Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth? https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
I've heard other people say, situation has greatly improved over the past year, esp. 6 months.
Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
261–270 of 720 posts
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#262For 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
I've been able to get something like 25 interviews in 2 months despite having long gaps on my resume and nothing especially impressive to my name. So I suspect you might be going about this wrong. I haven't gotten an offer yet, that's another story, but getting the interviews hasn't been hard. Applying in NYC/SF, senior-only.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher. High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are gonna crush it relative to juniors.
> Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers I guess? I don't really see why that would be the case. Being a senior is also about understanding the requirements better and knowing how/what to test. I mean we're talking about prompting text into a textarea, something I think even an "old timer" can do pretty well.
I've seen a few people I would consider senior engineers, good ones, who seem to have somewhat fallen for the marketing if you look at the prompts they're using. Closer to a magical "make it so" than "build the code to meet this spec, that I wrote with the context of my existing technical skills".
I'm not sure why junior engineers would be any better at that though, unless it's just that they're approaching it with less bias and reaping beginners luck.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop. We'd all prefer a magical unicorn applicant that checks every box but it's never possible especially the more you're required to know about specifics that are best learned internally to begin with. The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations
> So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop.
There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for making obvious choices.
If the perfect applicant happens to be looking for a job and it can save us the time and churn of switching someone internally, then yes: I would prefer to hire that person.
> The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations
I think the silly part of this thread is all of comments from people who think they know better how to operate a company they know nothing about the people who were in it.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#265Earlier 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…
That’s an insight that a project I’m working on has built upon: https://unratified.org/connection/ai/higher-order-effects/#1...
Education and training and entry level work build judgement.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It's implied by you wanting more people, that you had more demand than could be fulfilled. Even if you have teams, it stands to reason that the device repair would have been running into backlog territory that had negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?
> it stands to reason that the device repair would have been running into backlog territory that had negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?
I don't know where you're getting these ideas. We weren't hiring people to repair a backlog of devices. Warranty and repair work typically goes to the contract manufacturer, for what it's worth.
Companies like to grow and develop more products. You need more people.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#267In 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…
In my experience juniors are simply being replaced with intermediates and seniors who are willing to work for junior wages.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#268Earlier 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 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…
I've put a lot of thought into hiring in this era, and what I've personally found works the best is:
Let them use their preferred setup and AI to the full extent they want, and evaluate their output and their methodology. Ask questions of "why did you choose X over Y", especially if you're skeptical, and see their reasoning. Ask what they'd do next with more time.
It's clear when a candidate can build an entire working product, end-to-end, in In addition to the technical interview, hiring them on a trial basis is the absolute best if possible.
Taste and technical understanding of goals and implementation to reach those goals is the biggest differentiator now. AI can handle all the code and syntax, but it's not great at architecture yet - it defaults to what's mid if not otherwise instructed.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#269[deleted]
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#270In 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…
> 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.
That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).