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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

#481

Post by kitsune1 »

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…

[dead]

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

#482

Post by shagie »

dasil003 wrote: post #447
stemlord wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres a zoomed out version immediately below that tweet. https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916369056079975

Ah, I can't see that because I'm not logged into Twitter. Doesn't quite pack the same punch does it?

https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF via Imgur (though you get resizing - its bigger on my screen)

The question that I have for this data though is that its showing the derivative - the change each year in hiring.

The dot com crash is clear and very visible in there. The global financial crisis is also a dip in there (I'm saving this for when people claim the number of jobs lost compared to the dot com crash).

From 2010 to 2020, there was a fairly steady linear growth of employment. There was the dip in 2020, but 2020 to 2024 had a much higher peak. My "I want to know about the data" is "is the area above +150k jobs from 2020 to 2024 greater than the area below 0 from 2024 to 2026?"

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

#483

Post by edgyquant »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #461
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think HN has been frequented by startup engineers with leadership responsibilities in any density in a long time. It's very obvious to me reading a lot of the comments here that most folks are ICs somewhere in a large, bureaucratic software organization. That's why there's so much BOFH style commentary here these days. (For readers, I don't think there's anything wrong with that but it just means that certain…

That's what I've come to realize. For most of the commentators here "greenfield" means typing in 'npm init', for me it usually means doing three different roles in order to iterate as fast as possible on the product to find your market, then figuring out how to scale it to the new users you've started acquiring. The idea that this is means "you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons" is completely baffling to me.…

No but it usually doesn’t mean achieving stability at tens of thousands of users a day (or hour) and ensuring that stability while rolling out new features, migrating infrastructure etc

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

#484

Post by shagie »

d--b wrote: post #428

This is YoY change. It's impossible to read. And it only goes back to 2016.

There's another post for it that went back to the early 90s. I've grabbed it at https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF though it's a smaller image (Imgur resizing).

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

#485

Post by gozucito »

kypro wrote: post #350
GenerWork wrote: post #4

There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more competition than before.

Those of us who have been in the industry for 15-20 years we remember a time when tech was just a job. In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in. It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding bootcamps suddenly…

>In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.

I remember it was even earlier than that, in the 90s when Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.

You're right about 6 month bootcamps leading to jobs in 2021 though! A true gold rush.

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

#486

Post by Aurornis »

coliveira wrote: post #401
majormajor wrote: post #246

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. 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.

> So this is not a job that you need to fill,

There is no requirement that every job opening needs to be urgently filled.

You keep repeating this like it means the job opening shouldn't exist at all. Not all job openings are for urgent demands that must be filled right away or not exist at all.

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

#487

Post by wswin »

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…

Any reasoning/data or at least an anecoded behind this claim? No?

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

#488

Post by bluecheese452 »

andai wrote: post #239
SoftTalker wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd always heard inverting a binary tree thrown around as some kind of absurdly hard problem. I took a look at it and it was trivial. I was able to do it on the first attempt with no preparation. (And the point of these interviews is that you study for them, right?) It's a contrived scenario, but the whole point is that it measures min(a,b) where `a` is your ability to think, and `b` is your ability to prepare (and m…

I am not sure A is more important than B for the majority of jobs.

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

#489

Post by mancerayder »

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 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.

The Pick-Up Artist's Guide to Tech Interviewing, you should be writing.

The first 100 subscribers get a 50% off discount the month of March, you should be announcing on LinkedIn and Tiktok, and making passive income.

The rest of us experienced people with proven track records have to learn algorithms on the weekends despite having white hair.

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

#490

Post by Aurornis »

coliveira wrote: post #410
Aurornis wrote: post #264

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. 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.

> 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.

I screen hundreds of resumes a week when hiring. I know this very well.

Hiring the wrong person can easily be a net negative to the team. Hiring too fast and desperately hiring anyone who applies is doubly bad because it occupies limited headcount and prevents you from hiring the right person when they become available.

Building teams is a long game.

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