How to Get a Tech Job

The job market a mess right now. For juniors in tech, it’s especially bad. This is mainly due to economic uncertainty, which AI is certainly not helping with.

When deciding what to study or pursue, generally, I see two types of people, ones that ask, “should I do X, should I study Y” and ones that are doing X, Y and even Z. It is by virtue of this uncertainty that signals that you haven’t found your path, and you should keep exploring. So, my first piece of advice is to keep educating yourself. However, don’t commit to courses costing $1000’s, use cheap online courses on Coursera or deeplearning.ai. Get into a habit of spending 1 or 2 days a week progressing these courses. You will get to a point where you have an understanding deep and wide enough that additional courses won’t seem like a good use of time.

The next thing you need to understand is what an employer is looking for in a junior role. In the past, it was “an extra set of hands”, initially, then after investing hours of mentorship and teaching a “self-sufficient worker”. Now, AI is that extra set of hands, and teaching/mentorship is seen lost productivity (short-sighted I know). So, this means employers are looking for juniors who are self-sufficient, need minimal teaching/mentorship and leverage AI to get things done. Unfortunately, this is not what university prepares you for, and even some mid-career employees don’t fit this bill.

The question now shifts to: How do you become self-sufficient without getting a job?

I see two ways:

1.       Stay at university. Academic staff are often extremely knowledgeable in their domains and hungry for help with their research. Pick your favourite academic, offer to work as a research assistant during the holidays, ask if they can recommend any Master’s or PhD projects that you could do. Better yet, find the most prestigious schools in your domain and email the academics there. At the successful completion of a PhD you should be able to leapfrog the “junior vs AI” nonsense and additionally your ceiling has increased due to the depth in your knowledge. A word of warning though, it is a difficult road and could take 3-5 years.

2.       Build, build, build. Find former classmates who also can’t find jobs or fly solo. Make an AWS account and start making fun products end-to-end. It doesn’t matter if they’re useless or done a million times before. Teach yourself the full stack. Use YouTube, Medium, Coursera resources, commit to your public GitHub repo, host the products on Cloudflare and showcase them in your job interviews. Make sure you understand the fundamentals of what you’ve done and how it would scale in an enterprise environment. If this prospect sounds daunting, learn how to use Cursor, GitHub Copilot or Claude Code.

The alternative is to keep playing job roulette, applying for hundreds of entry-level roles, interview for 5% of them, and pray they call your number.

8 September 2025