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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

#211

Post by [deleted] »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #185
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…

> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Most prefer a greenfield project.

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by conductr »

Aurornis wrote: post #184
coliveira wrote: post #142

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…

So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.

Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and you can hire them by other means that full-time employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were meant to do for your situation.

Nothing about this was mission critical or even all that important or you would have found a way to solve the problem or you did and it wasn't a problem to begin with. I'm in a field where people often want to hire me for some special thing like this, but it often turns out, most of my life would be spent idle because no one company has enough demand for me. I can consult instead and be busy all year, or I can take a job for someone that's OK with me being idle for 80% of my time. I prefer the former for multiple reasons but just making an example of why hiring for specialized roles that aren't mission critical is often not the thing you should be doing.

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

#213

Post by beastman82 »

globular-toast wrote: post #119

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.

I think that's a very good plan FWIW. I'm going to consider cabinetry which I predict will be a semi-retirement in terms of income

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

#214

Post by layer8 »

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 very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.

Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory work — you know the real challenges are yet to come.

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

#215

Post by honeycrispy »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #203

This industry is a race to the bottom and long overdue for a massive salary reset. There is no society on Earth where someone who codes JavaScript (poorly) should make more money than, say, a doctor. Yet here we are.

A lot of doctors are just pill prescribers. I can't tell you how many times I've been to useless doctors that don't help and give you a big fat bill on the way out the door.

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

#216

Post by caminante »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #203

This industry is a race to the bottom and long overdue for a massive salary reset. There is no society on Earth where someone who codes JavaScript (poorly) should make more money than, say, a doctor. Yet here we are.

How much do you think doctors make?

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

#217

Post by zeroCalories »

SoftTalker wrote: post #172
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dev…

Being able to reverse a binary tree isn't something you need to memorize. If you can't do that it tells me that you're not fluent in your chosen programming language.

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

#218

Post by fny »

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…

As the kids say, AI makes everyone a 10x engineer. Who would you you want to 10x?

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

#219

Post by jjmarr »

karmasimida wrote: post #174
jjmarr wrote: 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…

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 e…

The problem is the lack of experience compounds.

Because AI accelerates the rate of knowledge gain, this gets even faster.

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

#220

Post by mmcnl »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #185
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…

> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Most prefer a greenfield project.

I don't know, the majority of my colleagues have no idea how to do anything in a greenfield environment. They need guardrails.
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