[solar-ice]

No, people aren't hiring junior devs, and haven't been for a long while. What they are hiring is people who have seriously built stuff; not "a webapp", but stuff in specific niches where they've essentially got past what would otherwise be the first year of industry training on their own.

And even then you have to hustle. Get yourself tickets to conferences (if you've built stuff, many niche conferences have free/subsidised tickets for open-source devs) and talk to people who are hiring - not the people who have the booths, but the people in the audience.

The idea that most people can just apply to jobs cold and eventually get one is essentially a lie, ime.

[idlehand]

If you're targeting well paid jobs at interesting companies, maybe. But we're at the point where practically every municipality, every government subdivision, and every corporation has IT development needs.

Developing and maintaining these boring systems is the primary source of employment in my corner of Europe.

[solar-ice]

In my experience, the companies that are developing these things are either about 5 developers and can barely keep the lights on for them - so aren't hiring - or have standardised their employment procedures so much that they probably won't hire you unless you hit every point on the job listing (including experience in arbitrary tech that only they and 3 other companies use) and can talk about your personal SWOT analysis and a bunch of other stuff that is more about signalling a specific cultural background than ensuring you're able to do your job and learn quickly. If you have that cultural background, cool, if not...

I could not get hired through most companies' cold interview processes - not "we make internal widgets in C#" companies, not "we're changing the world" companies. The most competent devs I know can't get hired that way. The only way that it's worked in my experience is to get someone internal to the company to champion me.

[roschdal]

> If you have that cultural background, cool, if not...

This sounds like another version of racism to me.

[welshwelsh]

I generally agree with most of what you said but I also think cold applications work.

I'd like to use the cliché "finding a job is a full time job."

Many people interpret this to mean "jam as many keywords as possible into a crappy resume and spend all day spamming it to every job posting you see." That's not gonna work well for juniors (although the most dedicated will still find something).

Applying to a job is more complicated than that. First of all, you need to understand the job you are applying for. That might involve researching the company and the project. You should make sure you are comfortable using the tools listed in the description and performing the role described. If you aren't, you need to practice before applying, which usually means building something.

When I started job hunting after graduation, it took three months before I sent out a single application. That's because every job posting listed responsibilities I didn't know how to perform or tools I've never used. Of course I'm not going to apply for Angular Frontend Developer if I've never built any frontends using Angular, that would be unprofessional. But after I made a couple simple projects in Angular, I would apply to these roles and got callbacks even from postings asking for 2-3 years of experience.

[solar-ice]

I wish I could say I had the same experience. I don't know what to say. My experience of applying for jobs that were well within my skillset, where I had projects showing off my non-industry-specific skills, was... either silence or being chucked out of the pipeline after the first interview or two, repeatedly. I'm not the only one.

Maybe this works if you live in a tech hub where there's venture capital to spend on masses of junior devs?

[benttoothpaste]

My experience is similar. All my carefully crafted resumes with cover letters were not even acknowledged. So I had to resort to resume spraying. After applying to 100 openings or so, I got one phone call which led to the interview and a job offer. I was not a great match for the job but it worked out fine.

[R0b0t1]

Same experience as you. I did eventually find a place, but it was not with a very good employer. Since separated. I remember getting tons of flak in theses posts. My CV is actually very good. No degree is a much larger problem than most people want to admit.

I am well past junior dev stage. Still no bites.

[ManlyBread]

>Many people interpret this to mean "jam as many keywords as possible into a crappy resume and spend all day spamming it to every job posting you see."

But this is exactly what landed me my first job back when I was a junior. As someone with no experience I could not afford to be selective and the more I spammed my CV the more interviews I was getting. It also works because the person who does the initial screening is usually not technical and is actually doing nothing more than matching the keywords.

> First of all, you need to understand the job you are applying for. That might involve researching the company and the project.

My experience is that the average job posting has close to no information about the project and the company does so many different things that it's impossible to get this information through your own research. Even if you do find some information it is utterly meaningless because this is NOT what the company is looking for when posting a job advert and this is NOT what the average candidate ends up doing. The company not looking for "someone who understands the company or project" - they're looking for a software engineer. That's it and nothing more.

>You should make sure you are comfortable using the tools listed in the description and performing the role described. If you aren't, you need to practice before applying, which usually means building something.

I've learned most of the tools I know on the job. Trying to learn something you don't know for the sake of the company that might not even give you an interview is a waste of time. Either they won't mind you learning on the job or they want someone with actual job experience. Large companies are also notoriously slow when it comes to organizing everything you need to do your job so the first week or two are usually filled up with nothing which is a perfect opportunity to learn something new.

[ravenstine]

> What they are hiring is people who have seriously built stuff; not "a webapp", but stuff in specific niches where they've essentially got past what would otherwise be the first year of industry training on their own.

I have no idea what this means. What makes web apps not serious?

[VoodooJuJu]

Going to second this. I'm a self-taught (non-bootcamp) dev who's making a serious webapp (without the quotes). It's serious in the sense that it's a real product of a real company (my own) on track to make real money from real customers.

If you won't take that seriously, then what?

[askafriend]

> on track to make real money from real customers

I'm sorry but to inject a dose of reality, that's a very low bar.

[gwnywg]

Can you elaborate what would constitute high bar? Another Google or Facebook? Or maybe hadron collider? Why does making money mean low bar to you?

The guy is making a web app which other people want to pay for, looks like just about the right height for a bar, and I'd say not low at all.

[VoodooJuJu]

I know technologies A, B, and C well-enough to use them to make a thing that is good enough for people to pay money for, i.e., not a bootcamp copy-paste thing.

"Tech Company" is looking to hire someone that knows technologies A, B, and C to use to make a product that's also intended to make money (allegedly).

If that's not good enough, I ask again, what is? What do you really want in a prospective junior developer?

[ManlyBread]

Ridiculous.

[mythrwy]

Agreed. Plus, isn't that like 80%+ of what we do today?

I realize some people do cutting edge programming, but the bulk of us probably spend much of the day shifting strings and filling in model fields and chasing webpack configs. Or maybe I'm just a sap and everyone else is doing cool stuff idk.

[neon_electro]

Nope, you're not just a sap. There's plenty of "cool stuff" to find in what you describe, at least that's been my experience, but I'm like you - I do not try to market myself as doing programming "outside of the norm" - my skills are full stack Web development and I market myself as such.

[solar-ice]

What I mean is that putting together a webapp without learning about something /other/ than how to put a <pick-a-technology> app together in the process isn't going to have anyone interested in hiring you.

If in the process you learned about something you could actually go up and do an interesting lightning talk about, that'd be worth it. Maybe you learned something about a specific industry and the challenges that developing something for it has that other industries don't have - maybe you accidentally spent weeks/months deep-diving into the technical details of HTTP/3 or some browser API and worked out you could do something that nobody has done before outside of Google.

[jollyllama]

My city used to hold at least two big, good, dev conferences a year. Neither did anything this year, even remotely. I'm not sure how new folks are supposed to get started in this environment. Very difficult. But I would add that networking correctly at a good university, by building connections with young, industry-connected instructors, was how I got my start. Ironically they were impressed by my attendance at these conferences.