Even if that wasn’t the case, trying to sell yourself as the person as “you should hire me because I will do the shit work” is not exactly a winning proposition to get a job.
AI isn’t going to do anything by magic. Someone has to tell it to do it, setup guardrails so it doesn’t destroy everything, etc. There is no way in hell I’d be handing over those agent issues to AI to monkey around on production servers. Saying AI can do it is a cop out excuse unless someone already setup AI to do it successfully.
Are you expecting to come in as a new grad and work on nothing but exciting greenfield projects with the latest tech? Maybe that’s the case in startups, but in a more established business, there is a lot of work that needs to get done to keep the business running. It’s not glamorous, but it’s why they’ve been making billions for decades. Those more interesting projects tend to go to the people who’ve proven they can handle them by doing smaller projects successfully, and everyone has their stories from when they did “shit work”. Thinking you’re above it sounds like a problem. The best boss I ever had was the first one to quite literally pick up a broom if that’s what was needed. Work was work, and he earned a lot of respect on those moments.
Having something be “shit work” is a matter of perspective, and also a question of how you solve it. A lot of times people were doing “shit work” and then I’d be asked to help, and I’d write some code to do it and the “shit work” went away. It was more interesting for me, I learned things along the way, I showed more value to the company, and only had to spend enough time doing that work to figure out how to not have to do it anymore.
For a while, my boss would throw me into random projects and teams, because he knew my tolerance for nonsense was low and I’d find a better way to do it. He pretty much let me do whatever I want after a while.
As far as getting the job. You’d be surprised. I’ve interviewed people who gave off a vibe that they were too good for certain types of work. They don’t get the job, because they’re a pain in the ass to work with and everyone has to cover for the jobs they feel are beneath them. They’re choosy beggars. I wouldn’t say what you said verbatim, or have that be you’re big pitch, but also accept that as the new person, you might get some “shit work” and it’s up to you what you do with it.
And you would trust a junior developer to do those things?
> Thinking you’re above it sounds like a problem. The best boss I ever had was the first one to quite literally pick up a broom if that’s what was needed. Work was work, and he earned a lot of respect on those moments.
I personally am above it with 30 years of experience. But it’s not about what he is willing to do. Every open job req gets hundreds of applications within a day these days. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd. But everything you said doesn’t help him stand out from the crowd to get the job. He needs to m actionable advice on how to get the job.
What they can do is reach out to hiring managers at various employers to get a feel for what job providers actually want. The challenge there is finding people and asking the correct questions. It’s the same challenge most hiring managers have, so once they solve it from their perspective they will be uniquely advantaged.
I spoke about it here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=raw_anon_1111&comm...
Short version: If I couldn’t get any responses from random companies looking for “enterprise developer with AWS experience” because every open req gets hundreds of applications and I had at the time a decade of experience (on my resume I actually had more) including leading AWS architecture at two companies and working at AWS, how is a junior developer going to stand out?
Of course submitting my resume to random ATS’s was an experiment. I had multiple offers via my network including a Director of an F500 company. But I was 49 at the time
I don’t think you realize how much of a shit show it is our there now for any developer especially junior developers
