Live data from Hacker News

Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

twitter.com

171–180 of 720 posts

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

#171
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc.

I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/d…

> ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard

I can never get over how this became a thing. Was listening to a Brian Cox video on YouTube the other night (something about his voice helps me sleep). He said "I don't memorize formulas, it's easy to look them up."

If you ever need to reverse a b tree (in 30+ years of writing code, I never have) it's easy to look that up. It tells me nothing about your ability as a developer of real software that you spent time memorizing trivia before an interview.

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

#173
post #88
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…

This is undeniably happening as well. Totally agree.

I just have had lots rejections, and some where I did have a good fit, that I don't think "AI auto rejection" is the only story. I have good credentials, several F500 experiences, no big career gaps.

The only real success I have had in the last few years is targeted emails (from who is hiring on HN) or through my network.

It's very different than at any other time and I believe it is a combination of a terrible market, AI rejections, and ghost jobs. And I'm sure there are more than a few ghost jobs.

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

#174
post #116
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 mean you don’t need your first job go to top of the top companies. Your first job is to get you into the industry then you can flourish.

How many juniors OpenAI GDM are going to hire in a year, probably double digits at max, the chances are super slim and they are by nature are allowed to be as picky as they should be.

That being said, I do agree this industry is turning into finance/law, but that won’t last long either. I genuinely can’t foresee what if when AGI/ASI is really here, it should start giving human ideas to better itself, and there will be no incentive to hire any human for a large sum anymore, maybe a single digit individuals on earth perhaps

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

#175
post #46

Anyone else's inbox slammed with recruiters, more than it ever has been in the past? Feels like there's 10x the jobs available, but perhaps it's just that LLMs have automated a recruiter's job and they're letting the slop fly

Mine is, but it’s AI generated slop from gmail addresses, for some kind of scam

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

#176
Yeah but like... area under the curve. All of those jobs and more were added very recently, 2020-2022. It's a major retreat from that growth, but the trend since, say, 2008 or 2010 or 2018 is still positive growth. 2020-2022 was just a huge shift due to a very weird Covid/ZIRP market.

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

#177

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…

> 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…

Yes when I saw this happen during the post COVID boom I was honestly shocked. Engineers I knew who were fairly senior thought that they could build the rest of their career in just boxes and arrows on a board. The whole thing just made me really dislike other Principal engineers.

I left to a startup where I write code and design architecture. I even had a former coworker tell me "wow you're willing to do stuff like that at this point in your career?"

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

#178
Remember it's the first derivative. The title and chart suggested at first that there are fewer tech jobs vs the start, but really it must be way more.

I still kinda want to see this going back to 2000. That must be the biggest tech crash by far. 2008 and 2020 were overall market crashes, but tech was booming.

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

#179

What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real, grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.

Games are a weird sector. Long term I simply want to go it indie. Even if I doesn't pan out, it's some kind of passive income and I have something to show to that is fully "mine" (so no ambiguity about how much I really contributed at BigCo.).

Short term I'm freelancing and doing whatever else I can find to get by. Hoping for one more full time role before I start my self published ventures.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Housing is the ultimate decider so I’d say that’s equivalent to at least 50 bucks today.
Post reply on HN