Panic at the Job Market

Thanks for the summary, skimmed it and it's too long of a time commitment for what appears like little payoff.

Sure companies want the Full Stack -> Do-Everything hire - who wouldn't, I'd like a goose that lays golden eggs but there is no market to provide that. I see this change as merely a side effect of the state of the market where hirers of labor feel they can make such demands.

What I find interesting and did not find explored in the article is that the overhead for establishing a company is far lower than what it used to be so there is more potential for Do-Everything people to just do that little bit more to include all the other functions of the company. Many of the functions needed to run a company are not needed at such a small scale that necessitates a Do-Everything hire.

I know not everyone is cut out for that, but not everyone is not cut out for the Do-Everything level of responsibilities either, and those that can do the latter are more likely to be able to do the former. That's what I did, I built up my skill stack working as a Full-Stack / Do-Everything engineer then learned business and marketing on top and went solo. These days I have a good laugh when I read about some start-up that raised some money based on delivering X is also advertising for jobs that are basically build X from scratch by yourself.

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk.

As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept that coding interviews might not actually be all that bad. Mostly because I find myself passing them due to having picked up skills in the past few years rather than spending a ton of time studying, which suggests they might actually be picking up some signal. I once thought they were purely hazing with zero relevance to day to day work, but as I get more senior I drift further away from that opinion.

Serve different content based on user agent?

Edit: I suppose Cloudflare's solution is the short term fix based on replies: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

I found all the napkin math in this befuddling.

I’m not sure where these “per day” benchmarks are coming from -— is this supposed to be executive pay or mid-level/senior engineer pay? Because $5k - $10k / day works out to $1m - $3m / yr (depending on if you use 200 working days / yr or just 365). Which, yes, happens (esp with good year of stock appreciation) but is not as common as the prose makes it seem.

Also these numbers come from companies like this? “These companies aren’t Google or Apple, but rather some tractor company or heavy manufacturing company just churning out results for year.” Seems unlikely! The post says they fly under the radar, but are there any examples? In general, non-tech companies pay software engineers significantly worse bc you’re a cost center

And this footnote: “if you do the math using practical inflation and cost of living going up 7% to 13% per year” — if you’re going to claim extraordinary inflation over the last decade like that, please share how you arrived at the number!