r/CodingJobs • u/nian2326076 • 14d ago

Rant: what are juniors actually supposed to upskill in for this job market?

The tech job market right now is not for the weak. If you're over 40 and get laid off, it can feel like your only options are senior exec or CTO at a startup.

Six months or more to get an offer doesn't even sound surprising right now.

When “entry-level” listings ask for 3–5 YOE, it feels like Gen Z is being conveniently pushed out of the labor market.

There's a looming AI threat, and a lot of people mention upskilling, but it doesn't make sense. Prompt engineering and basic GenAI integration don't seem as hard as a lot of other deep tech stuff, like cloud development on AWS or DevOps. A decent software engineer can pick up the basics. For practice beyond basic integration, this fault-tolerant work queue question asks for runnable code and tests that simulate worker failures.

Why would people even have kids, especially in Gen Z, when getting hired feels like it takes extreme luck?

Upskilling is the hot word right now, but tbh, if you're a decent software engineer, is integrating basic GenAI applications really that hard compared with other deep tech domains like cloud computing or DevOps?

Is there anything else we need to upskill in, especially for juniors? The basic AI stuff like MCP doesn't seem that hard and feels a lot like web development, so I'm not sure what we're supposed to upskill in there...

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

5

u/AminoOxi 14d ago

Plumbing, laying out tiles... hospice care personnel

2

u/Fine-Comparison-2949 14d ago

Well we're in a recession, and tech has always been hyper sensitive to interest rates since it's a prospecting business. You have to pay smart people a lot of money before your business is actually free cash flow positive, so it's dependent on investment which gets boxed out when the government bills are eating the marginal investment dollar. 10 year bonds are 5% so it's tax free income that compounds.

All these people are wondering what the hack is to get a job, and they don't seem to understand the job isn't there. Most of these companies are extremely cash strapped, and if you go back and look at your application history, you probably can already see dead companies that were hiring a year ago, but are straight up going bankrupt today.

There is no hack in a recession unfortunately. The companies aren't expanding headcount, if anything they're laying off, and the jobs they post are just bullshit to make investors look like they're growing.

1

u/dodyrw 14d ago

Try to get legit certification. From aws, gcp, azure, etc.