A CS student’s job hunt in 2026: an honest playbook | by Stephen Jonany | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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A CS student’s job hunt in 2026: an honest playbook

Stephen Jonany

6 min read·<br>May 20, 2026

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It’s harder to get hired as a junior engineer now than ever. There is lower demand (for juniors, but not necessarily for senior engineers) and more supply (i.e. competition). Cite: LinkedIn Jan 2026: “Record Computer Science (CS) colliding with a cooling hiring for entry-level software engineers (SWE).”<br>The environment is harsher, so you have to be more intentional and work harder than your seniors did. Realistically, expect 100+ applications, lots of rejection, and a search that takes months. This is the norm, not a sign you’re doing it wrong. With that in mind, here is an updated list of advice I would give to myself if I were a CS junior today.<br>Commit to daily habits<br>If you take away one thing from this post, take 5 minutes to do the following. (1) Schedule two recurring 30-minute blocks on your calendar every day — one for applying, one for upskilling. (2) Create 2 Google Docs to track action items for each session. For now, each doc should have only these two items: (1) fill in the list with items from this post (2) reorder by priority based on where you’re at and which jobs you’re targeting.<br>Prereqs<br>These are minimum requirements that you want to clear ASAP before you start applying.<br>Class: Data structure, runtimes. Take a junior-level data structures (UW CSE 332 Edmonds CS 143) class ASAP. I heard this recommendation a decade ago as a junior, and after a decade in industry, I still stand by it. If you don’t have a clear understanding of priority queues, hashing, and big-O runtimes, you will most likely fail technical interviews — and even if you pass, your teammates will be frustrated that they can’t have meaningful conversations with you about runtime performance and data manipulation.<br>Project: At least 1. Have at least 1 project, either personal or from a capstone class. Make sure it has a GitHub page that explains why the project is useful (a video works well — see example) and a link showing your design thinking (example).<br>Resume. Have a LinkedIn profile and a document-form resume. If you have time, also build a personal website.<br>Get interviews<br>Start ASAP. Start applying for internships and full-time opportunities as soon as you’ve finished your data structures class. Use multiple job search sites, look at your college’s career programs, and figure out when the interview cycles start (example).<br>Personalize your resume. Before you apply, tailor each resume to the job, if possible. AI makes this easy. E.g. for an embedded engineering role: (1) reorder your projects so the embedded capstone is at the top, and (2) update the profile summary so the hiring manager sees you as a great fit. A friend of mine wrote an AI-based script to automate this :D — something like: “Given this job description and my resume, can you output a personalized resume? Here are some personalization examples: …”.<br>Reach out actively. Send personalized cold emails to real people in addition to the hiring portal. If a company you’re really interested in doesn’t have a hiring portal, reach out anyway. See example.<br>Leverage connections. Is there anyone in your network willing to vouch for you? E.g. when I was a wee baby in community college, fresh out of my second CS course, I asked my professor if there was any collaboration opportunity I could take. He was kind enough to hook me up with a research project at another university.<br>Increase breadth. A tiered approach works well: for companies you really want, do the costlier tips like resume personalization; for the rest, just mass apply. If you’re not getting any bites for SWE positions, apply to adjacent roles like QA, support eng, devrel, TPM, IT, contracting, or smaller no-name startups. One success story: a friend of mine got a support eng role at a startup and was also offered SWE projects with the potential to switch to a SWE role.<br>Build skills in parallel<br>Budget your time: Level up v.s. apply. Figure out the right balance between time spent finding new opportunities and time spent upskilling. I personally would cap applications at 30 minutes per day, at the end of the day when my brain is tired. The rest is reserved for upskilling, unless I feel my skill set is already strong enough relative to peers who got jobs.<br>Show excellence, and network . Be excellent to the people in your program — professors and classmates. Do well in your classes. Show up to office hours with thoughtful questions. Find excellent classmates and do projects with them. Are you the kind of person your professors and classmates would be delighted to help succeed (e.g. referrals, mock interviews, sharing interview experience)?<br>Research the interview meta. For the companies you’re interested in, are they still asking...