Panic at the Job Market

Tech is a high growth sector, perhaps the highest. Because of this, tech companies are highly leveraged. They need cash to fund the growth and this cash won't result in revenue for some time, so they have to borrow the money. When rates go up, this cash becomes expensive. The last thing these companies want to do is cancel their growth plans and hand over the market to their competitor, so they look for areas to reduce costs. The single most effective way to do this is to the various recurring expenses associated with headcount.

Yes, covid is a factor and yes so is the shift from general purpose compute to specialized/high performance, but the single largest factor is the fed rate and what this has done to the money supply (as it is designed to do).

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably.

Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. Keep in mind also that a CV in the pile via a job portal is always going to be sediment at the bottom of the barrel. Try to make use of your networks and friends as much as possible.

As for my situation, I too feel a bit burned by the diminishing number of tech jobs, as I was in the process of trying to get a job via a software consultancy firm, but remained benched for 8 months. I dropped it, went back to doing corporate and tax valuations. Being underemployed is, thus far, better than nothing at all, especially mentally.

P.S. Here's a nice little tidbit in the source:

I have to admit, I did slip up on this banana by being a lazy monkey.

I generally like the article but the author seems to have a really inflated view of what jobs are paying. At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k.

Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in the US is making around 135-150k a year and that average is including all the faang engineers with the top end salary

This is a personal pet peeve of mine as well. In written text i see online and in direct communication, punctuation is absent, words are misspelled, ideas are incoherent.

It is frustrating to read because it is unclear. Even more frustrating is the over-reliance on memes and inside jokes.

I, too, despise this style of writing.

Indeed. There is so much more going on and not going on than is apparent in these (apologies to the author, but I think this is accurate) long but simplistic takes. Hearsay and arbitrary correlations are great conversation fodder but I wouldn't make life decisions based on such discussions.

The difficult bit is that there is very little available to folks who want concrete "answers" to the job market, life and success questions. There is simple, quality advice but it doesn't give answers and I've noticed people don't like them.