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Comment by thwayunion | Hacker News Reader

> So the Senior market is saturated?

I am not sure I would say saturated, but yeah, the Sr. SWE market is definitely not as tight as it was a year ago for most role types. However, it does depend on qualifications and company type. Seniors for R&D positions (so, PhD with 5+ years in product-focused R&D) are still basically impossible to hire. Friends tell me that hiring seniors at mid-pay or low-pay companies is still pretty hard.

The more important dichotomy is between mid-career/late-career and junior. The entry level positions are absolutely saturated. CS programs are definitely over-producing at this point.

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CS programs are overproducing but they are overproducing the wrong skills. Most don’t have the cloud skillset or experience with IaC, they are never thought how to solve problems within distributed systems. And their idea of systems design is a Flask app talking to a MySQL database on a laptop.

It’s not the students fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times, and sometimes even teach bad engineering patterns that cause problems and create technical debt.

> It’s not their fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times.

Yes/no/maybe. The schools got pressured by the bootcamps that were teaching the "flask app talking to a mysql db" .. they simplified their classes and stop teaching some things. It sucks, the people who come out of that don't have the theory/flexiblity/skills coming out that you would expect before.

A lot of development jobs can be simplified into a web endpoint that hits a database. So that seems like a completely fair project to have students work on in an applied course.

Also, universities do offer courses in cloud computing. I was helping our interns with their cloud computing courses back in like 2016, so it's not a recent addition either.

> A lot of development jobs can be simplified into a web endpoint that hits a database.

This doesn't ring right. It might (maybe) be educational to do this, but I'd say that any "development job" that is about software development is not trivial like you say.

An "endpoint-to-database" job doesn't exist [1] - I think you're making a simplification here and the real argument is if its educational.

[1] find a job description that says REST or GQL endpoint directly to database, and doesn't have a long wishlist of other skills, experience, or design - I'll gladly take 100 of those and be on my merry way (!)

> I'd say that any "development job" that is about software development is not trivial like you say.

I did say, "simplified too." Yes, there's other things you might have to learn, but being able to, "take data from some place, then stick it into a database"; and "take data from a database, and send it to some other place" is a fundamental skill set for a lot of dev jobs.

You might be working at a FAANG and get to do fancy cutting edge development that never touches a database. But a lot of us at banks, insurance companies, etc are piping data into/out of a databases or other endpoints all day long.

> An "endpoint-to-database" job doesn't exist

9 of the 10 dev jobs I've ever had amounted to this, including my current one. Half of my job is maintaining a Go-backend bolted to a Postgres DB, and the other half is piping data from various APIs into BigQuery or vice versa.

> An "endpoint-to-database" job doesn't exist [1]

This was my entire career pre-phd, and it was a pretty excellent career. Oh how the times change.

Very insightful and interesting comment. Thanks.

is it CS programs or is it the bootcamps?

I've seen the bootcamp crowd more often than not in these situations coming through, not many with actual 4 year CS degrees, though I've seen many of those too, but not nearly as much, by an order of magnitude.

EDIT: could be a difference in what part of the industry we work in too. I do more frontend / "design engineer" work.

Might be true in the US, not what I’m seeing have seen in the UK.

Here big companies are taking kids straight out of uni and boot camping them because decent juniors are hard to find.

How easy is it to find bad juniors? I think that may be relevant for determining how saturated the field is.

Yep, I'm probably going to have to accept yet another paycut if I want to keep working. Peak of earnings for me was at about 13 yoe. Now it's downhill until I'm better off working retail.

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