I was in a shared flat in Passau with a German dictionary open next to my laptop, translating a rejection email word by word to make sure it really was a rejection.
It was.
That was the eleventh one.
I had come from Rawalpindi on a language visa. Not a job offer, not a transfer, not a scholarship anyone had heard of. A language visa. My German was bad enough that I rehearsed phone calls in my head before making them, and sometimes I still hung up.
Six months later a large consultancy hired me, before I had finished my Master's.
I have been thinking about that sequence all year, because I do not believe it could happen to me today.
The part I usually skip when I tell this story
I was not exceptional. I want to be plain about that, because the story sounds better if I imply otherwise, and implying otherwise would be useless to you.
What I had was time inside a forgiving system.
There was work that was too small to be worth a senior person's afternoon and too real to skip. Ticket triage. Reading somebody else's code and writing down what it actually did. Fixing the thing that broke at four on a Friday because I was the one still online. Sitting in a meeting understanding maybe forty percent and writing down the other sixty to look up that night.
None of it was impressive. All of it was load bearing.
That work was the gap. It was the space where somebody who was not yet good could be visibly useful while becoming good.
That work is the first thing to get automated
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic.
The tasks that made room for me are exactly the tasks that are cheapest to hand to a model now. Summarising a codebase. Drafting the boring test. Triaging the ticket. Writing the first version of the thing so somebody else can react to it.
I use these tools every day. I build automation for a living. So I am not going to stand here and tell you the tools are the villain, because they are not, and because you would stop reading, and you would be right to.
The villain is a rung that got removed with nothing put in its place.
We took out the bottom step and kept the ladder.
Which is why I do not think the usual advice works
The most discussed thread on this platform in the last month is about the junior pipeline being broken. Underneath it, and underneath every thread like it, the same advice repeats.
Build projects. Contribute to open source. Network more. Learn the AI tools.
I believe every one of those is worth doing, and I do not think any of them touch the actual problem, which is this.
The old path was never a portfolio. The old path was somebody being paid to be around.
You cannot substitute proximity with a GitHub profile. Proximity is how you learn that the real system has three undocumented behaviours nobody wrote down, that the person in the corner is who you actually ask, that the deploy window is not what the wiki says it is. None of that lives in a repository. It lives in a room.
What I would actually say to you
I am going to be careful here, because I will not hand you a five step plan for a problem I have not solved.
Three things, held at different strengths.
The first, and I hold this hardest. Your inability to get in is not a verdict on you. It is a missing rung. Read that again on the day it feels personal, and it will feel personal, because I remember precisely how that felt in Passau with the dictionary and the eleventh email.
The second. The scarce thing is no longer producing output. Output is close to free now. The scarce thing is judgment about output, which means the fastest way to be genuinely useful early is to become the person who can tell when the generated answer is wrong and say why. That skill used to take years to become visible. It is visible immediately now, and almost nobody is deliberately training it.
The third, and I hold this loosest. The teams that pull ahead over the next few years will be the ones that rebuild the rung on purpose. Not out of charity. Out of arithmetic. Any team that only hires people somebody else trained is depending on a pipeline that is currently not producing, and that bill arrives late and all at once.
The thing I keep coming back to
I did not earn my way in by being the best person in the room. I was not close.
I got in because there was a shape of work that let an unproven person be useful, and I happened to be standing in front of it at the right moment, holding a dictionary.
If you are a few years behind me on the same road and the door looks shut, I do not think that is a story about you. I think it is a story about a door.
Doors can be rebuilt. But only if the people who already walked through them are honest about how they got there.
Your turn
If you got your first developer job before 2022, what was the small unglamorous work that made room for you? Name it in one line.
If this was useful
I work through this in public, the wins and the freezes both, mostly on LinkedIn and YouTube. If the real version of building in the open is useful to you, that is where it lives. Find me on X, GitHub, and the work at next8n.com.
Top comments (0)