Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 720 posts

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

#351

Post by jokoon »

People constantly tell me "oh you're a dev it's easy to find work"

I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience, and no degree in France. 3 years without a job.

I yearn for a new pandemic.

Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I have good savings.

Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If there is a job offer and recruiters are calling me, I answer and I accept.

But I'm not applying to all positions I can see and I won't run after them.

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

#352

Post by naet »

weatherlite wrote: post #99
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…

> 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...

I used to do online interviews with full access to Google or any online resource (so long as you shared your screen and I could see). Use your own code editor, no penalty at all for searching up syntax or anything else.

I always asked a simple question like here is an array full of objects. Please filter out any objects where the "age" property is less than 20, or the "eye color" property is red or blue. It was meant more as a sanity check that this person can do basic programming than anything else.

Tons and tons of people failed to make basically any progress, much less solve the problem, despite saying that they worked programming day to day in that language. For a mid level role I would filter out a good 8 or 9 out of ten applicants with it.

I would consider it a non-leetcode type of question since it did not require any algorithm tricks or any optimization in time/space.

Nowadays that kind of question is trivial for AI so it doesn't seem like the best test. I'm not hiring right now,.but when I do I'm not sure what I will ask.

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

#353

Post by colesantiago »

jrsj wrote: post #342

If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry don’t have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included. I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.

And AI will just shut out people just starting their careers

Too bad I guess.

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

#354

Post by SecretDreams »

layer8 wrote: post #214
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. 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…

Soooo agree. I've had to clean up the messes of people that did the 0-1 in my field and going from 1-unconditionally stable was a lot more work than the 0-1 part.

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

#355

Post by crystal_revenge »

gtowey wrote: post #235
layer8 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yup. You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation -- a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.

> You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them.

Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup.

Many of these comments make me wonder how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role. You learn a lot about what's maintainable and scalable, what breaks and what doesn't, in the process rapidly iterating on a product to find your market.

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

#356

Post by markus_zhang »

andai wrote: post #258
markus_zhang wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Damn, never thought about it like that. That seems a lot more practical and relevant than the Big Mac Index.

Yeah I think housing is the real index. CPI doesn’t make sense for individuals unless you build your own index.

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

#357

Post by stanleykm »

candiddevmike wrote: post #334
Ancalagon wrote: post #58

Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth? https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...

Biggest thing hurting folks is RTO. Unless you live in a large metro, tech jobs are slim/none.

That’s how it was before the pandemic.. Is it unusual that the jobs are where the people are?

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

#358

Post by shagie »

layer8 wrote: post #295
BoorishBears wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unironically my favorite kind of HN comment: to say something incredibly rude and/or condescending but wrap it in the right kind of thoughtful language to qualify as HN nice The original punchline ("you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons.") was just a bit too sharp, so you even edited in a psuedo-clarification which actually just repeats that punchline but in a softer way, masterful!

My intention was actually to inspire others to maybe also start preferring long-term/maintenance work, because I feel there’s a lack of enthusiasm for that. Almost invariably after submitting, I see how I could clarify and/or expand on my thoughts, so I often do end up editing.

> Almost invariably after submitting, I see how I could clarify and/or expand on my thoughts, so I often do end up editing.

One of the tricks of HN is the 'delay' setting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024

> There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments, users can, if they want, have some time to edit them before they go out in the feed. Many users edit comments after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft always got shipped.

I've got mine set to 2. It gives me a little bit of time for the "oh no, I need to fix things" or "I didn't mean to say that" and when everyone else can see it.

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

#359

Post by Aurornis »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #328
Aurornis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If your real candidate pool is so small that you're effectively targeting a handful of people worldwide then you aren't "really hiring"

Yet somehow we really did hire people.

If only we had listened to HN comments and given up instead

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

#360

Post by nabbed »

oblio wrote: post #83
ppeetteerr wrote: post #26

Those are raw numbers. I would look instead at the job changes over total employment numbers. I don't have the numbers but I would wager we have many more people working in tech today (overall) than we did in 2008. Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical nature.

Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers (US). Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9. Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m. Different ball game.

>Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.

I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000. Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to a larger group.

Post reply on HN