I got a Software Engineering Job in the WORST job market (2024)

First off, I want to give a thank you to all the kind words that people have given me since I announced on YouTube and public space that I lost my job. Yeah, there are a few trolls, but there are a lot of kind people out there. But just as the title and thumbnail suggests, I found a job. I'm no longer laid off. And in this video, I want to talk about how I found that job and my process of finding a job after being laid off in 2024. Now, 2024 is like one of the hardest job markets that a lot of people have seen in a very long time. And I not only want to tell you how I found my job, but I want to give you actionable advice so that I can help others in similar situations try to find their own job as well. Now, my job is specific to software engineering, but the advice I'm about to give has nothing to do with software engineering. It basically helps anyone who's actually looking for work. Now, if I just come out and tell you how I found this job, it's not going to be very helpful. It's kind of like if someone asked you, what is Lord of the Rings about? And I just said, well, it's about a couple of dudes and a weird friend, and then they throw some jewelry into a volcano. It's not going to be very helpful and you're not going to be able to do much with that description. So I'm not going to give you a lot of context and background information for you to understand what are the best ways that I found my job and how you can also follow suit in the same way. Okay, so ever since I announced that I lost my job, I have responded to every single comment on all the videos that I talked about being laid off. And I've noticed that a lot of people have made the comparison to like how 2024 feels to the 2008 financial crisis, the dot com bubble. Now, that makes a lot of sense to me because when I graduated college, as a 23 year old idiot that can barely learn how to code, I graduated in 2008. So that means I graduated right into the heat of everyone getting laid off in 2008. I can relate to a lot of people that are trying to find and get into this industry, and also try to find jobs at this time in their careers, because I had to go through the same thing. So back in 2008, I basically had no professional experience coding, I had no internships, and my grades weren't great either. But I had to figure something out as far as working because I had $100,000 in student debt, and I needed to figure things out fast. So when I graduated college, I did not have a professional network. I didn't even know what that was. And all I could do was continue to work my bartending job for 60 hour weeks and try to figure out some way to get an interview for someone to give me a job as a computer programmer. So I ended up finding one of those jobs, but it only took a high school diploma, it did not require a college degree, even though I had one. It was as a software technician for a pretty big company for $40,000 a year. But I was more than excited to grab it because I needed the experience and I needed to get a job right away. Now, the only way I found this job was by a strange connection. When I was bartending, one of my bartender friends, her husband works for that company. And I knew that he was a computer programmer himself. And I just love to talk to him about his job and what he's doing and how he manages his coders. And I was just really fascinated about the field and wanted to learn from him. So if we look over to the whiteboard, this is the very beginning of my professional network. I had one connection, it was a little indirect, but one connection to a real person in the industry. And when I got a referral from that person, that's how I got the job. That's how I found my way into the industry. So as this job that I was overqualified for, I still had to slug it out for two whole years of doing as much work as I can. And also just trying to talk to people, anyone who actually was a software engineer and learn about what they do, what challenges they run into. I was just super fascinated and super interested in what everyone else was doing. So I tried to talk to as many people as I could. And because I didn't know anything about white collar America, that's how I learned the ropes. That's how I learned how things work as an engineer and working in an office environment. I had to figure this out my own because like my mom was a nurse and my dad was a mailman. So they couldn't tell me about the intricacies of getting a promotion. They just, they just did the work. And I just was on my own as trying to figure out how to do this. And so I thought what better way is to try to, to talk to as many people as I can and see how to progress in this kind of career path. So this is my first lesson. My first lesson is that this is how you start building a professional network. I thought I was just being a young, annoying dude, asking questions. It turns out the people I talked to, the people I tried to help, the people I tried to like create a connection with, I was creating a real connection in a professional network. These are people that I was adding to my graph. And turns out that's all networking is. It's talking to like-minded people, learning about them, and trying to help them. And then maybe sometime they might help you back. It doesn't matter, but the idea is that you're just trying to connect and talk to people. And that's how you create a network. That's how you're adding nodes to this giant network. You may have a good idea where I'm going with this, but I'm going to still walk through it so I can tell you about the whole story. So let's go ahead and jump into lesson number two. So for the next like 10 years or so, I just kept doing this. I kept on trying to talk to people about what they do and what they build and what they like. And sure, I probably annoyed a bunch of people, but I also like enjoyed trying to learn and expand and figure out what you can do in software engineering because that's one of the great things about this industry is that you can do a lot. You can go into different fields, you can build crazy things and simple things and fancy and shiny things. It's very versatile. But what I found was very intriguing is that when I ran into other people that thought like me, that had the same enthusiasm with learning about other people's careers and learning about who knows who and how the connections all work. And I found out later that these kind of people that were very intrigued and try to connect with as many people as possible, whether it's at a genuine curiosity or just trying to expand and grow their career, those people are called super connectors. Now, if you've read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks a lot about super connectors. So when it comes to social media, when it comes to like any sort of network at all, or trying to like have anything move, expand and grow, super connectors are the most valuable like key parts of any sort of network because they connect to many more different nodes. And if you have these kind of super connectors in your network, then you're one step removed from an even wider network that's outside of your already growing network. There's no real shame or grossness about trying to be a super connector or one that's networking well. All it really boils down to is wanting to know more about your career and other people in your career and just other like-minded people so that you can also talk to them, grow with them, work with them, help them out, make connections yourself. Networking does not have to be, and it rarely is, a transactional thing where like if I talk to you and I help you, I'm expecting something on the other side. It's more about just expanding, being curious, and trying to build a relationship, whether that's a friendship or professional relationship. It's kind of one in the same in some scenarios where you have a like-minded industry and you are trying to grow and expand that network. So as you look at the graph that I'm drawing here, it becomes a little bit more interesting because not all nodes are the same. They're not treated the same. So the third lesson in this story is that I'm talking about super connectors and just normal people that you run into, colleagues that you have worked with, and connections in your professional node. Now there's a different kind of super connector, and here's the thing that might break your brain a little bit, is that a super connector does not have to be a person. A super connector could also be an organization, and organizations are probably just as valuable, if not more valuable, than kind of a super connector. Now an organization can be a meetup group. It can be a job or a company that you used to work for. It could be a startup. It could be a coding group, something that you build with your friends and it just like turns into like more of a community. Like these things, even though they are not a real person, like if you are associated with that company, with that group, that is also a good connection base in your professional network. Like these themselves are super connector nodes. Organizations are just like people that are super connectors, but they're just branched out more and they don't really have a, you know, a solid base. They're more distributed. So let's go ahead and like drive this point home. Now if we're looking at this graph right here, this final graph, this is more kind of an abstract representation of my actual professional network. You'll notice that, you know, there's the regular people that I used to work with. There's also some super connectors, some people that are very social and very much connected to a lot of different people in the industry. But you also notice that there are multiple organizations and these organizations that I like to connect with are agencies like independent contractors and consultancies who also freelance and do other jobs for different companies. So this is where things get even more interesting is that the super connections of these like agencies and these consultancies, these also have their own connections to other super connector nodes. They are connected to some client companies that they have for other organizations that they're doing work for. They have their own staff of people who freelance and work with a bunch of people and therefore have a bunch of connections themselves. So the question still remains on how I found my job. Now, when I found out that I got laid off, I reached out to a couple people in my network. Now, I always, even when I'm fully employed, I always keep my network warm, which is basically saying I reach out to people that I haven't talked to in a while and to say, hey, how you doing? How is life? What kind of work you up to? That's cool. Oh, you need some help. And then I try to help people when I can, even when I'm not looking for work. So in the moment that I did lose my job, I reached out to some people that I haven't talked to in a while and some other consultancies that I haven't worked with and said, hey, by the way, how's your workload? How are things going? And what turns out to be is that when I talked to a consultancy that I used to work for, they said, wow, what great timing. We just had a client of ours, so an organization, reach out to the consultancy that now the consultancy is talking to me about filling that spot so I can help with the project that they are trying to staff up so that the consultancy doesn't have to have all on staff so I can subcontract under the consultancy. The consultancy goes into the big company, the big organization. Now, that's some crazy, like abstract thought about how I find work, but that's how I found my job is because I was able to connect to these organizations and consultancies and agencies and companies that I have somewhat of a relationship with and said, how can I help? And it turns out they did have some openings and they were able to fill it really quickly because they've already worked with me in the past and they wanted to have some more work. Now, I wanted to go through this whole story because I don't want people to get discouraged if they don't have, if they haven't prioritized networking or like even known how to professionally network. The point is, is that it's something that you work on throughout your whole career and you can start at any time. And also, I want people to realize that there is no such thing as having no professional network. You have people that you have went to school with, that you have talked to, you have family, you have like organizations like, I don't know, church or like some coding groups, a coding bootcamp, like those are all connections that you just, you don't realize that are part of your professional network and the idea is that you want to grow with them. You want to talk to more people in those connections and try to build up some more rapport. You want to build more respect and reputation for what you do and how you can help people in your network. And that's how it grows and grows and grows. And keeping a network warm and trying to like talk to people that you haven't talked to in a while is always a good thing. It's always good to reach out and say, hey, how are things? What are you working on? It's good to hear from you. And that's it. That's it. That's how you keep a network warm and you continue to grow it and make it stronger that way. So if you don't have a professional network like I do, you can always work towards one or maybe your network isn't as small as you think. It is, you have connections whether you know it or not. I started my whole career because of my bartender friend's husband. Like that connection is super weak, but it was my foot in the door. I took a job that was below me, but I just kept on growing from that point. That's the moral of the video is that I found a job through my network. But if I just said that at the beginning of the video, it wouldn't have made much sense and would have been zero value. So having said that, I could talk about this for hours. Working on your professional network and networking is one of the most valuable things you can do throughout your whole career. And if this is something that's interesting to you, just go ahead and subscribe and like and let me know what you think in the comments. And I would love to continue to talk about this kind topic if it's interesting to you guys. So if you thought this video was interesting or you've stayed this long, then you probably will like this video as well. And I will continue to put out videos that are along the same topic because I'm really passionate about this and could talk about it for hours. But until then, leave some comments in, I respond to everyone, and I'll probably see you around in the next video. All right, thanks for watching guys.