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

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

July 20, 2026 · 18 min

About this episode

Brian Jenney shares harsh but valuable advice for breaking into the tech industry, focusing on strategies to stand out as a junior developer.

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&quot…

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