I find that the bigger problem is that hiring is broken. There are tons of fraud on the applicant side, so companies (for the lack of a better option) adjusted and now ratchet up their requirements to keep up with the fraud. (There’s also of course fraud on the hiring side, but that’s a different thing).

It doesn’t mean junior positions don’t exist, just that “senior” is the new junior, because now everyone (even if they just followed a tutorial and built a bog-standard Next.js website) is a “senior” who “delivered a high-performance scalable website using all best practices and buzzwords”.

This makes it hard for honest talent to brand itself, so now the only option is to follow the trend, lie and hope you get lucky.

And don’t get me started on outright fake applicants who sling ChatGPT’d resumes without even being able to follow the aforementioned tutorial at all, or boiler rooms in third-world countries who turned this into an entire business, often alongside their tech support scamming business (never put all your eggs in one basket!)

My advice for any talent, whether junior, “senior” or actually senior is to skip the front door and talk to people instead. Reach out to people on LinkedIn, meet people at conferences/events etc or even target non-tech people who might need or benefit from tech work. Talking to people (ideally in person) will generally prove your actual worth much better and allow them to get a feel for your skills in a way that no resume will ever do (because resumes now have zero signal over the noise since anyone can ask ChatGPT for a senior-level resume, and reference-checking is not possible with the amount of applications going around).