Stop Chasing Big Tech: A Better Way to Start Your Career in IT The Reality of the Entry-Level Market If you’re about to graduate in computer science, IT, or software engineering, the job market can feel uncertain. You hear about layoffs. You hear about AI replacing entry-level work, and with the jobs that are left, you are seeing more people applying to fewer roles. All of this, while you are just trying to get your foot in the door and land that first job. Most people respond the same way: aim for big tech. When I say big tech, I’m referring to the well-known and widely used companies in tech. These are the companies that most, if not all, your friends and family have heard about. These companies are often referred to as FAANG—Meta(Facebook), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. More recently, you may have heard the acronym MANGO (Microsoft, Anthropic (or Apple/Meta), Nvidia, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI) to highlight the companies in the AI/LLM space. Here’s the issue: everyone else is applying there too. That creates a situation where thousands of candidates are competing for the same role. In some cases, large tech companies receive hundreds of thousands of applications per year, with individual entry-level roles drawing upwards of a thousand applicants. With this much information to sift through, even strong candidates will get filtered out early, not because they aren’t capable, but because the system needs to be able to pare down the volume to make it manageable. ...