Transcription
You are currently learning to program and want to have your first job as a Developer. But everywhere you read the same sentence on the internet. Yes, Junior Developers are no longer being hired, and even on the job market, if you look at job portals, you will hardly find any job advertisements for Junior Developers. But the position of Junior Developer has not disappeared. It has changed its requirements. Companies naturally continue to look for people at the beginning of their careers. They just no longer look for people who start from scratch. And precisely this difference decides whether you will have your first job in IT in 12 months or 300 rejections. The old rule was relatively simple. Yes, you complete an apprenticeship or a degree, apply for a position as a Junior Developer, get it, are trained for 6 months, do small tasks, have a Senior who oversees it, and then after 6 to 12 months at the company, you eventually become a capable member of the team. This deal is gone now. This is not because companies have all become evil, but because these small tasks are gone. And these small tasks and tickets were the training ground for Juniors. In this video, I want to show you three things. First, what really happened to junior positions. Second, how you can gain experience even without being employed. And third, what companies actually ask for in job interviews today. Let's start with what everyone misunderstands. It's not the junior position that was cut, but the training period. Look at the job advertisements. The title says Junior. Yes, but two or three lines later it says, we are looking for someone with two to three years of professional experience. This seems absurd at first. Yes, how am I supposed to find a job if all entry-level jobs already require professional experience? But it's not that absurd if you understand why companies write that and what's behind it. In the past, the work of junior developers was clearly defined. Yes, I still remember that from my first job. Yes, you were given smaller tickets and tasks. Yes, fix a small bug, add a small form, maybe adjust the appearance of a certain sub-page, write tests, catch up on documentation, that kind of thing. So, precisely these tasks and the work that had to be done, that someone who knows a little bit had to do, but which was not critical. Yes, so if this small bug, which appears on the 17th sub-page of the app, is not fixed for two weeks, then it's not that tragic. Yes, it would be nice if it were done, but it's not that big of a deal. Precisely these tasks are now handled by AI in many companies, and not in two weeks within the entire sprint, but in just a few minutes, and thus this entire entry-level loop, which was intended for Juniors, is eliminated. Yes, companies have not stopped hiring and wanting new people and career starters. Yes, every company needs new talent. The system doesn't work at all if you don't hire new talent, but companies no longer want to pay for a 6-month training period, given that these technologies exist. For you, this also means specifically: stop writing your applications like a plea. Yes, sentences like "I'm looking for a chance to finally prove myself or something like that." Yes, that doesn't work anymore because it's a deal that companies no longer want. Instead, turn it around, show what you can already do, and sell to companies that you are already a valuable developer and can start directly with your experience in the team. Yes, that they don't have to finance you for another six months while you learn. If you write something like "I have developed a booking app that is used in a colleague's physiotherapy practice and handles all the bookings there," yes, that beats 1000 cover letters where you beg for so much motivation, attention, and chances. This works because it reduces the company's risk. Yes, that's why it's important. Hiring is always a big risk for companies too. It's not always just about sympathy, but also simply about minimizing risk. That's why Germany is also a country where degrees are still very important. Yes, if someone with a doctorate sits there, for example, then if you hire them as an HR person, you can shift the blame away from yourself, you can say, well, but he has a doctorate, I couldn't have known he wouldn't be good at the job, he's fully educated, right? This is a bit like the logic behind why all these management consultants exist, by the way. Yes, so if a DAX corporation hires McKinsey for 10 million and they lead the way in a decision, so to speak, and then simply say, well, McKinsey told me so, then they can somewhat absolve themselves of blame, and that's sometimes what it's about in hiring, especially in large corporations. Yes, that means companies no longer want to take such a risk, but they want to make the safe bet. So, someone where they know, okay, we're hiring them, and they won't cause problems, and they can start working immediately. Let's move on to my next point, namely that experience is not the same as being employed. This is a misconception that many beginners, especially career changers, make at the beginning. Yes, people believe that experience for the resume only arises when you are also paid for it with an employment contract and all the trimmings. But that's not true. You can also gain experience outside of an employment relationship. Yes, and companies see that when you do projects where you have solved real problems, then that is valuable experience in software development. It doesn't matter if there's an employment contract attached to it or not. And believe me, I can tell you from my own experience, there are developers who have worked for 10 years on paper as employed developers, but have never lifted a finger outside of their working hours, and they are by no means as qualified as someone who has simply gone all out for one or two years in their free time. Yes, and that's also the beauty of it, that's the good news in this video. You can create experience without being employed as a developer. What's important here is that you implement projects, and it's very important that you know the difference between real projects and tutorials. Typing out some To-Do app from a tutorial doesn't count on the job market. Not because the project itself is bad, yes, but because you have simply copied a tutorial, and that doesn't prove that you can do anything. Yes, experience arises when you implement projects that actually solve real problems and where you use your own brain. So, not projects that you program from tutorials, but projects that you truly think through, plan, and then implement and program yourself. Yes, here are three short ways that work to get such projects. For example, a project with real benefit. You can choose a small business in your city, for example, that needs something, for example, a website or small software, some kind of tool. Yes, it can be a craft business, a hairdresser, a restaurant. Yes, maybe you know someone through friends or family who runs a small business, and you could ask them and just see if you can implement a small project there. Yes, it's best to do it for free or for a small fee. I would really not focus on getting rich with it, yes, but do it for your portfolio. It might sound unspectacular to have made a website for a hair salon, but that's real work experience in the field that no one can take away from you. Yes, and that's 1000 times more valuable than having copied a website from a tutorial. Yes, what's important is that you actually put the whole thing online and keep it running so that you can show it to companies in potential applications. The second way you could go is Open Source. Yes, by that I don't mean, as some others recommend, that you go to some open-source repos and fix typos in the README file just to be listed as a contributor on Gitab, but I mean, choose a tool that you actually use. Yes, it doesn't have to be some super cracked, really crazy library, but it can also simply be a mod for a computer game or something that you like to use in your everyday life, yes, if you're a bit familiar with it, and there you can then contribute, yes, and there you will also learn things that you really need on the job, yes, reading and understanding code from other people, working in a team, communicating, and also actually finding solutions for real problems. Yes, so if you can tell in a job interview that you have a package, for example, for a video game, some mod that you installed for GTA or Minecraft or something, and there was a bug or a feature that you were missing, and then you implemented it, yes, then that's a cool story, then you can use it, and it also makes an impression on employers. Or, and this is also the most underestimated way, you could go the route through your old profession. Yes, that's the most underestimated lever of all, and that's what we always do with our participants in our further training. As a final project, we recommend looking at your current old job, if you come from nursing, logistics, retail, sales, wherever, to see which processes in our daily work are simply very tedious and annoying and where time could be saved. And then you can go and set up a small project where you automate, optimize, better represent, simplify, save time, and so on and so forth these work processes. Yes, for example, the participants in our further training regularly do something like this. Yes, for example, one who works in a shift system in production has written a program for reporting errors from production machines, because until now it was always done verbally through some writings that you then put into some letterboxes or communicated via WhatsApp groups. And now he has written a central system. Yes, it's simple software. Just a central system, like a kind of Kanban board, where problems can be reported, where the shift leader can also look at it directly, where you can assign different statuses depending on whether the problem has already been seen, worked on, and so on. Yes, and this solves a real problem that occurred in daily work, and that is worth its weight in gold for applications. Yes, and that is also worth more than any certificate, because it proves unequivocally that you are capable of identifying problems in the real world, translating them into technical requirements, and then implementing them cleanly. Yes, so the point is not that you should do a lot of projects. So, you should do projects, of course, but it's not about the project itself, but about getting real problems solved. And these problems then provide you with the proof, yes, this proof that companies want to see. And this proof that you can solve real problems, yes, that's what companies want to see. And I've shown you a few ways. You can start directly tomorrow, or preferably right after this video is over, to collect this proof by implementing your own projects that solve real problems. Let's move on to what companies actually test and want to see in job interviews. In the past, the question might have been, can you write this and that function here or solve this and that task? Today, the question might look more like this: Can you also recognize where the problem lies with the help of AI? Look at the AI-generated code and tell us what it does, what it means, where the problem lies. Writing code itself has become cheap, yes, replaceable. The AI can do that. Yes, it's no longer about writing code in IT, in software development, but about understanding the code, evaluating it, and finding solutions that practically solve problems. Yes, so as a little insider tip for preparing for job interviews, you can practice three things specifically. First, reading code. Take foreign code specifically or have the AI generate code and try to read it, understand it, and then explain aloud what it does. Line by line. This might feel unproductive at first, but believe me, it's the fastest way to true understanding. If you read foreign code line by line and explain why it's written that way and what it does, what its purpose is. Second, debugging. Yes, when something is broken, you usually only realize how deep your understanding actually is. And I would really recommend that you don't always do everything with AI, yes, especially for practice. Please learn to find and solve errors yourself, debugging. Yes, I notice this so strongly today, because everyone always runs directly to ChatGPT or Claude. This problem-solving ability is completely lost. Yes, as they say, brain rot. Yes, the brain rots a bit through AI because you no longer go looking for the error yourself, so to speak, yes, try to find and fix the error. Leave the AI out for now, try to narrow down the problem with your own means. Try to find a solution for it, test different approaches, yes, and that will make you truly valuable. And third, using AI as a tool rather than an answer machine, yes, or an all-encompassing miracle cure. Feel free to let the AI write code. Let the AI discuss technical topics with you. Yes, but never let the AI take over something in your project that you don't understand. Yes, that's a very, very simple rule of thumb. If the AI produces code or a solution that you yourself couldn't explain or defend if someone critically questioned you why you did it that way, then don't incorporate it into your project. Yes, it's an integral part of the job as a software developer to explain to other developers in the team why you wrote the code that way and why you didn't solve it differently, for example. And if you can't do that because the AI did everything, then it's worthless and even detrimental, yes, because you damage the code quality and thus the long-term maintainability of the application. But that's also good news about this whole topic. The bar is no longer, yes, how much syntax you have memorized and how many great terms you know, but how well you can think and solve problems. And that's the beauty of it, you can learn that relatively well, and for that, it doesn't matter if you start learning to program at 17 or at 47, because you can learn that. So, let's summarize. The classic Junior Developer has largely disappeared. This is not because there is no longer a need for new talent in the industry, but because these entry-level opportunities have disappeared, and companies are simply no longer willing to pay salaries for months for people who provide little practical benefit. So, you have to come to the jobs with experience. And the beauty of it is that you can build up this experience even without having a job, by building real projects with real benefits that solve real problems. Use your old profession as an advantage, not a disadvantage, because then you are not applying as someone who is begging for a chance, but you are applying as someone who can truly deliver and offers added value to the company. This is precisely what our further training programs at Defkarriere are geared towards, so that you learn in a practical way exactly what you need to get into the industry and work in software teams. We specialize precisely in training career changers, i.e., people who do not come from a formal IT background, to enter the IT field. We primarily focus on software developers. With us, you can learn front-end, back-end, and full-stack software development, also together with AI tools, so that you can then start directly in the job. Our further training can be completed completely online and flexibly in terms of time, either alongside your job or you can also learn full-time. This can also be subsidized through the employment agency, for example. If this is interesting for you and you would like more information, you can register with us for a free initial consultation. Yes, go to our website www.defriere.de. Then enter your contact details there. We'll have a phone call, look at your situation, see if a change to IT is generally an option for you, and then see if we can offer you a place in our further training. If you want to learn more about learning to program and a career in IT, then click on the video that YouTube shows you.