Finding a job

The tech job market is hard right now, and everyone is struggling to find employment. I remembered someone saying that if you have a job right now, you’re as stressed as the person not having a job, because every day, you wake up to go to work, scared of some micro-economic downward adjustment will lead to the termination of your current employment, so you end up looking out for the next place in your part-time; meanwhile, the ones not having a job are also looking for their next place. Everyone’s looking for their next “home” if you want to call your workplace that way.

The job market’s so hard that I can still remember the whole GHC’23 fiasco, with thousands of male job hunters invading a female/non-binary-only recruitment conference. If anything, that showed how desperate we all are at the moment, but more importantly it shows a point of no return where we are so ready to stomp on others foot to get what we want. Getting a job is now a survival game, and GHC’23 wasn’t the only example; the 2023 SHPE Convention — a convention for the Society of Hispanic Engineer — recently just happened, and from what I saw online, it was as if GHC got replayed.

Another source of data for how hard it has been for people to get jobs is Reddit — in particular, r/mscs, r/f1visa, r/csmajors. The average STEM major / CS major (especially an international) has shot around 1000 applications so far with zero callbacks. The callback rate seems to be <1%. Lots of people advise others online not to come to the US, and there are even those who snap back against those people, calling them “fear mongerers”.

Maybe I’m contrarian, but I don’t think you should be too desperate looking for a job; you should work on things that excites you, be it at your job or not, and make sure your job is great for you. If you think in first principles about what it means to hire and why people hire, you see that you get a job because your employer thinks that you can do something(s) really good, and those things can add tons of value for them, be it money, impact, etc… (which is shown through your hard/technical skills) AND that you will be a great teammate (since no one likes working with a robot; shown through your soft skills). When a company hire you, they are purchasing talent, and you’re providing that talent; they had a demand for some talent, and the right person/people are supplying that talent. It’s basic economics: supply and demand, and when you’re supplying this demand, you better make sure it’s worth it so that you’re not underselling. What this all means is that when you are providing your talent to someone else, you need to make sure you’re happy with the price or the stuff they’re paying you with. Many ended up underselling (e.g they work in a position they absolutely hate, or in a team they hate, or build something they find no joy in, or in a workplace that doesn’t align with their values but they bit the bait anyways because they were desperate). I think everyone should value themselves higher, given they also raise the quality of their supply, so that—per supply & demand economics—the demand is higher for them.

So if you’re really loving what you’re working on and what your career is about, that’s good! You just need to get better and better and better at it. However, we just assumed that you love what you do; the issue arises when you don’t. Back in the 80s, programmers are really good: Linux kernel hackers, 10x devs who can do anything, professionals coding low-level software that are much harder than the typical jack-of-the-trades full stack development we all do these days, considering how they learned all of this through textbooks alone; back then, programming books were hardcore, and they required a lot of brains to get through. As such, programmers back then were really passionate about what they do. Nowadays, software engineering has become oversaturated, because people know that software engineering salaries with sky-high numbers that are insurmountable for most other professions. For many, that number compelled them to pursue becoming a SWE. If that’s you, please reconsider your career goals: you won’t be able to do your job well if you only do it for the money. I think pursuing a career that you have no real passion/interest in is pointless. I’ve seen way too many people down bad for a job build very stupid cookie-cutter projects that barely took any brainpower to do or show their passion for building, e.g. MERN stack todo list CRUD web apps.

Many will argue that your job is not your life, and other aspects are important. This is true; by no means do your work have to be your life. If your job is your job and you want to focus on other things to be happy in life, do it. The concern is if you will actually enjoy what you do 9-5, or even see beyond what you’re doing to make an impact to the world. Lots of new grads I know get pitted into teams building internal tools, to which they ended up complaining a lot, yet they never considered moving out, because the security of their job is more important than their happiness. At the very least, whatever you do, you should be enjoying it, or else your time would be a waste, and you being unhappy also makes the place that hired you unhappy. If you want to rise to the top of your field, you will need to love what you do, to stick with it for a long time, so you will have to like it.

At the end of the day, to get the best jobs, you will need to stand out. When you have the skills, you may do whatever you want, but remember that you should do what you like doing. Don’t spend time on chasing gold; chase value, and success will follow.