Job market is brutal for juniors everywhere right now, especially in Aus. I graduated in July 2025 with a Bachelor of Software Engineering in Melbourne. Out of all the internationals I know, barely anyone had jobs lined up. Most are still stuck in hospo, Uber, or casuals.
I got an internship in 2024 at an early stage startup, then another one at a biotech company as a SWE. The first one offered me a part-time junior role, but being a startup, it was unstable and later cut my hours due to shifting priorities. So I started job hunting while still working that's when I realized how cooked the market is especially if you’re on a visa. You basically need to be cracked technically and outperform locals just for them to even consider sponsoring you/spending money training you which is justified because Aus needs to think about its citizens first.
Recently got a software engineer/full stack offer from a company that’s willing to sponsor. But that happened only because a recruiter called me and set up an interview for a role that wasn’t even listed anywhere. They only hire through recruitment services. Applying through LinkedIn, SEEK, Indeed etc was just pain. I only use LinkedIn now to connect with recruiters. If I combine all of my callbacks from these sites, 2 were from Indeed (One company asked me to design the architecture of a Pinterest like website for a react+typescript advertised junior role, no other technical question was asked), 2 from linkedIn. I had an interview lined up with a company from Sydney this week (frontend heavy), but salary was same ($75k + super) and relocation would have costed me more.
I also sat the Amazon OA, first question all test cases passed, second one 11/15. But with how bad the market is right now I was scared to just wait it out. Or maybe deep inside, I knew I wasnt good enough yet to join a FAANG level company. I wonder whether I will regret this decision later.
On a personal side, I quit ciggies cold turkey when I first came to Aus (too expensive here), thought it was easy. But then I picked up vaping and realised it’s actually way harder to quit. Flying to India now, tossing the vape at the airport (they are banned here). Using the trip as my hard reset and try to walk nicotine free. It helped me a lot not gonna lie during my prep, hyper focused. Not getting hungry for food, can sit on my desk for hours, lost 7kgs and all my gym progression (sometimes i smile recalling myself benching 120kg, now probably 60 wont go up).
Not in a position to advise others becuase its not like I cracked my dream job but your communication and cultural fit carries equal if not more weightage than technical skills. I gooned on leetcode so many nights alone, I have lost count. But the thing that helped me more was cherry picking stories from projects and work experience, convert them to behavioural stories and pivoting to them when similar questions came up. You can optimize a hard dp problem but you would get rejected if you cant confidently answer their situational questions.
For masters students, if you don’t already have 2–3 years of work experience in your home country, please don’t take the risk of coming here thinking you’ll have a job lined up before graduating. This is not 2015–2020 anymore. I will admit I had the privilege, my dad is wealthy and owns a hospital back in India, which meant I could lock myself in my room and just study without worrying about bills, rent, loans etc. Also I got a 75% scholarship which meant, the tuition was not that much expensive. A lot of people don’t have that luxury, and if you’re taking on a massive loan to study here, you cant prepare for interviews without stress.
For fullstack, I can recommend Roadside Coder's frontend interview prep for js and react, Akshay Saini's namaste node series and frontend system design course, Joseph Heidari's Understanding Node.js Core Concepts (Holy Sh*t his course blew my mind and made me realise how noob I am in fundamentals lmaooo). For DSA, I followed NeetCode (completed his 250 problems list). Aussie firms rarely (outside FAANG/big tech) run hard DSA rounds for junior roles. I also studied the EPI python book and DSA in python by Goldwasser a bit.
