Develop Yourself

#291 - Open Source + Hard Work: A CTO’s Roadmap for Junior Developers

• Brian Jenney

Share episode

Amber argues that the biggest problem facing new developers isn’t coding ability…

It’s lack of real experience, and an over-reliance on feel-good advice that doesn’t translate into hireability.

We dig into:

  • Why contributing to real, medium-complexity open-source projects is the fastest path to becoming job-ready
  • Why most juniors aren’t actually hireable yet — and how to fix that
  • How toxic positivity on LinkedIn is misleading beginners
  • Why “passion” means nothing if it isn’t backed by proof-of-work
  • The kinds of projects and habits that actually impress hiring managers
  • The mindset shift every junior dev must make to survive today’s market
  • What Amber wishes she knew as a brand-new developer
  • How to stand out when 30,000 other bootcamp grads are competing for the same jobs

If you’re early in your software career — or mentoring someone who is — this conversation will challenge your assumptions, push you out of the fluff zone, and give you a clear, actionable roadmap to becoming the type of junior developer who actually gets hired.


Resources Mentioned in This Episode


Open Source Projects & Communities:

  • Dance-Chives Prototype (Amber’s breakdancing app project): https://github.com/BenTheChi/dance-chives-prototype
  • Build In Public community: https://buildinpublic.com/
  • Gridiron Survivor project: https://github.com/LetsGetTechnical/gridiron-survivor

Mentorship:

  • ADPList (free mentorship sessions): https://adplist.org/

Connect With Amber:

  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amber-adamson-a33a3860/


Send us a text

Shameless Plugs

Free 5 day email course to go from HTML to AI

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

Apply for 1 of 12 spots at Parsity - Learn to build complex software, work with LLMs and launch your career.

AI Bootcamp (NEW) - for software developers who want to be the expert on their team when it comes to integrating AI into web applications.

SPEAKER_00:

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.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that the best thing a person can do maybe to get the job ready, and a lot of juniors aren't gonna want to do this, but I think the best thing they can do is contribute to open source.

SPEAKER_00:

What's your opinion on like getting a tech job in 2020 versus now? Is there a difference?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, totally a difference.

SPEAKER_00:

Today I'm joined by Amber, a developer who followed a very non-traditional path to get into tech. She went from teaching English, became an email developer, which I can't wait to ask her about because that's a title and a job I haven't heard about for a while. And now she's a CTO of a growing startup. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Brianna. Feel free to ask me anything.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, we're gonna do it. You said you were an email developer. Can you tell me how you landed that first role, like how you got into developing emails and what is email development? Because people are probably thinking email development. What the hell is that?

SPEAKER_01:

It's such a funny story because I mean, like I said, I was kind of my first year, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, front end, back end, full stack. I kind of had an idea, but I wasn't, I honestly wasn't really ready for anything. I applied to a bunch of jobs. I got a hit on the any email development job. Um, and I think honestly, to part of what got me into it was that I was able to pass the coding challenge because it was just like HTML and CSS. It was almost more like something that was like an editing challenge rather than like a real deep technical challenge. Um, but a lot of what the role involved was kind of um, it wasn't really a coding role. It was more like organizational. This particular role wasn't. Some email developer roles are more HTML development, but this was more like um kind of setting the emails up, monitoring the process. Um, you know, it wasn't interesting. I learned some interesting things. Like I learned about A B testing, which is I think still a really valuable concept in any kind of development work. Um, but I think what I struggled with as an email developer was kind of realizing that this was not going to advance like my full stack skills because you know, um, they even in the interviews, they even said this is gonna be like coding from 15 years ago. There's no React, it's maybe the tiny bit of JavaScript, CSS and HTML. And I think that was that those early jobs was kind of were kind of like when I realized, you know what, I need to be a little more intentional with like what I'm trying to do. If I want to be a React developer, I'm going to need to actually build stuff with it. And I can't just lean on that coding boot camp to like, you know, kind of get me there. And I think that the best thing a person could do maybe to get them job ready, and a lot of juniors are gonna want to do this, but I think the best thing they can do is contribute to open source, but like really contribute, like treat it like a real job and investment. Most most juniors are not gonna do that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I I really want to ask about this because I have never really contributed to open source, and I've usually told people, hey, you know what, it's really difficult, like maybe, maybe don't do that. And I and I I some of I think about that, I'm like, well, I know people do it. And I've done like a little bit of contribute contribution, like through things, like libraries I've used. I'm like, oh, there's actually a bug I need fixed for for work, and I'm gonna make a patch and submit it. Tell me how you approached working in open source.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I so I should put a little bit of a caveat here. When people say open source, they usually mean like MS code, like next.js. I like the big old libraries. Yeah, don't start with those big, like professional software things. Find like a personal project that's like a kind of like I posted today about dance jags. We're building like a breakdancing application. Find something like that and treat it like a real, like building it for an audience. Cause that's what that's how I'm thinking of it. Like we're treating this like a professional application because we're hoping to make it one. And I think if you do that, you aren't doing real dev work and you're doing something probably similar to what you'd be doing for a company. Um, but like maybe, maybe eventually stuff like Next.js, but don't start with that. That's just gonna be too much. Um try to find those kinds of open source projects. I know it's not always an easiest thing to find those kind of like accessible, you know, for other people open source. You kind of have to look a little bit. There are a few floating around on LinkedIn if you know where you look. I've been kind of following things like I joined Built in Public, it's a little quieter right now, but something like that. Um, David Weiss has built to give. It's for like working with nonprofits. Um, there's that ching room where they do different projects together. There's stuff like Gridiron, Survivor. I think a a baby developer who's trying to get a job, if they really want to put their money where their mouth is, sure they can walk the log, they should try something like that. Every time I get on one of those projects, there are people inevitably who they call themselves passionate developers, but they're they're quiet, they're not doing anything. And that's the thing, you know. Your friend uh David Roberts, I think he said this. Everyone calls themselves a passionate developer, and you know, everyone says that. But when you're in a group and you're developing together, are you gonna be the one doing anything? And I think those real like open source projects are a really great place to set to show that you you are really going to put that work in, you're really gonna do a dev workflow.

SPEAKER_00:

I I love everything you just said right there because yeah, that that term passionate developer is so overused, first of all, it's really hard to like stand out. It just kind of it's it's very cliche nowadays, but it's like, show me you're being a passionate developer, you know? Yeah, and uh I like what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01:

It'll speak for itself, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

For sure, yeah. And then the open source thing, I think that's such a great take on it because I think that's like what when I hear open source, when I was younger, especially, I was like, how am I ever gonna contribute to something like you know, it's AngularJS or jQuery at the time? I was like, how can I ever even attempt to do this? But you're right, if if you either build something and open source it yourself and then look for people to contribute or join one of the mini groups you just said, and really thank you for for shouting those out. And I'll try to have links to those in the show notes as well for people to check them out. That's a great way to do it. What's your opinion on like getting a tech job in 2020 versus now? Is there a difference?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, totally a difference. I mean, man, right in my mind, I got my first job. I I said I guess that I started kind of in 2020. I think my boot camp ended 2021, the end of it. I started searching early 2022. So it was right in the like post-COVID boom or I guess kind of mid-COVID boom, however you want to look at it. Anyway, I got my first the email developer job, dude. I had like I had to-do list applications on my resume from a tutorial. Not even like, not even like that I built the to-do list, literally from like one of Angela Yu's tutorials with like boot strap on it. So that's why when I got laid off at Takeda, I looked at my resume and I said, Oh, I'm so dissatisfied with myself. I'm not the developer I want to be. And that's why I've gone so hard on like, you know, working on things like dance chimes, and it's like we're building like a real full stack application, real users. And once you get to that point, you know, you can't go back. Like I could never do a tutorial application like that again because once you've you've gotten the the sauce of like building for real users, it's just like invigorating in a way that you can't you can't go back.

SPEAKER_00:

For sure. Um okay, so yeah, the the job markets obviously changed now for for me, uh like a kind of senior plus level. Um, yeah, I've actually, I'll be honest, I've had it, I've had an easier time right now than I've ever had.

SPEAKER_01:

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00:

It's very interesting. That's why it's so difficult for me to like get a pulse on what's going on because I know for junior developers it always sucks. It's never been easy, but I know that it sucks more now, for sure. Like it definitely sucks a lot more now. What do you think junior developers like? Let's say you just got out of a coding boot camp like today. Like, what do you think you would be doing or telling this person to do?

SPEAKER_01:

I think kind of what I was saying earlier about like find a real project to contribute to. And like I said, don't aim for the you know, again, like VS Code next to it does. I know that is open source, but like try to find something like medium complexity, like one of those projects that is collaborative, that is floating floating around LinkedIn. Try to do something like that, I think, and really take it seriously and like really show up. I think too many juniors who just get out of a boot camp, like I said, they have this attitude that they're job ready and they're not. I see people who bare bones LinkedIn, no GitHub pushes, just got out of a boot camp. Their GitHub, if they have one, is full of bootcamp projects, and they're like, I'm doing two 30,000 applications and I'm not getting hired. It's like there's there's like really obvious why you're not getting hired. And I feel like people in LinkedIn don't really want to just admit that that is some people are just not hirable yet. Like, yeah, you know, I I think that some of the advice on LinkedIn that is good advice for a developer of your level is maybe not as good for just a total baby developer, like just go go network, go message people at companies. It's like if you're messaging people with boot camp projects in your GitHub and they're like a CEO at like a big AI startup, you know, what are how are you offering that person? We need, I think I know it's harsh, but I think we need to keep it a little real. Like you can grow. I mean, you said I think I've grown in a lot a lot in the last year, and I think that's just because it wasn't because I took a ton of boot camps, it was because I said I have to grow and I have to take this seriously. And I think that's what a lot of people don't really want to do. I think they want a boot camp, they want a one and done, maybe they want another boot camp or something that kind of keeps pushing them along, but they're just not really taking the reins. You know, the people I see succeeding, even if they're juniors, are the ones who are really seriously taking the reins. Um, you know, like I saw one developer, she was talking about how she did an immersion year. She went to like, she did all these collaborative projects like free ones. She found a free mentorship site, ADP list. Um, you know, joining small group discords and like really actually building stuff. I think that is really kind of what it takes to get your foot in the door. Because I think this market is more than ever about you have to really prove you can do it. You can't just say you're a passionate developer anymore because you've got 30,000 other people with that same line in their LinkedIn bio.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. And I and I like I like what you also said about the like the overemphasis on networking with the underemphasis on like what value are you gonna provide here? Because I can tell you that as a as a former manager, I would get people in my inbox and they would send me things like their portfolio. And I feel like I'm I'm probably nicer than the average person because I am so present on LinkedIn that I am gonna open up your DM. I am gonna see it. Oh, let me see what this person made. Just let me give them a shot. And I gotta, I gotta tell you, I saw some stuff like this. You should not be showing anybody this. I put this in mobile view, it breaks. It's like it there's like misspellings in the page, it doesn't work. The thing that you think works doesn't work. There's the images that don't have anything there. I was just blown away. And I'd go to their GitHub, like you said, and it would be nothing. And I'm like, why'd you show me? If you didn't show me the GitHub, I wouldn't have cared. But you showed it to me, and now I'm looking at it and I'm seeing there's nothing there. I'm like, you you gotta present yourself a little bit better. I don't want to like dunk on junior developers. But but I've seen a lot of great ones, like I've seen a lot of people with like really amazing things, but I've seen a lot of people like, what did what do you expect to happen from showing this? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01:

This is why I I I honestly have some criticisms of LinkedIn because I think it's great that we are a great positivity culture, but I think there's a little bit of like gassing people up when like you know, look, go go join, do LinkedIn, but also join Reddits and Discords that are not as much the gassing up culture and get some feedback from those. Like, go to somewhere like React to Flux, where like you share your portfolio. There was a guy who shared his portfolio in there and got nine poo emojis because stuff was breaking on mobile, and I could tell that's why he was getting those reactions. So, like, go to somewhere where you're gonna get roasted a little. Like, I think junior developers, it's hard because you know, they they're they're I was I've been more fragile at that point. I mean a lot of juniors are a little more fragile, and it's they don't want they want to be gassed up, right? But like go somewhere where you're gonna get a little bit roasted. I think that might do more for your growth than like you know, coming on LinkedIn and be like, yeah, I'm I'm passionate. Everyone's like, you got great energy, and it's like, but that is not a referendum on your actual technical anything, like you know, there's gotta be that balance. So I don't mean to be harsh, I don't think of myself as a harsh person. I'm I'm harsh with myself, if anything, but like yeah, I I think that is what it's needs to to grow a little bit, some of that environment.

SPEAKER_00:

I I I feel you sometimes I'm like, I feel like I'm overly nice, and but even me on LinkedIn, sometimes I'll say something just a little critical, and people like flip out. And I'm like, what is the deal here? Like, chill out. You know what I'm saying? I can't I gotta try to keep it real with you too, because I want to see people succeed. I honestly genuinely do. Whether you go to Parsley or whatever, whatever you're doing, I want to see you make it. If you're putting in all that effort and time, I would hate to see you not make it because that sucks. That's a terrible, terrible feeling. Speaking of LinkedIn, you're very active on LinkedIn. Now, do you would you suggest this to people that are juniors? And I'm just curious overall, you're uh if you have like a LinkedIn strategy, because you seem to be super active on there, and I and I love what you post in general, and I think that you're you're using it the right way because you talk to me, and we have like a genuine connection and some some DMs going back and forth, which led to this conversation here. But yeah, one, should people be using it if they're junior? And two, what is your strategy in general for using it?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you know, it's so funny we're having this conversation because while I'm still active on LinkedIn, I actually have dialed it back a little bit just because I'm trying to focus on like posting, you know, proof of work and like proof I'm working on stuff and to make sure I am working on stuff and not just hanging out on LinkedIn all day. So I've I I am still active, but I try to make it like like today, you know, I did my dance jibes update. I try to make it so when I'm coming on there, I'm actually showing I'm working on stuff because that's something I've been a little self-conscious about. Like I don't want to just be like a LinkedIn influencer. I also want to, you know, be doing my co. But I think that is that is to answer your question. I think what you kind of have to gets a little um tricky with juniors, and there's nothing wrong with like being, you know, like if you just want to hang out on LinkedIn and you want to do that, that's one thing. But like I think there's kind of this the way networking gets talked about, I think there almost becomes this subtle implication that like being a LinkedIn influencer is what's gonna get you a damn job. And I am not convinced of that. In fact, I dare I say part of why I've scaled it back a little is because I kind of worry maybe some recruiters are seeing me posting all the time and thinking, is this person gonna be posting on LinkedIn at work? Are they gonna actually be pushing code? And you know, in these open source discourses, some of the discourse, some of the people I know who are really showing up and doing the code are not always the most LinkedIn active or the most LinkedIn popular people. I think LinkedIn kind of can give people a false idea of who's really a strong dev because like charisma on LinkedIn starts making people feel like you know your dev stuff. And I I don't want to be that. Like I don't want people to think you know, Amber knows her stuff because she's active on LinkedIn a lot. So I do want to be active on LinkedIn, but I also want to make sure I'm like that I'm showing up and I'm actually doing stuff. And I feel like you run that risk of like LinkedIn activity at the expense of like really doing a lot of dev work, you know. That's that's what I kind of start to think about.

SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate that take because I think of this myself. I don't know. I know I have a business, and so I'm on there and I do this for marketing. Now, if I was a junior developer, I wouldn't copy what I'm doing at all. I think that's a really bad move, and it's also gonna take away a lot of valuable time from doing, like you said, the actual work. And uh hey, before I let you go, and I appreciate you spending the time talking with me today. I really like like your direct, keeping it real. That's always the most important thing. We get too much fluff out there nowadays, too much advice that is like well-intentioned, but doesn't actually is not really practical. So I appreciate you keeping it real with us today. But before I let you go, I got a few hot takes I want to get from you. Um what's what's one piece of advice that you think is completely wrong, but we keep telling junior developers?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh gosh, I I I'm glad you saw you really know what my favorite topics are because I was just thinking of this before we did the podcast. I was thinking of my spicy hot takes, and I was like, should I go into those? And then you'd have to say that.

SPEAKER_00:

We gotta hear them.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that the biggest advice that I think is wrong that I see people saying is I think a lot of LinkedIn advice comes from the perspective that you that every developer is already hireable and they just need the right course, the right trick, the right amount of networking to get them there. And my spiciest take is I do not think everyone is hirable yet. Like I really do not think if you just came out of a boot camp and you are coding to-do lists with a tutorial, maybe you are not hirable and maybe that's okay. Maybe you need a few more months. And I know that's hard because you need money. Um, maybe get a part-time job. That's what I've been doing. I've had to do this multiple times where I got a part-time job and I coded on the side, and I actually tried to build things for real users. But like, I think too much LinkedIn advice has kind of created this ecosystem of very junior developers who seem to kind of be leaning on their charisma and personality almost like as like that's their skill. Like, that's like I'm a I'm a non-traditional. You see all these, like I'm a non-traditional coder from like this background, and that becomes kind of their whole brand. We talk about branding, we talk about networking, and it's like, bro, I'm not saying that's you know, it's sweet, it's it's it's nice that like you like these other hobbies. You're you're like a former artist who's a coder now, but man, if you can't pass a tech challenge, you're not you're not gonna get hired. And we need to be blunt with people about that. Like, you gotta you gotta be doing your DSA and those like unsexy things on the weekend. And I think I think that's where like LinkedIn is not the best because I think in that way for juniors, because I think it gives them kind of this idea of like branding and networking is everything. And I've just I've got a little bit of tech skills, and if I can just make myself the most likable, I'm gonna get hired. And it doesn't matter if I'm and you'll see this with these clergy stories, like uh, I I this there's this guy, and he's his tech challenge wasn't the best, and he was rough, and he failed a DSA, but I hired him, and then he became my best developer. You see these stories, I don't know if they happen, but you see them all the time on LinkedIn. I'm like, okay, and how many times was there that guy who he didn't become the best developer? He got put on a PIP and he got laid off. You're not gonna see that story. That's not heartwarming, but or even maybe didn't get put on a PIP because he but he got laid off anyway, because it's a fan company and they laid off 15,000 people. So that's my spicy technic. I think I think you've got like so many juniors who are kind of just leaning into this wholesome, scrappy, like I'm you know, Bob and I I come from like this non-tech background, and now I'm this aspiring, hopeful, etc. developer who's passionate. It's like, you know, you you gotta do that that hard, the like I said, the unsexy work. You gotta prove you can really, you're really gonna go in and build features, and you, you know, when you get a production bug, like a a React strict mode bug, a hydration bug, that you're not go you're really going to do it and not just sit there and go, hmm, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

Yo my god. Uh oh, I the I I like everything you just said, you know. Now you're you already got my brain spinning for posts I want to write, but I'm also nervous to even write some of this stuff. But I think but you're right, you're right. We both come from non-traditional backgrounds, and I and now I play that up more, but that's after 11 years of doing this professionally that I feel more I feel more open to talk about my personal life a little bit more because I kind of feel like I proved myself. Part of me wishes I hadn't waited this long to kind of talk more about my personal life, but at the same time, I knew that no one cared really. I'm like, no one's gonna judge me on my personal life. They want to see, yeah, can I pass the coding challenge to get to the job? And most of your coworkers are gonna have computer science degrees. That's just the reality. So you're competing with them, you want to speak the same language as they do, and they're not necessarily going to care so much that you came from a non-traditional background. It might be interesting personally to them, but they don't really care as far as the context of you being a fellow software developer on their team. Yeah. Super, yeah, I love that hot take. A couple more for you. What's something that you think juniors obsess about that um that no one cares about?

SPEAKER_01:

I think depending on how you characterize projects, I think like when we talk about projects like boot camp or tutorial projects, I think having a portfolio with projects is something that junior developers kind of obsess about. When when we talk about you know projects, we mean like shipping something end-to-end or building something for users. I think juniors obsess about that a little too much. Um, I think we've already kind of discussed like the maybe obsessing a little too much about like your social network and maybe not obsessing enough about like getting technically on the level. I think juniors don't focus enough on on learning to love the pain of debugging. I think that is really what separates the people who are gonna make it and those who aren't, because debugging is not glamorous, it's not like a TikTok where it's like my cozy day at Google and you're you know at the food area. And you know, I think when you get one of those, I had like a this awful goblin bug in one of my open source the other day where React Strict Mode was running everything twice, and I tried so many ways to get to the bottom of it because it looked like a stiff closure, it looked like other things, and I was pulling my hair out. I think you really have to there will be so many of those painful things, and you really have to learn to love that. And I think a lot of juniors have to really need to really be oriented their attitude on that, and like you know, you have to be kind of like John Wick with like I'm gonna solve this bug no matter what, and that's right. I think that's not really the attitude. So I think like I think they obsess about that. I think um you know, I I think oh, another thing, I'll be I'll be real. Uh to your point, they obsess too much, and this is something I'm I'm getting out of. I've I've had I've been this person in the past, obsessing too much about wanting to try cool tech. Like you learn about a library or framework, you gotta put that library or framework in your project. Like, you know, you learn about like Prisma or Postgres or Docker. Oh, that wouldn't work with that. You want to come up with a reason to work with that. It's like it should be the other way around. You need to use that stuff when you have a use case for it, not because you heard about it and it sounds cool. Yep. And so you've got like a game and you're trying to put like nine uh libraries on it. It's like, no, if you use that, like if anything, I think the thing a lot of juniors don't get is that more senior people are often taking out complexity, they're also often reducing complexity where possible.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, the the most important thing, in my opinion, you can do is usually remove lines of code. If you can remove lots of lines of code, that's a really great day at work in any code base where you're just like taking out lots of stuff. And you'll just naturally come across instances where you will get to use a lot of cool kid stuff. Now, I I have this problem really bad too. I love chasing shiny objects. I'm always like, oh, I want to use this. Oh, a new agent library came out, or oh, here's some new friends, I gotta try this out, and I'll do this little weekend project. And it can be fun, but you have a limit, right? You just have a time limit, you have a limit to how much you can deeply go into something, and you can become what I like to call a Swiss Army knife developer, where you do a little bit of everything poorly, and uh that that's like a really quick way to be unhireable, but then have like a bunch of what you consider knowledge in your head. Like, I know 20 different libraries and frameworks and you know, cloud service programs.

SPEAKER_01:

I think one of the most junior things is trying to put everything on your resume that you've ever touched. Like I my first resume out of my boot camp, I had like it's still funny to think back in it. I had Ajax and jQuery and stuff like that on my resume, not realizing that's actually selling the wrong impression in this era. Like, not really just think, okay, it sounds cool, and I've kind of touched it, so I'm putting that on my resume. It's like that's not telling the story you think it is, and like obviously recruiters, sometimes I don't always know the tick, and that's a whole other story, but like it's not necessarily selling what you think when you're just putting every name on there. Um, you know, like it's like I said, it's those non-sexy fundamentals like the data structures and algorithms, which I'm I'm trying to make myself do more up to. I've started to learn to like it, but it took a little while, but I am learning to like it. But so it's that fundamental stuff, closures and JavaScript, this keyword, what those you know, inheritance, uh, object-oriented programming. It's that fundamental stuff that doesn't sound as cool, but that is what you really need to be like learning. That's gonna what's gonna put you on the level of the computer science people because they're coming out knowing that stuff, and a lot of boot camp grads are. And I think that's something I wish I kind of internalized earlier.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's a big one. Um, because it that's the the biggest difference when you come into uh your first job, you'll typically work for other people, work with other people that have a computer science degree, and they may be a little less uh used to using frameworks like React or Next.js or whatever, but they have a lot deeper fundamental knowledge, and at some point they will be able to accelerate past you because the higher up in the career you go, the less it is working with the frameworks and things, more like system level thinking and how to construct code that's extensible and all these kind of common software practices that if you went to a bootcamp, you may have missed out on. So I do think there's that weird point where a bootcamp grad and a CS grad can kind of start off with equal footing, and even the bootcamp grad can even be a little more valuable in some cases when you're like you're working at a startup on a framework. Um, but then at some point in that three to five year range, I do see this happened to me, where the CS grads were just blowing me out of the water, and I had to do all the things you're speaking about, like double down on fundamentals in order to just keep up.

SPEAKER_01:

I think when people talk about how rough the market is, I think the divide you're talking about is really where I don't I feel like I don't see this being articulated enough, but I think that's really what's separating people who are struggling less from those who are struggling more, because I think there are a lot of people who have maybe even had industry jobs for a few years, but have not been forced to learn those fundamentals. And now it's like suddenly the bar for those fundamentals has just gotten really brutally high. Like everyone has coding tests. You know, if you it's before you could kind of in 2022, I think you could kind of sneak by just on being kind of scrappy and knowing some frameworks. And I think that now the the devs I see who are making it and not struggling as much are the ones who really actually are learning or have learned those fundamentals. And I I think it's really a difficult market has kind of shaved, I don't know, the ice off the top or like the glacier and it's kind of hiding what's underneath. And and that's what I feel like I'm seeing um as I as I work with other devs and to kind of see what people are going through. And you know, I'm not, I'm not like I said, I'm I don't I'm my fundamentals, I'm working on strengthening them too. Like I'm I'm doing the DSA, I'm I'm I'm reading the JavaScript documentation, right? Like I've I feel like I've got it know those those fundamentals.

SPEAKER_00:

I agree with you. I think that's another interesting topic for the show. Uh hey, thank you so much for taking time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. I think I'm gonna be playing this episode back to get some some ideas for the next things I want to talk about because I think you give me a lot of great ideas too. For maybe I wasn't too blunt.

SPEAKER_01:

I I kind of did, I I kind of been holding a lot of it, I kind of went all out.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm really glad you were. I'll have your uh contact information in the show notes. We should do another show where we roast people's resumes in the most harsh way possible. Maybe that would be a good idea. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01:

I I I'd be happy, I'd be happy to do that. You know, I'm always like, I need to update my resume, I need to update my LinkedIn, it's been on my mind. I think I think you can always push yourself to do better, right? And that's that's good. That's what we should be doing in this field.

SPEAKER_00:

100%. Well, if you want more genuine hot takes, follow Amber on LinkedIn. Thanks again.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Brian. It was so nice talking to you.

SPEAKER_00:

You too. 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 parsity.io. 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.