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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

#521

Post by __turbobrew__ »

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…

> What I am going to be most interested in is what happens in the SRE/Sysadmin world over the next few years as more AI-generated code hits prod in organizations that don't have adequate review & oversight functions.

You kindof answered the question yourself. Humans write the tests and then go tell the AI to write the solution which passes the test.

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

#522

Post by broknbottle »

This is a culling and the fake it until you make it crowd that focused on surface level only knowledge are finding out why they should have went deeper. The ones that honed their craft and really focused on the foundational and core stuff are in demand.

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

#523

Post by koito17 »

I wonder how the figures look for countries outside of the United States.

For what its worth, I ended up getting a tech job in Japan instead. Ironically, the requirements at U.S. startups are much higher, and U.S. startups fit the stereotype of Japanese work culture more than Japanese companies nowadays.

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

#524

Post by jeffbee »

dlivingston wrote: post #438
cyberpunk wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s bananas how many utterly crap candidates we get at the moment too. One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with his current work laptop and couldn’t find the $ key on it for a basic scripting question. I can’t make it make sense either.

We had a guy interview for a senior C++ position that hadn't used Git before and had no idea what a "merge" was.

A person who only has real industry experience can very easily have never needed git at all. I know this shocks people who only have hobby or startup experience but git works very poorly at large scale and there are many big organizations who don't use it either because their solutions predate git, or they are newer companies that simply have good taste.

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

#526

Post by monero-xmr »

eranation wrote: post #520

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.

I haven’t seen any evidence of an army of agents producing unicorn companies. If this was the case we’d see a rash of < 10 employee startups being worth $1 billion, and to my knowledge that’s zero

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

#527

Post by __turbobrew__ »

Aurornis wrote: post #108
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…

> Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles. I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure architect…

If Jeff Dean still codes, so can I.

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

#528

Post by Karrot_Kream »

edgyquant wrote: post #483
crystal_revenge wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You definitely do. Do you think Anthropic isn't working with thousands of users an hour? They're struggling to keep up with the scale and their ability to create a stable platform is, well, existential for them. Do you think Anthropic isn't a startup? The pace of their feature rollouts is exponential.

Even in areas where startups aren't literally creating new product categories like the foundational model providers, the edge of a startup over a more established business is the speed at which they can provide value. What's the point of buying CoolCo when you can go with L&M Inc. that has thousands of headcount working on your feature. The value prop of CoolCo is that CoolCo can roll out a feature in the time it takes L&M to make a detailed specification and a quarterly planning doc breaking down the roadmap and the order of feature implementation.

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

#529

Post by unselect5917 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #243
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…

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!

Passive aggressiveness isn't the opposite of kindness, and worse than directness, but you'll get away with it here because this is just reddit but more pretentious and all the same biases are intact, just more walls of text instead of getting to the point.

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

#530

Post by cindyllm »

hackable_sand wrote: post #491
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

Silent? You guys keep trying to put a pillow over our face.

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