The job market is very hard right now. It feels like 2009 all over again. It took until 2014 to recover in my local area.
And there is a LOT of new devs getting pushed out. Crazy.
nice project!
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Hi, nonprogrammer poking my head in from all. What happened in 2009?
A global recession.
More like a global depression that governments won't admit was a depression because the economy is completely shareholder centric with very little consideration for workers. New grads did the occupy Wallstreet protests because they spent multiple years unable to find a job. It was a nightmare that destroyed the lives of countless working class people
oh huh, really showing my age here heh
Oh don't worry you'll get to experience one firsthand in [ checks watch ] about 20 minutes.
Ngl I’m a little bit looking forward to the next housing crash, because maybe then I can finally buy a fucking house for a not-too-insane price.
I'm right there with you. I feel like everyone I know's a bunch of hermit crabs lining up to upgrade from soda cans and plastic bottles into real shells
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
My local area was hit bad about a year later than everyone else. But once it hit, houses were close to 1/2 the price of what they were going a year earlier + unemployment was up to about 20%. It was VERY bad and I remember trying to get a job in the middle of it. I got lucky and got something around an hour away while quite a it of my social group moved away.
Tht crash of '08
I had just graduated, fresh engineer and super happy I landed a pretty good starting engineering job in a great company. I was quite lucky. Engineers dropping like flies, becoming taxi drivers, or whatever they could find to sustain their families. All investments everywhere were dwindling. Thankfully oil prices were high regionally so some remained.
Doesn't seem that bad to me, but I'm not a junior, or in the US.
I applied to 600 jobs last year, had 30 interviews, and only had 1 job offer that was revoked after Emperor Elon took over. Things have been completely hellish for me.
600?? Did you automate it or something?
US has been in a rough spot on the tech side as all the big tech companies kicked off a layoff spree (assumed by many to chase profitable quarterly reports).
With Trump and Elon screwing with the federal government, even stable government jobs are now hurting.
Contributing to big project can earn you more recognition than doing little project from scratch.
You know JS ? Contribute to some libs.
Found a bug in chrome ? Report the bug, learn a bit of C++, and submit a patch to fix it.
Cyou count to 100? Learn quantum physics, compute the odds for each ball, and win the lottery. Easy peasy. I don't know why these kids can't thrive here in the future.
/s
In all seriousness, learning c++ or any language is good advice but it may only be easy or even possible if you have a certain background of concepts. We tend to overlook those, and remember achieving a certain skill without the full picture
I contributed a feature to the .NET JIT without knowing C++.
I really dont know C++, I have at most wrote 300 lines while following a tutorial 6 years ago.
I honestly don't think that doing these cool things improves your odds of getting hired. Junior Devs don't really touch these parts of a platform, let alone lead development on them from scratch.
A valuable engineer, to me, is someone who writes clean, maintainable code and follows common patterns. That's also something which has to be learned by trial and error to actually see the value of.
And how would you demonstrate clean code and check for maintainability or patterns? How can you gauge the value of their trial and error?
Look at their code, look at their work. It is a point of reference for potential and actual scenarios.
This would absolutely increase their odds.
Sure, look at their personal projects. I'm just saying the maintainability and quality of the code and speed of iteration is more of the point than how impressive the math is behind an ML algorithm. I've just seen a lot of ML engineers/data scientists who really suck at writing maintainable code
"Maintainable code and common patterns? But I prefer code-golfing my if-statements into one, long sequence of characters." -coworker standing atop the Dunning-Kruger peak
Pffft. I write everything as a one liner in notepad and just copy and paste into a compiler.
Note: Sarcasm. I'm not a dev, I just script shit for my own convenience at work. I'm the guy the idiots talk to first. After 12 years I'm pretty good at filtering out the bullshit and giving a concise ticket to escalate in the event I don't have permissions to fix something.
I have fixed code before, but its been very rare, and was most certainly a case of the actual dev not seeing the forest due to the trees. It just happened I had the cube next to him and he wanted any other set of eyes, lol. I just happened to have some education in various languages that I opted not to pursue further.
It just happened I had the cube next to him and he wanted any other set of eyes, lol.
Hello, rubber duck!
If you can. Sales Engineering is a good field for engineers that need work but are not expected to code like an outright developer.
If you can get into it, and more importantly enjoy the role, also can be hilariously well compensated.