I’m finishing university, scared about future career prospects

Dear Reader,

I read your note yesterday evening while skimming through a stack of CVs from this semester’s graduates (the pile is somewhere between “manageable” and “where did my desk go?”). First off, congrats on wrapping up your computer-science degree. That’s no small feat, and, degree in hand, you’ve already cleared the first gate most hiring systems won’t let you skip.

You asked whether the entry-level market is as brutal as the headlines make it sound. Short answer: it’s tough, yes, but not apocalyptic. Our agency ­— mindnow in Zurich — opened three junior slots last summer. For each one we received roughly eighty applications, about half with some internship, a handful with a meaningful side project, and a few that made me pause and think “we should talk to this person today.” That ratio hasn’t changed much over the past five years, recession chatter or not. (I should be upfront — this is my narrow slice of Europe, not a survey of a thousand companies.)

The job ads you see asking for “1–2 years of experience with Kubernetes” for a junior role? Most of us post those hoping someone great applies, then happily compromise when we meet a curious grad who can pick things up fast. We care less about ticking every buzzword than about whether the candidate can explain why their last bug took four hours to trace. Still, having something concrete to show — an internship, a half-finished game on GitHub, anything that proves you’ve wrestled real code — nudges your CV from the middle of the pile toward the top.

You also mentioned the LinkedIn fairy tales: “Landed 120k straight out of college!” Those happen, usually at the intersection of an in-demand speciality, a famous school, and sheer timing. Everyone else starts somewhere more modest — think 60–70% of that number in Zürich and considerably less if you’re remote in a lower-cost region — then climbs as they accumulate scar tissue and pattern recognition. I could be wrong, but the engineers I’ve promoted fastest were the ones who shipped small things reliably rather than chased title inflation.

If the traditional grad program funnel feels blocked, look sideways. A six-month contract at a tiny startup might pay less but hand you the keys to the whole stack. I don’t advocate weekend crunch as a lifestyle (been there, still undoing the posture damage), yet those intense bursts can compress learning the way a pressure cooker softens beans in minutes. Just watch for burnout — experience only compounds if you’re still standing to use it.

Practical next steps, in no particular order:

• Ping your university’s alumni Slack and offer to fix a lingering bug in one of their products. People remember the person who solved their Friday 5 p.m. outage.
• Pick an open-source repo you already use and improve the docs. Maintainers notice well-written README PRs faster than yet another feature branch.
• Pair up with classmates and ship something tiny — a browser extension, a Discord bot — then write a two-paragraph postmortem. Recruiters love links they can click.

None of this guarantees an offer, of course. It does, however, move you from “fresh grad, unknown signal” to “engineer who delivers despite limited runway,” and that delta is often what gets you the callback.

I won’t close with the usual marathon metaphor; careers rarely unfold at a steady pace. Expect sprints, plateaus, an occasional detour into a ditch, then another sprint. Stay curious, keep shipping, and send me your portfolio once it’s ready — I’m happy to give it a once-over.

Warm regards,
Vadim