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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

#131

Post by overgard »

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.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the people that got laid off were the ones that deserved it. Obviously politics, situational factors (wanting people back in the office), etc are a huge part (I myself am recently laid off and I don't think I deserved it!) What I was trying to drive at is developers have lost a lot of leverage and negotiation because there are too many people fighting for too few roles. Also I can't help but wonder if people have lost trust in developers because of the dilution of talent.

That being said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that creating a massive influx of new developers without jobs that provided good mentorship (most jobs are awful at mentoring junior developers) is going to have huge consequences that we're now dealing with. I think the "learn to code" thing was a massive mistake. Encourage the people that want to, sure, but don't try to pull people in that are only marginally interested in a paycheck.

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

#133

Post by tracerbulletx »

stanleykm wrote: post #106
tracerbulletx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its only the part about casting any aspersions at the people laid off for being low performance that bothers me because I know so many incredible people for whom they absolutely did not deserve it and its not fair to assume anything about their value or quality of their work specifically.

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

#135

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

weatherlite wrote: post #99
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…

> The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI Did you consider tech whiteboard / leetcode interviews are unnatural stressful environments ? Have you gone through a mid/difficult technical appraisal yourself lately ? Try it out just to get an idea how it feels on the other side...

Simple: don’t do that.

It’s been well over a decade that I’ve had to do the coding interview monkey dance and I actually turned down an offer where I did pass a coding interview because I found it insulting and took a job for slightly less money where the new to the company director was interested in a more strategic hire (2016). That was the same thing that happened before in 2014 and after in 2018 - a new manager/director/CTO looking for a strategic hire.

In fact even my job at BigTech -AWS ProServe (full time blue badge RSU earning employee) as a customer facing consultant specializing in app dev was all behavioral as well as my next full time job as a staff consultant in 2023.

I’m 51 years old and was 40 in 2014. If I’m still trying to compete based on my ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard even at 40, I have made some horrible life decisions.

(Well actually I did make a horrible life decision staying at my second job too long until 2008 and becoming an expert beginner. But that’s another story)

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

#136

Post by johnnyanmac »

stanleykm wrote: post #106
tracerbulletx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the industry and product, as usual. On an large level, I do not think there's "too many engineers and not enough problems to be solved". Companies are simply hunkering down for a recession we can't say out loud.

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

#137

Post by Aurornis »

fullofideas wrote: post #129
Aurornis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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?

More specialized.

If we wanted to train someone, we'd start with an internal candidate who was familiar with the other parts of the job and then train them on this one thing.

Hiring an outsider who doesn't know the subject matter and then teaching them is less efficient and more risky. It was better to have someone in the team learn the new subject as an incremental step and then backfill the simpler work they were doing.

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

#138

Post by Forgeties79 »

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…

Hopefully it’s not too much like 2008 and we end up with another huge surge in unpaid internships

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

#139

Post by plagiarist »

jimbokun wrote: post #90
jghn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this remains a moat at all. So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are tes…

"And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?" Either the machines exterminate us or we become glorified pets. Hope the AIs prefer us to cats (even though that's a long shot).

There'll definitely be a niche for us, similar to how people keep parrots as pets.
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