Ask HN: Is the Market Recovering?

One anecdote here:

for me personally the job/funding market collapsed in maybe December of 2022.

In November I got ~10 inbound pings from credible recruiters or HR folks at credible shops a week, and that was typical of probably the last 5 or 10 years.

In December it was zero and has stayed zero until this month when I’ve had 2.

Outbound resumes and pinging the network was pretty much “I wish I could help you” all year until May/June and now conversations are starting to go somewhere at least in the early stages. The compensation packages people are talking are still like a quarter of what was typical a year ago if that.

So it seems like we’ve got a ways to go before the market starts operating with consistent price discovery, but I’m seeing the ice crack here and there.

Yes, there are basic technical patterns that are used to repeat (or not!) but as others say in the dotcom crash there were no real Internet/technology penetration into the society: dot com companies tried to create a market that didn't exist and required time to be builts (e.g. mobile phones). Once the technology "eats everything" we are part of a new ecosystem and sometimes we are humans using tools but in many other times it is tools (e.g. ads) that are using humans.

AI is having an impact in the markets, there is not question that ChatGPT inaugurates a new milestone even if at the end that AI is not so smart, it is very useful.

IMHO we, humans, are the bottleneck and slowing things down: matching a buyer with a seller is slow, it requires building trust and depends on culture. If you remove humans from some activities the economy will accelerate. That does not mean that the human race will be better as a whole but the money spped will rise and money will flow in the direction of removing humans when they could be replaced.

In Poland it's still a little bit slower, only serious hiring I see is for senior roles in business critical teams. No great new investments made

I think there are several possibilities, among them is the idea it will not recover. What has made things rebound previously is the emergence of some new platform and/or a new way to make money on a platform. For the first time in decades it feels like the low hanging fruit have all been picked and the VR/metaverse idea is not proving nearly so compelling as many hoped.

In the near future I suspect any major growth in this sector will be around environmental problems, probably kicking off in earnest later this year, and fixing hilariously inefficient cloud deployments would probably count.

The simple fact though is a lot of people that had been in the software industry really weren’t cut out for it, and were in the way of those that are. We will be better off when they find their true calling making money elsewhere.

For job seekers not at all. I just finished my job search after 5 months and 1 week. After 179 applications, 22 interviews, 2 offers later, I'd say that it's one of the toughest and miserable job market someone can find into. I job search-ed even during the pandemic, and although it was difficult, imho this one is order of magnitude worse... The Senior you are the better chance you'll have, but there is no market for JR, and I feel so bad for them because I have a few people that I care about that are in that condition and aren't able to find almost any openings.

For startup funding, if you are in AI it's fine. Otherwise better presenting with very good metrics and not with the pressing needs of raising money.

It's impossible to say when it will recover, but I'll echo the people in this thread that say "not this year".