Ask HN: Is it just me, or does the job market for IT seem bad today?

Yes because non of us techies ever had other jobs before we got better jobs. This is such insulting post. Should I refer to you as a "non-techie".

Not in LCoL countries. I am a developer with 20+ years experience, I'm starting a new job in September and I only interviewed with this company, plus another one who emailed me halfway through the process. The trick is that I'm living in Warsaw, Poland.

I'm late 50's, 35+ years professionally programming, mostly business software and ecommerce. I entertain at least one serious offer a month and numerous inquiries a week, none of which I intend to take but instead use as leverage for raises at my current position which I now have been at over 15 years. I have leveraged a 50% salary increase in the last 5 years. I am not a hard bargainer, just matching my estimated value. I am not in a big city. I work in an office.

I have outsourced coworkers that I tutor. They are almost universally pathetic at software development and are a net negative overall. I get the most done during the times upper management can't overlook the lack of progress on current projects and leave the offshore people to their own devices for a spell, or have fired them as we go through cycles of hiring and firing. Management just can't stop touching themselves thinking about those sub-minimum wage salaries but somehow never grasp you get what you pay for.

Want a job in software development?

- Love it for the work not the money. If you're in it for the money you'll never be good.

- Don't chase fads. I know little of crypto, web 3.0 (what version are we on now anyway?), javascript frameworks, and use AI sparingly. But I know programming and software development well enough to ace the little pointless tests they give in job interviews.

- Don't play games with getting hired. Use people not technology to find a better job. That means being presentable and personable and networking. Indeed is not networking it's a marketplace and you're the product.

Everyone has reasons not to attempt these things, but believe me when I say I can do it so can you. I have pretty good social anxiety but we're all bozos on this bus and I just keep that in mind at all times.

IT/CS pays well which brings in a lot of competition to the market.

It's not a feeling, the IT job market is dead relative to how it was in the recent past and is unlikely to recover imo.

Were I to guess, 20 years ago you were in niche group of weirdos who enjoyed writing computer code in their free time which just so happened align with the 90s-00s internet revolution and 10s smart phone revolution.

For a couple of decades there just hasn't been enough nerds to build all apps and websites companies wanted built, and therefore competition for these jobs was extremely high. If you wanted to win the best IT talent you had to pay 6 figures and offer endless perks.

Today every government in the world is trying to push kids to code in an attempt to win a share of economic success that companies like Google and Apple have had. But with more people now going into software, more outsourcing and with cloud software like Shopify allowing those without a technical background to build and ship websites and products on their own, the demand for engineers relative to the number of engineers is now decreasing for the first time.

Going forward I'd bet on AI continuing to erode the relative demand for software engineers.

I'd also argue it's less that the IT market today is bad, but that it's adjusting to be more comparable to other skilled labour jobs which are more competitive and less favourably compensated than IT.

Clearly going forward the shortage is likely to be in jobs that have geographical restrictions and require hard skills. You can't outsource a roofer and use Gen AI to generate you a roof, and it's a profession that takes years to master therefore you can't just hire anyone to do it, and yet no one wants to do these manual labour jobs anymore. Were I in my teens today, this is where I'd be looking for career security. As it stands I'm not going to complain after lucking massively over the last ~15 years – there really was no better time to be a computer nerd.