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Entry-level programming roles are increasingly scarce, with junior applicants fielding fierce competition.
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Bryce Adelstein Lelbach, a principal architect at Nvidia, discussed the state of the job market in a podcast interview.
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He said young developers should focus on honing two skills — math and writing.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world in the job market for entry-level software engineers — just ask Nvidia principal architect Bryce Adelstein Lelbach.
“I think that it’s a very challenging time for young programmers,” Lelbach said on a recent episode of the TechBytes podcast.
“We saw, post-Covid, with a little bit of the tech pullback — we saw a lot of tech companies pull back on hiring,” he added. “And the reality is that most of the Big Tech companies have the luxury of just hiring senior people, these days.”
Mass firings in the wake of the pandemic set loose a flood of mid-to-senior level coders into the job market, who suddenly found themselves competing with junior programmers for positions they were once considered overqualified for.
As AI appears more likely to further shrink the pool of available jobs, Lelbach says there are two skills he’d suggest young programmers prioritize.
The first is writing.
“Especially with the emergence of large language models, it’s going to become even more important to be able to communicate your ideas and your thoughts,” Lelbach said.
The second — the “timeless field” of pure mathematics.
“While there may be a future where we humans do a lot less programming, the fundamentals that you learn in math are always, I think, going to be relevant,” he said. “They’re going to be relevant to how we design things and how we build things.”
Above all else, Lelbach says practical knowledge remains king.
“I think the best option is to have internships,” he said. “If you want to get a job as a software engineer, you need to have internships essentially every year that you’re in college.”
Despite the temptation to delay entering the workforce by way of a master’s degree or Ph.D., Lelbach says that approach can present more problems than solutions. The sheer volume of applicants that now sport post-graduate degrees somewhat dilutes their ability to make anyone stand out, he added.
“I am generally a little bit more skeptical these days of people getting Masters and PhDs because there are so many people who have them now,” he said.
For undergraduate seniors who are weighing their options, Lelbach suggests focusing on acquiring as much real-world experience as possible.
