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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

#121

Post by paulmist »

lowkey_ wrote: post #55
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…

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…

> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI

I'd go a step further and say the engineers who, unprompted, discover requirements and discuss their own designs with others have an even better time. You need to effectively communicate your thoughts to coding agents, but perhaps more crucially you need to fit your ever-growing backyard of responsibilities into the larger picture. Being that bridge requires a great level of confidence and clear-headedness and will be increasingly valued.

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

#122

Post by zarzavat »

_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.

It's like having an early/broken chess engine.

An amateur with a chess engine that blunders 10% of the time will hardly play much better than if they didn't use it. They might even play worse. Over the course of a game, those small probabilities stack up to make a blunder a certainty, and the amateur will not be able to distinguish it from a good move.

However, an experienced player with the same broken engine will easily beat even a grandmaster since they will be able to recognise the blunder and ignore it.

I often find myself asking LLMs "but if you do X won't it be broken because Y?". If you can't see the blunders and use LLMs as slot machines then you're going to spend more money in order to iterate slower.

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

#124

Post by johnnyanmac »

CrossVR wrote: post #3
whimsicalism wrote: post #2

the 2020 ‘recession’ wasn’t really bad for tech employment at all

In fact in sectors like the game industry the pandemic resulted in a massive hiring boom. The layoffs only materialized after the pandemic was well and truly over.

Yeah, pandemic was good overall. Next generation of consoles looming, sales overall were up since people were forced inside, there were finally some loosening of dev kit practices to accommodate for the lack of offices to go into (I never would have imagined in 2015 having a dev kit in my home 5 years later) .Pretty much the only art medium to benefit from the times while cinema collapsed, Streaming services were running a defecit war where no one won except Netflix, and music stalled for a bit.

But as per usual, the bust hit just as hard as the boom. Multiple high profile failures in games and initiatives as a whole, Microsoft and Apple decided to stop bleeding money with their respective subscription deals, mobile gaming (from the advent of Genshin Imapct and co) became less an easy cash grab and more a 2nd wing of AAA development, investments dried up overnight for indies (unless 'AI').

And the headcount, of course: https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-wo...

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

#125

Post by bayarearefugee »

no_wizard wrote: post #103
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.

In tech 'culture fit' is generally a dog whistle for ageism in my experience.

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

#126

Post by Aurornis »

sanufar wrote: post #101
crystal_revenge wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring.

Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we all know that revenue going up 23% YoY was not attributable to this single programmer doing anything at all.

Often I'll get candidates into interviews and they light up telling me about impressive things they did at a past job with enough detail to convince me they know the subject, but their resumes are garbage because they've followed too many influencers.

So try to work on your resume first. Try different resumes. Rewrite it and see what makes interviewers take notice and what they ignore. The most common mistake is to write a resume once and then spam it to 100 jobs. I know it's not fun to change the resume or invest time into applying for a job that may not respond, but you know what else isn't fun? Applying to 100 jobs and not getting any responses because every hiring manager has 20 tailored resumes in their inbox ahead of yours.

Having a simple but clear LinkedIn profile helps. Many scoff at this, but it works. You don't have to read LinkedIn's social media feed or do anything with the site. Just set it up and leave it for them to find.

GitHub portfolios and other things have low relative value at most companies. There are some exceptions where someone will look at it and it might tip the balance in your favor, but it's a small optimization. You need to be perfect the resume first, get a LinkedIn that looks decent second, and only then think about the ancillary things.

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

#127

Post by johnnyanmac »

locusofself wrote: post #5
whimsicalism wrote: post #2

the 2020 ‘recession’ wasn’t really bad for tech employment at all

on a personal level I was hired (by Microsoft, my first and only "big tech" job) in April 2020 and I am still working here... all these companies "over-hired" during the pandemic, and the term "covid hire" is even a thing..

Overhiring implies that MSFT's headcount went down over this time. But that doesn't seem to be the case. They still hire a lot, just not in North America.

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

#128

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

teagee wrote: post #10

The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever. Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days. Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view

The chart shows devs still growing, and "Computer System Design SERVICES" getting hammered (most of the total loss).

I'm not even sure this chart tells the story of the title.

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

#129

Post by fullofideas »

Aurornis wrote: post #112
overfeed wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've interviewed for that's still open after 10 months When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title. It made a couple people furious because they assumed we were going to take the job posting down when we hired someone and then re-pos…

Honest question. Were these super specialized roles with such specific skill requirements that it took such a long time to find the right person? Looking back, do you think the team would have been better off hiring someone who came close enough, and supporting them to learn on the job?

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

#130

Post by klooney »

jjmarr wrote: post #116
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…

Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high. I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting…

I hate the credentialism. What a bummer of a place to end up.
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