There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers

Boot camp level skills are dead now - deeper grounding in CS is a requirement. With the 2022 hiring boom over and AI taking on some of the work, the junior market has more competitive, and will remain so in the foreseeable future.

My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers.

FOSS software is any other place to build skills and value until you land paying roles.

> My advice to new grads, students, and other juniors is to find any way to get real-world work experience. The pay for these roles may be lower, as higher salaries are increasingly reserved for senior-level engineers.

This is just sound advice in general. A good professional analogue to recommending a junior college as a stepping stone to a university.

That's actually good news in a way because boot camps were so surface level and we didn't get a lot of actually good developers out of those programs, just lots of arguments by people defending ideas that weren't well-founded.

No one cares about FOSS experience. You’re lucky if they even visit your GitHub/Lab/Berg at all and even luckier if they look at anything past your heatmap.

Fact is, if FOSS experience counted for anything, then those charged with hiring would also possess the capacity to understand that C# and Java experience are nearly 1:1. Sadly, it doesn’t and they don’t.

As someone who is very experienced primarily as a C# dev, I wouldn’t say Java is “nearly 1:1”.

At a syntax level they’re practically the same and they both use GC, but in terms of ecosystem they’re very different.

It might not seem like it to people who are just starting out at programming, but syntax is probably the easiest part of it.

Sure, I would probably be productive in Java if I had to start using it fully tomorrow, but it would take me months or years to get that same nuanced knowledge of its ecosystem to be as effective with it as I am with C#.

Having been through interviews lately for mid-level CS internship positions, I'd say that having FOSS contributions on my resume that I was able to discuss extensively was indeed a factor in both attaining an interview and ultimately an internship.