Ask HN: How to "make it" as a newlygrad/junior? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to "make it" as a newlygrad/junior?

4 pointskartoffelsaft14 comments

Hello HN!

Over the past couple months I've made dozens of job applications and it's not turned into much, and from talking to some of my coevals I'm not alone. It really feels like me and my friends have been dropped onto an industry that has just shut the doors to anyone in our 0-2 yr. experience range. Needless to say, I'm pretty worried that it's going to be a year out from my graduation without being employed doing the thing I spent the past >4 years of my life studying.

So I'm stuck, wondering what do I do from here.

A bit about me if context is useful (although generally-applicable responses are preferred because I know I'm not alone):

- Graduated December last year - Had a 3 month full-time internship for my capstone - Feedback on my work was super positive - Wasn't in the plan to get full employment right after (didn't fit in budget, and I have reasons to believe that that I won't get into) - I'm mildly worried that not turning into full employment is a bad look - Have many years of hobbyist experience preceding college/university - The projects I did don't feel very portfolio-able, i.e. hard to explicitly show what I learned or how it's useful - I can go either way on AI usage for code, but I know I have a strong distaste for "vibe" coding - I'm "detail-oriented" in resume-speak and vibe coding exists in contempt for detail - I've tried making use of my network, but the most common response has been "we really want to hire you but we'd need more funding to do so"

Currently the main thing I've been doing right now is a blog where I talk about mostly tech-related things and want to make a section where I talk about past projects, but don't know if that's the best thing to be doing with my time. I'd link the website here but I don't know the HN policy on links in posts; it's in my bio if you're curious.

Through all of my career there have only been two career routes:

1. Do what others cannot

2. Do what is most trendy

I always followed route 1, which mostly harmed my career as a JavaScript developer. I no longer know what the best answer is, at least for juniors. Now that I am in management in a niche area route 1 is all that matters, but it still bristles at personalities that are higher neurotic.

This advice is honestly unhelpful. What exactly can a new grad do that others can not?

How about doing what others are unwilling to do?

There are some tasks that aren’t exactly fun, but need to get done. Doing those jobs can also help give you more skills and deep information on certain issues other may lack or let atrophy.

We had a new guy who liked doing the same thing 1,000 times, so I asked him to fix agents on severs that were always broken and would cause deployment failures. Doing it proactively instead of reactively. Our failure rates dropped dramatically, which is a nice feather in his cap. That was low hanging fruit that anyone could have picked up and started doing for 10 years, but no one did. It was a slog at the start, but once he got caught up and everything was clean, it would take him maybe 20 minutes each day to maintain, and he knew more about fixing those issues than anyone. He became the expert in the room.

As issues were discovered, fixing them probably could have been largely automated, by putting the various fixes into code and having it run on broken agents each day to see what it would fix. The gaps could be addressed and added to the fix-it script if possible. This would have been even better. No one actually writing code knew enough about fixing the agent to do this, or cared enough, they’d just deal with things failing periodically.

Look for these gaps in your organization and come up with ways to address them and do it.

And those things that no one wants to do that are mundane increasingly AI can do.

Even if that wasn’t the case, trying to sell yourself as the person as “you should hire me because I will do the shit work” is not exactly a winning proposition to get a job.

I guess you could make an excuse of why no one should anything… but that won’t get you very far.

AI isn’t going to do anything by magic. Someone has to tell it to do it, setup guardrails so it doesn’t destroy everything, etc. There is no way in hell I’d be handing over those agent issues to AI to monkey around on production servers. Saying AI can do it is a cop out excuse unless someone already setup AI to do it successfully.

Are you expecting to come in as a new grad and work on nothing but exciting greenfield projects with the latest tech? Maybe that’s the case in startups, but in a more established business, there is a lot of work that needs to get done to keep the business running. It’s not glamorous, but it’s why they’ve been making billions for decades. Those more interesting projects tend to go to the people who’ve proven they can handle them by doing smaller projects successfully, and everyone has their stories from when they did “shit work”. Thinking you’re above it sounds like a problem. The best boss I ever had was the first one to quite literally pick up a broom if that’s what was needed. Work was work, and he earned a lot of respect on those moments.

Having something be “shit work” is a matter of perspective, and also a question of how you solve it. A lot of times people were doing “shit work” and then I’d be asked to help, and I’d write some code to do it and the “shit work” went away. It was more interesting for me, I learned things along the way, I showed more value to the company, and only had to spend enough time doing that work to figure out how to not have to do it anymore.

For a while, my boss would throw me into random projects and teams, because he knew my tolerance for nonsense was low and I’d find a better way to do it. He pretty much let me do whatever I want after a while.

As far as getting the job. You’d be surprised. I’ve interviewed people who gave off a vibe that they were too good for certain types of work. They don’t get the job, because they’re a pain in the ass to work with and everyone has to cover for the jobs they feel are beneath them. They’re choosy beggars. I wouldn’t say what you said verbatim, or have that be you’re big pitch, but also accept that as the new person, you might get some “shit work” and it’s up to you what you do with it.

> AI isn’t going to do anything by magic. Someone has to tell it to do it, setup guardrails so it doesn’t destroy everything, etc. There is no way in hell I’d be handing over those agent issues to AI to monkey around on production servers. Saying AI can do it is a cop out excuse unless someone already setup AI to do it successfully.

And you would trust a junior developer to do those things?

> Thinking you’re above it sounds like a problem. The best boss I ever had was the first one to quite literally pick up a broom if that’s what was needed. Work was work, and he earned a lot of respect on those moments.

I personally am above it with 30 years of experience. But it’s not about what he is willing to do. Every open job req gets hundreds of applications within a day these days. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd. But everything you said doesn’t help him stand out from the crowd to get the job. He needs to m actionable advice on how to get the job.

That sounds like a baseless assumption. Once you get good at doing things others are incapable/unwilling to perform people will notice. The soft skills are more important than the technical trendiness everybody else is already doing.

Maybe but that’s also not the point. He needs actionable advice on how to get the job in the first place.

The catch-22 for getting any first job is to invest time into that which appeals to the desires of the hiring personnel. That said they still have to choose to invest that time into either skills advancement or trendiness.

What they can do is reach out to hiring managers at various employers to get a feel for what job providers actually want. The challenge there is finding people and asking the correct questions. It’s the same challenge most hiring managers have, so once they solve it from their perspective they will be uniquely advantaged.

That’s not the reality post 2023.

I spoke about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=raw_anon_1111&comm...

Short version: If I couldn’t get any responses from random companies looking for “enterprise developer with AWS experience” because every open req gets hundreds of applications and I had at the time a decade of experience (on my resume I actually had more) including leading AWS architecture at two companies and working at AWS, how is a junior developer going to stand out?

Of course submitting my resume to random ATS’s was an experiment. I had multiple offers via my network including a Director of an F500 company. But I was 49 at the time

I don’t think you realize how much of a shit show it is our there now for any developer especially junior developers

I'm "detail-oriented" but you hate 'vibing'? I would argue it is made for you. Up your with AI. Lucky for you being detail oriented means you can use the technology of today in ways people with adhd can't.

On the job front, it has never been harder. But keep applying, don't give up or get discouraged.

I think we disagree either on what detail-oriented or vibe-coding means.

When I say vibe-coding, what I'm referring to is telling an AI your requirements and then using it's output without reading and/or understanding it. If I can point to some of the code and ask what it's doing there, and no one can answer that as if they're an author of that codebase, then it's vibe-coded. To not be able to is to imply those details were not important enough for any programmer to have considered.

I've done that before, in fact; I made a daily habit tracker for myself that way to cater to my own weird needs. I just find not knowing the details of a project intensely uncomfortable, and if I were to pay enough attention to it's output to alleviate that discomfort it would no longer be vibe-coding.

> you can use the technology of today in ways people with adhd can't.

You say this, but funnily enough I've seriously considered that I might have ADHD and should get examined for it. It feels like there's dozens of symptoms people describe as ADHD that I have, from weird things like sleeping immediately after having caffeine to having trouble listening to a full sentence. My inability to form habits intentionally has been pretty bad for my health already, and I'm not even that old.

It's a grind, private sector hiring is way down, re: Trump policies leading to unclarity, leading to cautious business. This is paired with the Ai moment.

You might try searching old HN for similar posts around the Great Recession.

Separately, Hytale is running a big Worldgen V2 competition and hiring out of the community. Very likely several contestants will be hired. (since it seems you are into games, you might pair your genre interests in, I suspect the more creative uses of their Worldgen tools will do well, saw a spiral galaxy gen that was super cool)

Searching for Great Recession posts is actually an interesting tip, I'll be taking a look into that.

As for the Hytale suggestion I do find that competition interesting but I'm afraid that I mightn't actually care that much about the game itself; from the gameplay I've seen it looks like it's taken cues from all the parts of Minecraft I don't find interesting, and the stuff that's unique for it's genre (like it's combat mechanics) looks underwhelming to me if I zoom out a bit. I, of course, haven't played it so I might be wrong about that (I was with Valheim, not with Vintage Story).

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