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Advice to new grads: Take any job you can get in the industry

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Getting into the software industry matters more than getting the perfect role right away. Taking jobs in support, QA, or technical writing puts you close to real problems and real people. Relationships built through good work open doors that portfolios alone cannot. Proximity to the right people and problems is what moves careers forward.

Jim Grey on software management

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Advice to new grads: take any job you can get in the industry

If you graduated with a CS or SE degree in the last year or two and you’re struggling to find work, I see you. I was you in 1989.

I graduated from engineering school with a math/CS degree during a recession, into a tech industry that was a fraction of its current size. I could not beg, borrow, extort, or steal a job writing code. So I did something that felt like settling.

I became a technical writer.

Me, about age 24, in the apartment I could afford because I took the technical writing job

There isn’t much call for technical writers in software anymore, but in 1989 there very much was. It wasn’t my ideal role — but crucially, it was inside a software company. I figured I could find my way from there.

The advice you’re getting right now is probably some version of: build a RAG pipeline, contribute to open source, develop AI engineering skills beyond just using Copilot. Sure, do those things.

But at the same time, take any door that opens into the industry. Customer success, QA, technical support, sales engineering, implementation consulting, professional services. Take it and do the work.

My experience taught me that this isn’t settling. It’s being physically and organizationally close to problems that matter. This is where opportunities can find you.

Shortly after I became that technical writer, someone handed me a problem others didn’t have either the time or the ability to solve. The company had built a suite of API endpoints — ahead of their time for the late 1980s — but whoever designed them was long gone and all knowledge had become lore. No documentation existed. No one in the building could explain how they worked.

I had figure-it-out skills and I was inside the company when the problem needed solving. I learned enough C++ to get by, reverse-engineered the whole thing, and wrote the documentation.

Then the sales team realized they could start selling this product again because now it could actually be used. We sold it a bunch of times.

That’s what can happen when a curious problem solver gets inside a company and finds a problem worth solving. I may have been only a technical writer, yet I resurrected a product line.

I got there because I took the job I wasn’t excited about.

When you’re inside, you get to know people. And people tend to want to work more with people they know, like, and think are good. This is how human beings have always operated, and it’s how careers get built.

It’s how I moved from technical writing to QA to engineering over more than three decades. (I likely would have gotten to engineering a lot faster had it not turned out that I came to really like tech writing and QA and didn’t hurry.) I did it through being present, being good, and building relationships over time. People saw me work and decided they wanted more of me.

Not every company enables paths between departments. Some will happily keep you in customer success or QA forever. But if you can’t build the momentum you seek, the same role exists at many other companies that will be more open to you, and you can switch companies.

It still works. I know because I watched it happen recently.

I was Director of Engineering at a midsize software company a few years ago when Dan joined us in customer support. Dan wanted to be an engineer, but those roles had recently become hard to come by everywhere.

Dan became good at the job. He wrote excellent trouble reports, ones that gave Engineering everything they needed to go on. Engineers appreciated his curiosity about how the product functioned and his cheerful helpfulness in troubleshooting difficult issues. Dan even showed up in the Zoom during production incidents. Nobody from Support had ever done that before.

Engineering came to trust Dan, which led to them getting to know Dan. When a role in QA opened up, engineers wanted Dan there. Engineering could well be Dan’s next step. Not because he built a great portfolio project, but because people who know him want to work with him and will make it happen.

I’m writing this from a moment of professional uncertainty myself, so I’m not selling you a formula that guarantees outcomes. The path is neither fast nor glamorous. It has real costs — slower starts and roles that feel beneath your capability. You need patience to let relationships develop on their own timeline. But it lets you build a reputation inside a real organization with real people who can actually move you forward.

It’s frustrating to work hard to earn a degree and then not get to use it immediately. But the industry is the credential that takes you places. It’s in the relationships you build and the problems you solve. It’s in every person who sees your work and thinks “I want more of that.”

Dan didn’t plan to spend time in customer support. I didn’t plan to spend time writing documentation. We did that work for the opportunities it could lead to.

Proximity matters. It’s why I say you should take any position you can get inside a software company. From there, a path to engineering becomes much easier to find.

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Posted

8 July 2026

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Career

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Jim Grey

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8 responses to “Advice to new grads: take any job you can get in the industry”

1. 

   Bill Jurasz

   8 July 2026

   As a Comp Sci major, getting my only job offer as a Technical Sales Rep, selling chips for Texas Instruments, was not what I wanted either. But my dad told me “TI is a big company. If you don’t like the job, look for transfers”. And after 18 months that is what happened – a transfer into applications engineering. And that was built on…. wait for it… building relationships. (ironically that is a sales trait). And that later led to becoming a verification engineer. Which then built most of my career. All because a programmer went off to sell chips out of college.

   This is also something I really do not like about the work-from-home aspects of work today. That, and geographically disperse teams. It is really hard to build those relationships, and I really miss those days.

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   1. 

      Jim Grey

      8 July 2026

      You got in. And that’s what mattered!

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      Reply

2. 

   pdrussell046153196d

   8 July 2026

   This is outstanding advice! And I, like you, am an example of why it works. In 1979, I was finishing five and a half years of night school at IUPUI with the intent of getting a job as an accountant. At the beginning of my last semester, I was offered a position doing “special projects” in the accounting department of what was then the third largest bank in Indiana.

   One of those special projects was to learn a computer programming language so I could write a program to generate a specific financial report. The request for that report had been at the bottom of the IT department’s to-do list for quite a while and was probably going to remain there for the foreseeable future.

   So I wrote the program. And then another. And then another.

   What started as a one-time project for one person grew into a full-time job for three people. A couple of years later, I was offered the opportunity to move to the “real” programming department. And a couple of years after that, I was invited to join the OS support team.

   And that’s how my 30+ year career in IT started.

   I never intended to be an IT guy, but someone who knew me thought I might be a good fit for the “special projects” job and suggested that I apply.

   So, to echo Jim’s message: don’t wait for the door you hope will open, walk through any nearby open door and do your best in whatever position you find there.

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   1. 

      Jim Grey

      8 July 2026

      Sometimes you want to row the boat hard in a direction, and sometimes you want the river to just carry you!

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      1. 

         pdrussell046153196d

         9 July 2026

         Or … sometimes you row towards a destination; sometimes you take an unexpected fork because it looks interesting, and that changes the nature of your journey.

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3. 

   Ted Shideler

   8 July 2026

   This was pertinent for me because I’m starting a new job Monday. It’s not in my chosen career path, not that I have one, or what I was hopefully on track to do in my last role as a production planner in manufacturing, but it is in quality where I have an established track record. I’ll be development procedures from the ground up and reporting directly to the COO of a small fiberglass manufacturer.

   The reason this is pertinent is that I’m hoping this foot in the door will help open other opportunities there.

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   1. 

      Jim Grey

      8 July 2026

      I’ve been there after being unemployed, trying to build my way back to what I lost. But at least it’s a chance to build.

      LikeLike

      Reply

4. 

   adhambishr

   12 July 2026

   Great Article! Totally agree

   LikeLike

   Reply

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