There was a dev who found a job posting asking for like 10 years experience in a piece of software he had written that wasn’t even 5 years old yet.
-But I’m the one who created it, sir!
-Then you should have created it sooner! Good day!
When you still need a job
“Junior level position, 5+years experience required!”
10yr+ DevOps career (the entirety of it having been dedicated to creation and maintenance of NDA-wrapped systems that don’t even exist anymore (so the “proof” became “poof!” thanks to legalese prohibiting me from having it as “live portfolio”) because corporations don’t GAF about how much of our own soul we put upon coding something as programmers), incomplete bachelor degree for reasons too long to get into detail, started coding during my late childhood, 2 yrs (and counting) of unemployment and, sincerely, utter disillusionment with the winds of all fields of human endeavors, especially the enshittification of tech… Even though I’m not a junior, sometimes I widened my search to include junior positions as well (“you shouldn’t be too picky” as I heard a few times, as if job positions were the only ones granted the divine right to be “picky” about who they should hire), so I can quite relate…
It’s been some time since I gave up doing pointless searching, and all of this makes me wonder if my next job will be “in-situ quality test inspector of six-feet-under diggings”, “afterlife consultancy” or “personal secretary of Ms. Rosa Caveira”, because I have no expectations (nor the will) of being “repositioned” within the “job market”, especially because I don’t want to be a ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini nanny, which seems to be the case for most, if not all, DevOps jobs nowadays.
At least Ms. Caveira doesn’t require experience, the job requires no paperwork, it’d be instant start, and I feel like She’d the best employer ever (e.g. I wouldn’t be a fungible number in Her spreadsheet).
I saw a positon labeled Junior Developer, looked inside, and it asked for five years of experience.
I’m starting to think my bachelor’s degree isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
Ghost jobs that are just there to appear successful are a plague.
“We want a senior that is desperate or dumb enough to take junior pay.”
What they want is the last guy who just retired, and was handling 4 jobs on his own because he had the experience to do it, but the hiring manager doesn’t know that they need 5 positions to cover that, not one, and training is right out because it’s not fiscally viable to train someone at entry level pay because then the person is very likely to take those skill to the competition who actually pays more.
(this is their reasoning, and no, you’re correct: it makes about as much sense as a three eyed watermelon getting a tan at the beach with a pet trinomial equation)
Good news, new “junior” encrypted all your customer data at rest. Bad news, all data is now at rest and the key to decrypt is with some group from Central Asia.
Ironically, “Computer Science” is the degree most likely to get you hired by the HR rep, but is also the degree that is least helpful in any practical application because it’s purely theoretical. Everything taught to you in Computer Science is abstracted from you and handled automatically by the compiler, API, OS, or protocol.
I figured it out a while back. It’s a definitional mismatch. While you and I think about entry level as the level at which we enter a career, the companies think of entry level as the level at which somebody enters the company. They ditched any notion of social responsibility in the form of cultivating new workers long ago.
I heard a stat that 73% of entry level jobs have gone away. And it makes me so angry, it is hard to articulate all the ways this is terrible. Obviously, for the people entering the workforce. It is short sighted for a business to not have a hiring and development strategy that allows them to pick up fresh talent. And it creates a problem in 15 or 20 years when we don’t have enough people with the right experience. shakes fist into air
shakes fist into air
SCNR
This is why with a marketing degree I work in a bank.
“entry level” is referring to remuneration not expertise.
