Are Junior Developers Screwed?

it's really tough out there if you're a junior developer looking for a job every job opening instantly gets hundreds or thousands of applications if you go on Blinder Reddit seems like everybody that gets a job already has a job or graduated first in their class from a top tier computer science university and that ain't you in this video I'll give you my take on the current job market for junior and entry-level developers and what I would do if I were in your situation I've survived three collapses of the software developer industry the com Boom the

Great Recession and whatever it is that we're going through right now I think the answers are easier than you think they are even if it is painful I'm completely self-taught and I became a software developer at Amazon at the height of the Great Recession so I know it's possible the big question is whether the downturn and low availability of jobs for junior developers today represents a permanent shift in the industry with all of the layoffs is the end of software as a lucrative career done for should you just abandon everything and get a job in

the trades should you just go be a plumber because AI can't unclog a toilet yet the simple answer is no it's an absurd idea and you'll agree with me when I share my reasoning if you're new to the channel welcome my name is Steve win Uncle Steve or Steve and I'm a former principal software engineer at Amazon where I spent 18 years I just quit my job to make content fulltime my new mission is to uplevel 1 million people in their Tech careers thank you for for helping me on this Quest if you want more

from me sign up to my free Weekly Newsletter or join my free community of several thousand Tech professionals upleveling themselves and encouraging each other on my Discord details in the description so let's start with AI yes the demos are all amazing llms can code faster than you can they can now produce functional code snippits debug existing programs and even design simple applications a couple of years ago this technology couldn't do Squat and that's the thing with exponential growth it doesn't take that much time for the numbers to get really really big if the growth in

capabilities continues to stay exponential it's not just tech jobs that are going to be replaced everybody will be out of a job while ai's capabilities are still growing signs of a Slowdown are already here it's like when your buddy meets a new girl and she's absolutely perfect she's not it just takes a bit of time before you understand that she isn't new studies indicate that llms can't independently learn or gain new skills that's a problem if you're trying to replace developers you train an llm only on poems it can't write a good novel they frankly

can't write a good novel now even though they're trained on novels llms are great for paring things that they've been trained on but without the ability to learn about adjacent skills llms will just be a really fancy autocomplete but Steve you might say what if we invented the ability for llms to learn well sure but my wife would be a car if she had four wheels the thing about about breakthroughs is you can't predict when they'll come if ever llms were an amazing breakthrough for sure but now that we're understanding their limits you can't just

predict another fundamental breakthrough is coming soon doesn't work like that the second bit that doesn't scare me about Ai and that nobody is talking about is that nobody is making any money from it well maybe Nvidia is but they're selling shovels during the Gold Rush everybody else is spending a ton of money on AI nobody's struck gold yet show me a company that has actually replaced devs with AI I'll wait everybody assumes that it'll happen but just look at where the money is and how it flows big picture when it comes to AI I'm on

team Yan Lun the chief AI scientists at meta in the future we'll all have ai assistants that do all of the work that we don't want to do and they'll amplify our existing abilities these AI assistants will talk with the assistance of other people when they do some work for us we'll check to make sure that that work matches our intentions that would be a really big upgrade to our quality of life but it's not going to result in artificial intelligence taking over the world and making humans obsolete that's just absurd to me like look

at the crowd strike outage where code was pushed out and brought down large portions of our corporate software systems you mean to tell me that we're going to replace devs that have the power to make mistakes with a huge blast radius with an AI that hallucinates and can't reason please but Steve you might say look at all the layoffs many thousands of developers have been laid off in this recent down cycle well companies are laying people off because they over hired during the pandemic we're still above pre-pandemic Staffing for software developers and I don't like

that attitude here's a secret companies all copy each other sometimes this imitation leads to a really hot Market as we were getting out of the pandemic everybody was hiring these creat cycles that feed on themselves during the hiring boom companies were throwing big money at people to get them to come to their companies this left an open seat that needed to be filled at the company they left since a company with hiring needs is also competing with others with hiring needs this created a crazy boom cycle anybody with a pulse was hired what we're seeing

now with the layoff cycle is companies copying each other again companies are trying to trim teams down as much as possible a lot of companies will trim too much but the consequences of overfiring take months to years to catch up so suppose you're a company with 100 developers and you get a mandate to eliminate 20% of them this year and 20% next year and also to freeze promotions so you'll be down to a nice round number of 64 people after this 2-year down cycle the work didn't go away you still have a road map you

still have to keep the lights on and support existing products morale is going to go down the tubes burnout is going to increase the senior people are going to leave the team because they have options I'll tell you right now that AI isn't going to solve this problem there's another big problem here which is the impending demographics bomb when the company finally realizes that they cut too much they're going to want more Senior People First to plug the holes but they don't have any seniors because they haven't been promoting internally nobody has any seniors because

the industry collectively decided that they weren't going to hire Junior engineers and that's where senior Engineers come from today's Junior and entry level engineers I'd like to take a quick moment to thank today's video sponsor springboard I get a lot of boot camps that want to sponsor the channel and I've said no to all of them until I learned about springboard springboard is a software boot camp that combines online learning with dedicated one-on-one support from actual humans it gives you the flexibility to learn at your own pace because really nobody has the bandwidth to do

a short intensive and immersive program if you've already got a full-time job oh What attracted me to springboard wasn't the over 18,000 students that have graduated or enrolled in the program the 85% placement rate to a full-time job after graduation or the over $23,000 more people earn on average after they graduate it was their job guarantee with springboard's job guarantee if you don't land a job within 12 months of graduating from their program you'll receive a full refund now terms and conditions definitely apply so please make sure to understand the eligibility criteria before enrolling but

I did some research on this guarantee and it's not a scam people are getting their money back if they can't find work now what an amazing offer either you get a job making more money in Tech or you uplevel yourself for free it's an amazing win-win situation where incentives are aligned so if you're in the market for a tech boot camp springboard seems like a no-brainer to me to get more information and to apply to their various programs click on the link in the description and as a special offer for my viewers I've negotiated a

discount of $1,000 off their software engineering boot camp using the code a life engineered thanks again to springboard for sponsoring today's video the market is going to come back I guarantee it unless you think that technological innovation is done now here's what I believe it's really difficult to predict change so it's smarter to think about what isn't going to change which is human and Company Behavior companies are going to copy each other they're going to run into Collective problems the collective the problem they'll run into in the coming years is a lack of software developers

and Tech workers to build tomorrow's technology in the late '90s early 2000s I made websites for medium-sized organizations this dried up after theom bust well what were people saying back then that the technology sector was done that the internet was played out what a ridiculous thing to say today but back then people really thought that the internet was just another fad when it comes to software technology and the internet internet I think we're much closer to Kittyhawk where the airplane was invented than the moonlanding I think technology and the internet are going to evolve in

ways that we cannot imagine today I believe more money will be made on this technology in the future than has ever been made up until this point and I think that the Junior and entry level Engineers of today are going to be the ones that realize that future so what should you do if you're a junior or entry-level developer if you have a job you need to become a senior developer as quickly as possible this will protect you if you lose your job as senior jobs are still out there now is not the time to

Coast if you're employed if you don't have a job then you need to kill the clock if you were thinking about going to school to get a supplementary degree or do a boot camp and you won't go into too much debt do it if you've been thinking about starting a company I would encourage you to do so it's never been easier to create a website or mobile application with the Advent of cloud computing you can get something off the ground really fast and get customers in record time if you can make your own experience that's

great and if you still can't find a job as developer loosen your constraints a bit and start applying to adjacent roles maybe you can get your foot in the door as a support engineer QA estd TPM project manager program manager syy something that is related to software development my first job at Amazon was as a support engineer contractor I thought the job was beneath me but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me I was able to get exposure in the industry while studying to be a developer from the

inside this Choice enabled me to transition to software development at the height of the Great Recession when nobody was hiring anywhere software developers are problem solvers that bring technology into existence AI simply can't learn on its own the only way the industry won't rebound is if you don't think that new technology will exist in the future Junior developers are the people that will take us there if you're looking to break into the industry keep your sales up it's just a matter of time when the wind picks up and you can be there to catch it

if you found this video helpful take a look at my latest video on how I would find a job if I had to start over today it's packed with a ton of tips on finding a job and if you're looking right now I guarantee you you aren't doing everything in that video