Ask HN: How to "make it" as a newlygrad/junior?

4 points by kartoffelsaft 68 days ago | 14 comments

Hello HN!

Over the past couple months I've made dozens of job applications and it's not turned into much, and from talking to some of my coevals I'm not alone. It really feels like me and my friends have been dropped onto an industry that has just shut the doors to anyone in our 0-2 yr. experience range. Needless to say, I'm pretty worried that it's going to be a year out from my graduation without being employed doing the thing I spent the past >4 years of my life studying.

So I'm stuck, wondering what do I do from here.

A bit about me if context is useful (although generally-applicable responses are preferred because I know I'm not alone):

- Graduated December last year - Had a 3 month full-time internship for my capstone - Feedback on my work was super positive - Wasn't in the plan to get full employment right after (didn't fit in budget, and I have reasons to believe that that I won't get into) - I'm mildly worried that not turning into full employment is a bad look - Have many years of hobbyist experience preceding college/university - The projects I did don't feel very portfolio-able, i.e. hard to explicitly show what I learned or how it's useful - I can go either way on AI usage for code, but I know I have a strong distaste for "vibe" coding - I'm "detail-oriented" in resume-speak and vibe coding exists in contempt for detail - I've tried making use of my network, but the most common response has been "we really want to hire you but we'd need more funding to do so"

Currently the main thing I've been doing right now is a blog where I talk about mostly tech-related things and want to make a section where I talk about past projects, but don't know if that's the best thing to be doing with my time. I'd link the website here but I don't know the HN policy on links in posts; it's in my bio if you're curious.

austin-cheney 68 days ago |

Through all of my career there have only been two career routes:

1. Do what others cannot

2. Do what is most trendy

I always followed route 1, which mostly harmed my career as a JavaScript developer. I no longer know what the best answer is, at least for juniors. Now that I am in management in a niche area route 1 is all that matters, but it still bristles at personalities that are higher neurotic.

raw_anon_1111 68 days ago | |

This advice is honestly unhelpful. What exactly can a new grad do that others can not?

al_borland 67 days ago | | |

How about doing what others are unwilling to do?

There are some tasks that aren’t exactly fun, but need to get done. Doing those jobs can also help give you more skills and deep information on certain issues other may lack or let atrophy.

We had a new guy who liked doing the same thing 1,000 times, so I asked him to fix agents on severs that were always broken and would cause deployment failures. Doing it proactively instead of reactively. Our failure rates dropped dramatically, which is a nice feather in his cap. That was low hanging fruit that anyone could have picked up and started doing for 10 years, but no one did. It was a slog at the start, but once he got caught up and everything was clean, it would take him maybe 20 minutes each day to maintain, and he knew more about fixing those issues than anyone. He became the expert in the room.

As issues were discovered, fixing them probably could have been largely automated, by putting the various fixes into code and having it run on broken agents each day to see what it would fix. The gaps could be addressed and added to the fix-it script if possible. This would have been even better. No one actually writing code knew enough about fixing the agent to do this, or cared enough, they’d just deal with things failing periodically.

Look for these gaps in your organization and come up with ways to address them and do it.

snoren 68 days ago |

I'm "detail-oriented" but you hate 'vibing'? I would argue it is made for you. Up your with AI. Lucky for you being detail oriented means you can use the technology of today in ways people with adhd can't.

On the job front, it has never been harder. But keep applying, don't give up or get discouraged.

kartoffelsaft 67 days ago | |

I think we disagree either on what detail-oriented or vibe-coding means.

When I say vibe-coding, what I'm referring to is telling an AI your requirements and then using it's output without reading and/or understanding it. If I can point to some of the code and ask what it's doing there, and no one can answer that as if they're an author of that codebase, then it's vibe-coded. To not be able to is to imply those details were not important enough for any programmer to have considered.

I've done that before, in fact; I made a daily habit tracker for myself that way to cater to my own weird needs. I just find not knowing the details of a project intensely uncomfortable, and if I were to pay enough attention to it's output to alleviate that discomfort it would no longer be vibe-coding.

> you can use the technology of today in ways people with adhd can't.

You say this, but funnily enough I've seriously considered that I might have ADHD and should get examined for it. It feels like there's dozens of symptoms people describe as ADHD that I have, from weird things like sleeping immediately after having caffeine to having trouble listening to a full sentence. My inability to form habits intentionally has been pretty bad for my health already, and I'm not even that old.

verdverm 68 days ago |

It's a grind, private sector hiring is way down, re: Trump policies leading to unclarity, leading to cautious business. This is paired with the Ai moment.

You might try searching old HN for similar posts around the Great Recession.

Separately, Hytale is running a big Worldgen V2 competition and hiring out of the community. Very likely several contestants will be hired. (since it seems you are into games, you might pair your genre interests in, I suspect the more creative uses of their Worldgen tools will do well, saw a spiral galaxy gen that was super cool)

kartoffelsaft 67 days ago | |

Searching for Great Recession posts is actually an interesting tip, I'll be taking a look into that.

As for the Hytale suggestion I do find that competition interesting but I'm afraid that I mightn't actually care that much about the game itself; from the gameplay I've seen it looks like it's taken cues from all the parts of Minecraft I don't find interesting, and the stuff that's unique for it's genre (like it's combat mechanics) looks underwhelming to me if I zoom out a bit. I, of course, haven't played it so I might be wrong about that (I was with Valheim, not with Vintage Story).