> The harsh reality is that for senior positions you're either going to spend a LOT of time smashing submit on hundreds and thousands of applications while hearing _nothing_ back, or you're going to tap your connections and have a job lined up relatively quickly. New grads have it a lot easier in the open market IMHO.
I disagree with this take entirely.
* Senior engineering positions, at least looking at the layoffs over the past year, trend to be the least impacted by layoffs. Empirically this appears to be the case, and it makes logical sense: they may be more expensive, but if that person/role is capable of doing more with less then its worth that investment versus training up mid-levels/juniors, dealing with inexperience, etc. Of course, ideally companies want both, but the industry has matured well past the point of "just keep the cheapest people"; we know better nowadays versus previous recessions.
In other words; during a layoff, there's less liquidity in the senior engineering talent pool than in other pools.
* In a similar vein; when companies have openings in this recession; they want Senior people. Either in the title, or just a bias when interviewing candidates; seniority matters. I've seen this in my own small-city startup community; startups with three or four junior/mid-level engineers, put up a posting for Senior talent, and it stays up for months (I'm looking at some right now which date back to October). Great companies, great culture, great compensation (not FANG, but); just very low liquidity in that talent pool to meet the demand.
The one caveat; Senior engineers who come from a FANG-salary background may have issues if they enter interviews with that expectation. But there's a lot of numbers between entry-level compensation and FANG-compensation.
* Why do companies hire junior/mid-level talent? Its the most liquid talent pool. Cheaper. Maybe you make the argument that junior talent has more loyalty/staying power because they can grow with the company. Etc. One issue with this recession is: All of these companies still have a LOT of money. This isn't, for most companies (especially FANG), an issue of "we don't have the money to meet payroll so need to cut"; its an issue of spending the past two years blowing cheap money on as many people as they could, realizing that they got a lot of low-tier talent, managing all that growth is HARD, and in some cases there just isn't enough high-impact work to justify some roles. This recession legitimately isn't leading to layoffs which are just about cost-cutting; its as much if not more about reorganization, refocusing managerial resources on high-impact projects, cutting bloat, cutting moonshots, etc. That changes the firing/hiring dynamic; its not necessarily about saving money on hires, its about reindexing on what makes a Good Hire.
That makes being a junior engineer very hard; after all, the best way to convince a hiring manager that you're a great hire is to say "Yeah I've worked on something similar to this problem before, let me tell you about it." Junior engineers don't have that.
> you're going to tap your connections and have a job lined up relatively quickly.
But this is absolutely, undeniably true. Its universally, physically, fundamentally impossible to overstate how much impact connections have in getting jobs during a flat or declining job market.
To the point of the original post, and to junior engineers: Stop worrying so much about actual technical skills. Obviously, be competent. But: Your #1 priority needs to be networking and socialization. Go to tech meetups. Offer to give presentations. Join local young professionals associations. Make friends and get drinks with them.