Potentially related to ground truth shared in what was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493049 https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1fbhap7/sec...
You know what would be funny? If there was a free labor market for the C suite. There's probably some talented disgruntled folks with financial runway right now, who would do CEO for minimum wage just for the lolz.
Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
11–20 of 81 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#12Anecdotally I just got a new job and a massive raise from my last position but my friends who are new grads or have less experience/weird educational backgrounds are still struggling to land roles. Definitely a much better market than a year ago but the floor still dropped out from under us and it took the new grads and bootcamp devs with it.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#13It's getting better, but it's still dire.
Anecdotally I've gotten a fair few more job interviews in the last month or so than I did when still at my previous company, and seems recruiters are reaching out a bit more than they did back then as well.
But it's still really bad for anyone that's not a senior, especially anyone who hasn't been a senior at a large tech company. I often look on LinkedIn and Glassdoor and other such sites for jobs, and whenever I end up on the home page feed, there's always at least a few very popular posts from people lamenting how bad the market/search is. Those posts are filled with comments from people saying it's been weeks/months of effort to get anything, including from those in the tech industry.
And heck, I've even seen depressing stories pop up all the time outside of job boards and related sites too. Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon... they've all got a lot of people who seem to be in serious trouble right now, and in pretty much every industry under the sun.
It definitely feels bad, especially when people I know with a lot of experience are struggling to even get interviews. We're talking senior devs, team leads, managers, etc. All people that I feel should be getting offers left, right and centre, yet are struggling to get anywhere.
Makes me rather worried as someone who is by default unlikely to have much of a personal network, and who has basically negative charisma.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#14Yes. I'm the CEO of Google and I can't even get an internship at Google But tbh yes, it seems job postings for software jobs are the lowest in 4 years, almost as low as the dip that occurred just after the pandemic. The COVID job boom was clearly temporary and is now being massively offset by AI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&he... It's over. Best alpha for people who aren't being flooded r…
What is the evidence it is being offset by AI? I haven't really seen that. I think it is mostly two factors: - Companies over-hired during the COVID boom and don't need to hire as much because they still have those people. It's like they did all of their hiring for a few years ahead of time. - Interest rates are still the highest in a long time. Tech hiring is disproportionately affected by this. You can throw in off…
Doubt AI is reducing the need for developers very much, if at all, but the perception of AI very well could be causing some companies and managers to reduce hiring as they believe the hype that LLMs will obsolete most developers.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#15[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#16As someone involved in hiring, there are a few factors going on:
1. There's no available headcount. No one is leaving since there are no opportunities elsewhere. Especially those on visas.
2. When we do have headcount, we get 1000 resumes within an hour or two. We also have a stack of referrals to get through first. A lot of these resumes are experienced folks with backgrounds in FAANG.
3. Supply remains high (100k CS undergrads every year including global supply) whereas innovation is low.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#17Yes
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#18Yes. I'm the CEO of Google and I can't even get an internship at Google But tbh yes, it seems job postings for software jobs are the lowest in 4 years, almost as low as the dip that occurred just after the pandemic. The COVID job boom was clearly temporary and is now being massively offset by AI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&he... It's over. Best alpha for people who aren't being flooded r…
What is the evidence it is being offset by AI? I haven't really seen that. I think it is mostly two factors: - Companies over-hired during the COVID boom and don't need to hire as much because they still have those people. It's like they did all of their hiring for a few years ahead of time. - Interest rates are still the highest in a long time. Tech hiring is disproportionately affected by this. You can throw in off…
My opinion there are five things going on:
1) Tech hasn't really innovated since the smart phone era. VR and web3 didn't work out. All the covid B2C subscription stuff didn't work out. Big data and SaaS only partially worked out. AI is pretty transparently a pump and not many people are investing in headcount for it.
2) Interest rates raise the risk-free rate of return so there's less impetus to dump money into speculative investments in chase of yield. This affects startups but less so established companies who don't need to raise.
3) There's a massive offshoring push right now. Bigger than I've seen since the early 2000s. Lots of organizations are making it basically impossible to open a req in a western office while also actively moving roles offshore.
4) There's a big push from the ownership/investor class for labor discipline. There's a feeling that industry workers got too comfortable during the Covid boom and started making demands.
5) People actually getting displaced by AI is marginal to non-existent as far as I've seen, but I've seen plenty of managers using it as an excuse for workforce reduction "we're going to fire 10 percent of you because you should all be using AI to be more productive."
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#19LinkedIn is now silent for me besides spam.
Re: Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
#20One promising anecdotal is that I've seen a big uptick in the last 8 weeks of people leaving my current place (not FAANG but you've heard of it) with work secured whereas that wasn't the case much for the last 2 years.