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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

#201
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this here -"What are you actually developing?" People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post: - I am developing an X - I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc. - I have these ... testing problems - I have these problems with the V…

I'm hosting a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and trying to autoscale it to tens of thousands of vCPUs. The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstations (edit: transparently replace compiling) because our codebase is really big and we've hired enough people this is viable.

edit: to clarify, I'm using recc which wraps the compiler commands like distcc or ccache. It doesn't require developers to give up their workspace.

Right now I'm using buildbarn. Originally, I used sccache but there's a hard cap on parallel jobs.

In terms of how LLMs help, they got me through all the gruntwork of writing jsonnet and dockerfiles. I have barely touched that syntax before so having AI churn it out was helpful to driving towards the proof of concept. Otherwise I'd be looking up "how do I copy a file into my Docker container".

AI also meant I didn't have to spend a lot of time evaluating competing solutions. I got sccache working in a day and when it didn't scale I threw away all that work and started over.

In terms of where the LLM fell short, it constantly lies to me. For example, it mounted the host filesystem into the docker image so it could get access to the toolchains instead of making the docker images self-contained like it said it would.

It also kept trying to not to the work, e.g. It randomly decides in the thinking tokens "let's fall back to a local caching solution since the distributed option didn't work" then spams me with checkmark emojis and claims in the chat message the distributed solution is complete.

A decent amount of it is slop, to be honest, but an 80% working solution means I am getting more money and resources to turn this into a real initiative. At which point I'll rewrite the code again but I'll pay closer attention now that I know docker better.

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

#202

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…

> some specific job listings we had open for years If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

Exactly. Hire someone 80-90% there and invest in their training FFS.

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

#204
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 are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true. The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing. A rando jr vibe c…

While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc as those are now higher level concerns not part of code itself.

This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.

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

#205
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…

> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?

Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer is bigger than ever.

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

#206
post #6

https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...

What that graph looks like to me is that there were a ton of marginal folks hired during COVID, and we're shedding a lot of those folks who probably shouldn't have been hired anyway.

I mean COVID was 5 years ago and many companies have had multiple rounds of layoff since then, how long will we keep calling it covid shedding

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

#207
What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER will be coding everything for their company lol.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some specific job listings we had open for years If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

> If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready. This was extremely true when we were working on things that could not be done remote (literal physical devices that had to be wor…

> I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready

If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings. That sort of critical position is for headhunters

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mid/difficult You're assuming the question has to even be that difficult. I've proctored sessions for senior-level webdev roles where the questions were akin to "baby's first React component" -- write a component that updates a counter when you click a button. So many candidates (who purported to be working with React for years) would fail, abysmally. Not like they were just making small mistakes; I didn't even car…

I think some of this is probably attributed to being maintenance devs who don't build a lot of greenfield stuff. I got this way in one of my past jobs. I think us as devs really need to practice creating things from scratch from time to time. Working out those kinks is a good skill (less with AI) but also good practice for those baby components you'd need to make in an interview.

TBH I'm like that, but how hard could writing a React component be? I'm not even a React programmer but I can probably write working code on a whiteboard.

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

#210

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

Wow, that stinks. Are you just doing freelance in the meantime?
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