Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by ryandrake » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #162

dolebirchwood wrote: post #146

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.

When I did tech interviews, I used to think I could just jump right in with an intermediate level question and go from there. But the reality is that most of the candidates I interviewed couldn't even answer a trivial question that just required a basic for-loop with an if-statement inside it. These are not pressure-cooker interviews where they need to balance a binary tree while having Baby Shark blasted at them on full volume. These are chill interviews where I ask them to iterate through a string and tell me where the first "x" character is.

There are so many software engineering candidates who literally cannot write the simplest code. I even had someone actually say "I don't really write code at my current job, I'm more of a thought leader." Bzzzzzt.

I've always prepared what I called level 1, level 2, and level 3 questions ready for candidates. But, I almost never even got to level 2, and never in 20 years of interviewing got to my level 3 questions.

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

#222

Post by andai » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #71

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…

I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how…

"Those who can't, do..."

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

#223

Post by Aurornis » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #212

Aurornis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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.

I don't know why you assumed that. We had teams. We just wanted to grow them.

We weren't sitting there waiting.

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

#224

Post by kseniamorph » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

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…

This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has always been easier for people who communicate well regardless of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's making some people more resilient to this market shift specifically

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

#225

Post by Aurornis » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:14 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #208

Aurornis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings.

Why? Not everyone is on LinkedIn or has an updated profile.

Some of the best candidates I've hired were people who were in other states who were planning to move, but waiting for the right job opportunity to come up.

We also used recruiters.

Why does it make people so angry that we posted job listings for real jobs that we were really hiring for?

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

#226

Post by Aurornis » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:14 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #202

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.

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

Answered elsewhere: If we're investing in someone's training we'll promote someone from within who is already familiar with the product and then backfill their simpler work.

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

#227

Post by tokyobreakfast » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

caminante wrote: post #216

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?

Some make less than new grads at AMZN with 0 YOE.

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

#228

Post by andai » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

dolebirchwood wrote: post #146

weatherlite wrote: post #99

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...

> 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…

>You're assuming the question has to even be that difficult

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Most interviewees failed fizzbuzz, and that was 20 years ago.

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

#229

Post by caminante » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

xrd wrote: post #31

fred_is_fred wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see everyone say this but what is the point of making a fake job opening? Are companies just doing that to see if a unicorn applies?

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…

> Two reasons. One, they have already filled it internally but legally have to post the job.

This scenario isn't a "fake job," which are more akin to ghost/scam/non-existent openings.

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

#230

Post by boomskats » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

sam0x17 wrote: post #71

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…

I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how…

What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none.

That time when you got to internalise through first hand experience what good & bad look like is when you built the skill/intuition that now differentiates competent LLM wielding devs from the vibers. The problem is that expectations of juniors are inevitably rising, and they don't have the experience or confidence (or motivation) to push back on the 'why don't you just AI' management narrative, so are by default turning to rolling the dice to meet those expectations. This is how we end up with a generation of devs that truly don't understand the technology they're deploying and imho this is the boringdystopia / skynet future that we all need to defend against.

I know it's probably been said a million times, but this kinda feels like global warming, in that it's a problem that we fundamentally will never be able to fix if we just continue to chase short term profit & infinite growth.