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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?

#91

Post by withinboredom »

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…

You’re lucky that your employer negotiates. I worked at a place that came back with: “oh, you looked for another job, so you are not happy here. We pay you what we think you’re worth and if you don’t agree, it sounds like you aren’t happy here anyway. Here’s a severance package, now go fuck off.” (Paraphrased).

It was their legit policy to fire you if you tried negotiating your salary.

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

#92

Post by BillFranklin »

withinboredom wrote: post #89
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

It would help to explain what the axis is. Is higher more seekers or more jobs?

Higher is more jobs

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

#93

Post by sifar »

xutopia wrote: post #45
mempko wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are missing is that there was a tax code change as part of the Trump tax cuts that made engineers much more expensive in the short term. Companies, especially startups, were hit with a high tax bill. The layoffs are, I believe, a direct result of this tax change.

Wait... how can I learn more about how this affects engineers?

This is a good explanation.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

A recent bill has given relief for the domestic amortization but is still stuck in the senate.

https://gop-waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...

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

#94

Post by jamie_ca »

gilbetron wrote: post #77

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…

That looks just like a regression to the trend line - connecting the two endpoints on the graph correlates on par with the growth from 2015-2020. The recent hiring boom was an overcompensation from the 2020 covid dip, and now we're back to business as usual.

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

#96

Post by dexwiz »

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

I commented on this when you initially posted it, but you really need a Y axis for this graph. Also if its a ratio, which way is it? A double bar or double line chart would probably be easier to interpret.

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

#97

Post by VirusNewbie »

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…

>In the late 90s, early 00s

Right, but in the late 90s and early 2000s, unless you were a manager climbing the ranks, you weren't making big bucks.

Even folks at Microsoft, which at the time was one of the most dominant software companies, were only millionaires if they joined pre-IPO. The company wasn't minting IC millionaires.

Now you have a whole host of FAANGMULA companies that do mint millionaires if you stay long enough and get your full vest, and don't get totally unlucky on the timing of RSU grants.

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

#98

Post by CM30 »

It's definitely rather bad at the moment. Probably a tiny bit better than last year/the beginning of this one, since I've had a lot more interview calls than I did then, but still really bad compared to previous years.

Now it seems like 80% of open positions are for senior developers/engineers, the list of required technologies for these roles is higher than ever, and you're competing with hundreds if not thousands of other candidates too. If you ever want to feel depressed about the market, one look at LinkedIn's candidate numbers for any role is probably gonna do it.

As for why this seems to be the case... the best I've heard is that the end of the pandemic shook multiple industries to their cores.

Interest rates were good (for these companies) during that time period, so they had money to throw around on hiring developers en masse. And with everyone locked inside, internet based businesses were booming, whether it was online tools like Zoom, media companies like Netflix or gaming companies as a whole.

Unfortunately for them, when the pandemic ended, all this went away. People went back to normal life, and in many cases, actually spent far more time offline than ever before. So the stats went down, the beancounters and CEOs panicked, and we've seen the effects ever since.

All those companies either shut down, laid off a bunch of staff or outsourced the work to some cheaper locale, and said staff flooded the market. So now it's an employer's market where they can be ultra choosy about who they hire, and where the requirements to get hired are higher than ever.

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

#99

Post by CM30 »

mongol wrote: post #14

What interests me is if this is a natural dip that will be followed by an upturn, or if something fundamentally has changed, and it will remain lower demand. Perhaps the AI boom will decrease the demand from now on. Waiting for better times may be futile?

I suspect the answer is a bit of both. On the one hand, the era of zero interest rates is apparently over, so that'll effect things a bit. And the end of the pandemic means that the numbers we saw during that time period probably won't happen again, at least without a major world emergency breaking out.

But things will likely improve eventually. Probably due to a mix of laid off developers finally finding new jobs, a decent percentage of developers/engineers leaving the industry, and new companies being founded in future.

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