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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

#401

Post by coliveira »

majormajor wrote: post #246
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. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business. There's a difference between "critically needing" and "would benefit from." If you can find the specialist who's done what you're doing before at higher scale and help you avoid a lot of…

So this is not a job that you need to fill, it is a wish you may have and that is mostly impractical. If you really needed that person, you would go find them and pay way more than they're making now or give them something else they want to join immediately.

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

#402

Post by Gigachad »

jdwithit wrote: post #304
Gigachad wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my experience, applying at jobs online has been entirely useless for the last 5 years. No company ever contacts you after using the online application forms. And the only way I’ve got interviews is from recruiters contacting me.

As someone applying right now I agree. I think I've had one company out of dozens get back to me on a cold application this year. Every contact that has led to an interview was from being referred in by a current employee, or a LinkedIn recruiter reaching out to me about a job. I assume the application forms get spammed with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. It's hard to blame someone for not wanting to sift t…

I assume online forms are spammed with thousands of AI generated resumes now. The only reason I apply is it seems to flag your account as active which triggers recruiters to contact me.

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

#403

Post by agentultra »

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…

What is a high performer?

Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it?

Someone who works 996 in the office?

Or someone who knows what they’re doing?

I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job.

Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.

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

#404

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

windowshopping wrote: post #262
mariopt wrote: post #171

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

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.

So what do you attribute your success in getting interviews to? What are you doing right, or better than other people?

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

#406

Post by hshsiejensjsj »

jokoon wrote: post #351

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 i…

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

Oh to be French

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

#407

Post by js4ever »

jjmarr wrote: post #343
exceptione wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstation Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best engineers leave? I am half serious here. If you want your software to run slow, IT could equally well install corporate security software on developer laptops. Oops, I did it again. Oh well, in all seriousness, I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtu…

> I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtualization Sorry, I wasn't clear. I am not virtualizing the workspace. I'm using `recc` which is like `distcc` or `ccache` in that it wraps the compiler job. Every developer keeps their workstation. It just routes the actual `clang` or `gcc` calls to a Kubernetes cluster which provides distributed build and cache. > Isn't there a le…

This makes absolutely no sense to me. Are you really recompiling 6000 things each time a dev in the company needs to add a line somewhere in the codebase? Have you thought about splitting that giant thing in smaller chunks?

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

#408

Post by jordanb »

eitally wrote: post #340
toomuchtodo wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What kind of role are you looking for?” “Technologist flavor of NTSB investigator.”

There was a two year period around 2011-2013 where I experimented with my dev team. We were being "forced" to migrate a legacy enterprise system from .Net/MSSQL to Java/PostgreSQL with replace the front end with a modern, reactive web interface. Only two of the existing developers had Java experience, and both were conveniently senior engineers in two different offices and running their own discrete sub-teams. One of…

The nice thing about the "just pass the tests" approach is you end up with something sufficiently abstracted that it's easy to write tests for it.

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

#409

Post by BoorishBears »

shimman wrote: post #302
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!

It's correct tho. If your entire career is nothing but greenfield development, you'll never know the result of your decisions or the impact of tech chosen. Staff or principals that have a tenure of majority greenfield development are extremely dangerous to companies IMO. Especially if they get hired in a nontraditional tech company, like utilities, banking, or insurance.

Your list is places that treat development as a cost center, but greenfield-only devs don't want to touch that work with a 10-foot pole.

And if your entire career is nothing maintenance and sustaining projects, you'll never know what decisions it takes to build a greenfield application that lives long enough to become a graybeard.

You'll think you do because you see all the mistakes they made, but you'll only have cynical reasons for why those mistakes get made like "they don't care, they just make a mess and move on to the next job" or "they don't bother learning the tools/craft deeply enough moving, it's all speed for them".

-

To indulge myself in the niceness a bit: I don't think you write comments like the one above if you've done both, yet having done both feels like an obvious requirement to be a well-rounded Staff/Principal.

Most maintenance work suffers because of decisions made at the 0 to 1 stage. And most greenfield work fails entirely, never maturing to the maintenance stage.

So both sides have to do something right in the face of challenges unique to their side. And having familiarity with both is extremely valuable for technical leadership.

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

#410

Post by coliveira »

Aurornis wrote: post #264
conductr wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You probably don't realize that there are several thousands of people without a job who could work for a company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an imaginary worker. That's what people complain about. The more companies think the way you do, the more useless open positions are listed because companies will not hire anyone unless it's the perfect candidate in their dreams.
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