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Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

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Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#191

Post by roncesvalles »

fhd2 wrote: post #110
roncesvalles wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Felt like we got about what we paid for This is the usual ebb and flow of offshoring in the tech industry that's been going on since the 90s. There has never been a scalable arbitrage for tech talent by going over to another geo, and there won't be one in the foreseeable future. What US HCoL talent gets paid is unfortunately the fair and natural market rate for that caliber of talent, at least if you need to hire mo…

It's quite simple market forces, from where I stand. Companies in high income areas have two options for outsourcing: 1. Just go for the cheapest salary, quantity over quality style. 2. Find a replacement that has a comparable level of skill, experience and knowledge to the local talent they have or would need. Now for (1), there is almost no floor. You can get devs for five bucks an hour. For some people, it's the o…

I think many companies intend to do (2) but find themselves in (1) because they try to force their assumptions about the mythical cost savings, which aren't actually there.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#192

Post by IsTom »

KronisLV wrote: post #127
DeathArrow wrote: post #123

>I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings I can't agree with the conclusion. I can come with tens of examples of when using AI doesn't work. Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.

> Also, software engineering means much more than writing code. What if it speeds up the part of pumping out widgets in the widget factory, shipping Spring Boot / Laravel / whatever projects more quickly and therefore individual devs becoming more productive on cookie cutter projects (without necessarily getting more money for it either).

That's been the case with libraries and frameworks since forever and all it does is rise demand for devs because of Jevons paradox.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#193

Post by roncesvalles »

torginus wrote: post #149
roncesvalles wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Felt like we got about what we paid for This is the usual ebb and flow of offshoring in the tech industry that's been going on since the 90s. There has never been a scalable arbitrage for tech talent by going over to another geo, and there won't be one in the foreseeable future. What US HCoL talent gets paid is unfortunately the fair and natural market rate for that caliber of talent, at least if you need to hire mo…

I can raise two points to disprove this - I'm East Euro, but have worked with people from all over the globe in all kinds of companies. First, my experience with devs at mid level companies is that the average dev ranges from competent (as in, can work within an existing framework to accomplish tasks), to incompetent (cannot do the same consistently), with there being a top 10-20% who are truly good (able to deliver…

Mid level companies have wide ranging talent since they almost by definition pay below market for talent, and don't even enjoy the brand value draw of the top companies. These companies benefit from the fact that there is some lag in labor discovering their true market value.

>Second, at high level companies, there's lots of European talent

Lots is subjective. The problem is the scale. You can easily hire 100 great devs in London over some period of time. 10000? Maybe not. It would take you too long to pick them up.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#194

Post by fhd2 »

roncesvalles wrote: post #191
fhd2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite simple market forces, from where I stand. Companies in high income areas have two options for outsourcing: 1. Just go for the cheapest salary, quantity over quality style. 2. Find a replacement that has a comparable level of skill, experience and knowledge to the local talent they have or would need. Now for (1), there is almost no floor. You can get devs for five bucks an hour. For some people, it's the o…

I think many companies intend to do (2) but find themselves in (1) because they try to force their assumptions about the mythical cost savings, which aren't actually there.

I've seen companies blatantly pursue the lowest possible hourly rate, kinda disregarding anything else (time zone difference, quality etc). I believe it comes from a procurement mindset (works for other areas, and probably taught in business school):

1. One $unit of $resource from supplier A is cheaper than from supplier B.

2. The price difference is sufficient to allocate a certain amount to dealing with quality issues (from lower efficiency to lawsuits).

3. If it turns out the quality issues are higher than expected, switch to supplier B.

The thing is, this doesn't work with software development. (2) has that pesky long feedback cycle. (3) typically is about equivalent to starting over from scratch.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#195

Post by DanielVZ »

tdeck wrote: post #166
bitwize wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackernews. Check the monthly "Who's hiring?" and "Who wants to be hired?" threads. Posting on the latter is how I landed my current job.

Unfortunately that hasn't been quite so busy lately https://hnhiring.com/trends

At least for me, that chart only displays until september.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#196

Post by acdha »

seattleeng wrote: post #122
jjeaff wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Returns are no longer the actual goal. The actual goal is the perception of far reaching future returns. The perception of those returns is much more valuable than the actual returns. Because the wealthy don't want profits and dividends that get taxed. They want ever increasing stock prices so they can continuously grow their asset base to borrow against so they can never sell said assets this triggering capital gain…

I think you're almost right I suspect its more a structural issue e.g. because of Big VC (a16z, other firms with dozens or hundreds of investing staff), VCs don't stick around firms long enough for real returns (cash distributed) to matter. If you're at a place and your stuff is marked up 10x after 4 years, you just hop to become a GP and try to ride the next markup wave. Even if these people exit VC after 10 years t…

> This might not even be the individual VC's fault -- there may just be too many venture dollars chasing too few power law returns, so you get a surge of startups circa 2019-2022 that all disappear

This feels right to me: the common trend between the dotcom bubble, mortgage bubble, tech bubble, blockchain bubble, and now the AI bubble has been big investors very high returns to make up for previous losses, like a gambler trying to win back, and it’s destroyed a lot of companies which had an idea which could have been a sustainable medium-size business but were funded and tried to grow as the next Google/Facebook without apparent recognition of how unusual advertising is for the ability to grow profits rapidly without scaling costs at the same rate.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#197

Post by phendrenad2 »

People underestimate just how much of the industry was total garbage, pre-AI, pre-pandemic, the signs were all there in 2015. Who remembers "the average tenure of a software engineer in the SF bay area is 18 months". Was it ever really sustainable? That means that after just 18 months you'll get an offer from a company more fantastical than the one you're currently at, which has even more frothing-at-the-mouth investors and converted some of that into higher salary for you. And your current employer can't hope to match it, because they have already been written off by investors. We have a LONG way to fall to reach the true software industry value.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#198

Post by acdha »

sisisbdhc wrote: post #51
throwaway638637 wrote: post #20

Kind of strange to see no mention of outsourcing in an otherwise detailed analysis

Our company just let go of all our remote LATAM hires. We paid high end in their LCOL areas. They were somewhere between ok and not good. Felt like we got about what we paid for - their cost was about 50% of a US dev. They were as productive as a low end US dev, so in some cases ok value but since hiring low performers tends to hurt a team overall they weren’t worth it. We’re a mid range company (decent cash comp, no…

> I’m sure if you’re paying more you can do better. But that’s how it’s always been hasn’t it?

I’ve been hearing about outsourcing destroying jobs since the 90s and that’s how it’s always gone: the suits salivated at the prospect of cutting wages by, say, 90% and had total write-offs because of it, because they missed that even in a poor country people have options and anyone smart enough to be a good developer is also smart enough to recognize that their skills are worth more. Outsourcing has some big costs related to communications so while you could find decent people at 50-70% of local labor rates, coordination overhead makes that a net loss even before you hit things like the security risks.

Part of the problem there is that the business people really want to think that they understand their business so well that they can give perfect instructions, and it takes a certain humility to recognize that more time goes into knowledge transfer and discovering the true needs than might be obvious.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#199

Post by cudgy »

addicted wrote: post #70
qwertyuiop_ wrote: post #62

Yet there is no let up in diluting software engineering labor pool with thousands of H1Bs amidst the already distressed labor market from American job seeker perspective.

This is so backwards it’s incredible. If H1Bs were so destructive to the software industry, why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades? Also, the idea that eliminating H1Bs will bring more jobs makes absolutely no sense. If a company is asked to eliminate all their H1B positions, what do you think is m…

“why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?”

Maybe because that’s just not true? Salaries have generally been stagnant over the last 20 years in real terms for most in the industry.

Most developers do not work at FAANG positions, and even those positions are only found in the extremely high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley.

Companies are always free to hire people from wherever they want. However, it could be foreseeable that “American” companies that are largely overseas, maybe at a disadvantage when it comes to taxes or other benefits conferred by the US government. Such companies may find that their products are subject to tariffs when trying to sell those products back in the United States or other active measures to prevent offshore positions. There is a risk as section 147 changes already has shown.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#200

Post by acdha »

0_____0 wrote: post #106
lazyasciiart wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that employee cost is usually estimated at twice their salary.

Does that scale neatly with salary? I would expect it not to, with things like benefits and other costs being relatively fixed regardless of salary

Until you’re over the many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year range, it works pretty well as a rule of thumb. If your company wants the cost of working in an office, they’re probably not paying high salaries to work in a rundown shack and the people making those high incomes also want better quality benefits (especially in the United States where healthcare is so expensive and cheaper plans mean more time having to argue with someone whose bonus is based on denying care).
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