The Pragmatic Engineer’s Career Advice for Tough Times

Gergely Orosz, author of the number one technology newsletter on Substack, The Pragmatic Engineer, says the job market has not been this tough for new grads and junior engineers in the last 20 years, ever since the dot-com bust.

We spoke to him at CraftConf in Budapest and asked Gergey to share his advice on how to stand out in these job market circumstances as a junior software developer, senior software developer, and engineering manager.

How to get an engineering job as a junior?

Gergely says junior developers should look for internship opportunities, consider applying to smaller or local companies or even consultancies, and apply for jobs that require coming to the office.

Think about just getting your foot in the door, it’s much easier when you’re in.  

It also helps to have a peer support group of people who are in the same situation, whether online or in person. Gergely advises juniors to work on their projects just so they have some code in production to show at job interviews.

However, he is skeptical when it comes to juniors contributing to open-source projects:

It may be harder than building your own side project, and it’s not realistic for very junior engineers to make significant conributions.

When you contribute to open-source, you’re basically working with senior engineers who review your pull request – it’s a great way to learn a lot.  It’s a lot of work, but if you’re willing to do the work, go for it! 

Seniors should become more full-stack

Senior engineers have to be prepared for slower career growth opportunities. A lot of companies are not hiring at the same pace as before or not hiring at all so they will not need more team leads if the team is not growing.  
 
Software engineers now have to start thinking of something that was taken for granted for a long in tech – career stability. These days, when even profitable companies have massive rounds of layoffs, stability has become something that is hard to plan for, says Gegely:

You can try to become more full-stack and familiar with more languages and tools.

The other way of becoming more full-stack is understanding the business more by talking to product managers, customer support or user research to become a well rounded engineer (and to maybe transition to a product engineer role).

Tough time for engineering leadership

During the good times, there was a lot of need for engineering managers to lead the new teams. Engineering Managers would spend about 50% of their time hiring. Now that the hiring has stopped, what do they do with that 50% of their time? They must prove to their employees they’re not overhead:
 

If you’re a frontline manager, it’s good to get back to being more hands-on. You’ll be more valuable for the company, and it gives you more career stability.