Are junior devs screwed?

I have to admit something to y'all. When I got my first job as a software dev, I was not qualified in the slightest. I really probably shouldn't have even gotten the job if I'm being totally honest. The reason I got it was the manager and the other people on the team liked me and vied with me. In particular, the manager liked my music taste, funny enough. And I had a few projects that showed I kind of maybe Could figure out code, but they didn't even give me a full-time offer. They gave me a three-month contract

that I did okay during. And rather than give a full-time after that, I renewed the three-month contract again to try and finally prove that I knew what I was doing. And it was a grind. That six months is within the hardest I've ever worked. I learned a ton. I grew a bunch. And finally, by the end of it, I would say I was somewhat qualified as an Engineer. So, why am I talking about all of this? Well, the world has changed quite a bit. the things that made it possible for me to have that job

and the value that I provided to that company are all in a weird spot now, especially in the era of AI. This video is unlike my others where I'm actually trying to talk to juniors for once. Normally, my content is not that. But if you're not a junior dev, it's still worth watching this because we need to sympathize with And offer paths to success for these junior devs who are getting into the industry right now because it has never been weirder and arguably harder to get your first gig as a dev and the bar is

in a really, really weird spot. We got a lot to dive into here, but I'm not making an end salary anymore, so we have to find some other way to pay the team. So, quick word from today's sponsor, then we'll get straight to it. Software dev has never been more accessible, but Actually learning to do things right is kind of challenging. Now that there is so much slop all over the internet, you never know if you're hearing from someone that actually knows what they're doing. Unless you use today's sponsor, Brund Masters. These guys get it.

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want to go watch the mastering Chrome DevTools one cuz this is I don't feel like I'm using the Chrome DevTools anywhere near well enough and I've been doing this for way too long. We got Prime in here, Kevin Powell, the CSS god, Katie from Expo, one of the most talented React Native engineers I've ever had the pleasure of talking to. It's insane. They could charge a lot of money for any one of these courses. The fact that they all come together as one subscription with clear paths on how to learn all these different things is

insane. And don't Think this is just for people who are learning how to code. If you already have a job in the industry, there's a good chance you can get your company to use education budget to cover your subscription to get to see all of this useful, awesome content. And that's knowledge that will benefit you at your job and future jobs, too. Get 25% off today at soyv.link/masters. So when I was getting into software dev, the industry was in An interesting spot. The amount of devs it took to solve a problem was relatively high. The

amount of devs available was relatively low. So if we have these multiple functions, let's say we have the first axis here is number of devs per feature. So how many devs and how much time does it take to build something? Second, we have number of devs available or higher. And three, we have money available to hire them. These three axes have been going all over the Place lately. For a long time, these trended in ways that benefited us as devs. I would argue now, for the first time, they're not. The number of devs needed per

feature has slowly went down. There are moments where it goes down faster, but for the most part, it's been slowly going down. The number of devs available to hire has been much more quickly going up and the amount of money available to hire these people. I hope I'm making my point here. It's utter [ __ ] chaos. This is the way we need to think when we are considering what does it mean to get a job right now. If we just ignore the money aspect entirely for a minute, just think about these two. If I

was building a Gmail killer back in the day, the number of engineers that would take was really high. The amount of engineers available to do it was really low. And the engineers needed to do something like that had to be pretty Deep and pretty technically advanced. So during this era, early on enough, if you just look at the gap between these lines, it all start to make sense. If the number of engines available is low and the number you need per feature is high, this gap, there's a term for this. The term for this gap

is leverage. We as the employees, as the engineers doing the building, making the things, actually providing the tools that created the value for the company, We had a lot of leverage because they couldn't just replace us. There were not enough devs to do it. There were even crazy practices going on that are meme'd on nowadays, but were very real at the time where companies would compete by hiring engineers other companies needed. Facebook hired the creators of almost every web framework, not because they wanted them to build a better framework. In fact, most of the React

team wasn't those framework people. They hired them So Google couldn't have them. There was competition at these weird deep levels where they would hire engineers just to make it harder for the competition to get them themselves. That is not the case at all anymore. But that was only the case because of how insane the ratio here was. The number of available engineers versus the number of engineers needed. That gap was insane. Over time, that gap has gotten smaller. In fact, I would make the argument it is flipped The other way where given anything a company

needs to build, if they're a big enough company that they can afford to hire you, chances are that company already has a bunch of engineers that are optimized that they can move over to go do that thing. It is more likely that a company at this point is going to reorg their existing staff than bother hiring new people because the likelihood that they hired too many people back in the day because they needed them so bad And now half of them are working on features nobody uses or they're just sitting around doing nothing then get

reorged and if they can't they can get laid off instead. That has fully removed our leverage where previously we could kind of just do whatever we wanted on this side because the companies needed us so badly it didn't really matter. that has flipped fully where we kind of have to do what the companies want even if you have experience in the industry. So let's do a much more like practical real world example here. Let's say I'm working on just use example earlier. I'm building Twitch chat. We have to add a new feature to Twitch chat

and we want to do it in a year. I spec it out and it's going to take four engineers the year to get this done in time. So, I have these four spots. I already have person one and two ready to go, but I need to hire two more people. Back in the day, I would have opened these Listings up on our job board. Would have gotten some number of applications, and most of the applications are going to be people fresh out of college, still in college, earlier career people. Maybe we get a couple more

senior people, but it's unlikely. Even for a senior role, the number of inbound applications of experienced people was relatively low. So to tier these, I'd say like the white color is already on team. We'll say yellow is poached from other team. And I'll say green is hired in. I'll also extend this a bit and say we actually needed five people, not four. Think numbers a little more real. Person three very likely could have been poached from another team or pulled in from a reorg or something, but then we're hiring two new people. What's funny is

this example I have here is exactly how we did Mod View, which is a product I helped run over at Twitch. We realized that Mod View wasn't a thing we could just build With our current staff. So, we grabbed one person from a different team that wanted to be more on the safety side and then I hired in more people to fill out the gaps. And the result was a team that was partially people who already worked on the team or in that area at the company, a person who moved over and then two additional

people that we hired in. This was back in 2020 2021 era. So not as absurd as it used to be, but still very real. And these roles were Competitive. These got hundreds of applications. I did a ton of interviews to get the right people for these roles. One of them was an intern that we had who killed it. So we brought her full-time as quickly as we could. Unreal. Waterl devs are cracked. And she was even amongst Waterl devs. One of the best I've ever worked with. And the other we poached from another company. I

believe it was Disney Plus. So even then, like one of these had to go Through the internship and impress us to get the spot. The other one had to come from another qualified company. And even then, we actually massively underpaid and underleveled this person. And I personally had to fight a lot of people because we brought them in at the wrong level. And I I needed them to get a promotion. I delayed my own promotion to make sure person five here would get hers in time. Wild experience. But point I'm making here is this was

a realistic Thing back in the day. If I was building this today, first and foremost, the number of people has gone down a lot. This is for a bunch of reasons. The combination of decreasing the expectations for the product, trying to get it out faster and get feedback earlier, plus the tools that we build the website with being better, plus the AI making it way quicker to build. Those two roles are just gone now. They don't exist. That's a huge change. the Likelihood that the things we're building internally, just from my literal personal direct experience,

just a 3 to five year difference now, those roles don't exist. Hell, if we downsize enough, we might be able to do this with just two people. Now, this person who was on a failing team that we poached, they might just get laid off. So given these people, even pretending these were junior engineers, which they were not, these were experienced people, Where do they go? How do these people get in when the box they're trying to get into has gotten smaller and the space that the teams have and the time they have is harder to

justify doing that? Because realistically speaking, the way I kind of think of this is we do have a third person, so to speak, on this team, but it's not person three. this person 3.5 Claude and if this is my team comp where do I put the junior engineer it doesn't they don't fit and It sucks it genuinely sucks that there isn't a good spot for these people to come in the way that there would have been in the past it's a weird painful reality and I'm not saying to give up I'm not saying you can't

get a job I'm not saying this is all a worthless journey I'm saying we have to think a bit differently about it and this isn't the only place that we have to Think about it. This is just the hiring side, but I want to go to a different layer. I Want to talk about getting good as a junior. When I was learning to program, we didn't have AI. We had Stack Overflow. It was not always the most accurate thing. So, when I ran into a hard problem, I had a crazy process to try and solve

it. I would hack at it to my best ability, isolate the problem, Google search the isolated parts to see if I could find anything. And after doing it for a while and giving up, I would very shyly go up to my manager, Who was an incredible dev, and ask him, "Hey, can you help me with this? I have no idea what's going on." And they would hold my hand through it and often just force me to rethink the whole problem. I was like, like if I was trying to figure out why this element was rendering

with the wrong data, he could come in and say, "Why are you rendering that element at all? That doesn't need to exist." and be like, "Oh, yeah. I was so deep in the weeds, I never came up." And if we think Of problems as having layers, the layer you're thinking about it in and solving it in can vary a lot. And the most common problem I see juniors running into is they're in here when the problem exists way higher up, like it should be here, but they can't stop thinking about the error message in their

console for long enough to take the step back and realize the problem exists somewhere else. The key is that I had to. There was no option. I couldn't just hack at This until it went away. I might be able to sometimes, but I certainly couldn't most of the time. The majority of the time, if I was getting a weird uncaugh exception in my browser, and I couldn't figure out the line of code causing it or whatever, I would have to step up in the like hierarchy of where the problem lives to figure out what layer

I can change to fix the problem happening way further down. That's not how it works anymore. Claude, Fix this error. This is why I'm scared. Humans don't like hard things. They can tell themselves they do. They can act as though they do, but it is human instinct to steer away from things that are hard or painful or bad. It's a basic evolutionary mechanism. If something hurts, you don't do it. If something feels stupid, you don't do it. If this berry smells weird, you don't eat it. It's basic human evolution. So, if Solving this uncut exception

requires the hard, painful process of taking each step up and most importantly each step along the way feeling slightly dumber. You'll take the easy out. The key to becoming a great engineer is first and foremost to accept and embrace the fact that you're not a great engineer. If you're not willing to feel stupid constantly and live in that feeling, bask in it as you challenge yourself to solve problems and to leave the layer You're in, to figure out what's wrong, to ask yourself, did I just do this whole thing wrong? And be down to humble

yourself in that way and challenge your notions, challenge your understanding of things constantly. Gabriel beat me to it. Feeling dumb becomes the best feeling once you learn to embrace it. I am so lucky that I learned this in a very different place. I've done a couple videos where I talk about this, but nobody ever cares. So, I'm going to Force y'all, trick y'all into hearing it here. There's a certain thing I got into at a young age that has helped me a lot. I'm going to give one more hint to see if you guys could

figure out what it is that I'm talking about here. Very, very accurate diagram of my skateboard. I love skateboarding. Not just the cruising around like the streets. I love the challenge of doing things you've never done before, possibly things that no one's ever done Before with this piece of wood with wheels attached. To get good at skateboarding, you don't sit and read a book about it all day. You don't go to class and get told how skateboards work. To get good at skateboards, you have to get hurt. The only way you improve in the world

of skateboarding is hitting the ground. You have to go in expecting to hit the ground. You have to prepare yourself and arguably teach yourself to Roll so when you hit the ground it doesn't hurt as bad. You be prepared every time you go up with the expectation that you don't come down the way you want because then what happens is a magical thing. You ride away. And that feeling when you jump up expecting to get hurt and you land correctly, that is so magical. And you have to engineer yourself to be prepared for that to

expect the fall so greatly to anticipate this knowing that this is the thing You're actually doing and then surprise yourself when this happens instead. So when you try to build something as an earlier career engineer, you shouldn't write the code expecting to run it and have it work. Because if you go in with that expectation and it doesn't work, now you feel bad. Now you feel like a failure. Now you feel unqualified. Now you feel like Claude's the easy out. Now you feel like ChatGpt will solve the problem. Now you're paying for a cursor Subscription

before you even gotten paid as a developer. That sucks. And I on one hand rely heavily on these tools. Most of the stuff I've been building recently I could not have built anywhere near as effectively without cursor. It's rewired my brain. But it's rewired my brain that was already wired to solve hard problems this way to go in with the expectation the thing doesn't work. So I would be forced to reduce the number of things. So if any one thing doesn't work, it's Easier to identify, fix, and replace. But also to prepare myself emotionally for

this journey and this experience. All of that sucks, but once you push through it, it makes you good at so many other things outside of software, too. As I said, I learned this from skateboards. And I would not be the engineer, and I certainly wouldn't be the YouTuber I am today if skateboarding hadn't taught me to think the way I think and to do things the way I do Them. And believe me, if I could have just asked Claude to do the trick for me and it would have looked the same to everyone outside, I'd

have Claude doing kick flips over cars without even thinking twice. Especially if that was a thing when I was getting into it. Oh man. Oh man. That would have ruined my entire life as a skater. And I probably would have quit skating a year or two in instead of doing it for 20 years. Now, there's one last important thing to Talk about here. It's kind of on the expectation setting piece, but it's a a weird way of thinking. This is going to be a chart describing your compensation effectively. So, going up we have salary and

going to the right we have time. It's really intuitive to think as a dev, your salary just goes up over time. This is the most unrealistic chart you could possibly use to think about how compensation works in a field like software dev. This might be how YouTube Compensation works. Probably a little more curved. This might be how sales for your SAS or the MR for your product goes. This might be the number of lines in your codebase. But this is not how your compensation works. The harsh reality of compensation in the tech field is it's

going to be zero until you hit a certain point and then all of a sudden it's going to be pretty high and it's going to stay there for a bit and then you'll get a promotion. You'll get Another promotion. This is how your salary is going to work in the dev world. And this feels awful because you're imagining this. Hell, you might even be imagining this. Like halfway through college, you figured your [ __ ] out. Maybe you got an internship. Maybe here you got a little internship and then immediately you were back down to

nothing for the rest of college and now you feel trapped. That sucks. And now in the current era, especially like post Layoffs world, that doesn't exist anymore. So now you're in this weird limbo area here where you don't know enough to get the job that pays you this. You're not qualified yet to be here, but you don't get anything for being here. So the weird reality is like, and this is going to be very US job marketcentric. You don't start at 20K and work your way up. If you're not worth $100,000 a year as a

software dev In the US, you're worth zero dollars a year as a software dev in the US. And that sucks because if you're not above a certain quality bar, like if we draw this out as a a bar to represent when you can get a job, until you can cross this line, you cannot make money as a dev. And that sucks. Previously, it was so hard to find devs that this bar was lowered and people were allowed to make these salaries that probably shouldn't have been. But the reason they did that Was it was so

hard to find people at these ranges that they would bet on somebody at a lower tier here in hopes they would be so good they could be promoted to these roles and deliver good quality in the next 2 to 3 years. It was a bet. It was an investment. It's not an investment that makes any sense to make now. So what do we do? How do we get around this? There's another way to think of this quality bar, the the bar for whether or not someone should be Hired. Don't think of this just as are

you good enough or not. Because even if you're theoretically a god dev that is better than all the senior plus+ people making $4,000 or more a year doesn't get you anything if you don't have trust yet. The most important thing today, the thing in the most short supply is trust. Previously, the combination of the money we had and the number of potential hires that we had meant that the lack of trust for the people we could possibly hire Was whatever. We just hire whoever and hope it went well. To go back to my decision here,

I knew I could trust people one and two because they were already on my team. I could probably trust person three because they already worked at the company. I knew the people who hired them. I knew the team they were on, the people there. I could look at their commits and see, oh, they're pretty good. Person four was an intern. We had paid them a smaller amount of Money to figure out if they were good or not. Figured out they were really good and immediately grabbed them as quickly as we could. And person five, they

had a role at a different company that they performed well in. It was worth taking the risk, rolling the dice, and hoping they would do well because they did well in the interview and their previous experience showed they were likely qualified for this role. If we needed to hire more people here more aggressively, We could very easily have had a person six that we didn't know as much about that was more of a risky bet because we didn't have enough people we trusted to fill the slots. If I have a stack of resumes from like

different people, these aren't just ranked by the potential quality. These certainly aren't ranked by which school you got a degree from. I'm going to rank this pile of the likelihood that this person will perform well in the role. And I'm not Calculating that based on all the fun things you put in your [ __ ] resume. Certainly not. I'm ranking these based on how much I trust that you can pull that off. So, how can you build that trust? If you don't work at my company, I can't see your code unless you're posting it publicly,

then I can. And I'm not saying go spam a bunch of repos with open source commits. I have a whole video about why contributing to open source is not the key to getting a job. But if you're already building, you're already watching videos like mine, you're taking part in this ecosystem, show your work a bit. Maybe write a blog post about how you tried two different solutions and what you liked and didn't like about them. Give me things I can see to trust the fact that you have challenged yourself and you have bettered yourself, that

you're not just generating templates with AI things and posting them to a GitHub repo hoping to Get a job. What you'll learn as you get more senior is it's pretty easy to see from how someone's talking about a thing if they know what the [ __ ] they're talking about or not and if they know that or not. If I was to read a blog post from a junior engineer I was like I tried these two solutions. I didn't understand this part but I did understand this other part and I liked it a lot. So

that's how I made my decision. I don't care that you said you Didn't know the other thing. In fact that's a good signal because now I know I can trust you more because when you don't know something you're going to tell me. If you're willing to admit that publicly, you're certainly going to be down to admit it to your team. That's awesome. But if you're talking about a bunch of tech you don't understand and I'm reading a paragraph and realize at the end, oh, you chat gpt what is React and pasted it in here. You

don't know Anything about any of this. And I go check your GitHub and you have your React website and the website is literally a single JavaScript file that is a single component where you pasted someone else's HTML template in. I [ __ ] you not. I saw that twice from candidates applying to work at Twitch where they had a React site that was just an HTML template pasted into a single component. No state, no logic, nothing. It's just a shittier way of Doing HTML. And if none of those words meant anything to you, you're not

ready for your first job yet. And that's fine. Get back to learning. Stop watching my videos. They're just going to distract you. Go build [ __ ] The thing I want to emphasize, and it's a really important point, it's surprisingly easy to show that you care. If you want this, if you want to be a good dev, if you want to improve, you want to learn, you want to challenge yourself, it comes off very Quickly. I don't think I'm that special in the fact that I could see it. I was concerned as I got more

popular that I'd have my chat with hundreds of people watching live and I wouldn't be able to tell who gets it and who doesn't. But two interesting things happened. Even though I've gotten much bigger, the people who show up here aren't the devs that are pretending they know how to code. For the most part, the people who show up here are the ones who care the Most, that want to spend their spare time learning about what's the best solution to these different problems, to talk about the fun things going on in the React world, to

go deep on new AI stuff. They're here because they care. And even then, even though the bar to be here in the first place is higher than average, the outstanding people still stand out. And that's a thing that I am so lucky is the case that I was really concerned about when I got more popular. Outstanding people will always stand out. Even in a chaotic world where there are way more people trying to get a job than there are devs necessary to build things. Even as the amount of money we have in the industry is

going down, even as AI is destroying all of these juniors, outstanding people still stand out. When an awesome person shows up in my chat, it's not that hard to notice because even if they are way more junior, even if they're still in College, maybe they're a year or two into coding, the way they ask questions, the thought they put behind their words and the effort they put in to better themselves, it's always noticeable. And if you happen to be applying to a place or interviewing with somebody that can't see that, that's their problem and you're

dodging a bullet. But from my experience, the people who care enough to challenge themselves, to learn, to grow, to do better, they tend to end up In the same places that people like me end up. People like my team end up. In fact, that's how my team formed. It was all people that hung out in the same places as me, cared about the same things I cared about, and showed demonstrated that care. and anything from an informative question to a really interesting link in the question of hey what do you think about this those conversations

and interactions and resources that are formed around those Things that's how you stand out and in a world where you're not competing with five resumes but you're competing with 500 to 5,000 AI generated slop garbage applications you don't solve this problem by being slop AI generated application number 5,0001. You don't solve it by buying someone's course on how to make a good resume. You don't solve it by making a bunch of crappy chatgbt generated things on your GitHub and use it to flex the commit counts. You do it by caring. You do it by getting

better. You do it by not relying on the AI to do the hard things, but falling in love with doing those hard things yourself. You got to get your feet wet. And when you do that, when you dive in, when you spend your time in these spaces challenging yourself in these ways, the likelihood you get to that 100k role goes up a ton. Because if you're currently here, in order to get to a higher quality, in order to get up To the point where you can be hired at that 100k range, you have to challenge

yourself and grow. But you also have to be noticed. So if you can find ways to combine the two to do the thing that grows you in a way that also increases your visibility and presence in the space, your likelihood of finding success goes up exponentially. But if every time you run into one of the problems, one of the challenges, one of the the details that make you a great Engineer, you ask Claude to do it for you, you'll just never hit that point because every time you ask Claude to solve the problem, you've robbed

yourself of the opportunity to solve it yourself. You've robbed yourself of the opportunity to hang out in the community to learn answers from them. You've robbed yourself of the opportunity to form a really good question to ask somebody who will remember that in the future. And if you rob yourself of Enough of those opportunities, all that's left is slop. And if you don't take them, you don't push yourself to take those challenging important things, you'll never cross that line. It's easier than ever to stop progressing and let the tools do the work for you. You

got to do the work yourself. And if you're one of those few people, there are more of you than you think. And funny enough, the people who are like this often don't even know it. I know a Lot of people that are here that are above the skill level that would get them even 150k plus a year that just don't know it themselves or sometimes are insecure and don't trust it themselves. They need to do more of the work publicly so they can first off compare themselves to the people around them and know. But more

importantly, they can be noticed by somebody who's in that range that will say, "Oh [ __ ] you're as good of an engineer as I am. Wait, you're still washing dishes for a living? What the fuck?" And now you're the first person in that person's head when they do need to hire somebody. So, it doesn't really matter where your current level is. If you show up with the honest goal to improve with thoughtful questions about the thing that you're trying to improve in, and you put in the honest work to do it, you'll be amazed

at how quickly people start to catch on to that. I've seen 16year-olds run laps around people way higher up in the salary range than they could possibly be just cuz they cared enough to. And those people will always stand out. You should try to be like those people. Your goal shouldn't be to hit that salary level. Your goal should be to have conversations with people at those salary levels to be part of the conversation with them. And I did this entirely subconsciously when I was at Twitch. If we change this to like Junior, midle, senior,

I very quickly found myself primarily talking with people making twice as much money as me because I was just interested in the things they were doing and they loved me. I I've had so many conversations in my past that I didn't realize the importance of until much later where people who I didn't know or even care how much money they made compared to me. I just knew they owned the thing that I was interested in or excited about and I Would ask them questions about these things and they loved it. If you ask somebody a

good question about a thing that they care about, one of two things happens. Either they answer because they're excited to talk about it or they don't because your judgment was wrong. They don't actually care that much about it. You'd be amazed how well this scales, especially with traditional engineers doing traditional engineering work. I'm a little flooded. I'm tired of All the crazy like essays in DMs I get. Like pro tip, and I should give this one more often because it annoys me. Hey, Theo, I was hoping I could ask you about something. Here's my life

story. I started coding when I was four paragraphs later. So, what do you think? Should I use X, Y, and Z, or should I re redo A, B, and C? This is the format of the majority of the DMs I get. What the [ __ ] Some amount of these are because of lack of general social ability. I Understand that. Some amount of it is cuz I'm a highly visible person. So, when someone who doesn't know how to talk has a question, they end up in my [ __ ] DMs half the time. Here's a

better example. In your video about X, I noticed you did Y. I'm a bit confused because I thought Y was for Z. Do you have any resources for me to better understand Z? This is phenomenal. I will remember you if this is how you DM me. Start with the context. Give me a simple Here's the thing that led me here. Show where your misunderstanding is in the simplest teeniest part possible and then make the ask. Notice how none of this is about the person. None of this is about their journey. None of this is a

story about their [ __ ] life. It is starting with the context that led them to my DMs. clarifying what they're here for and what the the missing piece is and then explicitly asking not for me to personally teach it to them, but to Point them in the right direction. The reason they're here is clear. The reason they're in my DM specifically is clear. The thing they need is clear, and the ask is super clear and low effort and low friction for me. This is an awesome DM. Notice how I get none of that here.

I have no clarity why they're hitting me up. Are they hitting me up because I'm popular? Are they hitting me up because they think I'm rich? Are they hitting me up because they think I can magically Hand them a job? Probably some combination of those, honestly. None of which are reasons I want to talk to somebody. If you're only reaching out to me because you think I can get you a job, I don't want to talk to you. If you're reaching out to me because I talked about a thing you're genuinely interested in, you are

struggling to grasp one of the concepts and you want help getting through that tiny piece, and you come to me with the smallest Possible ask, which is a link to a thing where you can learn more about it. These couldn't be more different to me. And if you can't see the difference between these two DMs, I I'll just say it right like go to speech therapy. It'll help. It'll save your life as someone who had to themselves. The difference between these is an essential thing to understand as a functional human being. And because so much

of the [ __ ] I get is this, it's really easy to stand out with This. I almost want to pull up my Twitch chat right now and highlight some of these things, but I won't do it. I don't want to be mean and bully people that way. I just want to emphasize the fact that simple, clear, concise communications that are relevant to the person you're reaching out to are so important. And if you can get good at that, this is such a rare skill in engineering that I'll hire you for this even if I

don't know how good your code Is. One of my community members in chat right now in bed, I hired her to help with a lot of the video process because she was always so concise and clear with everything she did. She was more likely to drop a useful link than she was to drop an essay about some [ __ ] She was so useful and asked the right questions and brought the right resources that I brought her on to help with the video review and like information gathering process and she's significantly improved How fast we

can get videos out. And when she hits me up with interest in other companies, I am so happy to write her a referral places. We also have Gabriel in my chat here who was similarly super super helpful. Was almost always the one dropping the links that I was covering and like the right links and sources for the things I was talking about live. I hit him up like I feel bad that I'm not paying you to do this. So I started paying Gabriel learned how hilariously Underpaid he was as an engineer in Venezuela. Yeah. And

since then, he has gotten a much better job from a referral from me. And I kind of screwed myself because he doesn't have as much time to help us out anymore cuz he has a real full-time engineering job. But all of this came from the fact that these people cared enough and just by caring and talking about what they care about, they stood out really quickly. Learning to ask good questions isn't a skill you Should learn on the job. I kind of got away with that, but also was deep enough in forums and other communities

because like common problem I would have back in the days of Minecraft server hosting is I'd be using two plugins that weren't compatible or there would be some problem and if I was to go to the forum for one of those plugins like hey I'm trying to use craft bucket with world guard you get the idea this is [ __ ] nonsense and the response to this would Be equally nonsense or flaming me or just no reply at all. But if I came in with, hey, I get specific error when trying to do specific thing.

I tried common debug step to no avail. I saw two other users with this problem. How can I help fix it? Oh man, the response you get here resulted in a dumb 15-year-old Theo contributing to World Guard. Like, it's it's crazy how easy it is once you realize there's a human on the other side perceiving the thing. And if you Treat people like me, if you treat these senior engineers like boxes that you throw data at and hope you get some data back, you're not being a good junior. You're not actually taking the opportunity to

learn and grow. You're trying to use the people who are higher up than you. This message is someone trying to use me to make money. This message is somebody trying to better themselves that happens to use my content as a method of doing such Genuinely asking for help improving themselves. And if you want to go 10 times further with this, if I give you the resource for this and it makes something click for you, if your next DM to me is, "Thanks so much. This helped a bunch of things click for me. I know it's

a bit of a big ask, but I wrote a blog post detailing the parts I struggled with. Would you be down to give it a quick look? Oh man, the speed at which I would Put this person on my do hire list is unbelievable. God, if that blog post is good, I'm going to hand you every job opportunity that gets thrown in my direction. First and foremost, old materials for how to get a job the old way is dead. The gap between the number of roles available, the number of people looking for those roles and

all of that means you can't just leak code your way to your first job anymore. That's not a thing. And even if you do, the place You'll end up is going to be [ __ ] You don't want to be there. thing too, you have to be good to get a job. Kind of plays into point one, but now more than ever, it's hard for a company to justify hiring someone who isn't there yet when there are 10 people who already are looking for the role. There used to be so few engineers that it was

better to risk it on someone not qualified and train them up. That's not the case anymore. It's just not worth it. That Means you have to train yourself, which means you have to stop relying on AI tools to get through the hard parts. And this is hard. This is difficult because it's human instinct to do that. When something is hard, like when you take a bite of some food and it's too hot, you spit it out instinctively because it's bad for you. It's human instinct to shy away from hard things, especially when you're given an

easy solution. But you have to kick the habit because if you Don't, you'll never hit the level that you need to in order to get one of these roles. But even if you are there, even if you are good enough to have the job, you have to build trust to get it. You will not get that job if there aren't people in the industry who have seen what you're capable of. And I'm not saying, as I mentioned before, spam GitHub with crappy open source repos and spam maintainers with crappy poll requests. I'm saying be present

in the Space. be part of the conversation, ask interesting questions, and don't waste my time when you do it. If you can figure those things out, it might take longer than it used to to get a job. You might come out of college and be hanging out in these communities for two years while you're doing a part-time gig, but you will make it. You just have to care enough and not give up. And if you don't do those things, if you slack on any of these parts, if you don't push yourself Through the hard stuff,

you don't take part in the community, and you don't do the necessary pieces to build trust and build yourself, you're not going to luck through it. Previously, you'd basically just throw your resume at enough companies that one would be desperate enough to hire you. And that's how I got in. The way I got in is done. The way I got into this industry is closed now. And it feels bad giving advice to people who are in a very different position Than I was where I wouldn't have done all of this and I wouldn't have gotten

the job. But I'm on the other side now. I do a lot of hiring. I help a lot of other companies with hiring. I think about these things a lot. And if I was thinking about somebody who deeply understood these things, who asked me really good questions and showed meaningful growth over the last year or so, I don't care if they ever had a job before. I'm hiring that person way Before I hire a more experienced dev that I don't have that level of trust with. Trust is a rare commodity nowadays. And if you can

find ways to build it while also building up yourself, you're going to kill it. I have no concerns for you. But if you struggle through the hard parts of a problem, you solve them with Claude, and then you DM me a life essay about helping you get a job, you're not going to make it. You're so far from the Reality we live in that I can't help you. You need to reset yourself and reset the expectations. You need to stop acting like you deserve a thing you don't understand. You need to take a step back,

evaluate if you care or not. Evaluate if you want to be a better engineer and evaluate why. If you're doing it, if you're trying to hit this bar so you can get the job and get paid, that era is closing fast. But if you're doing this because you played games as a Kid and were blown away with the magic of seeing code turn into things moving on your screen. If you're doing this because there's applications you use that are frustrating you and you want to fix them. If you're doing this because you have a genuine

love of the craft or curiosity of the technology. If you're doing it for those reasons, keep doing it and keep showing it. I got in for Minecraft. I got in I I mean I was playing with code much younger, but I Started taking it seriously because I wanted to host Minecraft servers. And one last thing, stuff I'm not saying because when I do these rants, people love to fill them with things that I did not say at all. So, let's put a couple of these in. I'm not saying don't use AI tools. There's a lot

of great things to use these AI tools for. Don't Hey, cursor, solve this error for me. do going to self plug a little go to T3 chat I'm running into this particular Error what might be the cause error pasted here awesome using the AI to improve your understanding of a thing hell I'm struggling to understand how React rendering works can you give me simple breakdown I do understand how Unreal engine rendering works. Maybe use that as a comparison. Awesome. Great use of AI. Using it to better yourself, not to avoid bettering yourself in order to

better your code. Awesome. A+ once You've built these skills, using the AI to solve problems that are I don't say them beneath you. Like if there's a problem that I know how to solve and I don't feel like it, AI is awesome for that. If there's a thing I don't know and I want to learn about it, AI is good for that. there's a thing I don't feel like learning. AI will make it so easy to never learn it and never actually improve. And finding that balance is key. And if you're struggling with the Balance,

that's fine. Throw away the AI tools, revisit them later. But if you can find if if you can understand this difference, using AI to help you be better, not to help avoid getting better, that can be good. So I'm not saying don't use AI tools. I'm saying don't use AI tools instead of improving yourself. Another thing I am certainly not saying is give up. It's not worth it. Now is a better time than ever to be an engineer. On one hand, getting that First role is harder. On the other hand, climbing up, rewriting everything around

you, bettering yourself in the industry and making real impactful change at scales unimaginable is more possible now than ever. Some of the most impactful people I met made that impact 6 months after their first gig. People like Shad Cen, as far as I know, didn't have a full-time engineering gig before working at Forcell. How crazy is that? That the lead architect behind so much of the Craziness with Shad Cen UI and Vzero was just a guy working on [ __ ] Don't give up. Once you're through, you can have more impact than you can even

imagine. Now, it's a better time than ever to get in if you care. It is a miserable time to get in if you don't. So, I will do the 2.5. If you don't care, rip that. that I am saying. That I am definitely saying. But if you're here in the first place, if you're however many minutes into this video, you probably care more Than most, you'll you'll be fine. You belong here. I am also definitely not saying give up on GitHub. I'm saying don't expect GitHub to be a magical thing to get you a job.

I'm not saying don't contribute to things you use. I'm saying don't hunt for GitHub repos to spam with crappy PR so that you can claim you contributed to things. But if you're using a tool and you're running into a problem and you cut a detailed issue with a reproduction process and Maybe even a stack blitz link and then you offer to do a pull request to fix it, that is so easy to hire for. It's unbelievable. If you can do that whole process, awesome. That's way more important than how well you know a certain framework.

I ain't even vaguely hinted this, but people love accusing me of saying this. You can't get a job if you don't learn React. I've never said anything even vaguely like this, so I don't know why it keeps coming up, but Felt obligated to call that out here. You can get a job. Like, half the I hired weren't React engineers when I hired them. I don't care. Use whatever you care enough about to get excited when you talk about it. I am also, Last thing I'm not saying. Certainly not saying spam random famous people in the

space with your dumb questions. Absolutely not saying this. If anything, my little section here, I would hope I know it won't do this, but I would hope That this results in me getting fewer DMs. I know that's not how it's going to work, but I can dream. Okay, I want to make sure people like myself are treated as a last effort resource where you put the effort in to solve the problem yourself and you come to me when there's a missing piece you can't you just can't close the loop for in your head. That's awesome.

But don't reach don't find someone to spam with every single question as you're going. Do your best To take advantage of the resources that people like me create. And when you've reach the limits of those resources, very calmly, kindly, and thoughtfully, reach out to the right people to do it. But the restraint you use for that outreach is as important as the quality of the outreach itself. The way you hit me up is as important as me being the right person to hit up. If you're hitting me up because I'm famous and rich, [ __

] you. If you're hitting me up Because I'm the only person who's talked about this particular thing you care about in a way that's exciting to you and understandable to you and you don't know anyone else that you could possibly ask about the thing, you've already looked through all your resources and can't find anything and you come to me with a really clear small ask. Awesome. Do that all day. I'll do my best to respond to all those. I still do. I'm always behind on DMs, but I've replied To people with zero followers far more

times than any of you would imagine because they hit me up with a really good question. Or one other fun thing, hitting me up with a solution to a problem I have. Yo here created a really, really cool plugin. Pretty TypeScript errors because the formatting of TypeScript errors in VS Code was garbage. I would complain about it a lot. Others did too. He hit me up on Discord with a, "Hey, big fan. I noticed You were fighting with TypeScript errors in your editor. I do all the time. I built this little plugin that makes them

look like this screenshot of what they look like. Link to the GitHub repo." It was like three sentences, not even. I looked at I was like, "Wow, that is way better." I went and installed it and this is the VS Code extension I would struggle the most to move on from. I need this at this point. And I almost immediately rushed out a video on it Because I was so blown away. And I have given Yoo here every possible job opportunity I think even vaguely makes sense for him because he solved a real problem in

a super practical way and communicated it incredibly well. I don't think he's a native English speaker, but he puts so much effort into every word of his DM to me. I don't care. It's clear he can communicate well and show value while also providing solutions to real problems. And if you can hit all of Those, if you can communicate well, if you can put effort into solving problems, identify the right problems, and show the work for those solutions in a way that's considerate, you're going to kill it. And I'm not expecting everyone to get this

right first try. You're going to stumble. You're going to make mistakes. But I'm not saying any of these things. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm not saying give up. I'm certainly not saying Spam us. Saying be thoughtful in how you learn and grow and challenge yourself to keep getting better regardless of where you're going to be tomorrow. And as long as you do that, as long as you think through what it means to improve as a dev, as long as you care enough to put the work in every day, you're going to make it.

So don't give up. Just keep pushing. It's harder than it was for me. And I really hope this isn't coming off as me gatekeeping and pulling the ladder Up from behind me. I'm trying my best to do the opposite. To point at the ladder, the much harder to use ladder than it was when I got started. to make sure the people who care enough to get up here with me make it. And I hope this helps a couple of you get there. Even if just one of you does, this one was worth it. And to

the half of you who haven't hit the sub button yet, what the [ __ ] How are you this far in the video? And I'm putting all this work in for free, by The way. You're not going to Anyways, sorry for being a little selfish at the end. This is a lot of work. This is like, do you see how much we drew here today? It's almost looking like a milky dock at this point. Anyways, that's all I got to say on this one. Hopefully, this is helpful to you. If not, I'm sorry. If yes,

awesome. Excited to see where you end up in a few years. And if in a year or two you end up with that job and this video was in Some way helpful for you to get there, send me a DM about it. Those are my favorite DMs. The, "Hey, this one random thing you said flipped my brain and now I'm doing well." That's a cool DM to send. And I really hope you get to send that one someday. Until next time, hope this helps. Keep coding, nerds, and and stop letting AI solve all your problems

for you. Seriously, you're just going to destroy your entire career if you stop actually solving problems and just let Claude do all the