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61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

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Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#251

Post by AstralStorm »

IncRnd wrote: post #170
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bull. I've been using Python since high school, but very few employers I've ever spoken to were willing to actually label me as having any years of experience in Python.

You need to be able to convince an employer that your experience is valid, that you can work on their critical code base without destroying their customer base and income stream. If you can't demonstrate your experience through results that you've achieved, that's the same as having zero years of python experience.

Sure. Demonstrate experience how? Link them to patches accepted by open source projects? IRC conversations and emails? :) (now harder with all that slack thing)

See people tend not to put patches on GitHub. (Some fork repos butit is harder for the recruiter to figure out the thing.) And there are only so many projects that are valuable at all.

If you're expected to work on yet another worthless project (TM) then the recruiters should quit. After all, they weren't working on recruiting and PR projects before they took the job. And yes, they can ruin the company just as well.

It gets even harder when you worked on a proprietary thing you cannot publish. Especially if it was freelance.

Technically breaking or not things is a matter for DevOps not developers. And anyway it is mostly a matter of mindset.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#253

Post by AstralStorm »

1812Overture wrote: post #35
apsec112 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also need food to live, and they have no influence on the price of food; you can't go into Safeway and get a prime steak for $1.50. Yet there is such an abundance of food at such low prices that half of Westerners are overweight. The labor market must have other issues, besides these, if it's having more problems than the food market.

The grocery stores I go to have price tags on everything.

And job offers typically come without price brackets. Moreover the requirements are often written (or processed into mush) by a person who has no clue.

This puts you at a major disadvantage.

And then there is the problem that a company can easily outwit and outwait you as they have a big buffer.

Only people currently in stable jobs or with plenty of f.u. money can match it.

If there is a slump in demand or peak in worker supply you will have even less bargaining power.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#254

Post by AstralStorm »

paulddraper wrote: post #163
chroem- wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that people need a source of income to live, and that they have very little influence on the price of their labor without collective bargaining.

Don't forget the fact that companies need employees to survive and they have very little influence on the price of the labor without (illegal) collusion.

Not true. They have the ultimate influence on the salaries once they have hired enough people. They can just not hire.

A person cannot really "not be hired" for prolonged time unless they're already rich. Most cannot tolerate unemployment for even a short time. Even students who don't have many commitments cannot do so for too long.

Only for very small companies this is somewhat true.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#255

Post by AstralStorm »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41
chroem- wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that people need a source of income to live, and that they have very little influence on the price of their labor without collective bargaining.

That's not how supply and demand works. I'm on the supply side of the labor supply-and-demand curve. I set the price that I'm willing to sell my time at. Nobody else sets my price, and I don't set anybody else's price. On the demand side, there are a bunch of employers who each have their own price for what they're willing to pay for a certain set of skills. Each sets their own price. Nobody else sets it for them. In…

It also breaks due to secrecy in salary structure at companies on demand side.

A worker on supply side only has very limited resources to figure out how valuable the offers are.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#256

Post by mieseratte »

AstralStorm wrote: post #251
IncRnd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to be able to convince an employer that your experience is valid, that you can work on their critical code base without destroying their customer base and income stream. If you can't demonstrate your experience through results that you've achieved, that's the same as having zero years of python experience.

Sure. Demonstrate experience how? Link them to patches accepted by open source projects? IRC conversations and emails? :) (now harder with all that slack thing) See people tend not to put patches on GitHub. (Some fork repos butit is harder for the recruiter to figure out the thing.) And there are only so many projects that are valuable at all. If you're expected to work on yet another worthless project (TM) then the…

One things folks tend to overlook is the communicative aspects of the job. You can be a rock-star engineer, but if you can't deal with other folks you're in for a rough time.

To walk in off the street and convince folks you've got the chops, talk intelligently and articulately about the things you've done, the how, the why, the tradeoffs and considerations and consequently talk to them about what their working on and ask those questions or intuit answers or, problems is a very hard skill to acquire.

When I started out, sure, I could write code. Decent code, and was willing to spend a lot of time writing a lot of it. Still, and as I like to describe it, I was a coder and not an "engineer"[0]. Knowing how to bang out Python scripts, or setup a Rails app, or some Hibernate entities is fine and probably a pre-requisite but the soft-skills of knowing how to operate within an organization are also incredibly important.

When you're fresh and starting off with no real experience, passion is about the best you can demonstrate at which point you can hope the folks on the other-side of the table are able to recognize that, and willing to take a risk. For all they know, you're a petulant little shit who can't hack it on the job site.

[0] - I still feel weird calling myself that since I know "real" engineers, but that's my title...

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#257

Post by usrusr »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #34
crazcarl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You absolutely shouldn't lie. But you also shouldn't let your lack of experience stop you from applying to entry level jobs.

If you don't lie you may be out competed by those who do.

On the other hand, not checking 100% of the boxes would boost the credibility of your other claims a lot. Clever HR departments might even deliberately add some extremely implausible optional requirements to flag those who are most comfortable lying in their CV.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#258

Post by dvtv75 »

michaelt wrote: post #242
vonmoltke wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it. That is a major abuse of "passion". While the original definitions are even stronger, something you are "passionate" about is something you actively seeking out to do. Something that is merely "sufficiently non-loathsome" is not a passion.

That is a major abuse of "passion". That's just the gap between what employers hope for when they place a job advert, and what they get . I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen. Someone I can promote, and trust with more responsibility and less supervision. But I'…

> I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen.

I had a job where I did this. Know what the employer did? He whined I wasn't doing enough, and gave me more to do then expected me to stay even later to do it.

I was eventually spending more time at work than I was at home - I no longer work for free. If an employer wants extra hours out of me, they pay or I head home at clock out time.

Employment isn't about your dream being fulfilled, it's a commercial agreement between two parties where one agrees to pay the other for time spent at the workplace. I don't live to work, I work to live, and I have other stuff to do.

On my death bed, the one thing I can guarantee that I will never think is "I wish I'd worked an extra evening for free on that project for my employer." It's far more likely to be "I wish I hadn't worked that evening for free, so I could have seen the sun set just one more time."

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#259

Post by mads_ravn »

dorgo wrote: post #226
sb8244 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did they get to be seniors in their companies? They didn't give the title to themselves, so someone must value their skills. Is having the title mutually exclusive to being humble or self aware?

Some years ago they introduced job titles at the place where I work. My boss asked me: which job title do you want? I said: senior developer. Her said: ok. Master of the universe would have passed too.

Same thing happenend to me. I went for "Grand Poobah of Software Engineering". The boss said ok, but I think the printed business cards ended up with senior developer.

As an aside, a friend got listed with the title cosmocrator (ruler of the universe, when translated directly from greek) in the phonebook. All it took was for him to request it when they asked for a title, and, when asked what it was, reply that it was a form of kinesiology.

All in all, you probably should not but to much stock into titles. Even less so, if they are not protected.

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