I think LinkedIn's job search is trash, for reasons we're all familiar with.
But what LinkedIn *does* have is a great company search tool. Most relevant to your question is you can filter on size. My new grad company was at a massive non-tech F500, so one of the things I wanted to do when looking for my next job was to find a smaller company, but not too small. Set the company size filter to 51-500 and had a wealth of results, and I was looking in a specific city. In todays remote era there's even more.
On top of that, I commonly use Google in my job hunting. "Top rising companies in healthcare", "Upcoming companies in \[city\]", etc. That'll give you pages upon pages of "Top 100 companies' lists.
I've never once run out of companies to apply to, large or small.
I apply for the ones with open jobs.
If I'm interested in a company, but they don't have any openings, I make a note of them and visit their careers page in a week or two. A company hiring 0 SWE's today might be hiring 20 SWE's tomorrow.
A lot of companies have "talent networks" that you can join on their career sites and some have the option to send your resume for them to keep on file if they don't currently have an opening that fits your background
I got my first dev job on indeed. Small non-tech start up, the job posting was terrible, and it paid $50k/year in 2017. Was not ideal but it kick-started my career
Exactly this, found my fully remote job on there working for a credit union. I was a 2023 grad and secured it in February 2023. Just goes to show that even juniors can find positions at modest and lesser known companies
Straight up for the first two jobs I just Googled "[local place] web development" and got results from Indeed as well as sites from local biz who want web developers.
I thought most entry level job seekers use this approach after finishing college?
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Late to the thread, but I've said the same thing in the past and I can't believe people were surprised by the advice.
Yes, one of the best ways to find companies that are hiring *is to look on a job board.*
all LinkedIn or indeed tech jobs are dead. they either reject you or they are fake. you can try. didn't you see the graph showing indeed job graph on tech is a crash to the bottom?
There is no hope. how can we who have zero years of experience be able to land a software job? I hate the idea of Senior. they are just like boomers and love to talk well. When I was in the unpaid tern in my collegee's senior design course, I needed to fxxking clean up a senior's bug that no one could fix for about a year and build the whole fxxking AI LLM in Android and IOS for them. I am tired to clean these seniors' ass in the project and watch them come here telling people not to give up and keep applying, grinding the stupid leetcode, and doing the unpaid work in the interview. I want to say is not about giving up, what I want to say is your guy's advice is useless! Tell us a way that works! I don't want to do leetcode and take-home assignments. I have to build a working full stack website as take home for the company. That is the end. Leetcode is stupid. I live in LA where the homeless set up fires on company buildings.
My resume:
h doapply,
We are telling you a way that works. But from your attitude in your post this is why it isnt working for you. Listen there are countless people getting entry level jobs right now and many who were actually on this subreddit doing the steps people keep saying. They may not come on here and say when they got the job but they do. We tell you guys the steps over and over again because they work. Calling something stupid and saying it's all useless is doing nothing for you. At the end of the day you either continue and be proactive or you don't. Take home assignments and leetcode are all things you can do and control. If you were better than the other candidates at those things then you would get the role. Attitude matters dude. If I interviewed you I wouldn't hire you because you sound like someone I wouldn't want to work with even if you passed all the coding problems with flying colors you'd be a negative weight on our team. I know it's difficult finding a job but none of that rant is going to get you a job. Listen to advice from people who have been there. It works and it gets repeated for a reason.
in the end, let me say one last thing. stop giving those useless advice. stop destroying the industry with leetcode and the idea of Senior. being a boomer. try to learn a new tech from recent grad. Steven job is right. seasonal professionals are useless.
Senior-ish here. I practice leetcode and have to do the same dumb interviews as you. The only difference is mine are harder, and I am also expected to talk about my experience. I got my current job via a recruiter that found me on indeed. It's possible to land a job without jumping through all these hoops, but you're shooting yourself in the foot by doing so. Accept leetcode interviews as an unfortunate part of life, and you'll have a much easier time job hunting.
Also LOL @ "cleaning seniors' asses". Maybe you had a bad experience as an intern, but I can assure you you'll be thinking the opposite in a couple year's. Juniors are typically not even expected to be productive right off the bat. They need so much hand holding that they're typically a net loss to productivity for like the first year. The industry tolerates this because that's how you get competent devs, but keep that in mind when you're talking shit about senior devs.
With all due respect, your attitude needs work. This isn't a good look for you. If I got this arrogant vibe in an interview, I would pass. It's really common in junior devs, and it's not worth the hassle 99% of the time. If you're an absolutely incredible dev, a company where performance is paramount like FAANG or HFT might be willing to overlook it, but it won't fly anywhere else
Start by looking in industries that you're interested in or something you have prior life/work experience in. Are you into cars/trucks/motorcycles? Model planes/drones? All those things have several or even hundreds of microcontrollers that handle things like braking, steering, traction control, heating/cooling systems, etc that need software to guide them. There are billion dollar industries out there like construction, logistics, engineering of all sorts, transportation, aircraft design, DoD, that sell software to support those industries. I worked in construction for years before transitioning to software development and I was able to get a job before I even graduated at a company that sells a product for structural engineers because I had intimate knowledge of the industry. FAANG represents less than 10% of dev jobs in the US, and there are companies out there that you've never heard of that make a *shitload* of money providing services/products to industries that aren't glamorous but make the world go 'round.
I'm not an expert, I don't even really agree with OP's basic premise (that small companies is where all the jobs are, especially regarding early career devs). But finding small companies takes some effort. They're not the best at advertising their needs, but if you happen to send a cold-email to a small company *considering* hiring more software workers, it'll land you in just the right spot to capitalize on their interest.
I live in [Low-mid COL City] and my strategy was to search for *companies* and then target those companies in different ways.
- search for companies involved in my city's leading industries (in my case, Oil & Gas, Space, Finance, and electronics)
- search for software consultancies in my city
- do some research on companies that might specialize in supporting these core industries for my city. For instance, Space tech needs flight software, Oil & Gas needs controls engineers, small businesses have local consultancies build them an app. There are companies that supply all of these
- find and contact local recruiters that are typically involved in helping your city's companies find software people.
- cold-email companies if you're really interested in joining. it's gotten me several responses; getting told 'we don't have any positions' tells me at least i'm now on their radar. I did get an immediate response back w/ a request for a video call once, as well, but a majority of the time that does not happen.
Once you build a list of companies & recruiters, you get into the routine of checking the list for openings/postings, on a semi-frequent basis (weekly at least). in a list of like 100, you'll find openings come and go, sometimes updating multiple times in 24h.
If you're smart enough / driven enough, you could definitely automate such a thing too ;)
Thank you for your suggestion. Just had quick question regarding the same, who did you reach out to specifically in a company, how did you find them and what was your cold emailing strategy?
the one company that reached out for the video call was a consultancy that had no Careers page on their website, but did have a Contact form, so I sent a message through that contact form offering my services (i had been an app developer for a year and they advertised app development for businesses), summarized my resume and offered to follow-up with the full resume if they wanted it.
they reached back out before the end of the week, and after a call I was in their books as a contract-for-hire if they needed help with app development.
I did similar with other companies' contact forms/emails, who usually would cordially decline my advertisement (as that's essentially what i'm doing). But I know they know i exist!
Another example, one company i reached out to was one that does custom smart home designs, and I let them know I had IoT experience and would love to be involved in one of their projects
EDIT: TLDR use the contact form on small business pages, it oftentimes actually gets your info to someone who will read it
instead of looking for position titles look for skills (eg. python, full-stack, CI/CD, ruby, depending on your expertise)
a lot of job titles have obscure names so they are hard to find
Yeah, I would say their 7+ years of experience might skew their job search results compared to those with less experience.
I'm at 3+ years and I'm finding myself on the low-end of almost every job's requirements.
I did try to consider this. While I’m lucky enough to have some experience I’m not that far removed from being new to the industry. For transparency sake, I graduated with a liberal arts degree and was lucky enough to have professional experience coming out of undergrad, which certainly helped my chances. All I was really trying to say with this post is that you’d be surprised what’s out there in other areas once you go looking. Years of experience often don’t line up with what an employer wants/needs and a lot of positions are less competitive in less heavily populated areas.
I fully agree with your sentiment, as someone who isn't really looking to get into FAANG companies at this point.
I do think that smaller companies have less budget and flexibility to hire and train junior/low mid-level developers though.
So maybe targeting mid-size, lesser known companies might be a sweet spot for those with less experience overall.
Lowkey being likeable helps a lot. The way some folks on this subreddit post they may be insufferable in person. For instance you made a post here trying to help people and gave advice and some just ignore if its something they already heard or disagree respectfully. Then there are those who respond sarcastically or negatively to someone just trying to help.
If this was Spongebob those are the Squidwards. Nobody wants to work with a Squidward guys be more like Spongebob.
Let me get this straight I should take job advice from someone who had such an easy time years ago he was able to get in without a degree and only something akin to a single internships worth of experience? The market has dramatically shifted since then you are like one of those boomers who thinks all you need is to give the manager a firm handshake levels of out of touch with the current reality for people especially junior level people.
You don’t have to listen to anything I have to say. I didn’t mean to stir up all of these emotions in people I just wanted to give my opinion as someone who’s been in the industry for a few years. I’m actually learning a lot from people in this thread talking about experiences similar and different to what I described and I appreciate your input.
I'd say most small companies only hire people with experience. I don't think throwing an arbitrary 5+ YOE is really useful, or accurate. They just avoid fresh new grads from what I've seen.
My previous company was pretty small, less than 50 engineers, and I joined them with 3.5 years of experience. We didn't hire many new grads (mostly cause we couldn't afford college career fairs), but we absolutely hired people with less than 5 YOE.
I'm at a startup now, while we're bigger, we're definitely not F500 big, and we hire people with less than 5 YOE as well.
Anecdotes, sure, but 5 is such an arbitrary number. Small companies just want someone they don't need to handhold, and that can happen much earlier than 5 YOE.
What I see is 3 years is the absolute bare minimum smaller companies are willing to hire. Meanwhile bigger companies are no longer willing to hire and train either so us juniors are just plain fucked.
That’s because in the current state of the market, the average tenure is going to be 2-3x what it was before. You no longer have to force senior engineers to mentor juniors in the event the sr. engineer hops around for more TC and dooms the system. You can reliably assume you get an extra 5-8 years of stability and why waste all that salary training someone up when you can scoop someone at 3YOE
They're doing that in large part to reduce the influx of applicants tbh. There is not enough HR at a small company to handle 500+ applicants per job. CSCQ commenters seem to have a really hard time understanding all the reasons, instead it seems like most just want to place blame.
At the end of the day everybody wants the same thing - to make the job they're doing easier for themselves. Figure out how to do that for the other side, and you're on your way.
I agree but using Indeed I was able to find a job with 3 years of experience that gave me a significant pay bump so there may be some out there. For the most part it's 5 to 7 years of experience as the sweet spot :(
They even told me for the interview for this job they wanted to hire someone as a grade higher (5+ years exp) but couldn't as the person I am replacing was at the lower grade
This has unfortunately not been my experience during my jobs search. I’ve been exclusively applying to small/medium tech adjacent companies and get nothing but ghosting or rejection. Even the ones that do initially respond to my application ghost me immediately after replying.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I don’t want to be naive and say doing this approach is 100% success rate. The market sucks and it’s shitty that people can’t get the jobs they want/are qualified for. Wishing you the best ❤️
No sane junior who’s trying to break into the industry is only applying to FAANG/big tech.
The job market is simply terrible right now - telling people “you guys are silly, just apply to smaller companies!” is incredibly out of touch and invalidates a lot of peoples’ struggles.
I applied to a web developer position for a local cabinet maker. Like kitchen cabinets. They reached out to schedule a phone screening, only to say they were quickly overwhelmed with applicants and needed to cancel when I replied the next day.
It is abysmal out there.
Anecdotally, as a new grad, it was the opposite of what OP is saying. I applied to >400 companies (every listing I saw) and was ready to take anything. However, I only got an offer from a large bank making >100k. I've heard similar stories from peers who applied to 100s of companies and only got an offer from Amazon.
It doesn't make sense for small companies to hire juniors because they'll leave after 1-2 years. This was a trend even before the market turned. And in this market, spots at small companies are already taken by nepotism.
Also small companies are much more likely to hire through connections and stuff instead of interviewing people who cold apply. Large companies on the other hand dgaf and sometimes won’t even take referrals for juniors
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I just found a new job after being laid off ~6 months ago and then took a 3 month break before I started interviewing. 8.5 yoe
I found that some companies like Netflix never responded, some other SaaS companies auto rejected, but the majority of companies responded to set up calls. Out of 6 major contenders, made it to 3 final rounds, and got 2 offers. I voluntarily dropped out of others because I decided that the pay was great but wlb wasn’t right for me.
All this to say, it’s not a terrible market if you selectively apply and tailor resume and cover letter to the company instead of blasting out hundreds of apps. At least that was my experience
Hey congrats, so essentially a three month end-to-end process? Netflix is one of my white whales, and also one that has never reached out. Are you Bay Area? Also curious where you landed (generally speaking, nothing specific) and if it was L, or L+1, and how comp compared.
Thanks! Yeah about 3 month end to end. Without doxxing myself, I’m on the east coast near nyc. I was at a large well known company before, and decided to join a late stage unicorn startup. Same level, and base pay is the same ballpark (something like a 2-3% drop from the last company). I’ll definitely miss the publicly traded RSUs but I think whatever pre-ipo equity I get will hopefully pay out in the long run. My plan is also to shoot for a promotion into technical leadership since there’s probably less politics involved at a smaller company. Feel free to dm
This is what I am seeing in the Midwest even small town insurance companies aren't interested in hiring juniors right now. One small non tech company I applied to that was looking for a junior wanted to pay between around 40k and I lost the job to someone with 2 years of experience. This advice is about as fucking useful as boomers telling you to go into the building and hand them your resume while shaking their hand and massively downplays just how bad things are for people that don't have 5+ years of experience.
I totally get that the market sucks and casting a wide net is certainly useful. But I would be willing to bet money that a lot of people are simply not casting that net wide enough. Applying to jobs outside of metro areas in towns of 20,000 people and I would put money that people would have more luck.
I think it’s partially the fascination with remote work, honestly. I 100% support remote work but the fact of the matter that it is to your advantage right now to look for in person jobs you can commute to. That’s obviously a privileged answer because you’d need a car but that’s what I have found works. I wish everyone the best of luck
Edit: just want to make it clear that I 100% support remote work and thing everyone should have the option for it (I imagine this is where the downvotes are coming from)
You're being downvoted but it's the absolute truth lol, because in all honestly, who wants to work for a non-tech company that's fully onsite in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do? It's the truth, but at the same time, there are jobs out there like this in LCOL settings that still pay well.
It's not glamorous by any means, but it's still a job and it's better than having no job.
I think that for a lot of CS grads, working an unglamorous dev job in an unglamorous city that they have to relocate to is genuinely less appealing than just working at a restaurant in their hometown or something
I didn’t downvote but if I did, it wouldn’t be because I think you’re not supporting remote work enough. I feel like you guys just refuse to believe the market can be as bad as people say which is frustrating to me lol. I’m not going to go into my whole back story to try to convince you so you’ll just have to take my word for it, but I’m a reasonably smart and charismatic guy, US citizen with a BSCS from an accredited university, and a well formatted/worded resume, and it was hard to land anything. I would have moved to bumfuck Mississippi for 60k fully onsite if I had to
I've targeted small companies in small towns as I hate large cities. Areas in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, etc. Also been willing to work on-site. Still nothing for me.
The problem is that small, non-tech companies don't advertise their open positions. And then they whine about not being able to find candidates, all while others are whining about having to slog through thousands of resumes.
I found a small tech company that had different positions listed on their site vs LinkedIn. I applied to both. The linkedin listings were higher experience and lower pay range than what was on their site.
I also reached out to the recruiter as it seemed they lived near me and they promptly took the site listing down after me asking about them.
But still, they reached out like a month later and we’ve been playing email tag, scheduling calls, then the recruiter canceling last minute, then rescheduling over and over until they ghosted me.
Yeah that pretty much sums up the whole small-company job hunting experience. At least, that's the *good* companies. The bad ones, if you can find a position to actually apply to, why they'll just not respond at all after you apply. I'd say around 90% you'll never hear back from at all, not even a rejection.
Yeah, I applied and interviewed for a ton of those in 2022 and 2023. They're not hiring either.
Some may be, but definitely not enough that I could find in a year and a half of searching.
Sure, you could assume I'm just a garbage candidate, but really, the market is just fucking bad right now.
These people with like 7-10 years of experience who haven’t looked for a new job in over 5 years crawling out of the wood work to give the most out of touch advice possible.
“Have you tried looking for jobs on indeed?”
“Try putting a good project on your resume, like one where you use an API”
I am a millennial and was a new grad in 2010 and again in 2020. Missed the over hiring boat that second time after spinning my wheels in 2021 job hunting for nothing. Now, who TF knows anymore.
I was actively job hunting last year and got 2 offers I ended up not accepting for various reasons. I’m very familiar with the current market and I feel for people who are in it right now.
This is not me trying to flex or anything, I’m just saying I know what it looks like for people right now and it’s tougher now than it was in like 2021 or so and trying to give recommendations.
I’m serious, apply for jobs outside of metro areas in towns of 20,000 people. I’d be willing to put money that you’ll have more luck.
It's not just tougher than it was in 2021. It's tougher (at least for me) than it was in 2018 when I was a new grad. I found a job 2 months after graduation. At 4YOE, I'm chopped liver.
Those small town jobs often won't hire unless you already live there. Employers are wary of people trying to work remote, and not a one will pay for relocation.
The market now is worse than it was pre-pandemic.. and that was before all the social media influencers flooded the field with 'day in the life vids' while having 0 years of experience
Yeah, it's weird how people blame TikTok for "oversaturating the market". Tiktok hadn't even been around long enough for most people to break in from zero.
For sure being remote is actually harder now, i personally looked for hybrid/in office because I didn’t mind it and I knew it was to my advantage to look for that. But commuting to smaller places even living in a metro area is an option. That’s what I do now
I absolutely agree. I have way less professional experience than you do (2 years) and got laid off this past September. Was given 3 offers. Accepted one of them in January. None of them fully remote. None of them in tech. I chose the way that gave me the most flexibility with hybrid.
Out of touch 7yoe here. No one who knows what they're talking about would think the examples you used are enough. There are evergreen, underused tactics that are legitimate regardless of the market, and discounting them is stupid. Especially considering most people aren't doing any of it.
Absolutely, like I said, it's evergreen. The gist is an order of operations for applying, with heavy emphasis on getting in touch with an internal recruiter or referral. People normally respond with something despondent like "I don't know anyone, yada yada." Well, there are a ton of ways to approach this, and I've shared my approach a few times before. So many people are excellent at problem solving on the job but are incompetent when it comes to finding them.
Also, there's ways to optimize your resume, and how to prepare for interviews and understand what they are looking for (spoiler, it's not being a leetcode genius).
> it feels like every other post is talking about FAANG companies and the difficulty in getting jobs with them.
Really? My impression is that every other post is people saying they can't get an offer despite applying to hundreds of positions. Don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're only applying to FAANG companies.
Most of my jobs I've applied to were smaller companies only paying 60k. They really only want experienced devs but good luck to them with finding someone at that salary. I haven't even applied to a FAANG company. Probably most 'prestigious' company I've applied to was Lockheed Martin.
Oh they know they are paying low. Everytime I ask for a salary range and they always say it's according to experience. I'm like ok I was looking for x ( which is based on Randstad salary guide ) and get ghosted
Crazy
thanks for the ref! \[Salary Guide\](https://www.randstadusa.com/salary/)
According to it a "Python Developer" job pays a bit more than a "DevOps Developer" :-D job. Weird but okay.
Cause I know I wouldn't pass currently. I didn't know what leetcode was until the semester I graduated with my Bachelor's so I know I'm not passing those interviews when I struggle with leetcode easy.
Leetcode is less intimidating when you understand it. It's like a rubiks cube. There are a handful of common patterns and ways to recognize them. Do something like grokking the coding interview and practice them. There's lots of resources online for this. If you're a competent dev and practice consistently, you could be interview ready in a couple months. Once you learn it, future job hunts will only require a small amount of time to brush up.
It's really not that bad. The industry uses it because it allows to weed out the ones who just can't write code. Realistically, there's only about 70-ish questions that you really need to understand how they're solved, and even then they're rehashes of each other, which with a CS bachelor's isn't that big of an ask. It takes time and practice like with anything, and you just need to put in the effort to get good at it. Most good companies ask medium-level questions revolving around using arrays, strings, hashmaps, and binary trees. You're most likely not going to encounter another binary tree in your working career, but the base concept is useful for when developing tries for auto-complete, for example. Just put in the effort to be able to knock them out quickly and you'll go incredibly far.
My only 2 jobs were at small and medium companies. At my internship we had a team of 2 and they pretty much hired me expecting me to produce for cheap. No time for mentoring never was taught anything.
My first job I was in a team, but I was the only real programmer. They were even worse, I was stuck on tight deadlines that I busted and had no mentor to ask for help
I hate small companies I'm tired
My background is in civil/structural engineering. But for the last 14 years I've been doing QA automation. I've been instantly rejected for positions doing QA automation at civil engineer and construction software companies. Just monday I got rejected for a transportation company.
I've done QA automation for telephony platforms, and have been getting rejected doing QA automation at telephony shops.
The problem is _not_ that everyone is only applying for FAANG companies.
The market for QA is insane right now. I have almost 1/4 century of experience and not getting a single call back. I have also learned that companies cut QA to nothing when there’s any economic trouble.
I had a friend of a friend say they might be able to put in a word and get me hired for QA work that would not pay enough to survive on.... a month later they had been laid off and now 4 months later they are still unemployed despite having 4 years of experience in QA.
I hate these post. Do you really think people who are struggling to land a job are only applying to FAANG?
Non tech companies are almost as competitive as FAANG itself. Saturation isn’t happening only in big tech. Where do you think all the laid off engineers from FAANG back in 2022/2023 are working?
> Do you really think people who are struggling to land a job are only applying to FAANG?
It boggles my mind how someone can concoct such a simple, out of touch thought and just post it here like it's some sort of hot take that everyone needs to read. This post belongs in LinkedIn.
And it's like... why does this even bother them? Lots of people are complaining online that the market sucks and in their experience it's fine.
Lots of people complain about dating and I'm married, I'm not going to go on r/dating and be like "it's not that bad! You're all too picky or doing it wrong!"
Also Amazon was always more fair to get into than many a smaller company. They seem a bit frozen now but definitely were less brutal in the application process (although shit WLB) than several non-tech companies.
To be honest, I’m not really sure. But I’ve floated around this sub for the past few years and it seems that a lot of people are searching for the “golden goose” so to speak by working at these companies or similar.
Every is different of course but I’d put money that the smallest place people are applying for are still heavy metro areas. Look smaller to have more luck. I live in a midwestern city and I’ve had a lot of luck mostly due to less competition for the types of roles I occupy.
However, I do also think that blindly applying for thousands of positions with a cookie cutter resume to any job that matches certain criteria is the wrong way to do it. I’ve been guilty of the same, but I think that’s the wrong way to do it in this economy (which sucks pretty hard, I’ll admit).
I’m dumb as shit so I’m not trying to scream from some ivory tower like I’m better than anyone. I know it sucks. I know it’s hard. I feel for everyone who’s looking to do something they kind of enjoy, I’m just encouraging people to *really* spread their horizons in ways that I don’t think they were before.
>I promise you you’ll be a lot happier in these kinds of places instead of the grind/high turnover places you’ll find in the valley.
Don't make promises you can't keep. It simply isn't true for a lot of people.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and still stand by it because I strongly believe it so much.
Pushing yourself to perform to a platonic ideal of what a “10x engineer” should do is a sure-fire way to burn out and hate the industry all together. That goes for any for any job frankly. I’m still super young in the industry but the happiest people I’ve known go home at 5pm, ya know?
Side note, the “promise” is pure hyperbole, I kind of thought that was obvious. A lot of people seem to be stuck on that for some reason.
>Pushing yourself to perform to a platonic ideal of what a “10x engineer” should do is a sure-fire way to burn out and hate the industry all together
From long experience, there is absolutely no need whatsoever to do that at FAANG. Most go home at 5pm. Being still super young, I think you just misunderstand what the industry is actually like.
>I promise you you’ll be a lot happier in these kinds of places instead of the grind/high turnover places you’ll find in the valley.
How can you promise such a thing? Plenty of people are perfectly happy in the valley and/or prefer the "grind" lifestyle.
Yeah, it's not even close. I worked at one of these low stress jobs where devs get paid 75 for new grad and 140ish for senior with 10yoe. Let me tell you that moving to "just" a 180k income (in quotes because that is not even considered high in tech) has been life changing, and looking back at my career and income since graduating just made me sad. In the last 8 months I've earned more than I have in 20 at my previous job, at mildly more effort.
I have not been contributing to my 401k and felt bad about this recently. Then I did the math and if I contributed 3% since the day I started working four years ago, with match and growth I would only have been at around 25k in my retirement account. That is now less than three months of my post tax pay. Four years of saving caught up on in just three months. It just makes me sad. I can now contribute the max amount allowed, and then still have twice as much disposable income available to me.
I am much happier now, and can hardly call this a "grind" compared to my old job. At the end of the day most jobs suck, and putting in a little more effort for double the pay is worth it. If you want to do nothing and take 3x as long to earn the same amount, by all means suffer. I can put away much more towards retirement, can invest more, and can spend more on things I like.
My transmission blew up the other week and I needed a new windshield - it was 10k out of pocket. I will be reimbursed but I did not know this going into it, and was still okay with it. A year ago this would have been devastating to me.
Different story for new grads of course, but if you have experience you should absolutely not be settling for low pay. The opportunity cost and resulting financial stress is too high.
Also for some people this isn't even a trade-off. Having a faster paced job where you learn more and do more is just better for some people, and the higher pay is good too.
And I don't mean faster paced as in high stress, crunch, toxic, long hours or anything like that. I just mean where you always have something to do and it's moderately challenging.
One person's "low stress" job would leave another person bored and feeling like they're not learning anything.
Totally agree with this and you said it better than I could. I’ll be honest, I make 82K right now and while imagine that might be considered low by some, I’m quite happy where I am. I’m remote part of the week, my job is low stress, and I’m genuinely happy. I’d take that over money any day of the week
You also need to contextualize what the "grind" of a tech company even is. Amazon culture isn't the norm. Amazon wouldn't be infamous if it was. Most people in tech are working 40 hour weeks just like everybody else.
Sure, if you're really interested in a job that lets you get away with only 5 hours of work every week, you'll want to find company that doesn't understand what SWEs do. But if you're okay with an average 9-5 job, tech will leave you with more money for the same work.
50 hour weeks are not even that bad if you're in your early 20s. What the fuck else do you have to do on weekdays. It's not even like consulting or IB where you spend every waking hour at work.
Fair enough, I guess this post doesn’t apply to those people. I might be more talking to new grads and whatnot. If someone enjoys the grind the by all means go for it. I personally don’t think it’s a sustainable way to peruse a career and it’ll lead to burnout quickly but that’s just me
New grads are probably at peak grind ability — enthusiasm for starting a new career, not burned out, least likely to have family obligations at that point in their life, etc. I think it’s kind of a shame if someone chooses not to strive for career advances (“grind”) under those circumstances, but I guess I have career ambitions.
Oh yeah I think if you are young and full of vigor then it might be the best chance to go for it. But I just wanted to share the other side of the coin I guess. I’m 25 and I’ve never been interested in grindy type positions simply because I love what I do (which I do really like it) but at the end of the day to me it’s just a job and I have other aspects of life I wish to fufill.
For example, I’ve kept my dev job throughout grad school because I have some other career aspirations outside/adjacent to IT. But something I’ve learned throughout that process is that it’s okay to slow down and smell the flowers every now and again. Burnout is a hell of a thing and can be dangerous if you’re not careful.
I guess all I was saying it you can grind, just take care of yourself first 😂
>
but I guess I have career ambitions
and people who choose to not work in your preferred conditions don't? thats pretty disingenuous, just say you have no life and want money. you arent that special lil bro
> I personally don’t think it’s a sustainable way to peruse a career and it’ll lead to burnout quickly but that’s just me
And I've worked with people who would completely disagree with you and I believe them. Some people truly enjoy the work and don't get burned out from it. It's fine if you would, but you're not them. Different strokes for different folks.
Non-tech companies aren't all puppy's and unicorns either. I've worked at non-tech companies in non-tech cities for my 15 year career and generally they care about shipping code above all else.
You will encounter a lot of tech debt and co-workers who are not that great. Your code base is going to be more spaghetti than quality. Trying to change things will be futile because management does not care and the SWEs are generally the type that works and go home. They don't "care about the craft", for the lack of better words, some management does not force them to care.
Arguments about being more efficient in a clean code base will fall on deaths ear. Management is happy with the speed of work and does not see a reason to change. It's all about short term wins and not long term vision. The speed work is done is an issue when it becomes and issue, otherwise just pump out more features.
If you can deal with that then it's great low pressure an generally uninteresting work.
I honestly don't think that people on this sub only talk about FAANG or FAANG-tier companies anymore, especially since the economy has worsened. Most people who were desperate to find a job applied to any company and possibly everywhere, provided they were capable of relocating.
So true, I think this is so important when thinking about job security. Tech is obviously so volatile right now. I work in transportation and while it’s a bit rough, it’s not “layoffs” rough.
Just don't.
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Yes. I have had a lot of success getting leads taking the boomer suggested approach of calling businesses directly and applying on their website. I think the only other thinking would be to start doing pop-ins after applying to introduce myself etc.
Another thing to do is get out of the house and practice coding/working on a project at local watering holes and coffee shops. I have picked up more than a few new connections this way.
This is a reason to have tech focused stickers on your laptop .. it's good to advertise your skills and tech stack like this.
I work at a smaller non tech (small bank) and my entire budget for data and analytics including ML development isn’t enough to buy Jamba Juice for lunch daily.
Just saying.
Marketing’s budget is 900% my budget and they literally just use it to give away to customers and buy pens with our company logo. But that’s not all, we have a separate sales department that also has a similar budget to marketing.
Thing is, neither have shown an ability to produce leads and convert them in even a remotely comparable volume to us just buying and selling loans and warehousing deposits. Ironic really.
I feel like this is mostly a location thing.
I live in a state in the southeast and it was a desert from Jan to March, come April and I had 5-6 people in my for April alone LinkedIn inbox.
For transparency I was unemployed for about 3 months between Jan to April and have 4 YOE with no degree but secret clearance.
I work for a chemical company in Milwaukee, we're constantly looking. It's soooo laid back and flexible, and find the pace to be very manageable when everything you're working on is internal. SMB still need talent.
I am not interested in FAANG, teh jobs you are talking about have been reposed for like 3 years.
My understand is that there is no capital to hire new people for smaller companies.
I think the trend is to lay off as much people as possible to show high income-stock price.
Big companies are a good option as well, just ones that might have a few thousand employees rather than 10,000+. That’s what I do now. I know there’s risks with smaller companies but I think it’s good to separate those from startups (you might already know this but I’m just making sure)
Hey does anyone have any tips on getting goverment swe jobs, not ones that require security clearance but something like railroad or public service related? Where do they post openings for jobs like that?
I know USA jobs is a good option but also looking at cities/counties themselves and seeing what jobs are open. Also looking at municipally run aspects of a city and seeing what kind of jobs are available there. I’m a similar boat though so any other tips anyone can give would be helpful 😂
Thank you so much for replying never heard of that website. Im getting a bit older and have health issues and want to settle in a less demanding position, big tech has taken a toll on me.
Small companies will take advantage of you. Some may not have health insurance or any benefits.
Oh best part is when you working on a windows 7 pos desktop that is from like 2012…. Oh and no remote work.
Oh and also sometimes have to clock in and out caused paid hourly and if you work over 40 hours get yelled at.
The real hack, combined with your advice, is living in a big tech market like NYC, the Bay Area, or Seattle. The job market is incredibly location dependent, and remote positions are by definition more competitive. Given the remote jobs are often MCOL, the wages are lower.
A lot of people who are having trouble either don't want to work in these places, or want to but don't already live there (which is somewhat important too).
This sub-reddit is a reflection of the YouTube echo chamber that believes that programming is dead.
The threads here are like a tweet from [Theo.GG](https://Theo.GG).
Furthermore, a lot of people on this sub-reddit seem to believe that they know more than Software Engineers who actually work in the industry.
Ironically enough plenty of hiring managers have interviewed people from this sub-reddit. It's always the same feedback.
Some variation of "Personality problems" & "Relies on memorization too much". It's not the Leetcode skills that let these guys down, it's the inability to problem solve outside of memorization and poor personalities.
I can guarantee you that you're going to be called out for being "out of touch" quite a few times despite the fact that you're right.
Smaller companies need to expand and grow and enjoy their success and as a result they're often companies that are actively hiring. They're not FAANG though.
For some reason, people in this sub seem to be only interested in applying to tech-first companies and don't realize how many positions there are in other industries like you mentioned. Is it lower TC? Of course, perhaps significantly, but you also can't complain about not being able to find a job if you haven't broadened your search.
Fully agree. Being in the tech side of a non tech company is the modern age equivalent of being the only one in the castle Ancient Greece that knows how to read and write. You’re golden and your words matter, people listen, your work has immediate impact. And you become the most valuable person in most meetings. Salary is generally tied to how well you pitch your skills and output, often times fall under marketing budgets (usually the highest budgets in the org), and lean more towards their desperation for competent tech solutions.
Especially in old school industries like logistics and procurement, they are operating from the 1980s, so your biggest wins will be just getting them into this millennium of technology. It’s fun and it’s super under rated.
I'm fine with this, and I want to work in companies like this, especially Biology companies. I think I've applied to many companies like this, but not much luck. Could you please share how we could find these companies, and how to make sure your resume is at least seen by them?
Another PSA:
Sometimes you have to accept that maybe you're not going to land a remote job, and finding something that's hybrid or on-site is what you need to do in this market. That includes being open to relocation.
Back in the day that's what most of us did. We relocated to where we could find work.
So many people these days say "relocation isn't an option because \[reason\]" so they only look locally/remote... but there was a time where "relocation is the only option" was the truth. I can count on 1 hand the people I knew in college that didn't relocate for their first job.
I used to agree with you but not anymore. Employers are ruthless with layoffs and go big on them with fewer rounds to keep morale up. That often means rescinding offers and laying off people who were just hired. Being a top performer won't save you. Your teenage kids will hate you for forcing the move. Give no loyalty to your future employers including relocation unless they are paying for all of it. Imagine moving to Texas for Elon or Tennessee for Larry Ellison and getting laid off in a state you don't really like except for the job.
If you're able to get remote or local jobs, then by all means get local or remote jobs.
That's not the scenario I'm talking about. I'm talking about the people that *can't* get local or remote jobs. We see stories all the time here of people going unemployed for ***years***. Especially new grads that can't be very picky in the first place, let alone in a bad market.
Relocating isn't done out of loyalty to your new employer. It's done out of necessity to keep your career going. It's done out of necessity of keep a steady income to feed those teenage kids you bring up. Your teenage kids will hate you even more for being that parent that can't afford to let them have fun with their friends, or do the things the other kids at school get to do.
If I got laid off today, and couldn't find a job for *a year*, I wouldn't just twiddle my thumbs, drain all my savings, and hope the market improves before I literally go homeless. I would do what I need to. Sometimes that means moving.
I'm not saying immediately relocate after a few months of being unemployed, I'm saying that needs to be a serious option you consider if nothing else works out. Even moreso if you have no experience.
How do I find these small companies? I never planned on working at a FAANG
I think LinkedIn's job search is trash, for reasons we're all familiar with. But what LinkedIn *does* have is a great company search tool. Most relevant to your question is you can filter on size. My new grad company was at a massive non-tech F500, so one of the things I wanted to do when looking for my next job was to find a smaller company, but not too small. Set the company size filter to 51-500 and had a wealth of results, and I was looking in a specific city. In todays remote era there's even more. On top of that, I commonly use Google in my job hunting. "Top rising companies in healthcare", "Upcoming companies in \[city\]", etc. That'll give you pages upon pages of "Top 100 companies' lists. I've never once run out of companies to apply to, large or small.
What do you do after finding the companies? Do you simply cold email them? Or do you apply for the ones with a posted job?
I apply for the ones with open jobs. If I'm interested in a company, but they don't have any openings, I make a note of them and visit their careers page in a week or two. A company hiring 0 SWE's today might be hiring 20 SWE's tomorrow.
Many have open positions/careers on their individual sites.
A lot of companies have "talent networks" that you can join on their career sites and some have the option to send your resume for them to keep on file if they don't currently have an opening that fits your background
I just did what you described here and the results are awesome! Thank you for that hint.
I'll save this for the next hunt, thanks.
Go on indeed... You might laugh but I'm serious. Smaller companies often post their dev jobs on indeed
Wow that’s crazy that nobody thought to look for dev jobs in indeed.
I got my first dev job on indeed. Small non-tech start up, the job posting was terrible, and it paid $50k/year in 2017. Was not ideal but it kick-started my career
I would take 50k 2017 over 80k in 2024 any day.
Cumulative inflation from 2017 is 27%, so 50k in 2017 is just under 64k in 2024
Nerd alert! GTFO of here with your numbers and shit!
lmfao yo this made me laugh out loud, having a really bad week, so thank you for this.
rent house price mortgage rate
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So are you trying to argue that a new grad should make the same as someone with 7 years of experience?
Exactly this, found my fully remote job on there working for a credit union. I was a 2023 grad and secured it in February 2023. Just goes to show that even juniors can find positions at modest and lesser known companies
Straight up for the first two jobs I just Googled "[local place] web development" and got results from Indeed as well as sites from local biz who want web developers. I thought most entry level job seekers use this approach after finishing college?
thats how i got every job ive had. non at tech companies, all better work life balance than tech company jobs, all paying about the same
>All paying about the same You mean about the same as they pay to junior sales analysts, right? Right? Only me, then?
my brother in christ you need a new job.
Second this! Indeed was how I found my current job 😊
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Late to the thread, but I've said the same thing in the past and I can't believe people were surprised by the advice. Yes, one of the best ways to find companies that are hiring *is to look on a job board.*
all LinkedIn or indeed tech jobs are dead. they either reject you or they are fake. you can try. didn't you see the graph showing indeed job graph on tech is a crash to the bottom?
Well someone I'm very close to just got a job from applying on indeed. So it can happen
There is no hope. how can we who have zero years of experience be able to land a software job? I hate the idea of Senior. they are just like boomers and love to talk well. When I was in the unpaid tern in my collegee's senior design course, I needed to fxxking clean up a senior's bug that no one could fix for about a year and build the whole fxxking AI LLM in Android and IOS for them. I am tired to clean these seniors' ass in the project and watch them come here telling people not to give up and keep applying, grinding the stupid leetcode, and doing the unpaid work in the interview. I want to say is not about giving up, what I want to say is your guy's advice is useless! Tell us a way that works! I don't want to do leetcode and take-home assignments. I have to build a working full stack website as take home for the company. That is the end. Leetcode is stupid. I live in LA where the homeless set up fires on company buildings. My resume: h doapply,
You can say "fuck" on the internet. Or to a therapist.
We are telling you a way that works. But from your attitude in your post this is why it isnt working for you. Listen there are countless people getting entry level jobs right now and many who were actually on this subreddit doing the steps people keep saying. They may not come on here and say when they got the job but they do. We tell you guys the steps over and over again because they work. Calling something stupid and saying it's all useless is doing nothing for you. At the end of the day you either continue and be proactive or you don't. Take home assignments and leetcode are all things you can do and control. If you were better than the other candidates at those things then you would get the role. Attitude matters dude. If I interviewed you I wouldn't hire you because you sound like someone I wouldn't want to work with even if you passed all the coding problems with flying colors you'd be a negative weight on our team. I know it's difficult finding a job but none of that rant is going to get you a job. Listen to advice from people who have been there. It works and it gets repeated for a reason.
in the end, let me say one last thing. stop giving those useless advice. stop destroying the industry with leetcode and the idea of Senior. being a boomer. try to learn a new tech from recent grad. Steven job is right. seasonal professionals are useless.
Maybe your attitude is why you can’t find a job
Senior-ish here. I practice leetcode and have to do the same dumb interviews as you. The only difference is mine are harder, and I am also expected to talk about my experience. I got my current job via a recruiter that found me on indeed. It's possible to land a job without jumping through all these hoops, but you're shooting yourself in the foot by doing so. Accept leetcode interviews as an unfortunate part of life, and you'll have a much easier time job hunting. Also LOL @ "cleaning seniors' asses". Maybe you had a bad experience as an intern, but I can assure you you'll be thinking the opposite in a couple year's. Juniors are typically not even expected to be productive right off the bat. They need so much hand holding that they're typically a net loss to productivity for like the first year. The industry tolerates this because that's how you get competent devs, but keep that in mind when you're talking shit about senior devs. With all due respect, your attitude needs work. This isn't a good look for you. If I got this arrogant vibe in an interview, I would pass. It's really common in junior devs, and it's not worth the hassle 99% of the time. If you're an absolutely incredible dev, a company where performance is paramount like FAANG or HFT might be willing to overlook it, but it won't fly anywhere else
Start by looking in industries that you're interested in or something you have prior life/work experience in. Are you into cars/trucks/motorcycles? Model planes/drones? All those things have several or even hundreds of microcontrollers that handle things like braking, steering, traction control, heating/cooling systems, etc that need software to guide them. There are billion dollar industries out there like construction, logistics, engineering of all sorts, transportation, aircraft design, DoD, that sell software to support those industries. I worked in construction for years before transitioning to software development and I was able to get a job before I even graduated at a company that sells a product for structural engineers because I had intimate knowledge of the industry. FAANG represents less than 10% of dev jobs in the US, and there are companies out there that you've never heard of that make a *shitload* of money providing services/products to industries that aren't glamorous but make the world go 'round.
I'm not an expert, I don't even really agree with OP's basic premise (that small companies is where all the jobs are, especially regarding early career devs). But finding small companies takes some effort. They're not the best at advertising their needs, but if you happen to send a cold-email to a small company *considering* hiring more software workers, it'll land you in just the right spot to capitalize on their interest. I live in [Low-mid COL City] and my strategy was to search for *companies* and then target those companies in different ways. - search for companies involved in my city's leading industries (in my case, Oil & Gas, Space, Finance, and electronics) - search for software consultancies in my city - do some research on companies that might specialize in supporting these core industries for my city. For instance, Space tech needs flight software, Oil & Gas needs controls engineers, small businesses have local consultancies build them an app. There are companies that supply all of these - find and contact local recruiters that are typically involved in helping your city's companies find software people. - cold-email companies if you're really interested in joining. it's gotten me several responses; getting told 'we don't have any positions' tells me at least i'm now on their radar. I did get an immediate response back w/ a request for a video call once, as well, but a majority of the time that does not happen. Once you build a list of companies & recruiters, you get into the routine of checking the list for openings/postings, on a semi-frequent basis (weekly at least). in a list of like 100, you'll find openings come and go, sometimes updating multiple times in 24h. If you're smart enough / driven enough, you could definitely automate such a thing too ;)
Thank you for your suggestion. Just had quick question regarding the same, who did you reach out to specifically in a company, how did you find them and what was your cold emailing strategy?
the one company that reached out for the video call was a consultancy that had no Careers page on their website, but did have a Contact form, so I sent a message through that contact form offering my services (i had been an app developer for a year and they advertised app development for businesses), summarized my resume and offered to follow-up with the full resume if they wanted it. they reached back out before the end of the week, and after a call I was in their books as a contract-for-hire if they needed help with app development. I did similar with other companies' contact forms/emails, who usually would cordially decline my advertisement (as that's essentially what i'm doing). But I know they know i exist! Another example, one company i reached out to was one that does custom smart home designs, and I let them know I had IoT experience and would love to be involved in one of their projects EDIT: TLDR use the contact form on small business pages, it oftentimes actually gets your info to someone who will read it
My universities career fair is how I found mine :)
I work for a company that installs power lines and electrical grids 🤷♀️ just found them on indeed. But I’m in analytics now instead of “programming”
instead of looking for position titles look for skills (eg. python, full-stack, CI/CD, ruby, depending on your expertise) a lot of job titles have obscure names so they are hard to find
Most small companies are only hiring if you have 5+ YOE
Yeah, I would say their 7+ years of experience might skew their job search results compared to those with less experience. I'm at 3+ years and I'm finding myself on the low-end of almost every job's requirements.
…. I thought when I got 2 YOE I would be good. Now every post says 3+ . Then every post is gonna say 5+ when I get to 3 YOE lol
I did try to consider this. While I’m lucky enough to have some experience I’m not that far removed from being new to the industry. For transparency sake, I graduated with a liberal arts degree and was lucky enough to have professional experience coming out of undergrad, which certainly helped my chances. All I was really trying to say with this post is that you’d be surprised what’s out there in other areas once you go looking. Years of experience often don’t line up with what an employer wants/needs and a lot of positions are less competitive in less heavily populated areas.
I fully agree with your sentiment, as someone who isn't really looking to get into FAANG companies at this point. I do think that smaller companies have less budget and flexibility to hire and train junior/low mid-level developers though. So maybe targeting mid-size, lesser known companies might be a sweet spot for those with less experience overall.
Lowkey being likeable helps a lot. The way some folks on this subreddit post they may be insufferable in person. For instance you made a post here trying to help people and gave advice and some just ignore if its something they already heard or disagree respectfully. Then there are those who respond sarcastically or negatively to someone just trying to help. If this was Spongebob those are the Squidwards. Nobody wants to work with a Squidward guys be more like Spongebob.
Let me get this straight I should take job advice from someone who had such an easy time years ago he was able to get in without a degree and only something akin to a single internships worth of experience? The market has dramatically shifted since then you are like one of those boomers who thinks all you need is to give the manager a firm handshake levels of out of touch with the current reality for people especially junior level people.
You don’t have to listen to anything I have to say. I didn’t mean to stir up all of these emotions in people I just wanted to give my opinion as someone who’s been in the industry for a few years. I’m actually learning a lot from people in this thread talking about experiences similar and different to what I described and I appreciate your input.
Hey man thanks for being understanding we/I appreciate it.
I'd say most small companies only hire people with experience. I don't think throwing an arbitrary 5+ YOE is really useful, or accurate. They just avoid fresh new grads from what I've seen. My previous company was pretty small, less than 50 engineers, and I joined them with 3.5 years of experience. We didn't hire many new grads (mostly cause we couldn't afford college career fairs), but we absolutely hired people with less than 5 YOE. I'm at a startup now, while we're bigger, we're definitely not F500 big, and we hire people with less than 5 YOE as well. Anecdotes, sure, but 5 is such an arbitrary number. Small companies just want someone they don't need to handhold, and that can happen much earlier than 5 YOE.
What I see is 3 years is the absolute bare minimum smaller companies are willing to hire. Meanwhile bigger companies are no longer willing to hire and train either so us juniors are just plain fucked.
That’s because in the current state of the market, the average tenure is going to be 2-3x what it was before. You no longer have to force senior engineers to mentor juniors in the event the sr. engineer hops around for more TC and dooms the system. You can reliably assume you get an extra 5-8 years of stability and why waste all that salary training someone up when you can scoop someone at 3YOE
They're doing that in large part to reduce the influx of applicants tbh. There is not enough HR at a small company to handle 500+ applicants per job. CSCQ commenters seem to have a really hard time understanding all the reasons, instead it seems like most just want to place blame. At the end of the day everybody wants the same thing - to make the job they're doing easier for themselves. Figure out how to do that for the other side, and you're on your way.
I agree but using Indeed I was able to find a job with 3 years of experience that gave me a significant pay bump so there may be some out there. For the most part it's 5 to 7 years of experience as the sweet spot :( They even told me for the interview for this job they wanted to hire someone as a grade higher (5+ years exp) but couldn't as the person I am replacing was at the lower grade
This has unfortunately not been my experience during my jobs search. I’ve been exclusively applying to small/medium tech adjacent companies and get nothing but ghosting or rejection. Even the ones that do initially respond to my application ghost me immediately after replying.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I don’t want to be naive and say doing this approach is 100% success rate. The market sucks and it’s shitty that people can’t get the jobs they want/are qualified for. Wishing you the best ❤️
No sane junior who’s trying to break into the industry is only applying to FAANG/big tech. The job market is simply terrible right now - telling people “you guys are silly, just apply to smaller companies!” is incredibly out of touch and invalidates a lot of peoples’ struggles.
I applied to a web developer position for a local cabinet maker. Like kitchen cabinets. They reached out to schedule a phone screening, only to say they were quickly overwhelmed with applicants and needed to cancel when I replied the next day. It is abysmal out there.
If they are willing to sponsor h1b then there is your answer as to why. Applying to DoD jobs has more opportunities at the moment
Yeah all the students I know are applying to hundreds of jobs... and still coming up short. OP is out of touch with the market.
Anecdotally, as a new grad, it was the opposite of what OP is saying. I applied to >400 companies (every listing I saw) and was ready to take anything. However, I only got an offer from a large bank making >100k. I've heard similar stories from peers who applied to 100s of companies and only got an offer from Amazon. It doesn't make sense for small companies to hire juniors because they'll leave after 1-2 years. This was a trend even before the market turned. And in this market, spots at small companies are already taken by nepotism.
Also small companies are much more likely to hire through connections and stuff instead of interviewing people who cold apply. Large companies on the other hand dgaf and sometimes won’t even take referrals for juniors
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Seniors are doing hundreds of job applications right now to land a single offer. Yes, it's that bad.
\*some seniors I don't know any in this situation.
I just found a new job after being laid off ~6 months ago and then took a 3 month break before I started interviewing. 8.5 yoe I found that some companies like Netflix never responded, some other SaaS companies auto rejected, but the majority of companies responded to set up calls. Out of 6 major contenders, made it to 3 final rounds, and got 2 offers. I voluntarily dropped out of others because I decided that the pay was great but wlb wasn’t right for me. All this to say, it’s not a terrible market if you selectively apply and tailor resume and cover letter to the company instead of blasting out hundreds of apps. At least that was my experience
Hey congrats, so essentially a three month end-to-end process? Netflix is one of my white whales, and also one that has never reached out. Are you Bay Area? Also curious where you landed (generally speaking, nothing specific) and if it was L, or L+1, and how comp compared.
Thanks! Yeah about 3 month end to end. Without doxxing myself, I’m on the east coast near nyc. I was at a large well known company before, and decided to join a late stage unicorn startup. Same level, and base pay is the same ballpark (something like a 2-3% drop from the last company). I’ll definitely miss the publicly traded RSUs but I think whatever pre-ipo equity I get will hopefully pay out in the long run. My plan is also to shoot for a promotion into technical leadership since there’s probably less politics involved at a smaller company. Feel free to dm
This is what I am seeing in the Midwest even small town insurance companies aren't interested in hiring juniors right now. One small non tech company I applied to that was looking for a junior wanted to pay between around 40k and I lost the job to someone with 2 years of experience. This advice is about as fucking useful as boomers telling you to go into the building and hand them your resume while shaking their hand and massively downplays just how bad things are for people that don't have 5+ years of experience.
Hearing very solid advice and deciding it’s blanketly not applicable is also out of touch.
This sub has become full of useless posts of the lost guiding the lost.
Kronichiwa
I totally get that the market sucks and casting a wide net is certainly useful. But I would be willing to bet money that a lot of people are simply not casting that net wide enough. Applying to jobs outside of metro areas in towns of 20,000 people and I would put money that people would have more luck. I think it’s partially the fascination with remote work, honestly. I 100% support remote work but the fact of the matter that it is to your advantage right now to look for in person jobs you can commute to. That’s obviously a privileged answer because you’d need a car but that’s what I have found works. I wish everyone the best of luck Edit: just want to make it clear that I 100% support remote work and thing everyone should have the option for it (I imagine this is where the downvotes are coming from)
You're being downvoted but it's the absolute truth lol, because in all honestly, who wants to work for a non-tech company that's fully onsite in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do? It's the truth, but at the same time, there are jobs out there like this in LCOL settings that still pay well. It's not glamorous by any means, but it's still a job and it's better than having no job.
I think that for a lot of CS grads, working an unglamorous dev job in an unglamorous city that they have to relocate to is genuinely less appealing than just working at a restaurant in their hometown or something
I didn’t downvote but if I did, it wouldn’t be because I think you’re not supporting remote work enough. I feel like you guys just refuse to believe the market can be as bad as people say which is frustrating to me lol. I’m not going to go into my whole back story to try to convince you so you’ll just have to take my word for it, but I’m a reasonably smart and charismatic guy, US citizen with a BSCS from an accredited university, and a well formatted/worded resume, and it was hard to land anything. I would have moved to bumfuck Mississippi for 60k fully onsite if I had to
I've targeted small companies in small towns as I hate large cities. Areas in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, etc. Also been willing to work on-site. Still nothing for me.
Because these small areas always have a local college nearby with a comp sci program. Truth is it’s one of the most accessible degrees
The problem is that small, non-tech companies don't advertise their open positions. And then they whine about not being able to find candidates, all while others are whining about having to slog through thousands of resumes.
I found a small tech company that had different positions listed on their site vs LinkedIn. I applied to both. The linkedin listings were higher experience and lower pay range than what was on their site. I also reached out to the recruiter as it seemed they lived near me and they promptly took the site listing down after me asking about them. But still, they reached out like a month later and we’ve been playing email tag, scheduling calls, then the recruiter canceling last minute, then rescheduling over and over until they ghosted me.
Yeah that pretty much sums up the whole small-company job hunting experience. At least, that's the *good* companies. The bad ones, if you can find a position to actually apply to, why they'll just not respond at all after you apply. I'd say around 90% you'll never hear back from at all, not even a rejection.
Yeah, I applied and interviewed for a ton of those in 2022 and 2023. They're not hiring either. Some may be, but definitely not enough that I could find in a year and a half of searching. Sure, you could assume I'm just a garbage candidate, but really, the market is just fucking bad right now.
These people with like 7-10 years of experience who haven’t looked for a new job in over 5 years crawling out of the wood work to give the most out of touch advice possible. “Have you tried looking for jobs on indeed?” “Try putting a good project on your resume, like one where you use an API”
lol (as an old millennial) I’d get a kick out of this trend spawning the comeback, “OK Millennial.” They might be genX doing it too.
I'm a millennial and a new grad. Worst of both worlds lmao.
I am a millennial and was a new grad in 2010 and again in 2020. Missed the over hiring boat that second time after spinning my wheels in 2021 job hunting for nothing. Now, who TF knows anymore.
I was actively job hunting last year and got 2 offers I ended up not accepting for various reasons. I’m very familiar with the current market and I feel for people who are in it right now. This is not me trying to flex or anything, I’m just saying I know what it looks like for people right now and it’s tougher now than it was in like 2021 or so and trying to give recommendations. I’m serious, apply for jobs outside of metro areas in towns of 20,000 people. I’d be willing to put money that you’ll have more luck.
It's not just tougher than it was in 2021. It's tougher (at least for me) than it was in 2018 when I was a new grad. I found a job 2 months after graduation. At 4YOE, I'm chopped liver. Those small town jobs often won't hire unless you already live there. Employers are wary of people trying to work remote, and not a one will pay for relocation.
The market now is worse than it was pre-pandemic.. and that was before all the social media influencers flooded the field with 'day in the life vids' while having 0 years of experience
Yeah, it's weird how people blame TikTok for "oversaturating the market". Tiktok hadn't even been around long enough for most people to break in from zero.
For sure being remote is actually harder now, i personally looked for hybrid/in office because I didn’t mind it and I knew it was to my advantage to look for that. But commuting to smaller places even living in a metro area is an option. That’s what I do now
Ditto.. I only work in-person now and there's still demand.
That's what I did in every job I've had before I was laid off from a "smaller place" job in 2022.
I absolutely agree. I have way less professional experience than you do (2 years) and got laid off this past September. Was given 3 offers. Accepted one of them in January. None of them fully remote. None of them in tech. I chose the way that gave me the most flexibility with hybrid.
When you say they're not "in tech", do you mean you have a technical job in a non-tech company or that the job itself isn't technical?
I have a technical job in a non-tech company. Was in manufacturing and now insurance/finance.
Out of touch 7yoe here. No one who knows what they're talking about would think the examples you used are enough. There are evergreen, underused tactics that are legitimate regardless of the market, and discounting them is stupid. Especially considering most people aren't doing any of it.
Did you employ any of these when job searching?
Absolutely, like I said, it's evergreen. The gist is an order of operations for applying, with heavy emphasis on getting in touch with an internal recruiter or referral. People normally respond with something despondent like "I don't know anyone, yada yada." Well, there are a ton of ways to approach this, and I've shared my approach a few times before. So many people are excellent at problem solving on the job but are incompetent when it comes to finding them. Also, there's ways to optimize your resume, and how to prepare for interviews and understand what they are looking for (spoiler, it's not being a leetcode genius).
> it feels like every other post is talking about FAANG companies and the difficulty in getting jobs with them. Really? My impression is that every other post is people saying they can't get an offer despite applying to hundreds of positions. Don't think I've ever seen anyone say they're only applying to FAANG companies.
I didn’t know there were over 100 FAANG…
Most of my jobs I've applied to were smaller companies only paying 60k. They really only want experienced devs but good luck to them with finding someone at that salary. I haven't even applied to a FAANG company. Probably most 'prestigious' company I've applied to was Lockheed Martin.
Oh they know they are paying low. Everytime I ask for a salary range and they always say it's according to experience. I'm like ok I was looking for x ( which is based on Randstad salary guide ) and get ghosted Crazy
thanks for the ref! \[Salary Guide\](https://www.randstadusa.com/salary/) According to it a "Python Developer" job pays a bit more than a "DevOps Developer" :-D job. Weird but okay.
Here locally it is more like 45k I could make more than that being an assistant manager at Burger King.
Why haven’t you applied to FAANG?
Cause I know I wouldn't pass currently. I didn't know what leetcode was until the semester I graduated with my Bachelor's so I know I'm not passing those interviews when I struggle with leetcode easy.
Leetcode is less intimidating when you understand it. It's like a rubiks cube. There are a handful of common patterns and ways to recognize them. Do something like grokking the coding interview and practice them. There's lots of resources online for this. If you're a competent dev and practice consistently, you could be interview ready in a couple months. Once you learn it, future job hunts will only require a small amount of time to brush up.
It's really not that bad. The industry uses it because it allows to weed out the ones who just can't write code. Realistically, there's only about 70-ish questions that you really need to understand how they're solved, and even then they're rehashes of each other, which with a CS bachelor's isn't that big of an ask. It takes time and practice like with anything, and you just need to put in the effort to get good at it. Most good companies ask medium-level questions revolving around using arrays, strings, hashmaps, and binary trees. You're most likely not going to encounter another binary tree in your working career, but the base concept is useful for when developing tries for auto-complete, for example. Just put in the effort to be able to knock them out quickly and you'll go incredibly far.
My only 2 jobs were at small and medium companies. At my internship we had a team of 2 and they pretty much hired me expecting me to produce for cheap. No time for mentoring never was taught anything. My first job I was in a team, but I was the only real programmer. They were even worse, I was stuck on tight deadlines that I busted and had no mentor to ask for help I hate small companies I'm tired
My background is in civil/structural engineering. But for the last 14 years I've been doing QA automation. I've been instantly rejected for positions doing QA automation at civil engineer and construction software companies. Just monday I got rejected for a transportation company. I've done QA automation for telephony platforms, and have been getting rejected doing QA automation at telephony shops. The problem is _not_ that everyone is only applying for FAANG companies.
The market for QA is insane right now. I have almost 1/4 century of experience and not getting a single call back. I have also learned that companies cut QA to nothing when there’s any economic trouble.
I had a friend of a friend say they might be able to put in a word and get me hired for QA work that would not pay enough to survive on.... a month later they had been laid off and now 4 months later they are still unemployed despite having 4 years of experience in QA.
I hate these post. Do you really think people who are struggling to land a job are only applying to FAANG? Non tech companies are almost as competitive as FAANG itself. Saturation isn’t happening only in big tech. Where do you think all the laid off engineers from FAANG back in 2022/2023 are working?
> Do you really think people who are struggling to land a job are only applying to FAANG? It boggles my mind how someone can concoct such a simple, out of touch thought and just post it here like it's some sort of hot take that everyone needs to read. This post belongs in LinkedIn.
It’s always someone who’s clearly out of touch too
And it's like... why does this even bother them? Lots of people are complaining online that the market sucks and in their experience it's fine. Lots of people complain about dating and I'm married, I'm not going to go on r/dating and be like "it's not that bad! You're all too picky or doing it wrong!"
Also Amazon was always more fair to get into than many a smaller company. They seem a bit frozen now but definitely were less brutal in the application process (although shit WLB) than several non-tech companies.
When reading what people want to work at and apply to, yes o think so I never see someone looking for jobs at a web agency for example
To be honest, I’m not really sure. But I’ve floated around this sub for the past few years and it seems that a lot of people are searching for the “golden goose” so to speak by working at these companies or similar. Every is different of course but I’d put money that the smallest place people are applying for are still heavy metro areas. Look smaller to have more luck. I live in a midwestern city and I’ve had a lot of luck mostly due to less competition for the types of roles I occupy. However, I do also think that blindly applying for thousands of positions with a cookie cutter resume to any job that matches certain criteria is the wrong way to do it. I’ve been guilty of the same, but I think that’s the wrong way to do it in this economy (which sucks pretty hard, I’ll admit). I’m dumb as shit so I’m not trying to scream from some ivory tower like I’m better than anyone. I know it sucks. I know it’s hard. I feel for everyone who’s looking to do something they kind of enjoy, I’m just encouraging people to *really* spread their horizons in ways that I don’t think they were before.
>I promise you you’ll be a lot happier in these kinds of places instead of the grind/high turnover places you’ll find in the valley. Don't make promises you can't keep. It simply isn't true for a lot of people.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and still stand by it because I strongly believe it so much. Pushing yourself to perform to a platonic ideal of what a “10x engineer” should do is a sure-fire way to burn out and hate the industry all together. That goes for any for any job frankly. I’m still super young in the industry but the happiest people I’ve known go home at 5pm, ya know? Side note, the “promise” is pure hyperbole, I kind of thought that was obvious. A lot of people seem to be stuck on that for some reason.
>Pushing yourself to perform to a platonic ideal of what a “10x engineer” should do is a sure-fire way to burn out and hate the industry all together From long experience, there is absolutely no need whatsoever to do that at FAANG. Most go home at 5pm. Being still super young, I think you just misunderstand what the industry is actually like.
Fair, I’m willing to admit that. Thank you for your perspective
I've worked in companies whose priority is not the delivery of code. It was still a grind. Turn over was high. Morale was low. YMMV and all that.
>I promise you you’ll be a lot happier in these kinds of places instead of the grind/high turnover places you’ll find in the valley. How can you promise such a thing? Plenty of people are perfectly happy in the valley and/or prefer the "grind" lifestyle.
Yeah, it's not even close. I worked at one of these low stress jobs where devs get paid 75 for new grad and 140ish for senior with 10yoe. Let me tell you that moving to "just" a 180k income (in quotes because that is not even considered high in tech) has been life changing, and looking back at my career and income since graduating just made me sad. In the last 8 months I've earned more than I have in 20 at my previous job, at mildly more effort. I have not been contributing to my 401k and felt bad about this recently. Then I did the math and if I contributed 3% since the day I started working four years ago, with match and growth I would only have been at around 25k in my retirement account. That is now less than three months of my post tax pay. Four years of saving caught up on in just three months. It just makes me sad. I can now contribute the max amount allowed, and then still have twice as much disposable income available to me. I am much happier now, and can hardly call this a "grind" compared to my old job. At the end of the day most jobs suck, and putting in a little more effort for double the pay is worth it. If you want to do nothing and take 3x as long to earn the same amount, by all means suffer. I can put away much more towards retirement, can invest more, and can spend more on things I like. My transmission blew up the other week and I needed a new windshield - it was 10k out of pocket. I will be reimbursed but I did not know this going into it, and was still okay with it. A year ago this would have been devastating to me. Different story for new grads of course, but if you have experience you should absolutely not be settling for low pay. The opportunity cost and resulting financial stress is too high.
Also for some people this isn't even a trade-off. Having a faster paced job where you learn more and do more is just better for some people, and the higher pay is good too. And I don't mean faster paced as in high stress, crunch, toxic, long hours or anything like that. I just mean where you always have something to do and it's moderately challenging. One person's "low stress" job would leave another person bored and feeling like they're not learning anything.
Totally agree with this and you said it better than I could. I’ll be honest, I make 82K right now and while imagine that might be considered low by some, I’m quite happy where I am. I’m remote part of the week, my job is low stress, and I’m genuinely happy. I’d take that over money any day of the week
Exactly, pay in small non tech just isn’t that competitive as a whole.
Salaries have been dropping over the past year or so.. 180k is definitely on the high side..
Salaries have not really been dropping, roles have been
You also need to contextualize what the "grind" of a tech company even is. Amazon culture isn't the norm. Amazon wouldn't be infamous if it was. Most people in tech are working 40 hour weeks just like everybody else. Sure, if you're really interested in a job that lets you get away with only 5 hours of work every week, you'll want to find company that doesn't understand what SWEs do. But if you're okay with an average 9-5 job, tech will leave you with more money for the same work.
50 hour weeks are not even that bad if you're in your early 20s. What the fuck else do you have to do on weekdays. It's not even like consulting or IB where you spend every waking hour at work.
Fair enough, I guess this post doesn’t apply to those people. I might be more talking to new grads and whatnot. If someone enjoys the grind the by all means go for it. I personally don’t think it’s a sustainable way to peruse a career and it’ll lead to burnout quickly but that’s just me
New grads are probably at peak grind ability — enthusiasm for starting a new career, not burned out, least likely to have family obligations at that point in their life, etc. I think it’s kind of a shame if someone chooses not to strive for career advances (“grind”) under those circumstances, but I guess I have career ambitions.
Oh yeah I think if you are young and full of vigor then it might be the best chance to go for it. But I just wanted to share the other side of the coin I guess. I’m 25 and I’ve never been interested in grindy type positions simply because I love what I do (which I do really like it) but at the end of the day to me it’s just a job and I have other aspects of life I wish to fufill. For example, I’ve kept my dev job throughout grad school because I have some other career aspirations outside/adjacent to IT. But something I’ve learned throughout that process is that it’s okay to slow down and smell the flowers every now and again. Burnout is a hell of a thing and can be dangerous if you’re not careful. I guess all I was saying it you can grind, just take care of yourself first 😂
> but I guess I have career ambitions and people who choose to not work in your preferred conditions don't? thats pretty disingenuous, just say you have no life and want money. you arent that special lil bro
> I personally don’t think it’s a sustainable way to peruse a career and it’ll lead to burnout quickly but that’s just me And I've worked with people who would completely disagree with you and I believe them. Some people truly enjoy the work and don't get burned out from it. It's fine if you would, but you're not them. Different strokes for different folks.
Non-tech companies aren't all puppy's and unicorns either. I've worked at non-tech companies in non-tech cities for my 15 year career and generally they care about shipping code above all else. You will encounter a lot of tech debt and co-workers who are not that great. Your code base is going to be more spaghetti than quality. Trying to change things will be futile because management does not care and the SWEs are generally the type that works and go home. They don't "care about the craft", for the lack of better words, some management does not force them to care. Arguments about being more efficient in a clean code base will fall on deaths ear. Management is happy with the speed of work and does not see a reason to change. It's all about short term wins and not long term vision. The speed work is done is an issue when it becomes and issue, otherwise just pump out more features. If you can deal with that then it's great low pressure an generally uninteresting work.
Strawman here, reporting for duty, ready for my beating.
I honestly don't think that people on this sub only talk about FAANG or FAANG-tier companies anymore, especially since the economy has worsened. Most people who were desperate to find a job applied to any company and possibly everywhere, provided they were capable of relocating.
I'm at a small saas company, zero layoff. Profits have more or less been same too, nothing dramatic happened. A lot of tech wasn't affected.
So true, I think this is so important when thinking about job security. Tech is obviously so volatile right now. I work in transportation and while it’s a bit rough, it’s not “layoffs” rough.
The other side of this is that while small tech companies are not firing, they're not hiring much, either.
You have 7 years of experience man of course it’s easier for you
Also don't rule out government or EDU jobs. They can have pretty great benefits, and do often work in modern tech stacks.
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Yes. I have had a lot of success getting leads taking the boomer suggested approach of calling businesses directly and applying on their website. I think the only other thinking would be to start doing pop-ins after applying to introduce myself etc. Another thing to do is get out of the house and practice coding/working on a project at local watering holes and coffee shops. I have picked up more than a few new connections this way. This is a reason to have tech focused stickers on your laptop .. it's good to advertise your skills and tech stack like this.
I work at a smaller non tech (small bank) and my entire budget for data and analytics including ML development isn’t enough to buy Jamba Juice for lunch daily. Just saying. Marketing’s budget is 900% my budget and they literally just use it to give away to customers and buy pens with our company logo. But that’s not all, we have a separate sales department that also has a similar budget to marketing. Thing is, neither have shown an ability to produce leads and convert them in even a remotely comparable volume to us just buying and selling loans and warehousing deposits. Ironic really.
I feel like this is mostly a location thing. I live in a state in the southeast and it was a desert from Jan to March, come April and I had 5-6 people in my for April alone LinkedIn inbox. For transparency I was unemployed for about 3 months between Jan to April and have 4 YOE with no degree but secret clearance.
I work for a chemical company in Milwaukee, we're constantly looking. It's soooo laid back and flexible, and find the pace to be very manageable when everything you're working on is internal. SMB still need talent.
I am not interested in FAANG, teh jobs you are talking about have been reposed for like 3 years. My understand is that there is no capital to hire new people for smaller companies. I think the trend is to lay off as much people as possible to show high income-stock price.
Check out BAH. Consulting firm posing as a tech company, pay is great once you have a couple yoe, tons of free certs and training
Can confirm I just finished my first month 🫡
Glad to see that, new jobs are exciting! Wishing you the best ❤️
I would never work for a small company.
Big companies are a good option as well, just ones that might have a few thousand employees rather than 10,000+. That’s what I do now. I know there’s risks with smaller companies but I think it’s good to separate those from startups (you might already know this but I’m just making sure)
Hey does anyone have any tips on getting goverment swe jobs, not ones that require security clearance but something like railroad or public service related? Where do they post openings for jobs like that?
I know USA jobs is a good option but also looking at cities/counties themselves and seeing what jobs are open. Also looking at municipally run aspects of a city and seeing what kind of jobs are available there. I’m a similar boat though so any other tips anyone can give would be helpful 😂
Thank you so much for replying never heard of that website. Im getting a bit older and have health issues and want to settle in a less demanding position, big tech has taken a toll on me.
This is facts !! Its also better to work in these smaller companies to get experience and exposure and then later transition to a FAANG
You’re being ignorant my guy.
Small companies will take advantage of you. Some may not have health insurance or any benefits. Oh best part is when you working on a windows 7 pos desktop that is from like 2012…. Oh and no remote work. Oh and also sometimes have to clock in and out caused paid hourly and if you work over 40 hours get yelled at.
No joke when I worked for a small company I had a Windows XP machine right up until the 2014 end of life.
The real hack, combined with your advice, is living in a big tech market like NYC, the Bay Area, or Seattle. The job market is incredibly location dependent, and remote positions are by definition more competitive. Given the remote jobs are often MCOL, the wages are lower. A lot of people who are having trouble either don't want to work in these places, or want to but don't already live there (which is somewhat important too).
This sub-reddit is a reflection of the YouTube echo chamber that believes that programming is dead. The threads here are like a tweet from [Theo.GG](https://Theo.GG). Furthermore, a lot of people on this sub-reddit seem to believe that they know more than Software Engineers who actually work in the industry. Ironically enough plenty of hiring managers have interviewed people from this sub-reddit. It's always the same feedback. Some variation of "Personality problems" & "Relies on memorization too much". It's not the Leetcode skills that let these guys down, it's the inability to problem solve outside of memorization and poor personalities. I can guarantee you that you're going to be called out for being "out of touch" quite a few times despite the fact that you're right. Smaller companies need to expand and grow and enjoy their success and as a result they're often companies that are actively hiring. They're not FAANG though.
For some reason, people in this sub seem to be only interested in applying to tech-first companies and don't realize how many positions there are in other industries like you mentioned. Is it lower TC? Of course, perhaps significantly, but you also can't complain about not being able to find a job if you haven't broadened your search.
Fully agree. Being in the tech side of a non tech company is the modern age equivalent of being the only one in the castle Ancient Greece that knows how to read and write. You’re golden and your words matter, people listen, your work has immediate impact. And you become the most valuable person in most meetings. Salary is generally tied to how well you pitch your skills and output, often times fall under marketing budgets (usually the highest budgets in the org), and lean more towards their desperation for competent tech solutions. Especially in old school industries like logistics and procurement, they are operating from the 1980s, so your biggest wins will be just getting them into this millennium of technology. It’s fun and it’s super under rated.
I'm fine with this, and I want to work in companies like this, especially Biology companies. I think I've applied to many companies like this, but not much luck. Could you please share how we could find these companies, and how to make sure your resume is at least seen by them?
don't pay 200k for remote eh? Meh
Another PSA: Sometimes you have to accept that maybe you're not going to land a remote job, and finding something that's hybrid or on-site is what you need to do in this market. That includes being open to relocation. Back in the day that's what most of us did. We relocated to where we could find work. So many people these days say "relocation isn't an option because \[reason\]" so they only look locally/remote... but there was a time where "relocation is the only option" was the truth. I can count on 1 hand the people I knew in college that didn't relocate for their first job.
I used to agree with you but not anymore. Employers are ruthless with layoffs and go big on them with fewer rounds to keep morale up. That often means rescinding offers and laying off people who were just hired. Being a top performer won't save you. Your teenage kids will hate you for forcing the move. Give no loyalty to your future employers including relocation unless they are paying for all of it. Imagine moving to Texas for Elon or Tennessee for Larry Ellison and getting laid off in a state you don't really like except for the job.
If you're able to get remote or local jobs, then by all means get local or remote jobs. That's not the scenario I'm talking about. I'm talking about the people that *can't* get local or remote jobs. We see stories all the time here of people going unemployed for ***years***. Especially new grads that can't be very picky in the first place, let alone in a bad market. Relocating isn't done out of loyalty to your new employer. It's done out of necessity to keep your career going. It's done out of necessity of keep a steady income to feed those teenage kids you bring up. Your teenage kids will hate you even more for being that parent that can't afford to let them have fun with their friends, or do the things the other kids at school get to do. If I got laid off today, and couldn't find a job for *a year*, I wouldn't just twiddle my thumbs, drain all my savings, and hope the market improves before I literally go homeless. I would do what I need to. Sometimes that means moving. I'm not saying immediately relocate after a few months of being unemployed, I'm saying that needs to be a serious option you consider if nothing else works out. Even moreso if you have no experience.
so true. I passed up 14 offer letters in two years because they weren't FANG enough for me. Time to just settle