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

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

#71

Post by filoleg »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #56
afpx wrote: post #24

In the late 90s, early 00s I would submit 5 resumes, get interviews from 4, get offers from 3. The whole process would take a few hours - no studying, no projects, no indefinite rounds of interviews. I could actually talk to the hiring manager and get a sense for my odds of getting the job before putting the effort in. Now it's like submit 1000 resumes, get interviews from 4, spend 20+ hours preparing and doing inter…

Might as well pick a name from a hat and hire someone out of those 30 people, and just tell no one that's how you picked them. At least then you wouldn't be wasting their precious time they could be looking at other jobs for.

Reminds me of the old joke about shuffling the stack of candidate resumes multiple times and then picking the top 3 (and throwing away the rest), because you wouldn’t want to hire unlucky people.

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

#72

Post by incomingpain »

dukeyukey wrote: post #10
incomingpain wrote: post #3

Far more a general trend. We have a major transition right now. https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/interest-rate Most businesses never operate from an operational budget but rather debt. When rates go high, the businesses have to cut the fat. Which generally means the job market tightens. This is but 1 factor in why the governments should be obligated by constitution to balance the budget.

That feels like the wrong lesson. Surely during downturns you want to government to step up spending to stabilise the economy, and to get safe bonds out on the market to compensate for stock market downturn?

>hat feels like the wrong lesson. Surely during downturns you want to government to step up spending to stabilise the economy, and to get safe bonds out on the market to compensate for stock market downturn?

Nope. Keynes himself created this idea and then disproved it. There's 1 key factor of why this fails EVERYTIME.

Lets say the downturn was just the uranium mining industry. Government comes in, adds spending to stabilize. Then you ASSUME the government will stop once the issue is over. Nope. Never ever does. Politicians who created the subsidy move on to other issues and those temporary government measures become permanent.

This is a big gap for the difference between theory and practice.

On occasion you'll hear about the need to end corporate welfare. Nobody ever actually does it, but then when that industry bounces back, they are supercharged by free subsidies. Then the next politician is told, you can cut but it's going to cause people to lose jobs. Which is true.

Government should never be in this business to start with.

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

#74

Post by lukan »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #50
lukan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The AI bubble is also causing a lot of companies to believe in the idea of replacing their staff with AI." Replacing generic slogan writers with AI might work, but replacing IT workers with AI at this point will be funny to watch (from a distance).

The worst IT professionals, like bottom 10% (which seem to be in the top .01% for getting hired and holding a job, somehow), are about on par with AI in my experience. At least with Health care IT professionals, which might be a huge selection bias. I am just about as likely to see complete nonsense suggestions or a complete misunderstanding of the problem from either.

Oh, no doubt about that. But also like you said, people who hired them in the first place, apparently cannot judge them correctly, so won't judge correctly now, who to fire as incompetent.

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

#75

Post by jack_riminton »

fendale wrote: post #16
cordenll wrote: post #7

I feel like it is pretty bad, although I do noticed that there is a lot off interest in people who can manage self-hosted software using kamal and hetzner for example. guys from 37 signals are really pushing the post vercel era.

Where are you seeing these sort of roles? Are they labeled as "devops" or something else?

Platform engineers perhaps, that's what my company is hiring for at the moment to get off heroku

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

#76

Post by jack_riminton »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #66
underseacables wrote: post #5

I think conditions for older employees are getting worse. Teams are outsourced, either to younger people who work from home, or to other countries, making older remaining employees seem like an unnecessarily high cost.

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 va…

True words of wisdom, thanks

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

#77

Post by gilbetron »

You can see from this graph that IT peaked at the end of 2022, and has stabilized at about 80k less positions since then. That means there are roughly 80k people around that could still be looking for IT jobs. Some of them probably have switched to other fields, but it still a lot of people sloshing around and jumping at job openings.

I don't think there's an end in sight for that issue, and it likely could get worse if the AI surge alleviates (or pops entirely!). It sucks, but I'd look in non-traditional IT places (government, universities, non-tech companies) as many of them are still growing quickly!

Graph: https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/US-employm...

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

#78

Post by oidar »

lawgimenez wrote: post #40

As a native mobile developer I just noticed a new trend called fullstack mobile developer (web and mobile), it seems most companies prefers cross-platform frameworks nowadays. One company wants me to develop their mobile app on iOS and Android while also help manage their AWS backend. I’m not looking for new mobile dev jobs soon but the market for native looks like shit.

What is this magical ios/android/web full stack called?

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

#79

Post by handzhiev »

BillFranklin wrote: post #6

It is indeed, judging by the HN Who Is Hiring / Wants To Be Hired comment ratio [1]. [1]: https://github.com/bilbof/whoishiring-ratio

Thanks for doing this! I'm a bit confused by the readme:

"This script outputs how many job seekers there are vs how many jobs."

Isn't it actually showing the ratio of jobs / job seekers? It does seem so by the chart and the code but the text makes it sound the opposite. (Or is it my wrong reading?)

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

#80

Post by onemoresoop »

lukan wrote: post #34
pjc50 wrote: post #18

There's been a lot of redundancies. Games industry hit particularly badly. I'm not sure how much of it is "real" and how much is sentiment; personally, I think profitable companies having layoffs is always "sentiment". The interest rate rises were intended to contract the economy and reduce wage inflation pressure by increasing unemployment, and they seem to have had that effect. The AI bubble is also causing a lot o…

"The AI bubble is also causing a lot of companies to believe in the idea of replacing their staff with AI." Replacing generic slogan writers with AI might work, but replacing IT workers with AI at this point will be funny to watch (from a distance).

The expectation with AI is that fewer devs will create and maintain more. It's not that the tools aren't useful, but they're a lot more useful for employers to squeeze out more from employees.
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