If I were starting out now…
Welcome to the second post in a subscriber-only series on finding your market, and niche, in the software. In case you missed it, part one was a high-level overview of where we’re at: In this economy?
We’re going to take a slight detour. Just in the middle of this month, Jacob Kaplan-Moss published a warning, Beware tech career advice from old heads. Argh! That describes exactly what I’m doing here. So we’d better take a look.
Jacob writes:
If you’re new to tech – say, less than 5 years in the field – you should take career advice from people who’ve been in the industry more than 10–15 years with enormous skepticism.
More:
…even when people with long careers try to give newcomers advice, while it may be well-intentioned, it’s likely to be useless. If you’re new to tech, ignoring advice from old heads is probably a good idea.
Do go and read the whole thing. It’s not long. It’s great, and I even agree with it.
At the same time, I have four teenage children. The eldest is thinking about university, and what they want to go on to do after that.
The others are coming up fast.
I certainly want to think that I’d some worthwhile guidance to offer them.
So pace Jacob, here are some thought on If I were starting out now. Let’s see if any of my old-man wisdom still makes sense.
I’m making this issue open access, as it wasn’t quite on my agenda, and folks still at school, or just starting out aren’t who I really expect to be subscribed.
Let’s go!
What if there are no jobs?
I live in Spain. Youth unemployment is notoriously high here. The year we moved here, 2011, was marked by the anti-austerity Los Indignados protests that overtook Spanish cities. At the time, youth unemployment in Spain stood at 43.5%. Figures from 2024 put it at 26.5%.
In contrast to some other developed countries, permanent jobs in Spain still come with a good level of benefits and protections. This is worth protecting. But it means that firms have been reluctant to create new openings, and that’s hit younger, less experienced, workers harder.
If you’re starting out in that environment, it’s going to be tough getting started.
At the same time (as I discussed last month) hiring in the tech industry is hard right now, and has been since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you’re looking to break into tech, in particular, currently, it’s going to be tough getting started.
And all the fuss is about LLMs and AI — ChapGPT, Claude, and so on. These tools are often remarkable. You’ve used them, you know. They’re error-prone, sure, but they’re improving fast, and their proponents think they might put us all out of work.
“Has the Decline of Knowledge Work Begun?” asks The New York Times.
“Humans won't be needed ‘for most things’”, says Bill Gates, of all people.
The theme, we’re being told, is that there’s a non-zero possibility that there will hardly be any jobs at all.
I’m sceptical of that. LLMs are getting better, certainly, but I see them augmenting humans, not replacing them.
There’s disruption coming. Jobs will be automated, and so disappear. At the same time, though, new frontiers will be opened, like in any industrial revolution. New opportunities will arise.
Or at least that’s what we need to adopt as a working hypothesis. If all the work really does disappear, we’ve got bigger problems:
Ask yourself this: will fares in self-driving cabs be cheaper? Will subscriptions to vibe-coded SaaS cost less? Will tickets to see model-generated movies be a fraction of the current price?
Or do all these technologies just solve the problem of having to pay people, with no benefit to anyone else except shareholders?
And then ask yourself this: if nobody's getting paid, who's hailing the taxis, using the SaaS and watching the movies?
Society as we know it just doesn’t work if no-one is employed building anything.
If you’re starting out now, it’s going to be tough. Firms are (at the very least) keeping their powder dry, to see how this LLM wave plays out. But you need to act as if it will resolve into one of the optimistic scenarios in the end. Use the new tools. Get good with them. And search for the opportunities that arise.
Bootstrapping experience
If you’re just starting out, the core problem that you face is that you have no experience. You don’t know anything. You can’t do anything. And nothing you can say to the contrary has any credibility at all.
Let’s assume you’re good academically. That’s probably served you in good stead up to now.
Now? Your application is one of a list of hundreds. And what do they all have in common? They’re all good academically. Unless you’ve literally got a PhD, your educational record is more or less the same as everybody out there.
We know you’re good academically. What else do you bring to the table?
What you need is experience.
If you’re not so good academically? Well, all the more so.
Experience trumps education, in more or less the same way that a higher level of education trumps a lower one. If you have an undergraduate university degree, it doesn’t really matter what you did at school. If you have a postgraduate degree, your undergraduate degree suddenly doesn’t really matter. Well, likewise, say you didn’t go to university at all but racked up three years of relevant experience instead. You’re going to stand out against a bunch of fresh-faced new graduates with nothing else to say.
What you need is experience.
It’s a kind of Catch-22: the hiring manager for the junior role is looking for someone with experience, but you need the role to get the experience. So how do you begin?
The challenge is to bootstrap something — enough — to get you that first chance to put a first role on your CV.
This is where internships have always played their role. Sometimes paid or often unpaid, a short posting to give you some exposure, and maybe even a reference to go with it.
In tech, contributions to open-source projects can play a similar role. You get to learn on some of the best code out there. You get to pickup good working practices. You get something you can show off. But again, it’ll be unpaid.
Both internships and open source reinforce existing economic privileges. To get an internship, you likely need a connection, an in. If it’s unpaid, you need to be supported while you’re doing that. If you’re doing open source, again, well, where’s your daily bread coming from? (I’ve talked about these dynamics in the past.)
If you’re privileged, are you duty bound to turn down these opportunities? No, I don’t think so. But do be clear eyed about the advantages you had. Make sure to pay them forward once you’ve found yourself on your feet. You worked hard, sure. But don’t fool yourself that it was all just on merit.
If you don’t have such a leg up, you’ll have to work to do something in the time that you can find. Don’t be shy in pointing out the struggle. Just like your education, what you’re working to put on your CV here is a signal to employers. It says, this person is worth looking at more closely, this person is worth giving a chance. As a hiring manager, am I more impressed by the kid who had it easy, or by the one who had it hard and did it anyway? I can’t see that effort unless you tell me about it.
Internships and open source are just examples. Internships because they’re a standard route, open source because that’s what I do. Within reason, anything can work here. The goal is to show something that allows you to stand out a little from the list of applications. Adapt it to your interests. What is it that you bring? How can you show that?
Two kinds of bad job
Your first job isn’t likely to be ideal. You’re young, you’re learning. You have to take what you can. The hope is that you can use it as a stepping stone to something better.
It doesn’t matter how long you go on, all jobs have got their bad bits — the grind. But even a bad job — if it’s of the OK kind — needs to have a sniff of the goodness in it. It has to give you a taste of where you could be going. It has to offer you growth.
There are plenty of jobs which don’t. Jobs which are just dead ends. These you might have to do, to pay the bills. But you need to be looking for your way out, your route to something better.
It’s never totally a loss. That you can turn up and do the yards, and show that you can, is itself a signal to an employer. But, yeah, when you can, move on.
And then there are jobs which are genuinely harmful, where the working environment is toxic. It can be difficult to spot these. Actual abuse is a thing. Often, though, it’s more subtle. Extracting extra work without compensation, or rest, is a common one. You’re young. You want to move on, so you’re encouraged to give your all. But somehow the rewards never quite come.
Look at how the company treats its people. Are the old-hands happy? Do they stick around? What’s the discussion at lunch? Do people talk about “office politics” a lot. These are just (possible) clues: it’s difficult to pin down. Your task is to get a feel for whether the company is really looking out for you, or whether it’s essentially a sweatshop. If it’s the latter, again, you need to think about moving on.
“But it’s a good opportunity”
No, it’s not. It just looks like it. Trust me. There are plenty of good companies out there. Maybe they’re difficult to find, but if you’re not at one, be looking, and be looking after yourself whilst you’re at it.
Look outside of tech
I’ve long-advocated to look outside the tech bubble when thinking about your career. Hiring in tech is overly cyclical, and technical skills are much in demand in the rest of the economy.
If you’re really into tech, then sure — but if tech is just something you have a knack for, look around at what else you’re interested in. Possibly, there’s a role there?
What are entry-level automation, web, or data science skills in tech, go a long way for folks that don’t have them. If you’ve got technical skills (LLM boosted ones all the more) you can potentially find a spot on a team that gets you the something on your CV that gets you the opening that follows.
Who knows, but don’t think programming means tech is your only option.
Sweat the details
Then, finally, have a care for what you do. Go the extra mile. Do it well. Sweat the details as they say.
There are two parts here. One, as an oldie, I’d tell you that this is where there true reward lies. The joy of the craft, the true satisfaction, the self realisation is down is the minutiae that you engaged with and took the time to do properly. That’s where real life happens. It’s where you get to touch grass.
But who cares what an oldie thinks? That was Jacob’s point at the beginning. Ignore that.
Much more is that, paying attention to the details is what makes your work stand out. It’s what gets you noticed.
Remember those piles of identical job applications? You needed something for yours to stand out.
Well, it’s the same in the workplace. Everyone is turning out loads of the same stuff. (Software in my case.) Attention to detail, and the quality of work that comes from it, is what gets you noticed. It’s that extra bit that you put in that makes your work stand out from the mass. It’s from that that opportunities arise.
Or, certainly, it used to work that way. I’m betting it still does. So that’s my advice. Hopefully, some of it's useful.