Self-taught engineer Gregor Ojstersek tackles the entry-level tech job crisis: SignalFire data shows a 50% drop in big-tech entry roles since before the pandemic. His advice: take freelance projects for testimonials, grab student jobs in QA or IT support, build side products, and create an unfair advantage by delivering a custom demo to prospective employers.
It's not easy for software engineers who are just starting their careers. The current market is very competitive and the expectations are rising, but that shouldn't stop you from entering the software engineering industry. In this video, I'll be sharing my advice on what you need to do to have a successful start of your software engineering career. So we have speculated for a long time that entry-level tech jobs are going to be decreasing, and now we, we finally have the actual data on it. Based on recent report conducted by SignalFire, entry-level tech jobs drop 50% in big tech and 30% in startups compared to pre-pandemic levels, which is a huge drop. And from 2023 to 2024, the drop was 24.8% in big tech and 10.7% in startups. Especially interesting because the hiring in 2023 was one of the worst years, and then in 2024 it has gotten better. Which brings us to an interesting paradox. The paradox is that you need work experience to get a job, but you need a job to get work experience. This is a classic catch-22 paradox which creates a no-win situation because you need work experience in the first place in order to get a job. But how can you actually get work experience if nobody hires you? The key here is to create opportunities and work yourself and not wait for others to give it to you. Proactivity is key. This was already the case when I first started my career as an engineer more than 10 years ago. As a self-taught engineer without a CS degree, I wouldn't get a full-time engineering role if I hadn't been doing student jobs before that. That got me necessary experience in order to get hired. It was different for new grads 10 years ago. It was way easier for them to get their first role, but this has changed now. No matter if you have a degree or not, you need to proactively search for opportunities and create work yourself. So how to do that? Let's get straight to my top tips next. My first tip is to do freelance projects. Any project will help, but especially if you do projects that will help a business to be better, so you can map your work to actual business outcomes. Start simple and do the first projects for free or for a low, low amount of money. Potentially seek to help your family or friends with creating an app or a website. Then after you do that, get testimonials. And after you have the first few projects finished, it will be much easier to get new clients after, which you can charge for them as well. This creates leverage so that you are not so desperate about getting a new role, because hiring managers, recruiters, they can sense if someone is desperate. And the last thing you want to do is that people think that you really need a role. You want to create an environment where you have choices and you are selecting them, not the other way around. The next tip is to get a student job or internship related to, in some way, to the field that you want to be in. This has helped me a lot, as I mentioned. The student work that you do should at least slightly related to the field that you wish to work in. So if you wish to get a role as a software engineer, you can work as a QA, IT help desk support, system administrator, tech writer, etc. Ideally, you'd get a role where you actually do work as a software engineer, and that should be your goal as well. I would especially recommend working in some sort of a service-based company where you can work on many different projects so you learn a lot from them. This has helped me a lot to level up as an engineer fast. And of course, look for internships, prioritize and plan for them in companies that you potentially love to work with. And then if you get an internship, make sure to make the most out of it, make the most out of the opportunity as much as possible. Let's go to the next one. The next one is build side projects or build a product. You learn a lot more by building than by just learning from tutorials or from doing courses. There is no better way to learn new technologies, concepts, frameworks than building an actual project, especially if you're passionate about a project and you're eager to learn a new technology or get better at it. So why not try building a product and get users? You will learn a lot about all technologies and at the same time about a business and how hard marketing and sales are. And last but not least, try to look for unfair advantage when applying to roles or when you are already in the hiring process. After my first 2 student jobs as an engineer, I started to apply for my first full-time engineering position. I applied to the role that I liked and the first interview went well. I was invited to the second interview. Before that interview, I designed and coded a new website for them. I designed it with Photoshop and built it with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of PHP. They liked it and gave me good feedback. The next day I received an email where they offered me the position. I was really, really happy about it. So my advice is: try to do something to stand out when you apply to the role or when you are already in the hiring process. Try to look for that unfair advantage that will differentiate you from other candidates. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on what should new software engineers do to have many opportunities in 2025. Make sure to share them in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great engineering leader. There are more than 100,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.
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