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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#121

Post by candiddevmike »

csomar wrote: post #62
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #15

Wild that explanations of the tech job market like this are still being written without referencing the tax consequences of Section 174 changes.

No one understands or is willing to research these things anymore. Everyone (or at least everyone who is screaming and being heard) is mumbling points about interest, boom/bust, AI, etc... The reality, in my opinion, the governments have made it so hard to start and maintain a business that the market is not liquid for employment anymore. It's not catastrophic, but rather dead (as not moving). Here are the employment…

What did the government do here? Interest rates?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#122

Post by tennisflyi »

Peroni wrote: post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

> Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration.

That's the thing now. That's how they interview for bakers

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#123

Post by devwastaken »

This is the natural result of workers that refuse to form cooperative organizations that compete in the market. Tech workers are neutering their own leverage because they want to gamble for that chance to make the top 1% of earners. We need to force tech back into the fold of rule of law, big fines, removing their hold on China, India, etc. You have to force the market to be free by cutting down the giant trees removing the sun.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#124

Post by wavemode »

caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

It really just depends on the recruiting culture of the company in question, in my experience. I've interviewed at top companies and been given coding problems I could have solved in high school. And I've interviewed at 10-person startups and been given ridiculous leetcode brainteasers. And vice versa.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#125

Post by FrustratedMonky »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…

All of his analysis about financial markets, can apply to all jobs, all hiring. Don't think he explicitly states that, but all hiring is down. Or at least all entry positions it seems like.

From a SWE perspective. Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart? You can only cut back programmer/tech jobs for so long, someone has to know how it all works.

This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how things work, are literally walking a knifes edge toward collapse, systems are failing all over, and yet companies wont staff up on tech people. The enshitification.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#126

Post by mavamaarten »

caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

I've never understood why people hate them so much. From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone.

You can't believe the amount of shit solutions we've gotten from candidates. We just let you make a very simple kata. A tiny program that generates some console output, you have to refactor it to make it prettier and you need to add one feature. Literally half of the people fail to make it work. Many others just show zero effort for code cleanliness. That's all we ask, make it work and make it look pretty.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#127

Post by scottLobster »

caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

There's coding interviews and coding interviews.

Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure

Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure.

Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure.

Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come up with on the spot under time pressure is incorrect or even just not the most efficient I'm rejected? At that point you're just filtering for starry-eyed recent grads you can underpay.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#128

Post by NordSteve »

Apocryphon wrote: post #118
NordSteve wrote: post #113

While it's true that the increase in interest rates is having some effect at the margins, a fundamental problem with the OP's thesis is that there's no _reduction_ in interest rates that creates the peak in 2022. That makes it hard for me to believe that interest rates are the only cause here. Another, more correlated hypothesis for what caused the 2022 peak is that it's related to a combination of pandemic economic…

Wasn't the all of the money-printing going on functionally similar to reducing interest rates?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL is a good picture of that.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#129

Post by zeroCalories »

caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

Yeah I feel like this is sour grapes from midwits that aren't as good at programming as they think they are. Sometimes you get a dick interviewer that asks you a trick question, but most interviewers don't care if you get a problem exactly right, they just want to hear you discuss a problem intelligently and show expertise while coding.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#130

Post by Vegenoid »

> stable stable, which is consistently growing, consistently profitable, and paying employees $5k to $10k per day at current full comp market rates.

The employees at these companies are consistently making 1-2 million dollars a year? That does not seem accurate.

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