The Advice I'd Give My Own Kid About Getting Hired in Tech

Want to actually build agents and RAG systems like the ones I mention in this episode? That's exactly what we do inside Parsity's AI engineering program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

I've been coding for nearly 12 years, I own and operate a coding bootcamp, and I've done over 1,000 free phone calls with people trying to break into tech. So this is the harsh advice I'd give you if you were my own kid. The stuff I can't really say on LinkedIn without getting flamed by people who've never worked a day in tech.

The market for juniors is rough right now. That part is true. But most people trying to break in are doing the exact same thing as everyone else: building the same to-do app, obsessing over green dots on their GitHub, slapping "passionate junior developer" on their resume, and smashing LinkedIn easy-apply 1,000 times. That's your competition. And it's beatable.

In this episode:

• Why "look junior, act passionate, wait for someone to take a chance on you" is a losing strategy
• How to build real, verifiable experience when you have none (start an LLC, get actual users, stop building toy apps)
• The one skill that actually matters now, and why "I use Claude" is table stakes, not a differentiator
• Why agents and RAG are still wide open. Even senior and staff engineers mostly aren't doing this yet
• Where the jobs actually are (small businesses and startups are hiring, big tech is slashing) and how to find them off LinkedIn
• The LinkedIn search-ranking trick most people ignore
• Why your timeline might take 2, 3, even 4 years, and why the ROI math still makes it worth it
• Stop outsourcing your brain to ChatGPT before you've even built the skill

Take it all with a grain of salt. It's one opinion. But I'll never tell you to do something I haven't done myself or seen work firsthand.

Free resources I mention:

Parsity AI Engineering Program: https://parsity.io/ai-dev

• Free 5-Day AI Advisory Board course (build agents + RAG hands-on): https://www.parsity.io/5-day-ai-advisory-board
• Free RAG project (better than most paid ones): https://www.parsity.io/ai-with-rag
• The agent project I mention: https://www.parsity.io/ai-agent
• Gusto Small Business Jobs Report (hundreds of thousands of net new small-business jobs this year): https://gusto.com/resources/gusto-insights/smb-jobs-report-june-2026
• My video on the entry-level hiring collapse, "Entry-level jobs didn't disappear. They moved.

Got a question or something you want me to cover? Drop it in the comments. I get tons on YouTube but almost none on Spotify, and this is where the hardcore Develop Yourself crew lives. Comment away, it genuinely helps the show get found.