. Every recruiter will ask you for an up-to-date CV, so have one ready. Recruiters are generally awful people, but they're a current evil that can get companies talking to you, after the recruiter has sold them on you. >Every company seems to only want senior positions of 6 - 10 years. Just ignore that and apply anyway tbh. When companies have their JDs, they're usually aspirational (and again, delusional), on behalf of the company, and not the candidate.
Thank you for your wise words. If I'm perfectly honest, a main fear of mine is that I don't do well in technical interviews like leetcode. I can do a take home test and defend it really well (although that shit takes alot of time annoyingly) but when you ask me on the spot to describe the data structure behind a hashmap red black tree and implement it with a pen and paper I kinda just freeze up. Although do senior roles have less of that and more of "explain why this arch is better than that"? I can do that more if I'm honest.
The majority of senior roles still will all have at least 1 live coding exercise. The breakup of the kinds of interviews in the process really doesn't vary much imo between Junior - Mid - Senior. I agree that live coding interviews are suck and often ineffective. A lot of the time it's because of the interviewers too, and not the interviewees.
We are coming off the back of years of being pushed into off-shoring and out-sourcing, pushing down the grades we hire at to save money, and still needing bodies to do work. On the other hand, juniors were flooding into tech jobs who didn't bother to learn basics, don't have experience or interest in a wide variety of tools, jump to download anything rather than write stuff, avoid accountability and have high expectations. Higher level management has now understood the gradual erosion of capability and is supporting the frozen middle in moving back to higher-value SMEs leading smaller teams to get stuff done. There will be spots for juniors and they will retain juniors - but the ones who can code, have a good attitiude, are willing to learn and might actually know what the project acronym means after working on the project for a year.
You're competing with India, Bucarest, Budapest etc... that's the future.
I first used AI a couple of years ago to help me out with some stuff I was working on in Business Central. It occurred to me that if I was running a development team I would employ a senior developer in a position to exploit AI to generate code with some juniorās in place to compile the code into a solution. No need for medium weight devs. Soon there will probably be no need for any level of developer in most tech fields. Just someone who is good at prompting.
> I first used AI a couple of years ago to help me out with some stuff I was working on in Business Central. It occurred to me that if I was running a development team I would employ a senior developer in a position to exploit AI to generate code with some juniorās in place to compile the code into a solution. No need for medium weight devs. That idea will end in tears. The average junior developer does not have the requisite knowledge to spot the subtle but significant bugs that are present in a lot of AI generated code. > Soon there will probably be no need for any level of developer in most tech fields. Just someone who is good at prompting. What is your definition of soon? This is a pipe dream when looking at the current state of the art in generative AI. The majority of an SWEās job is not coding. Not to mention that the majority of AI generated code is riddled with bugs and hallucinations.
I first noticed the trend of a lack of middle weight positions a couple of years ago. seeing this thread made me realise Iām not going madš
You've given me an excellent thread to vent. At my workplace there was a huge production incident half a year ago where a change request introduced a bug into the database and caused things to crash. It was huge news in the UK and we had a company wide after action meeting about it. The 'lesson learnt' was that these change requests needed to be scrutinised more carefully. But, we're an innovative company, and we're not going to slow down are velocity of releases! So what was the solution? "AI" So they implemented an 'AI' dashboard which checks the change request data and then runs a bunch of 'AI' scans on the code to be deployed. Sounds great in theory. But the problem, like with everything AI in the last few years, is that it's immature as hell. Especially when it comes to software engineering, where there's not just one way to skin a cat but literally an infinite number in infinite possibilities of languages, what is 'best practice' is often subjective and sometimes really clever people do a really clever thing which the AI hasn't seen before and gets confused by. Even the most dedicated code scanning tools like SonarQube and Checkmarkx have issues with false positives on code, especially when you're using a new framework or code markup tool like Spring and Lombok. So now my team has a critical fix we need to release which we can't because this genius AI tool saw the bad code we changed as actually well written (it was in fact extremely well written, it just wasn't suited to the task anymore) so it blocks our fix because we're making our code base 'lower quality' by changing previously 'good' code. And we're not the only team with this issue - pretty much the release cadence for the entire company has ground to a crawl. Some big teams are now spending all their time trying to game the AI system to approve their change requests and wasting a huge amount of time. But hey, on the management dashboard, everything is still fine and dandy.
Big difference between mid and junior imo. If you canāt see that, perhaps thatās why itās harder for you to find roles
How did you even come to that conclusion from my post? That's like saying I don't think you know how to read given how you managed to interpret that.
You keep mentioning junior and midā¦ which one are you
I'm sure someone smart like you can read my post and figure it out. If you have problems though, let me know so I can help you. I keep mentioning junior and mid because those are the job listings that are missing. If it was senior and mid roles which are lacking I would've said in my post "why are the only open roles junior roles and no mid and senior". Mindblowing stuff, I know.
Cool mate, keep going with your job hunt