Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 270 posts

Re: Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

#101

Post by Aaronstotle »

mooreds wrote: post #18

I like the advice here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-junior-softwar... (didn't write it, but it jives with my experience). I also wrote something here on how to stand out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2022/09/19/ways-to-stand-... Finally, you ask: > Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for? That depends on your financial situation and emotional runway,…

I'll add to this, I've had 5 jobs within 5 years of graduating.

The first 2 jumps were due to compensation, was able to get a nice raise each time.

The third job was a good fit, however the role evolved into something I didn't like as much and didn't fit my career goals.

I took the fourth job to try something new, quickly found out the role had nothing I enjoyed doing.

All of the experiences were valuable in terms of experience: different industries, meeting different people, and learning what I like to do.

Re: Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

#102

Post by steve76 »

btown wrote: post #73
Scubabear68 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good advice from the pragmatic engineer article. Particularly the advice to "aim wide". It is so tempting to put all your effort into that one perfect job. But in down times, you want a steady paycheck and to start getting practical experience under your belt. The only thing I would add is to always try to shoot for a company where technology is seen as an asset and not just a cost center. Traditionally, that was sof…

To the last point, it's important not to find yourself in the IT-as-a-cost-center trap if you're being asked to spend 90% of your time working on {IT tickets, business analysis, customizing-Salesforce, creating-old-school-java-beans-all-day} work, so much so that you can't write about software engineering with features you're proud to have worked on, in the bullets on your resume. On the hiring side, I've found quite…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

#104

Post by whstl »

eptcyka wrote: post #50
mooreds wrote: post #18

I like the advice here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-junior-softwar... (didn't write it, but it jives with my experience). I also wrote something here on how to stand out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2022/09/19/ways-to-stand-... Finally, you ask: > Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for? That depends on your financial situation and emotional runway,…

I'd say, having experiences at bad workplaces can still be valuable. This isn't to say one should seek out toxic colleagues and horrible working conditions, but knowing what you do not want is valuable too. And having bad workplaces early on is cheaper than having bad workplaces later in life. All in all, I'm trying to emphasize that a job in the field you want will almost always be beneficial when you're starting ou…

One particular thing I've noticed in my neck of the woods is younger Junior devs only staying at junior level jobs for a set period. They stay only one year, almost to the day, despite good performance and good fit.

That happened to a report of mine once, obviously with a previous mutual agreement, but some recruiters mentioned that trend to me as well.

I think having a set date to leave is healthy, especially at this point in someone's career. You just do your job and you're rewarded with money and experience. You shield yourself from toxicity in a way, since don't want to depend on the job for having "best friends". Also you don't play office politics since you know it's ephemeral.

Re: Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

#105

Post by r4vik »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #100
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently asked "Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?" by a laid off Visa holder. This is even more straightforward. Yes it is. I know many who are being hit by layoffs. The situation sucks. I don't think there's any advantage to downplaying this right now whether in your own mind or through advice to others. There's a huge number of tech workers laid off simultaneo…

At this point there is no way any software company could justify, legally, hiring someone on an H1B. There are some 40k layoffs in last few months and certainly a large number of those are US citizens. Any company claiming that they can’t find a US citizen with the right skills is lying.

they've always been lying, the can't find someone with the skills is just a hoop to jump through.

Re: Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

#108

Post by c7b »

> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?

Will depend a lot on the individual situation, but as a broad blanket advice I'd generally say, yes. Especially if you come from an undergrad/master's. There are very few of those really big tectonic shifts in life like fully entering the workforce for the first time, and a lot of it has more to do with having some job (at least somewhat relevant to what you learnt) than having the perfect job (which, frankly, you can't really know what that would be for you at that stage anyway). I don't see much good coming from delaying this just for the sake of waiting for the perfect match.

That being said, if you have other reasons for delaying, like wanting to try a startup, that might indeed be a good reason to not start in a job. Or if you're a PhD graduate, you've had sort of a semi-job experience already, and you might have ways to stay a bit longer in academia doing meaningful things (post-doc,...), while looking for something that really fits with the highly specialized profile you've already built at that point.

Re: Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

#109

Post by micro_cam »

rumdonut wrote: post #68
micro_cam wrote: post #15

I've been in the ML/data space for 20 years and went through the 2008 cycle early in my career. I'm not hiring at the moment but am always happy to review resumes and give career advice as part of networking so feel free to ping me. Reaching out to managers at big cos won't get you much. They are getting a ton of twitter/etc candidates and have stricter hiring policies and rubrics to prevent nepotism and favoritism.…

Somewhat unrelated but a remark of yours was interesting to me. You mentioned PhDs sometimes have previous engineering experience; did you find it common for ML PhDs to have waited a few years before entering a program? I’m exploring doing the same but had thought the ship had sailed, now that I’m in industry.

Not super common but its reasonably frequent for someone to go to industry for 2-3 years and then go for a masters/phd.

Those candidates tend to be great as they are up on industry practices/technology like source control and databases where as some phds can have only academic coding experience. And they tend to have studied something they really knew they were interested in and really been the driver on their thesis project vs just contributing to their advisors research.

You also see great phds who didn't wait but really took ownership of their project, used source control, figured out distributed computing, contributed to open source, scraped/built their own datasets, understood the real world implications and hacked on side projects to develop coding skills.

And you see some who just completed a theoretical + computational project their advisor suggested on an existing dataset with the minimal amount of coding needed and little thought to implications/applications.

Re: Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?

#110

Post by adra »

Aaronstotle wrote: post #101
mooreds wrote: post #18

I like the advice here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/advice-for-junior-softwar... (didn't write it, but it jives with my experience). I also wrote something here on how to stand out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2022/09/19/ways-to-stand-... Finally, you ask: > Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for? That depends on your financial situation and emotional runway,…

I'll add to this, I've had 5 jobs within 5 years of graduating. The first 2 jumps were due to compensation, was able to get a nice raise each time. The third job was a good fit, however the role evolved into something I didn't like as much and didn't fit my career goals. I took the fourth job to try something new, quickly found out the role had nothing I enjoyed doing. All of the experiences were valuable in terms of…

An average tenure of 1 year in a job is a red hot flag I'd almost immediately reject. Life's too short to spend a month wasted training an employee that's just going to jump again. It's my number 1 no-hire criteria. Good on you for convincing so many hiring managers that you're worth the risk though I suppose?
Post reply on HN