Getting a Dev Job in 2025

I try to not make a ton of videos about getting a job in Tech but with the state of the market and how tough it has gotten I think it's worth sharing my thoughts I just had a conversation with a bunch of Junior devs yesterday and before then I did a talk at a college that really showed me how rough things are for people trying to get their first job or even those who were laid off and are trying to get a new one it's rough out there and I want to do my best to

try and showcase what from my experience works I do want to disclose something important though I haven't looked for a job in a while I obviously don't need to get one right now thanks to all of you guys supporting me my team and the channel I have two companies one for my content and one for my actual Tech stuff that we sell with ping both upload thing and ping. and those have put me in a position where I don't have to hunt but what I do often have to do is hire fire and help other

companies doing the same so all I might not have as recent of experience actually looking for a job I still have a ton on the other side and having done hundreds of interviews as an interviewer throughout my career I hope I can give a little bit of good advice considering the current state of the market I don't want to mince words though it is rough out there right now and in previous videos that I covered the state of the job market in I showed that it wasn't that bad but at this point it kind of

is I know far too many people who are struggling to get jobs and at the same time I see the same mistakes over and over and over again I want to break all of these down and try to give you a like mini boot camp on what I think makes the most hirable Engineers but first a quick word from today's sponsor post hog the all-on-one suite of product tools that you almost certainly should be using every project I didn't use post hog for I ended up regretting it they're an open source platform that's uh a

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my life as a product developer way easier which is why I reached out to them to sponsor the channel so thankful they did I hope was helpful for you check them out today at soy. linkpos hog and make sure to tell him that Theo sent you to understand where the job market is now it's important to understand where it was not long long ago because most of the education system and the advice that you're going to get online is focused on how the job market worked in like 2019 2021 it also worked like this way

before then too a key thing about tech jobs is that there were way more jobs than there were tech people so if I needed five people on my team to work on a project and I only had three finding those other two was really difficult because the number of available Engineers was relatively low as such we were more likely to open up Junior roles not because we needed somebody at a lower level or we just wanted to pay somebody less but because it was so hard to find great Engineers that you would roll the dice

and hire people who were less likely to be meaningful contributors in hopes that eventually they would be in this example you need two really good Engineers maybe you'll hire five to six Juniors and if you have a one in three chance of them becoming really good someday you might end up with four people who are kind of dead weight but you would also end up with two that are really really good and eventually those people will be able to run teams and do their own hiring and level up other Engineers as well hiring a junior

engineer isn't a exchange of money for code it's usually an investment an investment in a bet the business is making in hopes that long term you'll become good enough to be a really useful contributor to that business it's harsh to say it that way but it is reality most Junior engineers slow down their teams however if they level up fast enough and they really start to get what's going on they stop slowing the team down and eventually can accelerate it really meaningfully so the best thing to Showcase in an interview will always be your ability

to grow and adapt on the Fly because that's the best indicator that somebody might break out of that junior level and go far far past it two really big things have happened that have made the job market work less like this the first is the massive layoff weight Wes that have been plaguing tech for a while now if you haven't kept up it's pretty brutal in 2024 over 145,000 Tech roles disappeared 2023 it was even more 260,000 that's a lot of Engineers who were employed that no longer are and these people now are also looking

for jobs so if I'm again imagine I'm an engineer running a team with five people we need two more previously I was very likely to consider juniors in hopes they could level up and get to that point now there are 260 to 400,000 senior plus Engineers that have actual industry experience that are competing for those slots the likelihood that I can get an actual experienc engineer is significantly higher especially if somebody on my team has worked with one of those people who was laid off and they say hey my friend Joe here needs a job

I worked with him before he's really good they're going to skip the entire line and jump in front and be much more likely to get that role there's a theme Here trust and we're going to be going back to that in just a minute because first I've talk about problem two AI this isn't oh AI is going to ruin all our jobs the big bad Doom machine just trying to be realistic here Ai and the tools that are being built with it do represent a meaningful change in how jobs and Tech roles work on one

hand the Need For Less experienced Engineers as unproductive as they were has has gone down a bit because training Claude to do what you need is both slightly more reliable and slightly less higher cap than what Junior Engineers could do and honestly in a lot of ways I feel like I'm mentoring a junior when I'm working with Claude it's roughly the same thing but more importantly it has accelerated what good Engineers can do very heavily if I have the option of teaching an employee on my team how to work with a specific code base or

just spend 20 minutes trying to get claw to make the change I'm working on going to do the thing with Claude most of the time it's just easier and faster and I as an experienced engineer can be much more productive when I use these tools and can cover a much larger surface area that previously would have required more employees that's not the biggest thing that AI has changed though AI has ruined the process of interviewing for earlier roles it is horrifying if you put up an open role on the internet like Hey we're hiring for

a junior hit up this email address you will immediately get thousands of emails from people AI generating the worst slop you've ever seen and calling it a res and then a five paragraph or 10 page cover letter that they had chat GPT write for them it is horrible I cannot emphasize enough how miserable it is doing the actual recruiting and going through the NeverEnding large pile of resumés that are more and more full of AI crap it's horrible and know it's hard to be sympathetic to the interviewer side when you're trying to get that first

role fresh out of school fresh out of boot camp fresh out a learning react yourself but you need to know the misery that is opening up a junior role for applications and the gigantic unbelievably large number of resumés that are going to come in as a result it sucks it sucks so hard that most companies just give up on managing that stack of resumés entirely because it's not worth going through because it's entirely slop just years ago those roles would have gotten a few hundred applications now it's tens if not hundreds of thousands sometimes I've

seen people who had like 50 followers on Twitter post an open job rle and in 24 hours get 10,000 applications it's insane so what do we do about this if the number of senior employees looking for roles has gone up the amount of shitty resumes has gone up and the amount of rolls as a whole has gone down how can you possibly get a job is it time to just give up I don't think so because there's one key thing that has been going down since all of this started trust trust is a hard to

come by commodity nowadays everybody is lying everybody's AI generating and hallucinating every resume coming in is questionable at best but you know what isn't your own experience in the people that you have worked with the best thing you can possibly have when looking for a job is trust and there's a lot of different ways to build trust the one everyone says is go contribute to open source I have a whole video called Don't contribute to open source that describes why this is a dumb idea and also gives a little bit of advice on how to

do this right but I want to focus on some more practical things one of the biggest ones is being part of the community you have no idea how many people pop up in my twitch chat show up in my Twitter replies hang out on Blue Sky hang out in Discord and just show without even trying that they know what they're doing and it's very easy to start trusting these people almost too easy if you know what you're doing enough to hang out and watch the videos that I make all the time there's a good chance

you could be successful in the space a very good chance and due to the fact that so many people are here it might feel like you can't stand out you are wrong it is very easy to Stand Out by just being around and being useful if you have a high signal to noise ratio where when you show a link in chat it's likely to be relevant and interesting or when you reply to something on Twitter it's likely to be useful or funny I'll quickly build an association in my head with your username your profile picture

brings value is funny these graphs in people's heads are relatively easy to manipulate not in the derogatory trying to screw with people sense but in the more realistic people like the people understand what they're doing s and it is so easy to build this type of trust if you just talk about the things you actually care about in spaces with other people who care about them there is a catch though if you don't actually care about tech you're kind of a lot of people got into software Dev purely for the money they don't even like

computers I knew a bunch of Engineers I used to work with that didn't use computers in their spare time at all they would just use their phones a little bit and then read books and watch movies and that's fine good for them but in this new era of AI and the slow condensing of the field the people who don't care are not going to make the cut the ones who only came in for money that aren't spending their spare time watching videos on my channel playing with new open source libraries and being part of these

communities they're absolutely and you have to go out of your way now to not look like one of them and that sucks it genuinely does cuz there's plenty of people who can contribute plenty of fine code but if you don't care it is unlikely you're going to be better than the AI tools that we'll be using next year and that's a very hard pill to swallow but once you've swallowed it you'll realize oh I actually do kind of care about this I know my peers don't but I was the one they were asking for help

with their homework on those people can still have a ton of success and if you're one of those if this isn't the first of my videos you've watched if you've hung out in the community you've played with the tools I recommend you've disagreed with things I've said and you've been involved you're fine you just need to show the world that you do care and that you do know what you're doing and the way to do that isn't spitting out hundreds of random GitHub reos it's not throwing bad contributions to whatever projects you heard me talk

about the way to do that is being involved hanging out bringing value be realistic and honest if there's something that I'm talking about that I missed a key point on point it out if I'm live streaming myself talking about things that you're familiar with and I say hey I need a source for this thing does anyone have it and you do go find it and bring it in make your name associated with value and you will very quickly build trust with me and I like to think I'm a good person to have trust you because

I've helped dozens of engineers get jobs in the last year alone because I know a ton of companies that are hiring but they're not hiring in the sense that they have a public listing that anybody can send a shitty AI generated resume to they're hiring in the sense that they're strategically building a team that has specific technical needs and requirements they want to make sure every bet they make is a trustworthy bet because that's what hiring is it is a type of gambling and it's a type of gambling that sucks because people's healthc care is

involved but you have to be ready to roll the dice a bit and understand that the other side is rolling the dice too it's your goal to make that roll look as likely to be successful as possible increase the likelihood that you're going to be successful for those companies and the companies will see it the same way you have to show them that you're very likely to be a good hire and very unlikely to be a bad one and that's not as hard as it sounds there's a lot of ways you can do this I

met this engineer Taylor at render ATL and she was awesome she asked a really good question after my talk about a niche use case for Server actions in nextjs and I decided to chat out with her more after cuz I was curious she wanted to make sure she was using the right Solutions with server action so she went out of her way to try whole of these different options and came to me asking what my thoughts were about them my thoughts were well I haven't done the research you have I would love for you to

share that research so I could do more with it and I told her it would be awesome if she had done a blog post about it her response wait other people care yes if you care enough to do that type of research to spend that time deep diving on different solutions to problems document it and share it with the world there's a decent chance nobody notices there's also a decent chance someone does and more importantly if you're talking with people like me and I go to your profile on blue sky or Twitter or whatever and

I go to your blog and I see you have this post that's really interesting to me light bulbs start going off in my head like oh they get it they're in they're not just playing with these things to get a job they care enough to Deep dive on things I haven't even had the time to Deep dive on yet and that is the best signal I can imagine that someone is a trustworthy potentially good hire and there's one last piece that will always make hiring easier friendships if you have connections with other people be it

peers that you went to school with co-workers you had in previous jobs or just a friend from your hometown that happens to have a role in an engineering company try to maintain those relationships and try to nerd out and talk about these things with them obviously if those people aren't actually nerds they're just coding for the job and making the money don't push it too hard but if you can form a solid m in their heads a oh this person is associated with this thing going well the likelihood that you can turn that into a

job is very very high I learned this personally from my time at twitch because as uh Rough Around the Edges as I could be to work with I'm not one to compromise where it would hurt our users I was very deeply associated with things actually shipping I became the guy that was pulled in when projects were going to miss their deadlines to make them not only hit their deadlines but often exceed them so we could keep working on the things that actually mattered and that association between me and shipping has persisted throughout my entire career

and I had a ton of opportunities come up and I still do to this day because somebody I worked with in the past has that association between me and actually getting done those associations last way longer than any role at any company will and the people who build those associations are going to have their own jobs in the future at other places you might be interested in that is so essential to succeeding because when I'm hiring I'm kind of doing like a tier list in my head of what I want if I have an open

role on my team the first thing I do is think about the people I know that' be a good fit for that role once I've exhausted that list if I can't find anybody the next thing I do is mention it to the team I'll say hey I kind of want to hire for this role what do you guys think and if somebody else says I think that's a good idea I actually know a person who would be perfect for it they just got laid off at this company and I think they'd be a good fit

that's the easiest interview in the world world they're probably going to get the job if after that point there's nobody on the immediate team that has a good referral for the role maybe I'll post it as an internal job posting to see if anybody from a different team wants to transfer to my team because if we've already hired them and I can look at the work they've done and talked to their co-workers the likelihood of a bad higher is significantly lower and internal poaching is at an all-time high right now because it's so scary to

hire someone that isn't a good pick after all of those steps are exhausted after I realized I don't know anybody my team has realized they don't know anybody and I can't poach anyone from another team at the company finally I might consider a traditional public job rooll list maybe so if you do want to get a job fast it's very important to do what you can to be in those first three tiers and if you're stuck fighting at the fourth one if you don't have friends in Tech if you're doing this alone find a way

to be less lonely because that's going to be the thing that kills your career it's not the opportunities that businesses have it's not the companies that are not giving you offers it's not the degree that you did or didn't spend all your money on the thing that will kill your career is letting the loneliness get to you fight that we're getting some good messages and I wanted to call out this one because I think it's a phenomenal example of what I'm talking about here I had a video call with a guy I didn't know from

Turkey to help him with a question that he posted in Theo's Discord about how to set up create T3 app in a certain way now he's a good friend of mine this is what I'm talking about AU here had successfully made a connection brought value and built this mental association with in that case one person but that could scale really far really fast so now if that person from turkey that he met is hiring or is working at a company that is hiring and he knows that you're looking for a role you are so much

more likely to snag that role and if you do this for not just one person maybe three or four maybe a few of those are public and if it's in the Discord and the public question stuff the answers are there too and I and many others notice who is answering those questions and who is bringing the most value some of the best hiring help I have given companies was telling them who in my Discord answers questions the best and they just straight up hired people from that and now those people are running engineering at surprisingly

large companies like clerk yes clerk has a high up engineer that was found because they answered questions while in my Discord these are some of the best ways to build trust to have these relationships with people who get it and are in the field too oh look my team I literally met aore through twitch chat Gabriel is my lead researcher I found him because he was always posting useful links and sources and all the other things I needed to be successful with my video creation and pulled him onto the team we also have Addie here

who has been beyond helpful she's found a ton of connections and made a ton of friendships in the space and now she's the one who reviews most of her videos before they go live there's a ton of these like Ethan met Rees through the server if you watched my video on uh the faster version of McMaster those two became friends through my Discord server and they built that together they might even do a startup in the future knowing how these things tend to go it's not that hard to do when you're a nerd and you

hang out in spaces with other nerds take advantage of that don't be alone don't let yourself be The Loner that doesn't have friends to talk about the stuff with and don't use the fact that you went to school during CO as an excuse which I've seen a lot it does suck but you can still make these connections other ways I made a lot of friends through weird Facebook groups grou about hacking stuff when I was in college and those friendships ended up being essential to me finding success in the field find people that you can

relate with that you can nerd out with that you can have these deep Technical and life conversations with so that you don't have to go through this alone because if you're going through it alone I honestly don't know if you're going to make it now because this kind of sucks so make friends build trust show the world that you kind of know what you're talking about and you won't have as bad a time and for everyone else if you're just here for the money good luck that's all I got to say on this one I

hope this was helpful until next time peace nerds