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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

#511

Post by loeg »

daheza wrote: post #493
cmiles8 wrote: post #252

Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion. The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.

I don't believe its over hiring I believe its offshoring. Blaming Covid after so many years doesn't make sense.

People have been booggeyman'ing offshoring since before I entered the industry and it's never been all that significant of a factor. Time zones are a big piece but there are a lot of other factors that make offshoring less appealing than a naive analysis of Fully Loaded Cost per head.

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

#512

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

As someone who has been hiring the past six months, the candidate pool has been absolutely abysmal. Slop resumes, misrepresentations, bad interviewing skills, etc. I'm baffled at the other end at how much inbound crap there is.

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

#513

Post by throwaway-abdq »

Aurornis wrote: post #486
coliveira wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I was a team lead at a big tech company, any requisition that was not filled at the end of each quarter was cancelled and required a fight to be reinstated. Many job listings became conflicts between:

Option 1) Hire someone sub-standard and deal with either an intense drag on the team while they came up to speed or worst case having to manage them out if they couldn't cut it.

Option 2) Give up the requisition which looked like an admission that we didn't really "need" the position, and also fails to help with senior management and director promotions tied to org size.

This always seemed pathological to me and I would have loved to have the ability to build a team more slowly and intentionally. Don't let all this criticism get to you.

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

#514

Post by asdff »

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…

The whole thing is this perfect candidate doesn’t exist. How can they? You are dealing with imperfect information. A resume, yours and theirs assumptions about eachother. That is it. All the interview hoops attempts to make ourselves the hirer comfortable with the fact we are fundamentally taking a leap of faith. Because n=1. Because we aren’t simulating this hire 1000 times and modelling the distribution of performance. Because we haven’t accounted for all latent factors that may intersect between our work model and the hiree. Because we can’t ever know anything at all about the future for certain.

I think we could all be a little more mindful of that in hiring. That waiting for perfection is itself a fallacy for all these reasons and plenty more.

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

#515

Post by asdff »

Aurornis wrote: post #490
coliveira wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Shame how the cost of the long game is paid by the future employee having to be lying in wait, applying to you and 300+ of your colleagues openings, praying for a bite.

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

#516

Post by sam0x17 »

jjmarr wrote: post #188
sam0x17 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 In my experience, target schools are the only universities now that can make their assignments too hard for AI. When my university tried that, the assignments were too hard for students. So they gave up.

This comment would make sense 6 months ago. Now it is much, much, much more likely any given textually answerable problem will be way easier for a bleeding edge frontier AI than a human, especially if you take time into account

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

#517

Post by windowshopping »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #497
windowshopping wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly have no idea. The last place I worked is pretty well-known. Not big tech, but a recognizable name to most people. I send out a lot of applications: those 25 interviews are the result of 150 applications in the last two months or so. And then I have my linkedin set to be discoverable and looking for a job. Basically just fiddle with the options under Visibility and Data Privacy in the linkedin settings and…

So are the majority of these applications the result of recruiters finding you via LinkedIn, or have you been applying direct as well? What application path have most of the interviews come from?

Both equally. I apply to a lot of stuff on BuiltIn, mostly.

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

#518

Post by DangitBobby »

loeg wrote: post #511
daheza wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe its over hiring I believe its offshoring. Blaming Covid after so many years doesn't make sense.

People have been booggeyman'ing offshoring since before I entered the industry and it's never been all that significant of a factor. Time zones are a big piece but there are a lot of other factors that make offshoring less appealing than a naive analysis of Fully Loaded Cost per head.

How would you it hasn't been a significant factor? We've had offshoring this whole time.

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

#520

Post by eranation »

In my very humble view, the mythical 10x developer can now be a 100x developer, and the 2x developer usually stays a 2x developer. We live in two parallel worlds right now. Some run an army of agents and ship somehow working and testable code, and some try to prove AI is not as good as them.
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