Transcript

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In the job market period, accountants fighting for roles, lawyers fighting for roles, developers fighting for roles. You think you're going to come in with not even the bare minimum, but under the bare minimum and get a role when everyone else is fighting for it?

I don't think that's the right mindset. If you're listening to this, what's the expectation for development these days that's going into an entry level role?

One person wrote as a bullet point, maintain the code. I automatically assume you're doing that. Who else would do it if it's not you?

Why would you tell me that as a bullet point?

Why are you wasting very important, mind you, expensive real estate on your resume to tell someone the absolute most basic of basic things?

When I see the HTML CSS top thing, it has a smell. It has a smell to it now. It's just like, no, you should be talking up your TypeScript.

You should be talking up your notes. You should be talking about these other things that are the meat and potatoes that have a harder curve to get into. Some people are just lost when it comes to the job search.

Some people are lost when it comes to how do I get that next step?

What would be that thing?

Write it down and then go do it. I'm a big believer in confidence by evidence. And so if the evidence is showing me I know what I know, why wouldn't I be confident in the thing that I know?

If folks want to work hard, they want to learn the things that are in demand, and now they have tools that help them learn faster. They have tools that can make learn faster they have tools that can make them a better developer that can spot their weaknesses accelerate their ability to get through that moat the world's yours what's going on everyone we are back with another one another one my brother's back from being in the woods we'll talk about that that in a bit. I'm one of your co-hosts.

My name is Danny Thompson. I'm the director of technology at a company called This.Labs and conference organizer for the Commit Your Code conference in Dallas. And I'm Leon Noel, managing director of a wonderful nonprofit called Resilient Coders and community member at 100 Devs.

It is a wonderful community. I am back from the woods, though. We can start there.

Let's start there. Let's start there before we jump into this topic. These technologists that listen to us.

No expensive time in Yosemite. It's good to unplug every once in a while. We were six days camping, hiking.

It was a lot of fun. Back, fresh, recharged, ready to talk tech. You know, I often ask when it comes to camping out and all that good stuff, what are some of the things that you're doing?

You're just one with nature, pondering thoughts. Yeah. So Yosemite is pretty easy because you have some of my favorite trails in the country.

I like to go really first thing in the morning. I like to wake up. It's 6 o'clock in the morning, 7 o'clock in the country that you can i like to go really first thing in the morning i like to wake up it's it's six o'clock in the morning seven o'clock in the morning sun just came out and go hike until noon one ish come back have some lunch and then hang out at the campsite yosemite is pretty cool because there's like um they have like restaurants and museums and stuff there too so this trip we kind of hiked for a while had some lunch did the touristy stuff and then came back for cooking dinner campfire hanging out um other than camping and like normal like hiking and hanging out stuff be like went and went in the river and a bunch of other fun stuff like it's just kind of chilling and being with family i always go with a lot of family and so for me it's like the first two days is just my brain turning off right like i still have like those impulse i'm still reaching for my phone i'm still trying to check the dms i'm trying like i'm still like in it by like the third, my brain calms a little bit.

And by the fifth day, I'm thinking better thoughts. I'm more creative. I have good ideas.

And I'm more calm. And that's what I do it for. I like the peace.

So what you're saying is the haters got to you and you finally touched grass. Pretty much, yeah. But I've always done it.

I do it once a year. At least once a year. Like once a year at least once a year every year like a big like a big trip at least once a year we camp and hike a lot though like um i'm a big boy but i'm on the trails yeah okay i don't do that i'm uh if they don't have high speed internet i'm not going so i'm big on yeah i'm i'm big on it man i you know i i work too hard to give up these modern-day luxuries.

It's not for me. I don't judge anybody that does it. But you won't catch me out there, unfortunately.

All right. We're going to make it. I'm going to get you out there one of these days.

I'm telling you, no. I'm going to trick you. Oh, this is a dope conference.

Come speak. Come talk. Get you in the Uber, and then it's just.

All right. Well, today's episode came by way of, honestly, y'all. I got a really random, different kind of question, but not really different.

It was just phrased in a different way that I was like, ah, this is the first time I've seen it phrased this way. So I'll answer it. And I did.

But then I realized this would make a pretty good episode, I think. And the question that was posed to me via Twitter was, in today's age, do we feel like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is enough in the age of AI?

The thing is, I think we both have spicy takes on this one unfortunately i think this is going to be interesting topic i feel like there's going to be multiple topics that kind of branch off of this yeah i know what my take is i don't necessarily know what your take is and when i mentioned this episode topic to you in the beginning um most people don't know our strategy in making these episodes so we'll often talk about topics and once we feel like something clicked we don't share it we share it live on the episode so that way we have live reactions to it yeah um so i have no clue what your take is i know what my take is but i'd like you to go first with yours and then i can proceed with mine i think i think it depends on what you mean by enough right and so for different people enough is going to be a different thing i think a lot of people in our communities are trying to get jobs so would html cs javascript be enough to get a job would it be enough to start developing with the use of ai i think those are all very different types of questions and so the answer is if you're trying to get a job, is it enough?

The answer is yes. But, and a huge big but, the odds are probably very low, right?

So there's always a possible door that could be open to where you land that dream HTML, CSS, HTML developer job making 60K a year. Like those still exist. We still see them post it.

We still have folks in our community that get them. They're becoming more frequently replaced with auto-generated stuff, not even AI, but like CMSs that do these types of things, email type software, but they still exist. So could you get a job with just HTML, CSS, JavaScript?

Yes, but the odds are very low. Now, if you're talking about HTML, CSS, JavaScript being enough for a more robust job, well, what do you mean by JavaScript?

Do you mean just on the front end?

Do you mean on the back end?

Because if you're a full stack JavaScript developer, yes, I still see people getting jobs with full stack JavaScript. Not even TypeScript, honestly. Just full stack JavaScript is still enough.

But are your odds the best?

No. You add TypeScript on that, you get even better odds. And then I think long-term, if you know HTML, CSS, TypeScript, I think we're going to see AI start to swing a little bit away from Python and into TypeScript world.

And then your opportunities really, really open up. So I guess it depends on what you mean by enough. And I can go all deeper on each of those.

But that's kind of what I think about. The more you when you first said it i said an explicit of in my mind then as you went further i said another explicit of in my mind and that is you're effing wrong to well f maybe uh my take is different. My take is no.

It is not enough. But there's caveats. I don't like making blanket statements.

So these are like. That's what I was trying to do. I was trying to move over the blankets.

You know, I was throwing the blankets out. Because I have people in my community that keep getting these jobs. I don't know how they freaking get them.

But they get them. So I can't go on a podcast and say that that person didn't get the job that i just saw them with my two own eyes do it yeah but you listening or watching youtube subscribe are probably not going to do it i get this question a lot i've got it so many times over the years it's actually pretty incredible but, I've seen a behavior in people when they ask this question. And generally, it is when you ask this question, you are asking it because you feel very confident with your HTML and CSS.

But JavaScript is the first time, in my opinion, you truly get into programmatic thinking. And the ground under you is truly starting to shake and you don't know how to excel with this so you're like well do i really need to go past this can i just stick with like you know html css maybe a little bit of javascript but nothing crazy and i'm going to stay right here very rarely is somebody asking me the question of is javascript enough when they've gone far to the deep end of it and they're really knowledgeable on what they're asking. So because of that mindset associated with this, my answer is no.

My answer is you need to dig significantly deeper. This is the most competitive market we've ever had in the field of tech, but not even just tech in general, in the job market period. Accountants fighting for roles.

Lawyers fighting for roles. Lawyers fighting for roles. Developers fighting for roles.

You think you're going to come in with not even the bare minimum but under the bare minimum and get a role when everyone else is fighting for it?

I don't think that's the right mindset. I don't think that's the right approach. And truth be told, I'm afraid for you because you're putting yourself in a position where you're really going to be outclassed by a lot of the competition because of the sheer level of solutions that they can build, deliver, and talk about.

So because of that, my answer is still no. Now, does that mean people can't ever break a rule, change a rule, or move past a rule?

Absolutely. There's no absolutes in this world in anything as far as I'm concerned. So with that being said, for the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority, only having JavaScript alone will never ever be enough.

I think if anything, the bar has risen dramatically, which is good and bad. It's good for those that are very focused on this being a long-term play for them. It is bad for people that thought this was going to be a very short term thing to make a lot of money in a short period of time with that being said when it comes to javascript in general there there are levels to it right so uh leon kind of alluded to the full stack aspect generally speaking when people ask me is javascript enough it's strictly on like the front end aspect they're never even talking about like no js and everything else they're talking about like i just learned vanilla js i know what an array is where are them jobs at like that's generally the rhetoric so for me i don't think that's going to be enough if you are a full stack i will say this i've said this for the last couple years over the last three years i've seen a dramatic drop in the number of front and only positions compared to what i saw three years ago.

Three years ago, you saw the big distinction between the two. Even on Twitter, you constantly heard the rhetoric like, don't say you're full stack because full stack means you're bad at one. You always heard that stuff.

I don't ever see those posts anymore. Why?

Because everyone has had to, in some way, shape, or form, pretty much had to become full stack to a certain degree. But that doesn't mean there aren't front-end only roles. It doesn't mean there aren't back-end only roles.

But I will say it's harder and harder to get those things. You just have to be exceptional at them, to be honest with you. Most companies, I don't want to say most, many companies are now in the game of full stack developers.

And they're not looking at you at like, you're a genius on both. They're like, okay, if you were given a task that was touching both, you're capable. Whether you're the best developer in the world for that, probably not going to be the case.

I think people aren't always sure where the bar is at. And that's kind of something you were talking about, kind of like where, if you're listening to this what's the expectation for a developer these days that's going into an entry-level role right and that bar has crept higher and higher and higher over the years we've been doing this and i'll tell you right now folks coming out of resilient coders, folks coming out of 100 devs are full stack. They're comfortable writing JavaScript on the front end.

They're comfortable writing React. They're comfortable writing Node on the back end. They're able to build full stack applications.

They all graduate with a full stack web application that's polished, looks good. They've all freelanced, so it's not the first time they've been paid to be developers. They are contributing to open source.

They have a depth of knowledge where they've studied lots of facts to be able to hang in conversations with other engineers. They've practiced their data structures and algorithms. And that is the baseline.

Like, that's the bare minimum these days. Like, that's the, we're in the right ballpark to play ball, not the thing that makes them exceptional. Whereas if you had all that maybe four years ago, whew, you were assigned on the dotted line that day, especially going up against folks that were coming out of traditional programs that didn't have any of that stuff.

Yeah, I will say that, you know, it's interesting, and this may be a hot take, but stick with me on this. To me, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is the baseline, meaning any employer that looks at a dev that's doing anything related to web development have a natural assumption that you know these things they don't question if you know it so when you say when you tell them you know html they're like well yeah i would imagine that you would know that thing right like why are you telling me you know html i automatically assume that about this role like i often do this exercise with people. When you think about certain job roles, what are some of the natural assumptions that you have?

If you use the example, easy one that everyone can understand and relate to, a coffee barista, someone that works at Starbucks or a coffee shop or something like that, what are things that you naturally think about?

I'll pause for a second for people to think. Think out loud. If you're listening in your car, your office, whatever.

But just think for a moment. What are natural things that you think about the position of a coffee barista?

Probably making coffee. Probably serving customers. Probably merchandising.

Why would you ever tell anyone that you did those things within that job role?

Because those are natural. Like, I already know that you did that. So if you tell somebody that you're a software developer, a web developer working in the JavaScript ecosystem, don't you think they already know that you use HTML?

Interesting question. A natural assumption. Go ahead.

So you know how when we look at people's resumes and they have in their skill section agile methodologies, communication, collaboration, Microsoft Word, is HTML, CSS now in that category category for you i will tell you one thing that i often do on resumes i fix so many dude um one thing that i often tell people is like if you for example having your resume section like worked on a home page or um what one person wrote as a bullet point maintain the code i automatically assume you're doing that. Who else would do it if it's not you?

Why would you tell me that as a bullet point?

Why are you wasting very important, mind you, expensive real estate on your resume to tell someone the absolute most basic of basic things?

Why aren't you listing out achievements that you had within the roles that you were in or successes and things like that so to go to your question of html css i kind of see that as something i wouldn't personally want to waste space on a resume with i think there are far more larger things and if you look at the job descriptions when do you really ever see html css in there maybe you see semantic html that might be interesting around accessibility um like i know know right now there are certain companies that have huge accessibility initiatives. And to be completely honest with you, AI has made that really, really easy for a lot of companies to start adopting and building up on. But I don't think I would go in with the basic HTML, CSS unless a job role or job description specifically says we need someone that knows semantic HTML.

That's going as the first bullet point. It says in the job description, first one. I think there are things that I've been coaching people to pull off their resume.

Because I want the vibe that you are a, I have to be careful of my words here, that you are a more established engineer or maybe an engineer that just has a larger repertoire of skills. or maybe an engineer that just has a larger repertoire of skills. When I see the HTML CSS top thing has a smell, has a smell to it.

Now it's just like, no, like you, you should be talking up your type script. You'd be talking up your notes. We're talking about these other things that are the, the meat and potatoes that have a harder curve to get into.

Not the basics. It has a smell, pull it off there. Show me that you're the hardcore ml researcher you know like pull those basic things off of there so that i can build up a picture of you in my mind of being a badass software engineer yeah that's what i always come back to it's you know often one thing that i'll hear even even in the whole – I'm trying to stick to the topic because my mind really wants to venture off.

But in the grand scheme of is HTML, CSS, JavaScript enough, I often get this comment when it comes to resumes. And I go review them and they're like, oh, but I don't have this – like I don't have XYZ as a thing that I can say. Like I don't have a win.

I don't have a metric that I can show. It's like, okay, cool. Are you unable to make that now?

Like, you have your whole life to prepare for the role that you want to prepare for. You have your whole life to kind of make your resume the way that you want to make it. If you know you're missing these talking points, either A, we'll be like, oh, man, it sucks.

I'm going to be, I'm just never going to have them. Or it's like, A, we've identified where the weak point is. Let's go make it.

Yep. Let's literally go make it. It's up to you on that one.

I think one of the biggest pieces of advice that I give folks these days is to write your description. Like, not the description you are currently. What's it look like in a year?

What's it look like in five years?

Because it gives you in a year?

What's it look like in five years?

Because it gives you direction, right?

It gives you like the things that you need to do to get to that point. So you can think about it and then put a game plan in place, right?

Like you said, if you don't have that XYZ format thing, that's going to help your resume, you could easily take a week to build something, right?

And that will have such a downstream effect on your applications if you don't have the perfect resume build a game plan for it and then backfill with the things that you do your day-to-day and it gives you guidance to get like some people are just lost when it comes to the job search some people are lost when it comes to how do i get that next step well what what would be that thing write it down and then go do it and there's so many places you can do it you do it by yourself you can do part of a community like you can join a cohort like whatever you need to do kind of goes back to that don't go into your day like an accident territory all right yeah and i think that's fair like it i'm being careful we're being too careful, man. We got to let it fly. That's what they came here for.

I mean, I think we are letting it fly, right?

I think my big focus right now and why I'm being careful isn't necessarily on a hot take, but it's I don't want this to come across as anyone listening to this being discouraged because that's not really the case. For me, I'm very big on blunt truths. You know what's funny?

Anytime I do a one-on-one call, this is like the first couple lines of the call. Hey, I'm very big on blunt advice. Nothing I say is meant with maliciousness, but it is meant to get you from A to B.

And if I hide some of it, you won't get there as quickly as possible. So I need this to be very, very transparent with you. So anyone listening to this right now, this is blunt advice.

None of this is meant to be malicious. We are not trying to tear you down. If anything, we're trying to build you up.

But we need to get from A to B in the most efficient way possible. That is a big focus here. So don't take this, listen to this, and be like, dang, now I got to do this.

If your goal is to work in tech, you're going to be coding for your whole career, right?

Doesn dang, now I got to do this. You're going to, if your goal is to work in tech, you're going to be coding for your whole career, right?

Doesn't matter what you got to do at this point. You're going to be learning languages your whole career, right?

Doesn't matter at this point. Just get these things done. If you don't know how to use AI efficiently, spend some time doing it.

It'll help speed up a lot of this, especially from like a productivity standpoint. I think that'll go a long way but now a lot of the roles that we know especially like from several years ago they're morphing a little bit right it's mainly because of the tooling that we have it's also because of the skill set that we see but if i'm being completely honest with you when you look at the income potential of this field it's so high there for years there was never really a strong barrier to entry as there is at this current moment but the barrier right now is less of what companies are doing and more in relation to the level of competition that currently exists at all levels but also it's because employers just have choices at this point, where previously employers never had choices, which just matches up with every single industry that's ever existed before this. If you looked at anything in the business field 10 years ago, they were already going through this.

They've been going through this for decades, right?

People are competitive and they fight for these opportunities. For tech, that was never the rhetoric. And so a lot of people are having to adjust the way that they do these things.

So now that you know that, instead of being discouraged by that, it's like just rise to the occasion. And if you rise to the occasion, you'll pretty much be surprised at what it is that you're going to be involved with, whether it's solution delivery, whether it's the way that you're approaching it, et cetera, et cetera. Now here's the one thing.

I personally, and maybe I'm naive, I don't know. Literally speaking of this, I'm going to be flying to AI Engineer Conference right after this. So maybe my opinions in a week from now are totally different based off of what I see there.

But generally speaking, I'm not necessarily too intimidated by the rise of certain tooling, right?

Like no-code tool, low-code tools, et cetera. You know why?

You know what I noticed?

I think it was Saturday I noticed it. I said it out loud out of frustration. All of these AI agent SaaS providing sites look absolutely the same.

I cannot tell the difference anymore. And it's because they're all trained on the same things to build the same thing and push it out. Do you not know this to me screamed, wow, designers are going to have a really strong future after this tiny disruption?

Because now what's going to happen?

You know what it reminds me of?

Remember when bootstrap was the thing?

And everybody uses Bootstrap. And I remember saying all the time, God, these Bootstrap sites are terrible because they all look absolutely identical to each other. Now, Bootstrap has definitely come a long way, but you could still tell a Bootstrap site.

That button. Yeah. But you can still tell.

And so what happened after that?

A huge surge in design and iterations and things like that where people can kind of distinguish themselves. You don't think that's about to happen again?

I absolutely do. And all these AI companies that were able to scale are now going to hire a team of designers and UX, UI people and front-end developers to kind of implement all that. So that way they can kind of get their stuff at the level that they need to.

Because, again, AI is trained on a theme of things things but it's not necessarily good at individuality i think we're this is kind of something that's coming around a lot of the online too is coming down to taste and judgment being the the last bastion right and so if you are developing taste and good judgment that's a skill that's going to play out, especially in the second wave that you're bringing up. There are two big pieces that you brought up that I wanted to touch on that I think are really, really important. The first one is the moat, right?

The reason why software engineering is such a great career is because there's a moat, right?

great career is because there's a moat right there is this skill that you have to learn that gets you into this place of privilege in terms of salary career things like that and that moat has always been hard to cross there have been bridges that have been built to help you cross it but even if that moat does get bigger that's a good thing what else can you put your nights and weekends into for a year and then wind up in a six-figure high growth career right that to me has always been something super special that if folks want to work hard they want to learn the things that are in demand and now they have tools that help them learn faster. They have tools that can make them a better developer that can spot their weaknesses, accelerate their ability to get through that moat. The world's yours.

And so if you're listening to this, the hard things are hard for a reason, but that's a good thing. Especially nowadays, if you want these jobs, you want these opportunities, it's just hard work standing in your way. And if you do it, the opportunity is still there.

And so for me, I've always been thankful that the moat exists because I know that that gives people that want to make a difference in their lives, the ability to make that change. And so that moat is your advantage. This is something that people spend four to five years to get into, right?

They go to the traditional pathway. If you can do it in less than five years and you're finding yourself in a high growth six figure career, beautiful, excellent. You crushed it.

All right, everybody. It is time for everyone's favorite part of the episode, including mine. Ask Danny and Leon.

Leon, what's the question today?

So I had a really good question come in the other day that i really want us to talk about on the podcast they said i'm 19 not in college trying to get a full-time role or internship it feels a bit awkward talking to people much older and experienced than me how do i fit in you know there's a person in memphis tennessee and i often called him my inspiration and i was calling him that when i was at the age of 30 and he was 19 and the reason why is this man i won't say his name because i don't want to embarrass him in public or anything, but he knows who he is. And if you were part of the Memphis tech scene, you probably heard me scream that across the room multiple times because that was the way that we used to joke around. But this guy literally ended up joining a Fortune 500 company at the age of 19, not as an intern.

I'm going to give you my intern spiel in a second. not as an intern. I'm going to give you my intern spiel in a second.

But he rose up the ranks, and he won them over, not with knowing the bare minimum, but like legit technical knowledge. He was so in deep to where they were like, wow, you just are a wealth of information here. And now he stayed at the company this whole time.

I believe he's 26 now. Stayed there the whole time. Or maybe 27.

Eight years, give or take. And he's a tech leader, tech leads, probably about to become an engineering manager for all I know. Just rising up the ranks.

He's still my inspiration to a certain degree. Because how do you go in there, have the confidence to talk about that which is incredible and then win them over the answer is pretty simple you're so confident in your skill set because you know what you know and i've i've i think i've said this in the podcast before, but I'm a big believer in confidence by evidence. And so if the evidence is showing me I know what I know, why wouldn't I be confident in the thing that I know?

I become unconfident in the areas that I'm not familiar with, right?

But if it's like, that's why I always say my strategy around interviews is getting them to talk to me about things that I know. I'm winning that interview every single time. But if we get into conversation territory where it's like unfamiliar things for me, I don't know how that conversation is going to go.

I can try and wing it, but generally speaking, winging it never yields the best results compared to being prepared for something. So if they're asking me now about like a React subject, or if they're asking me about something related to Java, I'm winning that conversation every single time. And with him, it was specifically that he was just so in depth, in the know of React that any question that they possibly brought up, he was winning it.

That's how he got that role. Now, what is my rule when it comes to internships?

My rule has been the same for years. If you are not in college, you are not looking for an internship. If you are in college, internships make sense.

But if you are not in college, there's no point for you to be talking to anybody about an internship. You're a junior dev. Get that junior dev role.

What's the point of the internship?

Just because you feel young?

No. You get an internship while you're in college because it's part of the curriculum, the program, and the experience. Outside of college, either you didn't go or you're not part of it, there's no reason why you should be looking for an internship.

It's the wrong thing to be doing. You're wasting good effort in a bad task as far as I'm concerned. You should totally change up your strategy.

Hopefully that helps. Absolutely. concern you should totally change up your strategy hopefully that helps absolutely um i i that kind of really handled like the the competence angle one of the things i i often like to talk about too is just people like new blood like bringing energy to a community is really important and i realize that a lot of people in our communities don't realize that the energy you bring has a lot of value.

Every company is trying to build community now. Every single company is trying to build community. And by you showing up, you being excited, you ret you're new to tech, even if you are just starting to learn, that enthusiasm that you bring is super valuable.

And every open source project needs it. Every company needs it. Any type of program you join needs that enthusiasm.

And it's often best when you're beginning because there are a lot of people that want to help others. Software is, by and large built off of open through open source at least the work of others and when somebody shows up and wants to be helpful there are some communities not all that will be really receptive to it and want to see you win says if you win then their project by large wins as well so find the right community find the right people because there are a lot of folks that want that enthusiasm and that burst of fresh energy that will be a huge value add. And then you slowly start to find your people.

You start to have more and more conversations and you develop that confidence that Danny was talking about that makes you undeniable for. Danny Housley Y'all, it's been real. It's been fun.

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