[thorwasdfasdf]

1 year advice: It's very hard to get a software engineering job but stick with it, get work experience any way you can, even if you have to work pro bono. Get as much programming experience as you can. Don't over reach on your resume qualifications, but do go into great detail. Instead of saying: "Skills: Javascript". Go into details, for example: "Skills: Javascript, Front end dev experience: Tabs, pagination, leaderboards, infinite scrolling, post loading, pre-loading, page load optimization, etc" the more details you can give the better. this gives interviewers an idea of what experience you have.

10 Year: It's much easier to get a job, but it's also much harder to keep your job, especially if you just got hired by a new company. an engineer who spends 4 years at one company will be more qualified to work there than a brand new engineer at that company with 10 years of experience. So, at this level, when you join a new company, you'll have to work extremely hard.

If you want the very highest salaries, you'll need to jump ship. it's hard work but the more often you change jobs, the higher the salary.

personally, i think, once you get past the middle of the bell curve, any additional raises are of diminishing returns. you'll work harder and harder for less and less money.

don't let mean companies with bad cultures take advantage of you. there still exist companies with good work cultures where you don't have to be a full time slave.

Your job performance is determined by the following: 1/3 - your own hard work 1/3 - how well you do politically (play nicely with others) 1/3 - factors beyond your control (just one example: working in a rapidly expanding industry will be greatly in your favor)

[brundolf]

Can I ask what country you're in? I'm in the US and my experience suggests the exact opposite of nearly every point in your first paragraph

Programming jobs here are plentiful, you should never work for free, your very first job might be a little harder to get than later ones but it won't be hard. And listing things like "tabs" and "pagination" on your resume feels really desperate, like you're scraping the bottom of the barrel to pad out the list as much as possible. The closest thing I would suggest is to maybe list some specific frameworks like React or Redux (or the equivalent for your area); though even then it's not really for the technical recruiters, it's for the imprecise algorithms that sift through the pile

[thorwasdfasdf]

Well, I started my career in the US durring the dot com bubble bust when absolutely no software engineer could get a job no matter what they did. this no doubt informed my views on the subject.

But, even now, I thought it would be harder to get a job as a junior role than senior. As a hiring lead, 5 years back, i remember, we could have our pick of just about any overqualified intern we wanted. we got one guy who already had 1 to 2 years of work experience, just so he could be hired as an intern and he was awesome.

As for being detailed. mentioning implemtations isn't just about padding out. It's about providing an accurate picture of what your experience is. It's not enough to simply say "i am intermediate JS experience". that doesn't tell the interviewer much. furthermore, most people aren't very accurate at rating themselves. overconfident people think they're experts and experts with no confidence under-rate themselves. by mentioning implementations and specific experiences, it allows the interviewer to more accurately guage your level of expertise.