The Ultimate Guide to Job Hunting for New Grad Software Engineers

So you just graduated with a 4-year computer science degree, or you are soon to graduate with one.

Congratulations!

However, unless you live under a rock, you’re probably more concerned than you are excited to enter this unstable tech job market.

We had record layoffs last year, and more layoffs this year, everyone’s worried about AI because it writes a lot of code now, and you are a bit concerned that your 4 years of hard work may have been for nothing but now a debt to pay.

Did you just completely waste your money?

Did you choose the wrong career?

This is a question I’ve seen more and more frequently in my YouTube comments.

So in this article, I’m not only going to argue that you did NOT waste your money, but I’m going to give you, from my almost 10 years of experience in the industry, some guidelines to help you find success and to rekindle that excitement in starting your career in tech.

This doom and gloom that hovers over your head is surface-level thinking. The tactics that worked for your parents in their day, don’t work now. Many things have changed and your way of thinking must change as well.

You need to have a much BIGGER concept of the opportunity that lies ahead and you need to layoff-proof yourself in the process.

So let me give you 6 tips. And these are going to fan out a bit from narrow to wide.

Six Tips On Job Hunting for New Grad Software Engineers

1. The Starting Point

Before we get to opportunity, we need to discuss humility.

You see the big salaries. You see the big titles. You see all the people that don’t have the degree you have and you were the one that put in the work. And you think the industry owes you a job.

Well, it doesn’t. You are a newbie in the industry. You have little to no real-world experience.

So take this pride that you may have and swallow it for a while.

This means, that to get your foot in the door, take what you can get from the outset.

If they only pay you $50,000 at your first job, take it and work it for a year.

Suppose it’s a paid internship. Take it and work extra hard to be amazing and they may just hire you on.

The biggest issue I see with many new grads is they have outlandish expectations. They’ve spent 4 years debating with other students, they have new clicky keyboards and 3D printing machines, and they think they know all the workings of the computer world. And they are often feisty and want to correct everyone because their professor laid it out this way or that way, and everyone else just isn’t thinking as technically as them.

And often you may be right.

But this isn’t how you enter the industry. You enter the industry more with your ears open and mouth closed. You do good work. And you try and soak in everything your mid and senior-level coworkers are doing.

They have that real experience that you NEED to succeed.

So be humble. Don’t expect 6 figures. Take what you can get to get some experience. And soak up the knowledge along the way.

2. Introduce yourself to the industry

This is one step in how you become what I call “unlayoffable.” You get on X, post a couple of posts per day and reply to like 10 people a day. Every day. And cross-post these on LinkedIn.

You subscribe to a newsletter (may I suggest the Travis Media newsletter) so that you are fed the latest updates happening in this industry.

This gives you the ability to be IN the discussions going on.

Then, start to form opinions.

And you do this not only by reading but by writing regularly.

Just go and buy a 99c notebook.

Writing helps you form thoughts and map together different facts, and you begin to form opinions that you can back up.

Then you share them.

Start writing on Substack or Medium, not in hopes that you’ll get paid for it, but to get your name and your views out there.

Again, take the content, break it down, and share it on X. Force people to see your profile picture multiple times a day.

Pop up everywhere so that you start to stand out when people see it. And don’t change the profile picture for a long time.

And over time become a person people look to for perspective in this field. Because when people do that, recruiters see it. And since people are seeing you daily, your network begins to grow. People begin to see that you know what you are talking about. They look for your perspective.

THEN… if you get laid off, you have this network of people who can “virtually vouch” for you, and many more who would rally to scoop you up into their company if they could.

The point here is to “not be a nobody in tech.” I have a whole video on that, link above, but you want to form opinions with skills to back them up.

And since you are young, you have many years to do this, many years to become more and more valuable and marketable in this industry.

3. Build the legos

Your degree helped you generalize. You learned data structures, algorithms, computer hardware, a little coding, math, science, and all that.

But it’s like a bunch of Legos poured out on the floor. It’s not a model Batman car or Star Wars ship, it’s a mess! These skills you’ve learned are not immediately valuable in the real world because when you start working with teams and in the cloud and writing scripts and debugging and trying to locate a memory leak and set up some Windows servers, it’s a whole different ballgame.

Many people say their degree didn’t prepare them AT ALL for what they faced in their first tech job.

However, you DID learn the right things. The things non-traditional devs would have LOVED to have learned.

But you need to learn to apply these concepts to real-world problems. And this takes time.

But what I’m getting at here is you need to work to become a good generalist. One who can solve problems, who can fix critical errors when they arise, who can deploy Windows and Linux machines in the same day, who can write scripts to automate monotonous tasks, a technically dependable person.

Businesses LOVE good generalists. Software engineers, they can trust to solve any problem. Software engineers that can take the technical and perform the practical with it.

You have this knowledge but you haven’t developed it yet. It takes time in the real world. But it should be sought after as fast as possible.

4. Glue the legos

Now that you are a good generalist. You can take a technology you’re not familiar with and figure it out (because it’s all somewhat the same under the hood). Now’s a good idea to add in, note that I’m adding not replacing, a specialization.

There is not a dichotomy between the two.

It isn’t an either/or.

It’s an and.

Be a great generalist with a particular specialization.

Love JavaScript? Become an expert in the language and one framework like React/Next.js.

Love C#? Become a .NET expert.

Love IoT, or Internet of Things, then become an expert in that field and with that tooling.

Generalization will get you jobs all over the place. Being a specialist, an expert, the go-to guy in a particular thing, puts the ball in your court throughout your career.

Now a lot of people say this gets boring working with the same specialty all the time. I get it. But you don’t have to stay a specialist in the same thing forever. Specialize in something else while you are exercising your specialization at your job.

And this leads me to the next point.

5. Your career is fluid

If you are 21, or 22, fresh out of college you have 30 - 40 years ahead of you. if you don’t “prefer” your first job, it’s okay. It’s just your first year.

And if in 5 years you are tired of programming and your passion is more in system administration, or project management, then make the moves to shift into that space.

And if in 5 more years you are sick of systems and love machine learning, then make the moves to shift into that space.

The point here is that your career SHOULD be a fluid career. Why? Because tech is a HUGE space.

Many project managers that I worked with have a background in programming. They are amazing in something they no longer do. They did it “the first decade of their career out of college.” They weren’t always what they are.

And you don’t have to always be what you are.

In fact, to stay fulfilled and satisfied throughout a lifetime, it is good and healthy to shift into different roles.

So every couple years or so, do a self-assessment to see if you are where you want to be. Is what you do fulfilling? If not, make some plans to shift into a different area of tech that excites you more in that season.

6. Why the opportunity is so vast

Okay, you may be like, “Hey Travis, you didn’t really answer the premise you gave us at the beginning of the video. I’m fresh out of college and I am worried about my career and if I made a mistake.”

What about this?

Let’s talk about it.

You are entering a tough market. But it’s not because it’s a bad industry. It’s because we’ve had a bad economy for a few years now and we’re digging ourselves out of the hole we created.

This isn’t new. It is NOT the first time this has happened by any means. It’s cyclical.

So first, you are NOT in a dying industry.

Second, you ARE entering an AI boom. AI can write code. AI can be a companion to a senior dev such that they no longer need you. And AI may be the reason why jobs aren’t coming back as fast as they are in tech.

This is a reality.

But let’s take a step back overall and look at the landscape.

EVERYTHING we do EVERY DAY is tech. Everything that exists all around you is created by people with your skillset.

The cars, the computers at the gas pumps, the cloud, web apps, your phone, your bank, your hosting service, your low code app, your watch, EVERYTHING.

So you’re now in a field where you have unlocked the skillset behind producing, maintaining, and creating EVERYTHING, and EVERYTHING going forward.

Now let’s say AI can do the technical of 20% of this. You either see this as a threat, or you see this as 20% of developers can now innovate on brand new, cutting edge, never really thought of, technology. And this new technology now demands people with YOUR skillset to run it.

That’s actually AI CREATING more jobs and opportunities.

If AI takes the job of the call center clerk, the bank teller, or the cashier, that’s one thing. These jobs are monotonous and no one really likes to do that work anyway.

But out of all the things AI can replace, do you think it can easily replace the field of workers that it depends on to exist?

And if for some reason it did, would those workers not then look to innovate into new frontiers now that “all that is out the way?”

Conclusion

What I’m trying to tell you is that you are in the very industry of future innovation.

Stop worrying about AI taking that legacy Java role that you hate so much anyway. Instead, think bigger into all the opportunities we have in tech today. None of this exists because of AI. It exists because of you and me.

AI just showed up at the middle of the game like, hey I’m ready to play.

You see, you see yourself as a person who writes code. That’s small. That’s a small percentage of what you do. You are a problem solver, an innovator, a persuader, a conveyor of technical to simple. Tech isn’t getting sucked up by AI. Tech is blowing up because of AI. And you are now in an industry, with a skillset, to come alongside of a field that is “blowing up!”

That’s exciting.

I’d love to hear what you think below.