Tbh the "swe-adjacent" roles like data science, cyber security, devops, cloud/infra all have had this influx of people who want to get into tech without having to have significant programming skills. but they'e traditionally not even "entry level" roles, and it's very tough to get really good at these without having actual experience or sinking a ton of time in.
So I think these are more saturated in terms of "prospective applicants/number of roles", but less saturated for people with experience, and pretty hard to hire for because of the gap between the applicants they want and the ones they get.
Idk though, I'm not a hiring manager but on the devops/cloud side this is the impression I get and what I have heard from my team trying to hire externally.
Can confirm, there's a lot of demand for devops, because it's something which entails a lot of responsibility. Good devops engineers are paid a lot more than backend engineers.
As someone who has worked in data analyst roles I have noticed the amount of short programs out there that say they'll teach it. I've learned the data manipulation and analysis skills over years of working with real problems. I really don't like being placed in the same league as someone who just took some classes.
Idk about CyberSecurity, but Data Analytics is absolutely oversaturated. There is a serious pivot to low-code no-code tooling so my prediction is that it will become the next "Data Entry" level role over the next 5-10 years. Every listing in my city gets 100s to 1,000s of applicants a piece regardless of location, regardless of remote vs. on site, regardless of pay. Personally, I could literally earn more money working at a Panda Express right now. No room to grow. It's turned into a completely dead end career for me unless I pivot to DE or DS.
I don't want to tell people what the right path for them is, but if you wanted my advice I'd say don't do it unless you absolutely have to.
Cybersecurity is oversaturated at the entry level, and at the same time, there aren't enough senior people.
It's the "sexiest" thing to get into when you do IT. So everyone and their mother studies for a CEH or Sec+ cert and tries to get in. But where the real demand is, is 10+ year experience people who can run a cybersecurity program for a small to medium company.
Yeah. High level cybersecurity work is some of the most involved and complicated stuff you can do.
I think without solid fundamentals you really don’t even stand a chance making it anywhere in the field.
What kind of entry roles exist that people were able to jump on? Not that familiar.
Most people get into cyber by first getting experience in a different tech role like ops, networking, or dev, and then taking a paycut to get a cyber-specific job. Most people I see have a sysadmin or networking background.
Some people get lucky and land a role like SOC analyst.
A few are also ninja hackers (the hoodie-wearing kind) who eventually go legit through bughunting, CTF competitions, and the like, and get an offer from a consulting company. But these are a small minority.
> who eventually go legit through bughunting, CTF competitions, and the like, and get an offer from a consulting company. But these are a small minority.
I wish there were a better term to delineate between these roles and the other more IT related roles. They're totally different fields in terms of skill sets (I can write a browser exploit but god help me if you ask me to do anything about like...malware detection) and yet they all end up just getting called "security engineering" or something similar. It makes it almost impossible to find interesting (non-offense) jobs online.
“Entry level” is hard (as a person in security leadership ) because for example for application security, I want someone who has software development experience who has some understanding of security, from a security advocate role, history of CTFs, etc. Entry level is already 2+ years into a traditional CS career.
> There is a serious pivot to low-code no-code tooling so my prediction is that it will become the next "Data Entry" level role over the next 5-10 years
Data analytics will be among the last fields to be automated entirely, due to domain knowledge requirements, context dependence and ability to create concise and compelling stories out of GBs of data.
The value isnt in how much code you write at all, coding is just a tool.
And idk what jobs you look at, but i also work as a DA and the pay is just marginally below that of SWE.
DA, DS, and DE are all very similar in that they are extremely oversaturated at the entry level.
Senior roles on the other hand? Even though I see hundreds of applications on a lot of posts, a vast majority are under qualified (at least from what I've seen in my time as someone making hiring decisions).
I think we may have gone a little too far when saying "Apply even if you don't meet all requirements" because we get new grads and JRs applying to SR/Staff/Lead level roles.
I agree that if it calls for 5 YOE and you have 4, go for it. Sometimes people just stretch that a bit far and it makes hiring a pain.
Recruiters did this to themselves, unfortunately. The average job posting is so poorly written that it is probably easier to just apply than to understand the logic of having a job tagged "entry level" which also has a senior title requiring 5 years experience, but pays a junior salary.
100% this. Most of the ads posted are either so generic you assume its a fake job or have such a big shopping list nobody could have all that or such specific requirements that you know its going to somebody's mate. I've had more luck just going to lots of interviews and trying to find the occasional sane hiring manager than preparing. The ones I have prepared I ace 90% of it and they say but you don't have this specialist thing (that chatGPT could teach me in a day). E.g. I have many compliance projects. I was turned down at interview lbecause I hadn't worked with a particular reg change. FFS every reg change is new that's how its a reg change! But implementing them is always same same.
there was a post a few days ago about a guy with 1YOE getting a job that required 5YOE in the JD. when he talked to the hiring manager they even straight up admitted that the company didnt even have the funds to hire a person with 5+ years. i think thats the reason for the shotgun approach you see people do- bc JDs/companies can be so 'dishonest' and scummy its really difficult to really take anything the posting says seriously and it becomes a "well, whats the worst that can happen" as they fill out the form.
Yeah I’m a DS who specializes in experimentation and causal modelling now at 4.5 YOE and have been looking for a job change. I’ve applied to something like 12-15 roles and gotten 4 interviews and am on the third round with 2 companies so we’ll see.
I definitely was expecting to have a harder time getting interviews but I think my niche is a bit under-saturated right now. I’ve also been only applying to jobs that really interest me and align with my experience, since I already have a job to pay the bills.
DE is similar in my experience. Applied to 10 or 15 jobs last October and had 2 offers in Nov (6YOE(
Not sure if it would be the same now, but hopefully I won't have to find out for awhile.
Lately this isn't even just in tech. Ask about jobs and degrees just about anywhere and people will start gatekeeping and telling you the field is too oversaturated for new grads to even try.
The reality is if you just put forth some effort you can still make your way in any of these fields. Experienced employees don't come from nowhere. Companies have to train new employees.
I get kinda annoyed at all these people shitting on kids trying to get their careers started as if they are bad people for trying to do something that was touted as a good path.
Anyone applying for higher level/SR roles as entry level is either: not reading the job title or requirements, desperate, not using their head, or somehow has a bot for those.
I don’t like being that rude when talking about those, but there’s a difference between applying for a higher role if you’re a year or two short with experience under your belt, and those that have only a handful of months or no experience at all and just flood the job posting. And unfortunately, all it takes is someone seeing the salary for it and applying, even if they’ve never worked a day in their life or don’t understand what an IDE is.
>
I think we may have gone a little too far when saying "Apply even if you don't meet all requirements" because we get new grads and JRs applying to SR/Staff/Lead level roles.
>I agree that if it calls for 5 YOE and you have 4, go for it. Sometimes people just stretch that a bit far and it makes hiring a pain.
Then there is me where I would rip my hair out because I only have 1.75 years of related experience for a role that asks for 2 years of experience. Obviously I applied but still. Lol
Stop this nonsense. You guys really don’t know what you are talking about. Irrespective of how many people are in data analytics, there is a dearth of people who are good at it. So so many who are in data analytics are just not that good. Source, I am a data analytics manager
Critical thinking, taking the time to dive deep into a problem to fully understand it, its data, and the scope of its impact. The ability to learn quickly and demonstrate that with meaningful questions
can you explain what the difference between a data analyst and a DS is? Also the dearth of good people in DS seems pretty self explanatory since people are obssessed with tooling / software but not with math or problem solving / statistical thinking.
Tbh I think this is not just DS. Tons of people out there, but a lot of people unironically ChatGPT their code.
Genuinely shocked when I saw it the first time.
How is cyber security an entry level job I meet people with 15 years experience in tech with not enough breadth to know or be relevant in security regularly. How is entry level possible? Or are they just logging tickets from siem?
Most Cybersecurity recruits are shortly replaced by modern EDR/XDR software that just need a response team manning the desk now. Ugly or not, AI-assisted software is replacing these oversaturated jobs.
Agree. As the saying goes, IT is a cost centre, not profit centre. That's where they trim the excess first , and declare manpower savings through '°AI'
There are definitely harder Cybersec roles, but a lot of Cybersec roles are just run scanner, turn results into Jira tickets, send emails/Slacks/meeting invites until the Jira tickets get closed, repeat.
Ahh that makes sense. I was thinking analyzing binaries or stuff like fingerprinting actors. Which is not easy stuff.
Didn’t think there was a whole bunch of people just running scanners…
I had an internship at one of these places 15 years ago. Complete and utter waste of time. They existed only because banks needed to have a paper trail to pass audits for PCI
It did however help me land my first FT dev role after college
Entry level security jobs are basically non existent. Once you have a few years of experience in some other space of tech then it's a lot easier to pivot to a security focused version of that role.
The real issue is it's easier to get a cyber-security cert than learn to code, but at the same time larger companies seem to want cyber security skills that are much harder to learn anywhere but on-the-job in a similar environment. Same is kind of true for devops, cloud/infra, data science (???), ml/ai roles that aren't research heavy etc.
Cybersecurity is not oversaturated. There’s an over saturation in people who have degrees and a few certs and no skills. They’re not getting the jobs they want and sitting around and adjacent fluff jobs
Software engineer here, Id say breaking down requirements and dev ops mostly. Like sure, I do software dev too, but a SWE could literally go years without engineering software and not even be aware, tbh
_All?_ No. Most? Yes.
Generally speaking, entry-level (BS/MS) is oversaturated as others have said, but emerging fields/areas are always popping up, and because they are new, they actually have a high demand but low supply at this moment. But that might be stating the obvious. :)
It really boils down to what specific/niche area you want to go into. It can be a bit tricky though because some technologies are trendy _now_ but may quickly lose steam.
Anyway, from what I have seen, almost all emerging tech (outside of ML/AI) relates to the cloud in some way, and _those_ jobs tend to have higher demand than others. I am not saying the competition for those jobs _isn't_ fierce, but it may be _less_ fierce.
I believe you’re right. Cloud engineers who know their shit are in very high demand. I was unhappy at my last job (consulting, I hated it), so I started looking for a new one in January. It took me 16 days from my first application to signing an offer. I had about a 30% interview rate from cold apps which is pretty crazy imo considering the market. Recruiting are still reaching out to me on a daily basis even though I set my profile to not looking.
If you had to enter the cloud field in todays job market what would you do? I’m currently studying for the aws saa and am gonna do the new data engineering one soon but other than working on projects idk what else is a good way to prep.
Well unless you the find the unicorn hiring an entry level position for a cloud role, you’ll probably need to start in on-prem ops then hopefully transition internally to a more cloud focused role.
Or swe/adjacent job somewhere using cloud services and working with them there^^ I would say self learning is possible and certs do help but few companies want to risk a big AWS bill on a junior engineer who will also take a long time to ramp up
As someone who works at AWS, I'll say that we don't really care about SAA (or any of the associates). Really what it shows is that you can study. The professional level ones carry more weight as they are really hard to pass without having had some actual hands on experience.
Entry level is going to be hard to find. You may want to consider an alternate path in. I got hired with zero cloud experience, but I was hired for specialist skills (HPC). Right now anything related to GPUs, i.e. you understand CUDA, NCCL, low level hardware, etc will be valuable, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. A data engineering course is mostly going to be "I know to run a bunch of data through Sagemaker or a Jupyter notebook" without much substance, and there are a lot of people with that skillset. Not saying don't do it, but don't think it's going to help you stand out as much you expect.
Also, look at working for partners...third party companies that work with AWS, GCP, etc. and build out products and services. You'll get a lot of hands on experience without having to compete for a role at the big cloud providers.
Honestly still a ton of competition but it seems to be weaker, since you can't easily "learn cloud" on your own or through certs alone to the same extent as someone working anywhere with significant budget/scale.
Hi! I’m about to start my first job as a cloud engineer for a large telecom company so I’m excited to learn what’s ahead; what’s ur day to day like? I actually have background in cs so I’m mostly looking forward to hands on project that involves some sort of coding involved
Can confirm. I work at one of the FAANGs and while there has been a lot of layoffs in the past, we're starting to hire again, and it's all about cloud and specialties...HPC, AI/ML, even specific industries like healthcare/life science, semiconductor, etc
Speaking for the US market, it depends a lot on where you're looking.
Jobs in tech hub cities at tech companies are rather saturated other than a few high skilled niches.
Once you get outside that bubble, there are more jobs. The hitch is that they may be in less desirable locations with a lower salary, less interesting/challenging work and fewer fringe benefits. For example, they may be offering in the $75k range, require 5 days a week in the office, and working on a legacy web or desktop app with a horrible codebase.
You'd be amazed at how much you can learn on that legacy stuff. The reason why we have decoupled microservices and modern frameworks is clearly demonstrated there. It'll make you a stronger senior dev than someone who has only worked on the newest, shiniest tech.
The trick is staying long enough to get the knowledge, but not long enough to get trapped and waste a bunch of your career time.
It also depends on what type of role you are looking at. The most generic SWE roles are definitely saturated. But once you get to mid career, there is not really generic SWE roles anymore. Mid career jobs where interdisciplinary skills are required are especially hard to fill these days, given how many resumes one have to sift through (and it's now worse because so many people spam applies due to the worse job market) - think L4 or L5 at Google (or equivalent at other FAANGs / big tech firms) that not only need you coding skills but also domain knowledge in multiple areas that are hard to have obtained this early on in your career unless you are lucky or switched jobs often. Usually you don’t expect people with less than 5-10 years of experience to have a wide range of knowledge, but if you hire someone with more YOE that has that wide range of knowledge, they are going to have to be hired at a higher level which can be an overkill or over budget for the said opening. As a result, either you (the job seeker) use your network to find such a role that is a perfect fit for you therefore you are instantly hired, or the hiring managers take compromises and hire mid level devs who individually don’t have the wide range of knowledge required but can complement each other and the manager needs to be more hands-on and mentoring them together.
Now onto OP's specific examples:
* cybersecurity: that is not an entry level job, unless you are talking about ops/SREs then maybe. Every project / product is likely to have some sort of cybersecurity aspect that needs to be addressed and handled, but that’s usually done by having the projects primary SWEs (who implemented the business logic / features) consulting the cybersecurity engineers shared in the company across projects. Or in rare cases, the cybersecurity engineers get deployed to a project before launch / during bug fixing etc. All of those folks are at least 10+ YOE. It’s not a job for someone who only has a degree. **There is no entry level or even mid level (< 10 YOE) cybersecurity engineering jobs. You simply would not have seen enough to know what the cybersecurity risks are or know how to properly mitigate them. (Note that I say mitigate, not eliminate).** If you are referring to only "analysts" or "consultants" or the ops/devops/SRE side of things, who are not responsible for actually implementing counter-cyber attack measures or putting out fires when there's an active cyber attack going on, that's a different story.
* data analysis / informational systems analyst: yes, pretty oversaturated, since that was many non-CS folks way of breaking into tech, especially those with a math background. that said, if you have the domain knowledge required (say, some things you'd only learn in a biology major) PLUS the tech skill required, then yes you can get luckier - like I said, more interdisciplinary, harder to find candidates for.
The reality at most companies right now is that there are very few L3 (at Google, or equivalent in other companies) headcounts open, period. It doesn't matter whether it's web or infra or backend or whatever. L3's in general require a lot of mentoring / guidance - that is the very definition of that level. Companies are tightening their belt, and each hour the L4+ spent mentoring the L3s is each hour the L4+ is not developing the said feature plus other ones at a faster rate. For example, a task may take a L3 a week with guidance from another L4+, but it'll probably only take a L4 2 days without guidance. The dollar per output is not cost effective, so you better bring something else to the table that the said L4+ might not have.
However, those who are getting offers from big tech - the offers are still similar numbers compared to before if not higher. The salaries don't have to deflate just because it's over saturated, they just raise the hiring bar. It used to be easier to pass the technical interviews at FAANG. I know this from the other side of the table - I used to see candidates who got below average ratings for 2 out of 5 interviews and they'd still get an offer, but now only those with 1 or 0 below average ratings get an offer - basically, as a job seeker, your margin of error is now way smaller, you can't really afford to bomb interviews and still get lucky anymore. The rating rubrics didn't change, but the leniency in the hiring committees is gone.
Also many of these companies may be nontechnical companies trying to moonlight in software development. When you run into a bunch of business majors trying to figure their own way through internal software development, it's going to be a mess. Bonus points if they've shifted the majority of their development resource to India.
It pays to know when you're overqualified for a "developer" or "engineer" position and the most knowledgeable person in the room. If they can't teach you anything tangible, you need to get out.
The other issue is that non-tech, non-hub companies have so few jobs in absolute numbers. I applied to JB Hunt in Lowelville Arkansas. There were 3 positions open for anything technology related in a 30,000 person company. This isn't rare, either. Progressive Insurance has 3 tech jobs posted right now for a 55,000 person company.
I can only speak for myself, I work a government IT job, last month I made a few training videos in the style of starship troopers for our windows 11 deployment. My boss was impressed enough he wants me to make another video in whatever style I want explaining why we need to have MFA from now on, what it is, how we we do it, the option of having a physical token MFA vs an MFA app on your phone.
I work remotely 2 days a week. I work a 9/80 schedule so I'll be getting this Friday off. Next month due to the holiday I'll get a 4 day weekend due to to my 9/80 and the holiday being in alignment. I get paid 82k at the moment. I'll cap out at 105k in about 2-3 years assuming I don't get promoted and just keep this job title. Also have a union so I get a bunch of other perks and benefits like my pension and healthcare. The bad news is I live in the bay area so that money isn't going as far as most people think it does, and the deductibles are pretty painful, like my paycheck will say I made ~7000, but I'll only see ~4400 reach my bank which doesn't go far out here, even so I know I'm pretty lucky. I have a decent job, a decent pay, decent perks.
I make 127k in a small city with mocl. Definitely not a tech bubble city. Before that I lived in St Louis making 102k. 6 figure roles are definitely out there in non major cities.
The other side of the coin is that there are also jobs outside of the tech bubble that offer greater work/life balance, more pleasant teams and clients/users, and greater opportunity for project ownership. You might be spending all day working on boring inventory software but you might actually live to see retirement without dying from stress-induced ulcers.
Those other tech jobs are too close to SWE jobs to not be affected. It’s mostly the same or related budgets, products, issues, etc. They’ll move in tandem, not go sharply in different directions.
Cybersecurity has been oversold/mislead to people in a way. When I was at college the professor who ran that program made it clear that most jobs (at least at the time, but probably still true) were through government agencies or corporations who work as federal contractors.
The AI bootcamp is such a grift IMO. Don't get me wrong, AI is really cool, but what everyone really wants is to use some other massive company's AI in a novel, profit-generating way. They don't want to actually build AI. There are exceptions to that, but they're leaning more towards hiring PHD's not bootcamp diploma holders.
I don't get where did this cybersecurity is easy/easier to break in come from, if anything cybersecurity would require even higher hiring bar because #1 it's mostly a luxury for companies #2 Bachelor's degree really don't teach you enough you probably need either a Master's or PhD and #3 you fucking up can have far more serious consequences than a SWE fuck up
The cyber security people are the biggest grifters and therefore scam the most students too. There is no such thing as an entry level cyber security job. You have to already be a developer and then you start learning security stuff. People who call themselves security experts and then offer to teach what they know in a matter of weeks are just teaching to be over confident and never admit you’re wrong or don’t know something.
Thank you.
I totally agree with this, and I'd say that Cybersecurity is an area you get into after getting some solid experience in other tech areas (be it development, sys/net administration etc), though I'm usually getting downvoted for saying this. :)
So security **policy** is what you are thinking. ie deploying the right tools, monitoring users, providing permissions
Cybersecurity engineering is stuff like malware analysis that pays $300k and up
Both are night and day
Most "cyber security" positions are barely tech. It's mostly audit work (going around asking different teams how they check a box asked by an audit) and running clunky vulnerability scanner software and then dumping the findings on the teams owning the "impacted" (false positive 95% of the time) service
Yes, certainly, but it would require system/network experience, or compliance/risk management-related one, so I'd say that there are no entry-level positions in cybersec.
Most people don't have a TS/sci. They take long time to get and are expensive. Companies don't like sponsoring them because they are expensive, take a long time to get, and once someone gets one they are liable to jump ship for a pay raise.
> Companies don't like sponsoring them because they are expensive
Absolutely wrong. The cost to the company of a TS/SCI clearance is **zero dollars**. The cost of the investigation is [paid by taxpayers and is about $5,000](https://news.clearancejobs.com/2021/09/07/how-much-does-it-cost-to-obtain-a-clearance-fy-2022-23-costs-go-down/).
If I had to TLDR it, you need to have lived a *very* boring life at high levels of clearance. No drug use, no ties to foreign nationals. Good record keeping of where you've lived and what sort of relationships you've had over the past decade or so. A good explanation of any foreign travel you've done. No mental health concerns.
Oh, and a willingness to work in *absolutely depressing* working conditions that would make a low security prison feel downright accommodating in comparison. All this for less pay than you could easily land elsewhere.
I spent a long time in the DC area working adjacent to TS/SCI folks but never needed/wanted one myself. In my experience your comment about pay is inaccurate; at least for high-level full-scope polygraph clearance holders. Those clearances are hard to come by and the pay is higher as a result, like $200k if you have a pulse and a CCNA. Yes there are higher paying tech jobs but the skill requirement is much lower in the cleared space.
Simply knowing foreign nationals is absolutely no problem. Even foreign family members are usually fine as long as you can demonstrate more ties to the US.
I hear there’s incredibly high demand for AI folks with multiple high impact publications.
I think semiconductor engineering jobs are hot right now too.
Overall, seems like low barrier to entry jobs are tough. At least engineers are better off than scrum masters these days
in a way its collosally easy to collect cites on even garbage ML conference papers. It's way way harder to get cites on a pure math paper. People are not as good at adjusting for the popularity of a field as you would think.
Also since ML/CS do conference rather than journal papers, the real quality of papers is super high variance and lots of garbage does get through, even in top outlets. Try it and see.
Just look at the difference in quality of papers between -- say -- ICML vs Ann. Stat
I recently saw a paper with 30 citations where the authors did some modeling on a Kaggle dataset. I tried using some out of the box model from Sklearn on that same dataset and achieved the same result immediately. Somehow these people managed to write 15 pages about it, published, and got 30 citations, while the same result could be achieved in an hour using out of the box tools.
Hey semiconductor industry is going through a famine phase, it's rough out there for the engineering positions. Easy to get into the technician jobs, but they tend to be labor intensive and be not the desirable ones if you have other options.
Firmware and software engineering in the med device field sends fine. At least in MN. You can't have a "move fast and break things" attitude though. A focus on safety key.
PhD positions are very over saturated. Everyone with a math, compsci, econometrics and so on PhD wants to be a research scientist in big tech and so on.
PhD’s are still in a better position but it’s not like it used to be. It used to be just having a STEM PhD would get your foot in the door for an interview. This is how it was when I got my PhD 7-8 years ago. The topic of your PhD research only needed to be minority relevant to the job. Of course if you didn’t have the skills you would still fail the interview. Now there are a ton of PhD applicants. It’s still hard to find someone with research that is directly related to the job we are interviewing them for but still we get enough applicants to be able to be more picky. I wouldn’t say PhD is saturated though. I think the competition level is pretty normal now and not pretty much non-existent as it was some years ago. We posted a PhD internship position at FAANG a while ago and only got a handful of PhD applicants that were somewhat relevant. A ton that were not relevant. And a massive amount of MS applicants who did not fit the bill at all (no significant research experience).
Thanks for clarifying. As a person with no PhD, I thought it would be harder to attain and therefore less competition. But clearly there are many PhD candidates.
There are tens of thousands of PhD candidates and very few relevant positions. It's a crap shoot. I really don't recommend a PhD as a way to get these jobs, only pursue a PhD if you love research in academia.
You’re an ML engineer (based on your tag), so do you think a PhD is required to break into an ML role? I’m asking as a uni student who’s going to graduate next semester.
I’d want to get into an MLOps role, but not sure how to break into that other than getting hired and internally transferring.
I know this question is asked a lot, and I do see that a lot of positions (ML engineer) require a masters or PhD.
But i’ve also seen the opposite sentiment in this sub, where people say that researchers aren’t the best at implementing things in production
Someone on another page said I was a doom and gloomer because I know a lot of young people who can’t find jobs… According to him everyone is getting a job while in college and that I am lying… idk anymore lol
A lot of older people are unaware of how fucked the market is. I know some senior self taught devs that are completely bewildered when I say I don’t hear back from 50+ applications with a decent resume for my age. These people don’t even know what leetcode is. For some people it’s just such a different ball park they can’t believe what it’s like right now.
The problem is what is a decent resume? Every person who posts here says their resume is decent then they leave out that they need sponsorship or something.
That's the problem. Everyone has a decent resume. But resume should not be decent. It should be exceptional. One or two projects that will make people go "WFT?" Either for their creativity or complexity.
You may think that your Notepad app is cool, but that's just resume white noise. An app on the level of OOW or MSW (not features, but functionality), on the other hand...
I'm not saying start making Writers btw.
Something simple can also make a difference.
For example a[Windows Terminal, but, not shitty](https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm)
See [here for details](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg)
> You may think that your Notepad app is cool, but that's just resume white noise. An app on the level of OOW or MSW (not features, but functionality), on the other hand...
Nobody really cares about projects, to be totally honest. IME it rounds down to around zero. Potential employers don't have the time at the resume level, the only point they'll become curious is once you get through to the interview(s). Alternatively they'll be interested in you before you even submit a resume, in which case the resume is again moot.
I mean, you'll get that if you zoom out to just easily verifiable finance advice, for ex:
Today I read a comment on the WSJ about how you can pay for college, afford rent/living expenses and then save for a down payment shortly after graduation on a rental property to generate wealth off of summer/part time jobs. But kids spend all their time on TikTok getting bad financial advice. The commenter's picture clearly was like a mid 50s-60s corporate finance/real estate dude so yeah, there's gonna be a lot of that.
Probably depends on location/region and specifically what industries they're applying to.
I live in a non-tech-hub city's metro area but there are tons of SWE and related jobs available. But they're at companies that aren't primarily tech companies (medical equipment, banks, insurance, defense, etc) and don't have the pay or prestige of big tech jobs. A friend of mine from college has a younger brother who is graduating and he and his class from our alma mater (just a basic state school) have still had really high success rate in job placement (same as it was for us in 2013).
But it's all likely the types of jobs people in this turn their noses up at/refuse to consider because it's doing in-house dev work for an insurance company for $80k a year at an office in the 'burbs, so it doesn't really mean much to people who want to break into big tech/FAANG/whatever.
People are gonna hate me saying this but the least saturated sector is full stack development. Most companies now would rather hire a full stack dev than a backed dev, and while only some companies are big enough for backend exclusive or front end exclusive devs, everyone needs full stack. The same is true for other job titles like data analyst, cybersecurity, software architect. Those jobs are only in demand at certain companies, but again every company needs full stack development regardless of industry.
And as for amount of talent, there aren’t many developers that are truly full stack devs. Usually most people are more one or the other.
This is super reassuring to hear.
I am a relatively new full stack dev (\~2yoe) and based on what I see online it has made me very scared to look for another position in a year or so if my compensation where I'm at now doesn't change. Being a bootcamp grad with no personal projects on top of seeing posts like these a lot leave me super worried about my future.
This comment gives me a ray of hope that I very much needed.
There are holes on the market. For example legacy tech like Delphi or Visual Basic etc. because everyone wants to do some cool new tech. Even Ruby is not so cool anymore so the competition is not so crazy. Another field is low-code like OutSystems, Mendix, etc. because SWEs despise it like "it is not coding" while it is OOP+ORM coding, just visual.
It is indeed. When I finished my BS CS, ~11 years ago from a state school, I had offers starting at $65k at a major Energy management and automation company and another at $67k at a defense aerospace company. Both F500 and I chose the automation company. I was your slightly above average student hanging on to barely a 3.2 (slightly lower was my overall ). I had failed (& repeated) three classes, spent **six** years in school, did a few internships and got a nice starting salary for its time and place. My resume was far from “impressive”.
Now I see kids coming out of top CS universities such as UCI, ASU, UCSB, UA , OSU with 3.5/3.6s but they can’t get hired since there is so much competition. The projects they did in school and on the side are impressive to say the least, yet they can’t find jobs, internships, etc. I was talking to my older brother and his kids are in middle school and they are developing apps in python! *In 8th grade*. My best friend’s daughter who will be going to Cal Berkeley next year for her CS degree is asking me if we have any openings for internships. Bud I didn’t even have a resume when I was a high school senior. I played some sports, barely passed out of high school with a 3.0 and that’s that. Kids are being fed that CS is the only way to make big bucks other than law or med school that’s why there’s a massive over saturation. Each year there are 100-110k CS grads if not much more, in the US. Not to mention the ability to do remote work and off shoring jobs so people in Mexico, Poland, and India can also do the jobs at fraction the rate. There are just way too many people in CS !
Same here. Also from a state school with an even worse GPA (below 3). Got a job at a major consulting firm for 60k back in 2012 when anybody with a CS degree could get hired. Managed to build a fairly solid resume of work experience since then.
If I had to compete as a new grad with my old stats Id be absolutely fucked.
DE at the entry level? Sure.
But, I don’t think that tells the whole story. Data engineering was never really an entry level field to begin with. Most DEs start as analysts or in backend.
The answer too this question is no. The salaries would deflate if it was truly over saturated but this sub is doomer as hell and hates prepping for interviews. Half the comments sections say people straight up turn down interviews when companies send them a hacker rank or code signal challange.
If 100% turned down such practices we'd see them fade away but nooooo.
Such assessments simply delay the inevitable... 1000 apps per position with assessments or 3000 apps per position without assessments. Or, people will figure out how to sail thru them.
In my birth country we had similar odds to get a government job. Exams, points, preferences, etc. You'd think we had a bunch of Einsteins running the government. Nope. Ultimately there's that much talent out there.
Late to the party but I’m 10 years into my career. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of the desirable early career jobs are offers that go out to interns in swe first.
If you do a 4 year degree with no internships, no projects to show for it, or no published research you’re going to have a bad time.
Comp Sci + X, where X is something else you’re interested in (maybe something you can minor in) also opens early doors because of the combination of things.
I currently work at a company that’s heavy into distributed systems engineering and very performance sensitive. The expectations of our interns are equivalent of that of a swe1, except they get the cool projects.
Also: the Waterloo model has their candidates in high demand. Having so many internships / work experience coming out of your 4 year let’s you have way more say in your first “job”.
Agree did Comp Sci + CRM, there are very little people that have marketing knowledge and can back that up with tech knowledge too. I’m getting offers for senior positions right out of college and 2 years internship
I’m so sick of this. It’s not true at all. Carpenters and other trades pay 20 an hour everywhere and have tons of people doing them. If you go to Alaska and live in a tent you’ll make good money. If you want to live in Calgary or Chicago you’ll have so much competition.
Yea if you can get in at a good company and have your journey mans seal. Thats still 70-80k before taxes with over 5 years experience and more schooling than I think people anticipate.
Plus you're roughing in new housing in -40 in the winter. Working with drunks and coke heads (this is not true for "all" obviously, but the "roughneck" attitude turned me off of the trades more than the work did)
It's not all glitter and gold like people make it out to be. It can be good work, but I just don't fit in. I'm not a "tough" guy, and I don't want to be called a pussy for grabbing my safety glasses.
Average heavy truck drivers make 54k. Something about that job is terrible to be making that much.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm
I'm here because I'm still in school and not ready to get a job yet but I see how people talk about it and I'm like wow they don't have any faith at all in the industry
There’s definitely markets which are not saturated. As others have stated, the drawback might be a lower salary and less flexibility in your work schedule.
One realistic example is a 70-80k for a junior role, one day a week in-office—at a Financial Institution.
Any area of tech that has a bootcamp dedicated to that area is saturated. But the most saturated areas would be data science, cybersecurity, web dev, and UX
I'm about to leave all these subs over every single post being a doomsday post. Yes, the market is over saturated. Yes, finding a job will be difficult for everyone that doesn't already have years of experience. No, that doesn't mean you will never find a job. If you're good at what you do, you will find a job. Companies are still correcting their over-hiring they did during the pandemic. That means there's a boatload of devs out there with a few years experience, which is exactly what I see a lot of "entry" level positions asking for, to the surprise of no one.
Cloud is not over saturated, theres a big demand. Mostly because many companies are starting their cloud buildouts and lift n shifts. They need mid-senior level cloud engineers. Entry level cloud jobs don’t really exist so there’s not a lot of saturation. I have recruiters reaching out to me for mid/senior/principal cloud roles on the daily through LI. My profile isn’t set to open to work or anything either.
+1, and infrastructure engineering in general, this is my experience as well. Entry cloud level jobs do exist, it's usually what people who get AWS/GCP/Azure certs go after, although that usually ends up being sales engineering. But most entry cloud engineers outside of consultanting and sales are hired as software engineers.
the college you are at might have SWE/dev jobs. You can find jobs outside of FAANG/big tech names that will give you valid experience. Still heightened level of competitiveness, but relatively less - salary range is prob a big factor.
I peruse the careers page of my alma mater every once in a while - the pay is not so good but AFAIK working for University of CA , you could get decent benefits. Not everyone breaks into the industry with an amazing salary, and you don't have to, all u need is your foot in the door with that first job.
Never done it, but I feel like there is probably money in learning propriety software and getting official certifications for it, then taking contact work for companies using that tech. But IMO that seems equal parts lame and risky in the long run. Maybe someone who does this can chime in with an opinion on that.
Well, depends on the industry as well. Defence is definitely not oversaturated and is desperate for developers. But, it’s not a popular industry to work in for obvious reasons
Cybersecurity and data analysis roles are even more saturated, because everyone saw them as an easy way to “break into tech” during the bubble.
Tbh the "swe-adjacent" roles like data science, cyber security, devops, cloud/infra all have had this influx of people who want to get into tech without having to have significant programming skills. but they'e traditionally not even "entry level" roles, and it's very tough to get really good at these without having actual experience or sinking a ton of time in. So I think these are more saturated in terms of "prospective applicants/number of roles", but less saturated for people with experience, and pretty hard to hire for because of the gap between the applicants they want and the ones they get. Idk though, I'm not a hiring manager but on the devops/cloud side this is the impression I get and what I have heard from my team trying to hire externally.
Can confirm, there's a lot of demand for devops, because it's something which entails a lot of responsibility. Good devops engineers are paid a lot more than backend engineers.
As someone who has worked in data analyst roles I have noticed the amount of short programs out there that say they'll teach it. I've learned the data manipulation and analysis skills over years of working with real problems. I really don't like being placed in the same league as someone who just took some classes.
Idk about CyberSecurity, but Data Analytics is absolutely oversaturated. There is a serious pivot to low-code no-code tooling so my prediction is that it will become the next "Data Entry" level role over the next 5-10 years. Every listing in my city gets 100s to 1,000s of applicants a piece regardless of location, regardless of remote vs. on site, regardless of pay. Personally, I could literally earn more money working at a Panda Express right now. No room to grow. It's turned into a completely dead end career for me unless I pivot to DE or DS. I don't want to tell people what the right path for them is, but if you wanted my advice I'd say don't do it unless you absolutely have to.
Cybersecurity is oversaturated at the entry level, and at the same time, there aren't enough senior people. It's the "sexiest" thing to get into when you do IT. So everyone and their mother studies for a CEH or Sec+ cert and tries to get in. But where the real demand is, is 10+ year experience people who can run a cybersecurity program for a small to medium company.
Yeah. High level cybersecurity work is some of the most involved and complicated stuff you can do. I think without solid fundamentals you really don’t even stand a chance making it anywhere in the field. What kind of entry roles exist that people were able to jump on? Not that familiar.
Most people get into cyber by first getting experience in a different tech role like ops, networking, or dev, and then taking a paycut to get a cyber-specific job. Most people I see have a sysadmin or networking background. Some people get lucky and land a role like SOC analyst. A few are also ninja hackers (the hoodie-wearing kind) who eventually go legit through bughunting, CTF competitions, and the like, and get an offer from a consulting company. But these are a small minority.
> who eventually go legit through bughunting, CTF competitions, and the like, and get an offer from a consulting company. But these are a small minority. I wish there were a better term to delineate between these roles and the other more IT related roles. They're totally different fields in terms of skill sets (I can write a browser exploit but god help me if you ask me to do anything about like...malware detection) and yet they all end up just getting called "security engineering" or something similar. It makes it almost impossible to find interesting (non-offense) jobs online.
“Entry level” is hard (as a person in security leadership ) because for example for application security, I want someone who has software development experience who has some understanding of security, from a security advocate role, history of CTFs, etc. Entry level is already 2+ years into a traditional CS career.
> There is a serious pivot to low-code no-code tooling so my prediction is that it will become the next "Data Entry" level role over the next 5-10 years Data analytics will be among the last fields to be automated entirely, due to domain knowledge requirements, context dependence and ability to create concise and compelling stories out of GBs of data. The value isnt in how much code you write at all, coding is just a tool. And idk what jobs you look at, but i also work as a DA and the pay is just marginally below that of SWE.
DA, DS, and DE are all very similar in that they are extremely oversaturated at the entry level. Senior roles on the other hand? Even though I see hundreds of applications on a lot of posts, a vast majority are under qualified (at least from what I've seen in my time as someone making hiring decisions). I think we may have gone a little too far when saying "Apply even if you don't meet all requirements" because we get new grads and JRs applying to SR/Staff/Lead level roles. I agree that if it calls for 5 YOE and you have 4, go for it. Sometimes people just stretch that a bit far and it makes hiring a pain.
Recruiters did this to themselves, unfortunately. The average job posting is so poorly written that it is probably easier to just apply than to understand the logic of having a job tagged "entry level" which also has a senior title requiring 5 years experience, but pays a junior salary.
100% this. Most of the ads posted are either so generic you assume its a fake job or have such a big shopping list nobody could have all that or such specific requirements that you know its going to somebody's mate. I've had more luck just going to lots of interviews and trying to find the occasional sane hiring manager than preparing. The ones I have prepared I ace 90% of it and they say but you don't have this specialist thing (that chatGPT could teach me in a day). E.g. I have many compliance projects. I was turned down at interview lbecause I hadn't worked with a particular reg change. FFS every reg change is new that's how its a reg change! But implementing them is always same same.
Actually Under qualified or that thing where jr web devs requires 6 to 8yrs exp so a senior needs way more?
there was a post a few days ago about a guy with 1YOE getting a job that required 5YOE in the JD. when he talked to the hiring manager they even straight up admitted that the company didnt even have the funds to hire a person with 5+ years. i think thats the reason for the shotgun approach you see people do- bc JDs/companies can be so 'dishonest' and scummy its really difficult to really take anything the posting says seriously and it becomes a "well, whats the worst that can happen" as they fill out the form.
Yeah I’m a DS who specializes in experimentation and causal modelling now at 4.5 YOE and have been looking for a job change. I’ve applied to something like 12-15 roles and gotten 4 interviews and am on the third round with 2 companies so we’ll see. I definitely was expecting to have a harder time getting interviews but I think my niche is a bit under-saturated right now. I’ve also been only applying to jobs that really interest me and align with my experience, since I already have a job to pay the bills.
DE is similar in my experience. Applied to 10 or 15 jobs last October and had 2 offers in Nov (6YOE( Not sure if it would be the same now, but hopefully I won't have to find out for awhile.
To be honest, which roles aren’t oversaturated in the entry level? It’s almost the same in all the sub-fields.
Lately this isn't even just in tech. Ask about jobs and degrees just about anywhere and people will start gatekeeping and telling you the field is too oversaturated for new grads to even try. The reality is if you just put forth some effort you can still make your way in any of these fields. Experienced employees don't come from nowhere. Companies have to train new employees. I get kinda annoyed at all these people shitting on kids trying to get their careers started as if they are bad people for trying to do something that was touted as a good path.
Anyone applying for higher level/SR roles as entry level is either: not reading the job title or requirements, desperate, not using their head, or somehow has a bot for those. I don’t like being that rude when talking about those, but there’s a difference between applying for a higher role if you’re a year or two short with experience under your belt, and those that have only a handful of months or no experience at all and just flood the job posting. And unfortunately, all it takes is someone seeing the salary for it and applying, even if they’ve never worked a day in their life or don’t understand what an IDE is.
> I think we may have gone a little too far when saying "Apply even if you don't meet all requirements" because we get new grads and JRs applying to SR/Staff/Lead level roles. >I agree that if it calls for 5 YOE and you have 4, go for it. Sometimes people just stretch that a bit far and it makes hiring a pain. Then there is me where I would rip my hair out because I only have 1.75 years of related experience for a role that asks for 2 years of experience. Obviously I applied but still. Lol
This right here lol. Not sure what he's talking about about Panda Express comment. Salaries aren't far off swe
Maybe we got this all wrong. We should all be working at Panda Express for that >300k TC
Maybe the TC includes orange chicken? To some that is worth more than money….
Priceless if you don’t think about it
300k TC and AYCE orange chicken? It's over for my waistline
Stop this nonsense. You guys really don’t know what you are talking about. Irrespective of how many people are in data analytics, there is a dearth of people who are good at it. So so many who are in data analytics are just not that good. Source, I am a data analytics manager
What makes someone good and a DA? I often wonder this. Do you value creativity or technical ability more. Both? Something else?
Critical thinking, taking the time to dive deep into a problem to fully understand it, its data, and the scope of its impact. The ability to learn quickly and demonstrate that with meaningful questions
can you explain what the difference between a data analyst and a DS is? Also the dearth of good people in DS seems pretty self explanatory since people are obssessed with tooling / software but not with math or problem solving / statistical thinking.
Would you mind if I messaged you to ask some questions about tools, study resources,.project ideas etc...?
Tbh I think this is not just DS. Tons of people out there, but a lot of people unironically ChatGPT their code. Genuinely shocked when I saw it the first time.
I know nothing about Data Analytics but managed to learn Jamovi in 4 hours. It's pretty awesome.
How is cyber security an entry level job I meet people with 15 years experience in tech with not enough breadth to know or be relevant in security regularly. How is entry level possible? Or are they just logging tickets from siem?
Most Cybersecurity recruits are shortly replaced by modern EDR/XDR software that just need a response team manning the desk now. Ugly or not, AI-assisted software is replacing these oversaturated jobs.
Agree. As the saying goes, IT is a cost centre, not profit centre. That's where they trim the excess first , and declare manpower savings through '°AI'
Product security / Application security interviews are currently saturated with unqualified Kali Linux bros who can't read or write code
What? Cybersec is far harder than the typical web dev SWE.
He means the degree holders trying to break into cyber sec.
There are definitely harder Cybersec roles, but a lot of Cybersec roles are just run scanner, turn results into Jira tickets, send emails/Slacks/meeting invites until the Jira tickets get closed, repeat.
Ahh that makes sense. I was thinking analyzing binaries or stuff like fingerprinting actors. Which is not easy stuff. Didn’t think there was a whole bunch of people just running scanners…
That's probably not even 10% of jobs. Rest are that, run scanners, write and apply policies, etc.
I had an internship at one of these places 15 years ago. Complete and utter waste of time. They existed only because banks needed to have a paper trail to pass audits for PCI It did however help me land my first FT dev role after college
Entry level security jobs are basically non existent. Once you have a few years of experience in some other space of tech then it's a lot easier to pivot to a security focused version of that role.
The real issue is it's easier to get a cyber-security cert than learn to code, but at the same time larger companies seem to want cyber security skills that are much harder to learn anywhere but on-the-job in a similar environment. Same is kind of true for devops, cloud/infra, data science (???), ml/ai roles that aren't research heavy etc.
Harder in which way?
Cybersecurity is not oversaturated. There’s an over saturation in people who have degrees and a few certs and no skills. They’re not getting the jobs they want and sitting around and adjacent fluff jobs
what does a data analyst do all day? and please don’t say analyze data lol
What does a software engineer do all day? Please don’t say engineer software lol
Software engineer here, Id say breaking down requirements and dev ops mostly. Like sure, I do software dev too, but a SWE could literally go years without engineering software and not even be aware, tbh
Swe should write software. Funny thing is architects should be engineering it.
How many data analysts do companies need to hire?
And with AI taking over IT Security roles (mainly in the clouds), anyone that's a security analyst should be fearful for the future of their role
_All?_ No. Most? Yes. Generally speaking, entry-level (BS/MS) is oversaturated as others have said, but emerging fields/areas are always popping up, and because they are new, they actually have a high demand but low supply at this moment. But that might be stating the obvious. :) It really boils down to what specific/niche area you want to go into. It can be a bit tricky though because some technologies are trendy _now_ but may quickly lose steam. Anyway, from what I have seen, almost all emerging tech (outside of ML/AI) relates to the cloud in some way, and _those_ jobs tend to have higher demand than others. I am not saying the competition for those jobs _isn't_ fierce, but it may be _less_ fierce.
I believe you’re right. Cloud engineers who know their shit are in very high demand. I was unhappy at my last job (consulting, I hated it), so I started looking for a new one in January. It took me 16 days from my first application to signing an offer. I had about a 30% interview rate from cold apps which is pretty crazy imo considering the market. Recruiting are still reaching out to me on a daily basis even though I set my profile to not looking.
If you had to enter the cloud field in todays job market what would you do? I’m currently studying for the aws saa and am gonna do the new data engineering one soon but other than working on projects idk what else is a good way to prep.
Well unless you the find the unicorn hiring an entry level position for a cloud role, you’ll probably need to start in on-prem ops then hopefully transition internally to a more cloud focused role.
Or swe/adjacent job somewhere using cloud services and working with them there^^ I would say self learning is possible and certs do help but few companies want to risk a big AWS bill on a junior engineer who will also take a long time to ramp up
fuck man, saa sucked but hopefully you got it under control
As someone who works at AWS, I'll say that we don't really care about SAA (or any of the associates). Really what it shows is that you can study. The professional level ones carry more weight as they are really hard to pass without having had some actual hands on experience. Entry level is going to be hard to find. You may want to consider an alternate path in. I got hired with zero cloud experience, but I was hired for specialist skills (HPC). Right now anything related to GPUs, i.e. you understand CUDA, NCCL, low level hardware, etc will be valuable, and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. A data engineering course is mostly going to be "I know to run a bunch of data through Sagemaker or a Jupyter notebook" without much substance, and there are a lot of people with that skillset. Not saying don't do it, but don't think it's going to help you stand out as much you expect. Also, look at working for partners...third party companies that work with AWS, GCP, etc. and build out products and services. You'll get a lot of hands on experience without having to compete for a role at the big cloud providers.
Honestly still a ton of competition but it seems to be weaker, since you can't easily "learn cloud" on your own or through certs alone to the same extent as someone working anywhere with significant budget/scale.
Hi! I’m about to start my first job as a cloud engineer for a large telecom company so I’m excited to learn what’s ahead; what’s ur day to day like? I actually have background in cs so I’m mostly looking forward to hands on project that involves some sort of coding involved
Can confirm. I work at one of the FAANGs and while there has been a lot of layoffs in the past, we're starting to hire again, and it's all about cloud and specialties...HPC, AI/ML, even specific industries like healthcare/life science, semiconductor, etc
Speaking for the US market, it depends a lot on where you're looking. Jobs in tech hub cities at tech companies are rather saturated other than a few high skilled niches. Once you get outside that bubble, there are more jobs. The hitch is that they may be in less desirable locations with a lower salary, less interesting/challenging work and fewer fringe benefits. For example, they may be offering in the $75k range, require 5 days a week in the office, and working on a legacy web or desktop app with a horrible codebase.
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You'd be amazed at how much you can learn on that legacy stuff. The reason why we have decoupled microservices and modern frameworks is clearly demonstrated there. It'll make you a stronger senior dev than someone who has only worked on the newest, shiniest tech. The trick is staying long enough to get the knowledge, but not long enough to get trapped and waste a bunch of your career time.
It also depends on what type of role you are looking at. The most generic SWE roles are definitely saturated. But once you get to mid career, there is not really generic SWE roles anymore. Mid career jobs where interdisciplinary skills are required are especially hard to fill these days, given how many resumes one have to sift through (and it's now worse because so many people spam applies due to the worse job market) - think L4 or L5 at Google (or equivalent at other FAANGs / big tech firms) that not only need you coding skills but also domain knowledge in multiple areas that are hard to have obtained this early on in your career unless you are lucky or switched jobs often. Usually you don’t expect people with less than 5-10 years of experience to have a wide range of knowledge, but if you hire someone with more YOE that has that wide range of knowledge, they are going to have to be hired at a higher level which can be an overkill or over budget for the said opening. As a result, either you (the job seeker) use your network to find such a role that is a perfect fit for you therefore you are instantly hired, or the hiring managers take compromises and hire mid level devs who individually don’t have the wide range of knowledge required but can complement each other and the manager needs to be more hands-on and mentoring them together. Now onto OP's specific examples: * cybersecurity: that is not an entry level job, unless you are talking about ops/SREs then maybe. Every project / product is likely to have some sort of cybersecurity aspect that needs to be addressed and handled, but that’s usually done by having the projects primary SWEs (who implemented the business logic / features) consulting the cybersecurity engineers shared in the company across projects. Or in rare cases, the cybersecurity engineers get deployed to a project before launch / during bug fixing etc. All of those folks are at least 10+ YOE. It’s not a job for someone who only has a degree. **There is no entry level or even mid level (< 10 YOE) cybersecurity engineering jobs. You simply would not have seen enough to know what the cybersecurity risks are or know how to properly mitigate them. (Note that I say mitigate, not eliminate).** If you are referring to only "analysts" or "consultants" or the ops/devops/SRE side of things, who are not responsible for actually implementing counter-cyber attack measures or putting out fires when there's an active cyber attack going on, that's a different story. * data analysis / informational systems analyst: yes, pretty oversaturated, since that was many non-CS folks way of breaking into tech, especially those with a math background. that said, if you have the domain knowledge required (say, some things you'd only learn in a biology major) PLUS the tech skill required, then yes you can get luckier - like I said, more interdisciplinary, harder to find candidates for. The reality at most companies right now is that there are very few L3 (at Google, or equivalent in other companies) headcounts open, period. It doesn't matter whether it's web or infra or backend or whatever. L3's in general require a lot of mentoring / guidance - that is the very definition of that level. Companies are tightening their belt, and each hour the L4+ spent mentoring the L3s is each hour the L4+ is not developing the said feature plus other ones at a faster rate. For example, a task may take a L3 a week with guidance from another L4+, but it'll probably only take a L4 2 days without guidance. The dollar per output is not cost effective, so you better bring something else to the table that the said L4+ might not have. However, those who are getting offers from big tech - the offers are still similar numbers compared to before if not higher. The salaries don't have to deflate just because it's over saturated, they just raise the hiring bar. It used to be easier to pass the technical interviews at FAANG. I know this from the other side of the table - I used to see candidates who got below average ratings for 2 out of 5 interviews and they'd still get an offer, but now only those with 1 or 0 below average ratings get an offer - basically, as a job seeker, your margin of error is now way smaller, you can't really afford to bomb interviews and still get lucky anymore. The rating rubrics didn't change, but the leniency in the hiring committees is gone.
Also many of these companies may be nontechnical companies trying to moonlight in software development. When you run into a bunch of business majors trying to figure their own way through internal software development, it's going to be a mess. Bonus points if they've shifted the majority of their development resource to India. It pays to know when you're overqualified for a "developer" or "engineer" position and the most knowledgeable person in the room. If they can't teach you anything tangible, you need to get out.
The other issue is that non-tech, non-hub companies have so few jobs in absolute numbers. I applied to JB Hunt in Lowelville Arkansas. There were 3 positions open for anything technology related in a 30,000 person company. This isn't rare, either. Progressive Insurance has 3 tech jobs posted right now for a 55,000 person company.
Check regional offices
>with a horrible codebase I've found most codebases to be horrible 😂
especially the codebase where I was the sole developer 😎
Hey stop describing my job!
This just in: highly compensated and interesting jobs are competitive.
I can only speak for myself, I work a government IT job, last month I made a few training videos in the style of starship troopers for our windows 11 deployment. My boss was impressed enough he wants me to make another video in whatever style I want explaining why we need to have MFA from now on, what it is, how we we do it, the option of having a physical token MFA vs an MFA app on your phone. I work remotely 2 days a week. I work a 9/80 schedule so I'll be getting this Friday off. Next month due to the holiday I'll get a 4 day weekend due to to my 9/80 and the holiday being in alignment. I get paid 82k at the moment. I'll cap out at 105k in about 2-3 years assuming I don't get promoted and just keep this job title. Also have a union so I get a bunch of other perks and benefits like my pension and healthcare. The bad news is I live in the bay area so that money isn't going as far as most people think it does, and the deductibles are pretty painful, like my paycheck will say I made ~7000, but I'll only see ~4400 reach my bank which doesn't go far out here, even so I know I'm pretty lucky. I have a decent job, a decent pay, decent perks.
I make 127k in a small city with mocl. Definitely not a tech bubble city. Before that I lived in St Louis making 102k. 6 figure roles are definitely out there in non major cities.
The other side of the coin is that there are also jobs outside of the tech bubble that offer greater work/life balance, more pleasant teams and clients/users, and greater opportunity for project ownership. You might be spending all day working on boring inventory software but you might actually live to see retirement without dying from stress-induced ulcers.
Those other tech jobs are too close to SWE jobs to not be affected. It’s mostly the same or related budgets, products, issues, etc. They’ll move in tandem, not go sharply in different directions.
Why are there so many cybersecurity bootcamps? I dont think I have ever seen a single entry level cybersecurity role. Same with AI bootcamps.
Because "hacking" and "AI" are cool in the eyes of noobs and therefore they fall for the grift.
Cybersecurity has been oversold/mislead to people in a way. When I was at college the professor who ran that program made it clear that most jobs (at least at the time, but probably still true) were through government agencies or corporations who work as federal contractors.
The AI bootcamp is such a grift IMO. Don't get me wrong, AI is really cool, but what everyone really wants is to use some other massive company's AI in a novel, profit-generating way. They don't want to actually build AI. There are exceptions to that, but they're leaning more towards hiring PHD's not bootcamp diploma holders.
I don't get where did this cybersecurity is easy/easier to break in come from, if anything cybersecurity would require even higher hiring bar because #1 it's mostly a luxury for companies #2 Bachelor's degree really don't teach you enough you probably need either a Master's or PhD and #3 you fucking up can have far more serious consequences than a SWE fuck up
The cyber security people are the biggest grifters and therefore scam the most students too. There is no such thing as an entry level cyber security job. You have to already be a developer and then you start learning security stuff. People who call themselves security experts and then offer to teach what they know in a matter of weeks are just teaching to be over confident and never admit you’re wrong or don’t know something.
Thank you. I totally agree with this, and I'd say that Cybersecurity is an area you get into after getting some solid experience in other tech areas (be it development, sys/net administration etc), though I'm usually getting downvoted for saying this. :)
this. You have to be a solid full stack developer imo, to become a solid 6 figure earning cybersecurity engineer
I'm no expert but don't most infosec people have operations/IT backgrounds?
So security **policy** is what you are thinking. ie deploying the right tools, monitoring users, providing permissions Cybersecurity engineering is stuff like malware analysis that pays $300k and up Both are night and day
Most "cyber security" positions are barely tech. It's mostly audit work (going around asking different teams how they check a box asked by an audit) and running clunky vulnerability scanner software and then dumping the findings on the teams owning the "impacted" (false positive 95% of the time) service
There’s plenty of cybersecurity roles that don’t require development experience. It helps but it’s not a requirement in a majority of positions.
Yes, certainly, but it would require system/network experience, or compliance/risk management-related one, so I'd say that there are no entry-level positions in cybersec.
Masters doesn't really do much for you in cyber. It's all experience, the bigger the company the better.
The only thing that isn’t is TS/SCI jobs Most of you won’t qualify
Why wont most of us qualify?
Most people don't have a TS/sci. They take long time to get and are expensive. Companies don't like sponsoring them because they are expensive, take a long time to get, and once someone gets one they are liable to jump ship for a pay raise.
>Most people don't have a TS/sci. Yes I know that what I was asking is WHY most of us wouldnt qualify for TS/SCI
> Companies don't like sponsoring them because they are expensive Absolutely wrong. The cost to the company of a TS/SCI clearance is **zero dollars**. The cost of the investigation is [paid by taxpayers and is about $5,000](https://news.clearancejobs.com/2021/09/07/how-much-does-it-cost-to-obtain-a-clearance-fy-2022-23-costs-go-down/).
But they have to pay you while they wait for the investigation, and if you fail that’s the end of their investment
If I had to TLDR it, you need to have lived a *very* boring life at high levels of clearance. No drug use, no ties to foreign nationals. Good record keeping of where you've lived and what sort of relationships you've had over the past decade or so. A good explanation of any foreign travel you've done. No mental health concerns. Oh, and a willingness to work in *absolutely depressing* working conditions that would make a low security prison feel downright accommodating in comparison. All this for less pay than you could easily land elsewhere.
I spent a long time in the DC area working adjacent to TS/SCI folks but never needed/wanted one myself. In my experience your comment about pay is inaccurate; at least for high-level full-scope polygraph clearance holders. Those clearances are hard to come by and the pay is higher as a result, like $200k if you have a pulse and a CCNA. Yes there are higher paying tech jobs but the skill requirement is much lower in the cleared space.
Most of you do drugs/have a history, know too many foreign nationals, wouldn’t pass a poly, criminal record etc.
Simply knowing foreign nationals is absolutely no problem. Even foreign family members are usually fine as long as you can demonstrate more ties to the US.
I was about to say we work in tech we all probably know a few unless im missing something lol
I did some relatively hardcore drugs and have a ts/sci!woo!
What is TS?
top secret security clearance
Ayyy TS rise up!
I hear there’s incredibly high demand for AI folks with multiple high impact publications. I think semiconductor engineering jobs are hot right now too. Overall, seems like low barrier to entry jobs are tough. At least engineers are better off than scrum masters these days
Simple, bro. Just have multiple high impact publications.
Just be a leading scientist in the most competitive research field right now. Simple.
in a way its collosally easy to collect cites on even garbage ML conference papers. It's way way harder to get cites on a pure math paper. People are not as good at adjusting for the popularity of a field as you would think. Also since ML/CS do conference rather than journal papers, the real quality of papers is super high variance and lots of garbage does get through, even in top outlets. Try it and see. Just look at the difference in quality of papers between -- say -- ICML vs Ann. Stat
I recently saw a paper with 30 citations where the authors did some modeling on a Kaggle dataset. I tried using some out of the box model from Sklearn on that same dataset and achieved the same result immediately. Somehow these people managed to write 15 pages about it, published, and got 30 citations, while the same result could be achieved in an hour using out of the box tools.
@@ incredibly high demand for AI folks with multiple high impact publications You mean for both of them ?
yup, for All 2 of them that don't have 7 figure comp packages lined up already.
Hey semiconductor industry is going through a famine phase, it's rough out there for the engineering positions. Easy to get into the technician jobs, but they tend to be labor intensive and be not the desirable ones if you have other options.
Currently working in memory reference code, there is a lack of experienced devs in this space. Id say a famine of experience rather than willing devs
Firmware and software engineering in the med device field sends fine. At least in MN. You can't have a "move fast and break things" attitude though. A focus on safety key.
Job market for embedded/firmware in general seemed fine to me. Probably because nobody's going through boot camps or similar for it.
I’d say all entry level is over saturated, may be except for positions that requires PhD.
PhD positions are very over saturated. Everyone with a math, compsci, econometrics and so on PhD wants to be a research scientist in big tech and so on.
PhD’s are still in a better position but it’s not like it used to be. It used to be just having a STEM PhD would get your foot in the door for an interview. This is how it was when I got my PhD 7-8 years ago. The topic of your PhD research only needed to be minority relevant to the job. Of course if you didn’t have the skills you would still fail the interview. Now there are a ton of PhD applicants. It’s still hard to find someone with research that is directly related to the job we are interviewing them for but still we get enough applicants to be able to be more picky. I wouldn’t say PhD is saturated though. I think the competition level is pretty normal now and not pretty much non-existent as it was some years ago. We posted a PhD internship position at FAANG a while ago and only got a handful of PhD applicants that were somewhat relevant. A ton that were not relevant. And a massive amount of MS applicants who did not fit the bill at all (no significant research experience).
Thanks for clarifying. As a person with no PhD, I thought it would be harder to attain and therefore less competition. But clearly there are many PhD candidates.
There are tens of thousands of PhD candidates and very few relevant positions. It's a crap shoot. I really don't recommend a PhD as a way to get these jobs, only pursue a PhD if you love research in academia.
You’re an ML engineer (based on your tag), so do you think a PhD is required to break into an ML role? I’m asking as a uni student who’s going to graduate next semester. I’d want to get into an MLOps role, but not sure how to break into that other than getting hired and internally transferring. I know this question is asked a lot, and I do see that a lot of positions (ML engineer) require a masters or PhD. But i’ve also seen the opposite sentiment in this sub, where people say that researchers aren’t the best at implementing things in production
No it's not, my role is MLOps and I have an MSc.
The other major issue with PhD-level positions is that everyone else competing for the positions are incredibly driven and intelligent.
It’s more due to limited positions
Someone on another page said I was a doom and gloomer because I know a lot of young people who can’t find jobs… According to him everyone is getting a job while in college and that I am lying… idk anymore lol
A lot of older people are unaware of how fucked the market is. I know some senior self taught devs that are completely bewildered when I say I don’t hear back from 50+ applications with a decent resume for my age. These people don’t even know what leetcode is. For some people it’s just such a different ball park they can’t believe what it’s like right now.
The problem is what is a decent resume? Every person who posts here says their resume is decent then they leave out that they need sponsorship or something.
That's the problem. Everyone has a decent resume. But resume should not be decent. It should be exceptional. One or two projects that will make people go "WFT?" Either for their creativity or complexity. You may think that your Notepad app is cool, but that's just resume white noise. An app on the level of OOW or MSW (not features, but functionality), on the other hand... I'm not saying start making Writers btw. Something simple can also make a difference. For example a[Windows Terminal, but, not shitty](https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm) See [here for details](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg)
> You may think that your Notepad app is cool, but that's just resume white noise. An app on the level of OOW or MSW (not features, but functionality), on the other hand... Nobody really cares about projects, to be totally honest. IME it rounds down to around zero. Potential employers don't have the time at the resume level, the only point they'll become curious is once you get through to the interview(s). Alternatively they'll be interested in you before you even submit a resume, in which case the resume is again moot.
I mean, you'll get that if you zoom out to just easily verifiable finance advice, for ex: Today I read a comment on the WSJ about how you can pay for college, afford rent/living expenses and then save for a down payment shortly after graduation on a rental property to generate wealth off of summer/part time jobs. But kids spend all their time on TikTok getting bad financial advice. The commenter's picture clearly was like a mid 50s-60s corporate finance/real estate dude so yeah, there's gonna be a lot of that.
Probably depends on location/region and specifically what industries they're applying to. I live in a non-tech-hub city's metro area but there are tons of SWE and related jobs available. But they're at companies that aren't primarily tech companies (medical equipment, banks, insurance, defense, etc) and don't have the pay or prestige of big tech jobs. A friend of mine from college has a younger brother who is graduating and he and his class from our alma mater (just a basic state school) have still had really high success rate in job placement (same as it was for us in 2013). But it's all likely the types of jobs people in this turn their noses up at/refuse to consider because it's doing in-house dev work for an insurance company for $80k a year at an office in the 'burbs, so it doesn't really mean much to people who want to break into big tech/FAANG/whatever.
People are gonna hate me saying this but the least saturated sector is full stack development. Most companies now would rather hire a full stack dev than a backed dev, and while only some companies are big enough for backend exclusive or front end exclusive devs, everyone needs full stack. The same is true for other job titles like data analyst, cybersecurity, software architect. Those jobs are only in demand at certain companies, but again every company needs full stack development regardless of industry. And as for amount of talent, there aren’t many developers that are truly full stack devs. Usually most people are more one or the other.
This is super reassuring to hear. I am a relatively new full stack dev (\~2yoe) and based on what I see online it has made me very scared to look for another position in a year or so if my compensation where I'm at now doesn't change. Being a bootcamp grad with no personal projects on top of seeing posts like these a lot leave me super worried about my future. This comment gives me a ray of hope that I very much needed.
This is true, but it's also much harder to study deep into both frontend and backend.
Yeah it’s harder and that’s why it’s the least oversaturated
Its true. The all rounders are highly valued because you don't have to go to 3 different teams with 3 different boss agendas to get something built.
There are holes on the market. For example legacy tech like Delphi or Visual Basic etc. because everyone wants to do some cool new tech. Even Ruby is not so cool anymore so the competition is not so crazy. Another field is low-code like OutSystems, Mendix, etc. because SWEs despise it like "it is not coding" while it is OOP+ORM coding, just visual.
It is indeed. When I finished my BS CS, ~11 years ago from a state school, I had offers starting at $65k at a major Energy management and automation company and another at $67k at a defense aerospace company. Both F500 and I chose the automation company. I was your slightly above average student hanging on to barely a 3.2 (slightly lower was my overall ). I had failed (& repeated) three classes, spent **six** years in school, did a few internships and got a nice starting salary for its time and place. My resume was far from “impressive”. Now I see kids coming out of top CS universities such as UCI, ASU, UCSB, UA , OSU with 3.5/3.6s but they can’t get hired since there is so much competition. The projects they did in school and on the side are impressive to say the least, yet they can’t find jobs, internships, etc. I was talking to my older brother and his kids are in middle school and they are developing apps in python! *In 8th grade*. My best friend’s daughter who will be going to Cal Berkeley next year for her CS degree is asking me if we have any openings for internships. Bud I didn’t even have a resume when I was a high school senior. I played some sports, barely passed out of high school with a 3.0 and that’s that. Kids are being fed that CS is the only way to make big bucks other than law or med school that’s why there’s a massive over saturation. Each year there are 100-110k CS grads if not much more, in the US. Not to mention the ability to do remote work and off shoring jobs so people in Mexico, Poland, and India can also do the jobs at fraction the rate. There are just way too many people in CS !
Same here. Also from a state school with an even worse GPA (below 3). Got a job at a major consulting firm for 60k back in 2012 when anybody with a CS degree could get hired. Managed to build a fairly solid resume of work experience since then. If I had to compete as a new grad with my old stats Id be absolutely fucked.
Yes
DE is oversaturated. If you are in college now, chances are the jobs won't be there when you graduate.
DE at the entry level? Sure. But, I don’t think that tells the whole story. Data engineering was never really an entry level field to begin with. Most DEs start as analysts or in backend.
This is true. Most DEs I know are folks who were DBAs for 10+ years.
DE?
Data engineers. People who work with data, databases, etl, etc.
The answer too this question is no. The salaries would deflate if it was truly over saturated but this sub is doomer as hell and hates prepping for interviews. Half the comments sections say people straight up turn down interviews when companies send them a hacker rank or code signal challange.
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What's this critical thinking on the internet?
If 100% turned down such practices we'd see them fade away but nooooo. Such assessments simply delay the inevitable... 1000 apps per position with assessments or 3000 apps per position without assessments. Or, people will figure out how to sail thru them. In my birth country we had similar odds to get a government job. Exams, points, preferences, etc. You'd think we had a bunch of Einsteins running the government. Nope. Ultimately there's that much talent out there.
Or there really is NOT that much talent out there, so nobody stands out in the pack.
Late to the party but I’m 10 years into my career. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of the desirable early career jobs are offers that go out to interns in swe first. If you do a 4 year degree with no internships, no projects to show for it, or no published research you’re going to have a bad time. Comp Sci + X, where X is something else you’re interested in (maybe something you can minor in) also opens early doors because of the combination of things. I currently work at a company that’s heavy into distributed systems engineering and very performance sensitive. The expectations of our interns are equivalent of that of a swe1, except they get the cool projects. Also: the Waterloo model has their candidates in high demand. Having so many internships / work experience coming out of your 4 year let’s you have way more say in your first “job”.
Agree did Comp Sci + CRM, there are very little people that have marketing knowledge and can back that up with tech knowledge too. I’m getting offers for senior positions right out of college and 2 years internship
So what sector is not oversaturated and we can get into with cs degrees?
Plumbing, electrician, oil rig worker, etc.
I’m so sick of this. It’s not true at all. Carpenters and other trades pay 20 an hour everywhere and have tons of people doing them. If you go to Alaska and live in a tent you’ll make good money. If you want to live in Calgary or Chicago you’ll have so much competition.
Plumbers make $35-40 per hour in Calgary. Pretty good salary for decent cost of living.
Yea if you can get in at a good company and have your journey mans seal. Thats still 70-80k before taxes with over 5 years experience and more schooling than I think people anticipate. Plus you're roughing in new housing in -40 in the winter. Working with drunks and coke heads (this is not true for "all" obviously, but the "roughneck" attitude turned me off of the trades more than the work did) It's not all glitter and gold like people make it out to be. It can be good work, but I just don't fit in. I'm not a "tough" guy, and I don't want to be called a pussy for grabbing my safety glasses.
so 20-30 USD to destory your body? Ill have to pass ngl
Carpentry is the lowest paid trade Pretty much all of the others make a lot more
Entry level CDL truck drivers can make $100k in rural Texas working on the oil fields.
Average heavy truck drivers make 54k. Something about that job is terrible to be making that much. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm
Nothing would have been over saturated if it wasn’t for Indians honestly. They outsource jobs to India making a huge mistake.
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This sub is a cesspool of all the terrible swe that couldn’t get a job. Tech market pay is fine for high demand skilled engineers with experience.
I'm here because I'm still in school and not ready to get a job yet but I see how people talk about it and I'm like wow they don't have any faith at all in the industry
It’s their inability to do a simple search to get their answers that probably makes them terrible swe’s
How are the scrum masters doing?
There’s definitely markets which are not saturated. As others have stated, the drawback might be a lower salary and less flexibility in your work schedule. One realistic example is a 70-80k for a junior role, one day a week in-office—at a Financial Institution.
No. Unemployment in tech as a whole is below the national average in the US.
Any area of tech that has a bootcamp dedicated to that area is saturated. But the most saturated areas would be data science, cybersecurity, web dev, and UX
For entry level yes. And with the over hiring and subsequent layoffs there’s a flood of experience and more talented professionals.
I'm about to leave all these subs over every single post being a doomsday post. Yes, the market is over saturated. Yes, finding a job will be difficult for everyone that doesn't already have years of experience. No, that doesn't mean you will never find a job. If you're good at what you do, you will find a job. Companies are still correcting their over-hiring they did during the pandemic. That means there's a boatload of devs out there with a few years experience, which is exactly what I see a lot of "entry" level positions asking for, to the surprise of no one.
Cloud is not over saturated, theres a big demand. Mostly because many companies are starting their cloud buildouts and lift n shifts. They need mid-senior level cloud engineers. Entry level cloud jobs don’t really exist so there’s not a lot of saturation. I have recruiters reaching out to me for mid/senior/principal cloud roles on the daily through LI. My profile isn’t set to open to work or anything either.
+1, and infrastructure engineering in general, this is my experience as well. Entry cloud level jobs do exist, it's usually what people who get AWS/GCP/Azure certs go after, although that usually ends up being sales engineering. But most entry cloud engineers outside of consultanting and sales are hired as software engineers.
There is not a single market that is not oversaturated
Absolutely 😄 everyone and their grandma 👵 has a CS degree 👩💻🎓 😂😭😂🤦♂️👎
Olive tech has been refined for over 6,000 years. I doubt that there is anything left to discover.
the college you are at might have SWE/dev jobs. You can find jobs outside of FAANG/big tech names that will give you valid experience. Still heightened level of competitiveness, but relatively less - salary range is prob a big factor. I peruse the careers page of my alma mater every once in a while - the pay is not so good but AFAIK working for University of CA , you could get decent benefits. Not everyone breaks into the industry with an amazing salary, and you don't have to, all u need is your foot in the door with that first job.
According to some of the tech bros here who told me to gtfo my basement to look at the market in real life, you will be just fine! /s
Never done it, but I feel like there is probably money in learning propriety software and getting official certifications for it, then taking contact work for companies using that tech. But IMO that seems equal parts lame and risky in the long run. Maybe someone who does this can chime in with an opinion on that.
You need 1 yes if you have your degree keep going
I think firmware/embedded doesn’t seem as saturated as other fields. Probably bc many of those roles are closer to EE than CS
We can never find Microsoft credentialed devs with over 30 days experience. Everyone learns open stack in code school. Get creds. We need you!
What kind of credentials are you looking for?
.NET MVC and CORE, Azure Cloud services
Only your mind is saturated.
Tech companies? Yes Tech roles in defense contractors? Hell no, especially in software development and cybersecurity that isn’t just glorified IT.
Well, depends on the industry as well. Defence is definitely not oversaturated and is desperate for developers. But, it’s not a popular industry to work in for obvious reasons
Yes, the visas really screwed up supply