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Comment by billy99k | Hacker News Reader

I knew lots of people that got into coding in the early 2000s and couldn't find a job after graduation.

Why? They just took the classes and expected a cushy job.

I, on the other hand, worked on lots of my own projects and contributed to open source. I had a job lined up after graduation and haven't been out of work since.

Most of them got out of tech completely.

You can't just expect to follow a list of pre-written steps and then get rich from it. Life has never worked this way, but people continue to expect it.

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Same. I went to a fairly middle-tier CS program, graduated in the mid 2010s. A good chunk of my CS class just never got CS jobs. One is a car salesman, one is a math teacher, one went into academia for linguistics, many went into IT or helpdesk, many work odd jobs or generic white collar jobs. I would guess only about 10-15% of CS grads ever land into the cushy six-figure Bay Area SWE career at well-known companies that people associate with the term "Software Engineer".

Becoming a SWE is hard and it was never easy. You needed projects, internships, hundreds of hours invested in interview prep, aggressive networking and, even after all that, excellent luck. It is not something that naturally follows a CS degree. Maybe it does for the kids at the Stanfords and MITs (who, might I remind you, have already won wars to even get there). Not for the average Joe Jr from University of Flyover State.

Things were different back then. Interviewers were expected to be skilled at assessing a candidate holistically.

Nowadays, how well you grind Leetcode is the most important test of your employability.

I agree, and have the same experience, minus the date my career started.

That said, there's still something to be said for the fact that this is the only field that requires so much outside work, constant upskilling, etc.

Tech is absolutely NOT "the only field that requires so much outside work, constant upskilling, etc". A good doctor never stops going to conferences, reading, publishing articles, etc.

But the doctors who never go to conferences and who don't stay up to date on anything are also called Doctor and work in the exact same places. Good luck telling the differences between them as a layman. I agree with you though. And the percentage of "Good Doctors" probably rivals the percentage of "Good Engineers" or "Good Anything" really because care of a craft is not the norm. Doing the bare minimum to avoid getting fired is the median we are exposed to on a daily basis across professions.

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