Develop Yourself

#251 - 8 truths no one tells you about becoming a software developer in today's market

Brian Jenney

The software development market didn't die, it's just unrecognizable.

Let's go over 8 harsh pieces of advice that will help you as a career changer to make a successful switch into a career as a software developer.

PS. If you're a front-end developer looking to expand your skills, grab the Node Express Starter Kit here.

Have a question for the Friday Q&A show? Submit it through the form in the show notes, and I'll shout you out or keep you anonymous.


Send us a text

Shameless Plugs

🧑‍💻 Join Parsity - For career changers who want to pivot into software.

✉️ Got a question you want answered on the pod? Drop it here

Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Googler, Brian-look-a-like)

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network and more. I'm Brian, your host. I wrote a newsletter over the weekend called 8 Harsh Truths for New Software Developers, and one person at least really hated it. They wrote me an email back. That was kind of mean. Now, the majority of people seemed to have liked it. They got a pretty high open rate and I had some positive responses back, which I really appreciate and enjoy. It's funny, though as a human, you always remember the negative interactions. But let me double down on what I said in this article, because I think it's really important for you to know if you're a newer software developer, things aren't all candy canes and roses, but it's not doom and gloom either, and I'm sick of it. I'm sick of pretending that things are as bad as people say they are. I've seen a lot of videos lately about people saying I'm quitting software forever, people saying the market is just unbearable and there's like no hope for software engineers. I even saw a principal level software engineer from a really big company tell people something like don't go to a bootcamp, don't learn to code. And basically, if you're not already in the door, then don't even try. And I thought what kind of backwards advice is this? Anyway, I consider myself an optimist, but I'm also a practical optimist. I don't think there's room for pessimism if you want to do something as big as career change or do really anything interesting with your life. In general, that's my opinion and from my own experience and what I've seen from people who I consider successful, they tend to be optimists. Pessimists are often right. Optimists are often successful. So, anyway, here's the eight harsh truths for new software developers that I want to share with you today, in the hopes that it will help you along on your own journey and help you go into this game eyes wide open.

Speaker 1:

So first thing is, the job market didn't die right. It just changed dramatically. We're in a new era. The bootcamp to job pipeline has basically dried up. Certificates have never really been the golden ticket, but they're more noise than signal. Ai basically tossed a grenade into the hiring funnel and there are actually more software jobs open right now. You can go to trueupio slash job trend and you can see that there's more jobs right now than there were two years ago by a significant amount and, conversely, it's harder than it used to be to get hired. It makes zero sense. It feels like the rules are completely different, because they are. So here's some advice that I wanna share with you. That is probably too harsh for LinkedIn or apparently for a few people that are subscribed to my newsletter, but I hope that you find helpful if you're a newer developer or maybe a not so new developer on the job market.

Speaker 1:

So this first piece of advice something I hope would be obvious right now this whole vibe coding trend, which is beyond foolish. It's not a career and it's not a replacement for any actual skill. I am trying my damnedest to vibe code my way through my job, basically at the encouragement of leadership. Who really want us to use these AI tools and I'm like trying my hardest to do it really want us to use these AI tools, and I'm like trying my hardest to do it. I'm telling you, the reality is that they are nowhere near capable to do what a software engineer does, and I don't know what people are doing differently than me that are online claiming they're 10x more productive. I don't believe it. Google actually did a study on this. They found their engineers were 10% more productive, which sounds a lot more like my experience than when I read online. So either all those people are the best programmers in the world or maybe people are writing stuff online for likes and attention.

Speaker 1:

Go figure, copying, pasting stuff from ChatGBT and just figuring it out later isn't a real world skill. You gotta build less like a hacker and more like an engineer. You have to understand the tools, the stack, what you got to build less like a hacker and more like an engineer. You have to understand the tools, the stack, what happens after you click the deploy button and your code goes out there and lives in the wild and users use it and you have error logs and you have third party systems and you have all these services which you have to interact with.

Speaker 1:

Vibe coders are out there running up their credits, exposing private information, and now they're even hiring back software developers. There's a few Reddit posts that have gone kind of viral about people that were dunking on software engineers saying we don't need software engineers anymore, we'll just vibe code the whole dang thing, and then a month later they're like, hey, I'm hiring because they ended up having something that was beyond the scope of their own knowledge. I get it. People want to believe the magic. I wanted to believe the magic. The magic is not there. The magic is a CEO trying to increase shareholder value or a big rug pull, in my opinion. So I give it another year or so before the term. Vibe coder kinda gets put in the same bucket as prompt engineer. Do you all remember when that was kind of a thing? And we see where that went.

Speaker 1:

Harsh truth number two I know people are gonna come for me on this one and I'm open to debate on this for sure, but in my experience no one cares about your certificate. If you got a Coursera badge, a LinkedIn learning thing, even a certificate from Parsity, which is the coding mentorship program I own, I don't think I would really show that off right. Hiring managers in general aren't impressed by this kind of thing and it can actually be a red flag counterintuitively, because people might look at it and think why do you have this random badge from some open source or big course out there that anybody online can do? What does this really tell me about you? And if you have a bunch of them but no job experience, it just creates this kind of distrust Like, are you just like some sort of course collector. I know a lot of people are gonna be very upset at me saying this, and here's the other thing.

Speaker 1:

I don't think there's anything wrong with getting these certificates. I think they're actually really important to know the skills and to take courses and learn. I think that's important. I think that's important. I think showing them off or expecting that these will actually get you closer to a job is misguided at best, and there's only a few exceptions I can think of. If you're in some sort of role that requires Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Provider basically, are you in DevOps or some sort of IT position can be necessary to actually just get the role. So that's one of the few exceptions I'll make.

Speaker 1:

But in general, certifications don't really help, and if you're a full stack developer, really no one cares about them. So it can actually be a little confusing. It's like why do you have an AWS certificate if you're going for a React role? Right, it just kind of causes a little bit of confusion. I think that you're better off just leaving them off, and if you're just chasing them, thinking that it's going to get you to a job, my strong advice to you is maybe just don't do that. Here's another one that I'm sure people are going to say. But my cousin got hired because of their portfolio.

Speaker 1:

But my advice number four is, if you must build a portfolio, if you must, please don't do it from scratch. Use Vercel's V0, use some other AI site builder, use chat, gpt, use cursor, use whatever. In fact, over the weekend I vibe coded an entire site. You can go to parsityai and check out the new AI offering that Parsity is going to have or that I'm going to have through Parsity, and I built that whole site without really touching any code. Right, I built a whole site, multi-page site, deployed. It barely touched a single line of code.

Speaker 1:

I'm so impressed with myself. Or should I say the AI Made something way better than I could ever make, made something so much better looking than anything I could ever dream of. Now, should that scare you or should it scare me? I don't know. I do know that I don't like building fancy landing pages or beautiful looking sites. I mean, I take that back. I like building stuff that looks good.

Speaker 1:

I just don't know how to design very well, and so AI tools are really great at doing this front end heavy stuff. Where it's a lot of design. It's not really any logic at all. I just needed something that looked good and had some words on it and some animations. It has zero logic like none. The moment you start adding logic in there and I mean like JavaScript that interacts with the page or does something beyond, like clicking a button that's when you need some actual software developers on the team and that's when I have to stop vibe coding and start really coding. So vibe coding does have a place and in my opinion, that place is doing super duper front end stuff.

Speaker 1:

Back end, absolutely not More than 20 files, absolutely not More than 100 files. You better not do it, my friend. You're going to be in for a world of pain. Let's be honest, though. If you're doing your portfolio and you're thinking it's going to be your ticket to the job as a manager, when I was digging through a stack of resumes, I'm not going to click on every link, I'm just not Following. Random links is also kind of a big no-no at most organizations, especially nowadays. And the other thing is, you don't have time when you have 99 resumes on your desk and you're trying to figure out who to put in the maybe pile, the no pile and the yes pile. You're not going to look at every single portfolio and half the time when I did it and I put them into mobile view, they break. Or I'd open up the dev tools and I'd see a bunch of weird stuff in the console, or they'd ask me to put in a password on to the next. So, yeah, I have met more than a few developers who got hired because of their portfolio in like 2013. So, you know, is it still happening? I'm sure somebody is still getting hired because of their portfolio, but, honestly, it's just not the best use of your time and it is certainly not going to be the thing that gets you the first job.

Speaker 1:

Harsh truth number five full-stack software developer is the new baseline. Full-stack is the new front-end. Front-end-only roles are basically fading away. Stack Overflow did this yearly survey, which I often quote, and it reported that only 10% of professional developers identify as front-end. This kind of saddens me.

Speaker 1:

This is ultimately what I wanted to be when I was learning how to code. I'm like I want to be an HTML and CSS developer. I didn't want to touch JavaScript, I just wanted to do HTML and CSS. Yeah, you heard that right. Then I had to do C Sharp, sql, ibm DB2, angularjs and then React. So didn't get to go that direction one bit. But that's what I wanted to start off with, and I still have a lot of love for front-end.

Speaker 1:

I think front-end developers get a lot of hate for no reason, or people kind of dismiss them like oh, it's just front-end, as if it's like much easier than any other type of coding out there. Front end is incredibly complicated nowadays but it's becoming less prevalent, like by a lot. No one really wants a front end only developer. So it's not that front end developers just all went away or they all just magically became full stack, whatever that means. What full stack honestly means is can you be deployed to the back end? Do you understand a little bit about back end services? Can you do something like triage, an issue that's happening in the cloud on AWS or GCP? Do you have enough knowledge to just be deployed to this area? You might not be an expert, but can you do it.

Speaker 1:

For example, where I currently work, I've done a lot of web development stuff. I've also helped create the data pipelines. I've also helped with the deployment process, helped with the CICD pipeline, helped to organize all the different scripts that can be run on a machine in the cloud. These are all things that ultimately just boil down to code living somewhere that gets run or executed based on something happening right. Can you do this? It's not that hard. In fact, if you want to get deeper into backend and you're a front-end only developer, it's really not as hard as you think. I have a whole show on it, but I'll also have in the show notes a link to a project.

Speaker 1:

I think that hands-on learning is really the only way to learn in general, and so this project does not include like a bunch of videos or whatever. It's a GitHub, it's all yours. There's nothing in it. You don't have to sign up or anything like that. Just take it. Hundreds of people have used this. I really love this project and I think it's the only way that you can really learn by just getting your hands dirty. So don't be afraid of full stack or think that you have to know like DevOps and backend and security and network protocols. I mean, ultimately, that should be your goal in the future, but right now, if you can make a basic Note Express app, I think that's probably fine and that'll help you out on the job market tremendously, much more so than just knowing something like React, which is not going to cut it nowadays.

Speaker 1:

All right, this next harsh truth, this one people get the most pissed off to hear. I don't know why people get so mad when I say this AI productivity is a lie, but you still have to play this game. Let me explain. There's this really sickening trend that I'm so, so tired of of developers online saying I'm 10 times more productive because of AI. Junior developers don't stand a chance. Companies read this. They want to believe it. Their shareholders are betting on it.

Speaker 1:

What could possibly go wrong? Not like companies have ever done anything so short-sighted as betting everything on AI or overhiring developers during a worldwide pandemic and then firing them all. Not like they'd ever do something like that, ever again. Right? What could go wrong? Well, google, like I had mentioned, actually found out that AI improved their developer productivity by 10%, not 10X. One zero percent, 10%. But why ruin the fun with facts and numbers, right?

Speaker 1:

So what do you do?

Speaker 1:

What do you do? In this case? You have to become AI first, a term I really hate. What the hell does that even mean? Right? But you have to play this game because companies are looking for these people. So what do you do on the shallow end? You use cursor you understand how to use Claude or whatever AI tool or editor in order to write code with AI assistance. You put this on your resume. You use autocomplete to write code faster and maybe a little bit better than you normally would when it comes to tests or front end or wherever. In some areas, it's going to be better than you. That's just how it goes.

Speaker 1:

Experiment with different agents, different models and tools. Bring these up to your workplace. You can look a little bit like an expert, because right now, no one knows what the hell they're doing. Managers are scrambling to hire so-called AI-enabled developers to appease their bosses, who told the investors that they would become 100 times more productive by becoming AI-native, whatever that means. Now, if you actually want to go deep into the deep end and learn some of the hard skills related to large language models because when we talk about AI, what we're really talking about is large language models right, we have the two conflated. So if you want to go into the deeper end, learn something like RAG, retrieval, augmented Generation. I saw a really cool course on Scrimba on this that somebody at Parsity actually brought up to me, I'm like, wow, this is really cool. I'm also going to have a more in-depth program on this based on my actual experience doing this with TypeScript, not using Python. This will be a TypeScript-only course for developers who have some experience and want to learn RAG, vector databases and agentic workflows in a practical way based on what I've actually done. You can check it out at parsityai.

Speaker 1:

But if you want to go the route of becoming more fluent in large language models and what's happening under the hood, just read up on things like transformers, attention mechanisms, page detention, embeddings. These are things that are gonna give you a much deeper understanding and help you speak intelligently about it beyond just I know how to prompt or tell AI to write code. For me, that's a cool skill. It's just kind of becoming a baseline. So take it a little bit further and you're gonna be early to the party that is AI, because right now people are on the shallow end of this and they're not really going further than how to prompt stuff or just integrate AI into their code to write code faster, which is cool, but it's just scratching the surface. Okay, the last two pieces of advice.

Speaker 1:

This one again, maybe a little bit harsh. Learning four languages doesn't make you look like a super developer. It makes you look unfocused. If you pick one stack and go deep, you're gonna look a lot better than a person that has a laundry list of random languages on their resume. It honestly is a big red flag when someone says, I know, go, python, java, c, sharp and javascript and typescript and whatever. And they have like this laundry list of things because what they're hoping to do is basically have the applicant tracking system like just pick up the fact that, oh, I'm looking for this combination of skills and this person has that combination of skills, so they're trying to like stuff as many keywords as they possibly can. The problem is when you look at that resume and you're thinking there's zero way this person knows this stuff. So it's like a big red flag. And then if they say, oh, I know Python, great, our test is in Python, our coding challenge is in Python. And then they get to the coding challenge like, oh well, I actually just know JavaScript. Well, why did you write Python on your resume? I'm guilty of this too, myself, by the way. I've done this. It doesn't work out.

Speaker 1:

You'll end up being in the running for jobs which you have no business being in the running for in the first place. I remember at one point I was getting all these Ruby jobs because I put Ruby on my resume, because I used it for like nine months. One time I forgot it all and then people were like great, do you wanna come to our Ruby shop and do our coding challenge in Ruby? I'm like absolutely not. So I just took it off my resume. And this is after three or four years into my career.

Speaker 1:

If you have more than three languages and you haven't had a job yet, job yet that becomes a bit of a red flag to recruiters and especially to hiring managers, and even more so to anybody that's remotely technical, because they just know that's not true. And while I'm at it, you know those little bars that you have on your resumes. Remember when those were a thing. I don't know if people are still doing this, but if you write 65% or whatever next to some language or technology that you say, you know that says nothing but confuse people and it's a big red flag to most recruiters who are like I don't know what that means. If you're only 50% good at TypeScript, well, that would be an F and I wouldn't hire you. So never put the percentage or say I'm strong or mediocre or whatever in the language. Just put the language as you know and let the coding challenges determine your proficiency in those things.

Speaker 1:

I don't really want to let somebody who's not technical know what I would rate myself, because I might rate myself a seven in JavaScript or maybe an eight or something, and they might say, oh, only an eight. And I'm like, well, javascript is huge and it's ever evolving, so I'm never going to, it can never be 10. But to them they might say, well, why not 10? You've been doing it for 10 years, what the hell? And so I'd rather just avoid that conversation by not having something like a weird percentage on my resume or on my portfolio. Anyway, a bit of a tangent. But please just remove those things. I'm telling you thank me later. All right, let's end on a bit of a positive note.

Speaker 1:

The last one you're never going to feel ready. This is what I think a lot of newer developers need to realize. There's no magical I'm ready now moment. If you wait until you're ready to apply, you've waited way too long. By the way, if you meet 50% of the requirements for a job, you need to apply. You must apply. I am forcing you to apply. If you meet 100% of the requirements, you are overqualified and you probably shouldn't apply for that role. I understand. If you do just realize you're likely overqualified, don't down level yourself.

Speaker 1:

Stop only applying to junior roles. Stop thinking that junior or mid-level or senior mean anything besides a random title. At most companies they mean something obviously like you can't just be a junior that doesn't know anything and call yourself a senior. But the title senior at some places means literally somebody that's been there for a year or more and at other places it means like a super duper, senior staff level engineer that knows the ins and outs of all these, like archaic languages and systems, and can be deployed and do all this stuff on their own. Anyway, the titles cease to mean much. So don't let them dictate how you apply. They mean a lot of different things at different organizations. Again, let the interview dictate your ability to do the job and stop filtering yourself out before anybody else does.

Speaker 1:

I see this happen too often. Or people that even get to the interview and they start downplaying themselves and saying, well, I'm just a junior. Oh well, I'm just learning how to code. You know, and I get it because they want to try to save themselves or lower the expectations. Don't do that. Come in strong. Let the person who's in charge of judging you in quotes judge you and then take it with a grain of salt. You don't know who this person is. You don't know what they're up to. You don't know what their qualifications are certifications so take it with a grain of salt. See if you find some sort of signal in the noise. Sometimes you just get a bad interviewer or a bad interview, or just have a bad day. Don't take it to the extreme and think, oh, that one bad interview is now I got to study this particular problem for the next six months. I see a lot of people do that. I don't want you to be one of them, so don't do that.

Speaker 1:

Remember this hiring is broken, but your network is not. So, yeah, mass applying still works. We've seen people at Parsity mass apply and get hired. So, yeah, mass applying still works. We've seen people at Parsity mass apply and get hired. Most people, though, at Parsity who have landed jobs are doing this. They're using their real network their former chefs, their former teachers, their former EMTs. The way they found their jobs is through reaching out to different colleagues, classmates, friends of friends, local businesses, random things that you wouldn't think would net you a job. But we've had two people just in the last few months and two of them have been on the show recently that did this, and this is a trend we've seen at Parsity for years now People looking through their Rolodex of friends, family, network and these aren't people that come from a software background at all.

Speaker 1:

In fact, most of the people at Parsity don't even live near a tech hub and they're finding jobs through their network and it's usually not their friend or their mom or dad or cousin or uncle. It's usually a friend of a friend of a friend. For example, one person is having an interview by literally writing an email to their school the school they went to and saying hey, I saw that you might have this open role for Webmaster. I'm a former student and I would love to learn more about it Immediately. They have credibility, the connection, and that person is likely going to get an interview. In fact, that person did get an interview, but if you're doing stuff like that, you're much more likely to succeed.

Speaker 1:

Linkedin is still a game to play and you should be on there playing the game. But if you're only on LinkedIn, you're only on Indeed and you're not tapping into your network of people, which I know is not easy or comfortable to do. But if you're not doing that, I think you're doing yourself a real disservice. So be really methodical. I've brought this up on the show before we do a lot of market development in Parsity, I would do what's called a breadth-first search of your network. If you don't get that reference, look it up. Bottom line is the market isn't hopeless, it's just different. And yes, it's difficult. It's never really been easy. I've heard the same complaints in 2013 that I'm hearing in 2025.

Speaker 1:

My super opinionated advice to end off is if you're an early career developer and you lack technical skills, consider a strategic investment in upskilling with AI by building out something like a full stack app using agents or using RAG. This, I think, is the most bang for your buck at this particular point in the AI hype train that we're currently on. Now, if you are having zero luck on the job market, like you're sending out resumes or job applications and getting zero feedback, and I mean if you've done over 100, if you're putting up numbers like 10, 20, those are rookie numbers Got to bump those numbers way up, my friend, to find out if you're actually getting a signal or if you're just not getting enough volume in there. A lot of people aren't putting in the volume. A good arbitrary amount might just be 100, right? Consider doing an audit of your network. Like I said, do a BFS, a breadth-first search of your network and see who might be able to point you to somebody who might know somebody else, who knows of some opportunities out there and maybe, just maybe, consider hiring somebody like David Roberts, who I've also had on the show. He's a person I can kind of vouch for, that I know personally who helps people out with the entire job search. If you're in that stage Now, if you're at the very beginning of your journey and you need somebody to do more of a holistic technical approach and market development and help you through the entire thing from A to Z, then just join parsityio.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I'm a little bit biased, I do own the program, but anyway I really hope that's helpful.

Speaker 1:

Grab the Node Express Starter Kit which is in the show notes if you're a front-end developer and you wanna get introduced to backend stuff, and I always hope that's helpful. By the way, I'm also taking questions for the show on Friday. I really am loving doing this. I got some great questions last week and I have some really good ones this week. So if you have a question that you'd like me to answer on the show, just fill out the form in the show notes and I will shout you out if you want, or you can remain anonymous. Anyway, hope that was helpful and not too harsh, and I'll see you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself Podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsityio, and if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.