“If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a software engineering job?”
The title of this post was a trending Quora question, with popular responses boiling down to “it’s not, the unemployment rate is 3.6%,” “there are too many developers and not enough engineers,” and “it’s a natural consequence of microeconomic theory.” It might be useful to elaborate on the last one, but I thought it would be a lot more fun to take a look at the absolute most popular answer:
“I was unemployed for many months. Waited hoping one day someone will hire me without requiring me to white-boarding. Yep it is worse than water-boarding.
After 7 months I realized — no other choice. Now I can white board in my sleep. Companies are in line to talk to me. They are ready to send flowers and even ready to send drivers to pick me up.
Nothing changed”
— Aravind Akshan, Engineer Manager at [UNDISCLOSED]
Instead of providing a cliche response about the difference between developers and engineers, this legend pokes fun at the entire interviewing process. If you expand the other threads in this post, you will see a few arguments about whether or not the software engineer interviewing process is flawed.
In all seriousness, though, the response about economics is worth discussing. Job pay is heavily influenced by supply and demand. While there is a very high demand for software engineers, there are now 4.4 million software developers in the United States alone [Edited. The original sentence said “4.4 million software engineers”]. In other words, software engineers are not extremely rare, and a degree in computer science is not the golden ticket some people may expect. I think the popularity of computer science and the surge of coding bootcamps are a testament to how accepted this has become as a field.
Other possible reasons one may find it difficult to find a software engineering job:
At most companies I have interviewed with, it takes at least three interviews to get a job. This is elaborated on pretty well here, in an article by the BBC
Technical coding interviews are, for lack of a better description, “their own game.” You typically get between 30 minutes to an hour to solve a coding question that assesses your understanding of data structures and algorithms. Regardless of whether you think this is a good test, supporters and critics alike would agree that this is not what you actually do in the field — it’s just a test
Software is BROAD. You can be a frontend developer turning wireframes into a web application. You can be a backend engineer who works very closely with hardware. You can work at a company that cures cancer. You can work at a company that causes cancer. There is an incredible number of fields and roles you may have, and so we face the same
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