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Jobs and Software Is Fucked

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Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#21

Post by zelphirkalt »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

[flagged]

> If I'm the owner of a business and I have hundreds of applicants for every job, I'm picking the one who looks least likely to cause trouble outside of work, assuming everything else is equivalent.

Interesting. If _I_ was the owner of a business, I would try to find the people, who have ideals, dedication, like understanding what they deliver, being thorough in their work, like to learn, etc.. Well rounded persons. Individuals, whom you can give a task and they will search and find a solution. I find the hyperallergic reaction to people who stand for something, anything actually, to be very superficial and short-sighted. Businesses which do that are bound to become mediocre, due to hiring mediocre yes sayers.

But then I am not a business owner, for a reason. I probably couldn't deal with all the crap one has to wade through to be a business owner.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#23

Post by nsingh2 »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

[flagged]

How does this have anything to do with a sluggish job market? Do you think people are struggling to find jobs because they are too political? One can be a servile dog, and still struggle to land a role, it's not particularly correlated.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#25

Post by bananamogul »

themgt wrote: post #17

It's not like the job market was that much better before AI infested every single corner of the market, but it supercharged all of the worst aspects of everything. I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends who make art or the people who work their asses off to properly test and review code or the writers…

That quote from Heat (1995) is so deployable in so many different contexts.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#26

Post by ryandrake »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

[flagged]

> The most important one is your attitude. If this is an employer's market, you need to present as someone who isn't going to cause any trouble. No him/her. No entitled attitude. No I hate everything attitude. No I'm always the victim attitude. You need to present yourself as someone who isn't likely to sue your boss, or advocate to form a union, or walk out on your company for supporting Israel or Palestine or Ukraine or Russia or China or whatever propaganda is on TV at the moment

As you said, this isn't about OP who didn't mention any of these.

But honestly, I don't think most companies read applicants' resumes and interviews deeply enough to even derive "attitude" from them. There is such an overabundance of supply that they have to use coarse, blunt filters to narrow the incoming list down to something manageable. Getting noticed and not rejected by the layers of AI filtering is likely almost a pure numbers/luck game at this point. When you have hundreds of applicants at the top of the funnel per job opening, who has time to figure out whether one particular applicant has an undesirable attitude?

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#27

Post by yifanl »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

[flagged]

> Wherever these tens of thousands of qualified ex-Meta, ex-Microsoft engineers willing to work less are, I'm not seeing them.

Two possible reasons:

1. People who are truly in-demand still have an easy time of finding jobs without going through the tedious process you set up.

2. FAANGMANGAMEME never hired that many truly exceptional people in the first place and you've fallen for corporate propaganda.

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#28

Post by firefoxd »

A month ago, I fell back into reading patio11's "don't call yourself a programmer" and I found it fitting. The core of the message wasn't about the title we assign to ourselves but the "other career advice".

I felt compelled to write "don't call yourself a Software engineer" [0], because we are still falling into the same trap of thinking we are hired only for our technical skills.

If we are just looking at a skills and these are assessed by parsing through a resume, then OP is right. We are all at a disadvantage. But the job search starts way before you are looking for a job. It's all about the connections you make along the way.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/you-are-an-ai-enabled-engineer-now

Re: Jobs and Software Is Fucked

#29

Post by FloorEgg »

During the pandemic money printing things got very weird. It created a lot of leverage and bullshit companies and bullshit dev work which led to artificial demand for software developers.

We are still in the post-pandemic hangover.

If you look up M2 money supply on St Louis fed - that chart has more influence on the job market in the US than anything.

The macro whiplash compounds this problem for people like OP in a few ways:

- cheap money leads to hiring frenzy (cheap capital costs lead to investments in human capital in software)

- developers get conditioned to artificially high demand and assume it will be like that forever

- artificially high demand attract people into software dev for the money instead of love of the art (increasing supply)

- when capital gets expensive again companies have to correct for over-hiring with layoffs and hiring freezes

- developers are stuck in a market with crashing demand (because of higher cost of capital) and over-supply (people attracted to work when cost of capital was cheap)

Everyone says it's about AI, but AI is more like the flavor & scapegoat, the substance is all a consequence of macro policy.

The next time the fed does quant easing labor market will kick up again.

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