As someone who graduated during covid, I envy people who are 2~3 years older than me
These 2~3 years differences separated us with <2YOE from you lucky folks: - offer tanked due to last years crash - easier targets for layoffs - even when you folks lose jobs, those >5YOE will always put your names first during recruiting - we never get to experience the precovid campus life - as a ROW immigrant, we have green card backlogs now
You will be fine. Hang in there
The 2016-18 batch envies the 2010-12 batch, who came just in time to get green card. 2016-18 batch will not get green card in their lifetime. So this never stops.
Itโs only going to get harder and more saturated. Graduates five years from now will envy you
so many people flooding the SWE market. it's gonna be way more competitive to even qualify for a job
For real, new interview questions will ask us to design, implement, and deploy the entire product that the company is working on and then they'll ask us to also solve 10 leetcode hards with an additional theoretical system design interview. All to be done in an hour or else you're just not a good dev ๐ค
ROW has a queue now? How long?
You are not wrong. Anyone who was hired in 2016-2018 caught the crazy bull market. But I would also argue it has never been easier to get into FAANG than the last two years.
Get in line, this is how each person feels about the generation before them lol I graduated in 2018 and envy the people who graduated a few years before me and they're the same way with people who graduated before them.
Not necessarily. I graduated in 2005. The people a few years before me ended up in the bleak post DotCom crash years and the people a few years after me ended up in the 2008 recession. Judging by what people claim on blind, the folks coming into the market in that 2016-2018 period were exceptionally lucky. They rode that tech boom. Otherwise you wouldnโt see all these 3-5 yoe folks claiming salaries into the half million range. In 2005, from Purdue (a top engineering university) that average starting salaries were 50 to 60k. Thatโs equivalent to the $80k range now. No, that batch of grads in the few years before COVID (in tech) have probably graduated into an unprecedentedly great job market that hasnโt been seen since the post WWII boom. Unfortunately, that only seems to have really applied to tech and even then a specific subset of tech at that.
I graduated around that time. I do appreciate my college experience not being killed by COVID. Although monetarily I think people who were working in tech and investing from 2010-2021 could've retired rich with that bull market. Coming in at the end of it isn't optimal.
In span of 20 years, it can happen many times. You are already resilient now and better than others. Don't worry about these things. Life is always like that
- I graduated a little after the dot com bubble had burst (with the post-9/11 slump added for good measure) - Just when things started to go ok for me, 2008 happened. Got wiped out - Was too dumb to join "big tech" in 2010-2012 when I could have - Still have a multi 7-figure net worth 2023 is nothing. Just keep investing in yourself and striving for self-improvement. You'll see.
@meta experience is subjective. I see fresh grads getting 400k I have never imagined such salaries during my graduation tbh lol ๐