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Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

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Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#101

Post by sanufar »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #92
mjr00 wrote: post #15

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…

I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…

In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#102

Post by jimbokun »

frankbreetz wrote: post #81

Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems to be doing better then most sectors... "Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year "Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries" "Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web sea…

"Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service"

It's a weird employment category that includes both Google SWEs and your local librarian.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#103

Post by no_wizard »

mjr00 wrote: post #15

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…

High performer is so subjective too.

You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance.

and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#104

Post by johnnyanmac »

phil21 wrote: post #88
xrd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons. One, they have already filled it internally but legally have to post the job. Two, they are gathering data on market trends and what salaries people will take, which is useful if they are considering firing people and rehiring with lower salaries. I've applied for many jobs where I was perfectly qualified and got rejection notices immediately. I applied on a Sunday and got rejected on Sunday an hour late…

> and if that's the case, what other explanation is there than "ghost jobs." You didn't pass some arbitrary ruleset given to an AI or machine learning algorithm. Companies can be very selective now, and usually implement this selectivity fairly stupidly. There also is the problem of being genuinely swamped with bullshit applicants for positions, so the false positive rate is likely quite high at the moment. I've foun…

If you don't have the time to sort them through, there's not much urgency to actually find someone, is there?

It also might point to a filtering mismatch of your get a high false positive rate.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#105

Post by overfeed »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #92
mjr00 wrote: post #15

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…

I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…

> I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.

How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#106

Post by stanleykm »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #74
overgard wrote: post #65

I know people will say AI, but I don't think it's that. The whole "everyone should learn to code" bullshit of the last 15 years or so has created a lot of developers that frankly aren't very good, and then you mix in the massive overhiring of the pandemic, and what you're seeing is a hard correction. CEOs love to use "productivity improvements from AI" as a smokescreen and investor catnip but the research shows it's…

Blaming the employees is BS. A pretty large % of the people losing their jobs are also high performing excellent people. I feel like anyone who worked at one of these companies doing lay offs knows this.

The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes performance into account, but that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#107

Post by weatherlite »

_alternator_ wrote: post #63
lowkey_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engin…

Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher. High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are gonna crush it relative to juniors.

> Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers

I guess? I don't really see why that would be the case. Being a senior is also about understanding the requirements better and knowing how/what to test. I mean we're talking about prompting text into a textarea, something I think even an "old timer" can do pretty well.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#108

Post by Aurornis »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #92
mjr00 wrote: post #15

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…

I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…

> Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore.

A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect roles where they advised teams of more junior engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with building or operating anything.

I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start when they have to interview at other companies after not writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't get past the first round of interviews (before coding challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as architects without realizing that companies want hands-on builders now.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#109

Post by ryanSrich »

tunesmith wrote: post #73
roxolotl wrote: post #24

How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely. EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124... There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expec…

In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.

The equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#110

Post by doctorpangloss »

mjr00 wrote: post #15

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…

> Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)

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