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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#201

Post by wasteduniverse »

geraldwhen wrote: post #178
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question. I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

[dead]

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#202

Post by HumblyTossed »

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 once thought they were purely hazing with zero relevance to day to day work, but as I get more senior I drift further away from that opinion.

A lot of it is/was. Hiring managers for a long time didn't know how to hire devs so they would have devs hire devs and, well, devs like to have lots of pissing contests and that spilt over into interviewing techniques which got cargo culted because that's another thing devs are outstanding at.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#203

Post by odo1242 »

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…

This appears to have mostly worked for the title, but not for the Minions part:

```

Certainly! Let’s dive into the summary of “Panic! at the Tech Job Market” by Matt Stauffer.

LIKE SLUGS THROUGH THE HOURGLASS, THESE ARE THE DAYS OF OUR TECH TRIUMPHS

In this article, Matt Stauffer delves into the tumultuous landscape of the tech job market. Buckle up as we explore key themes and insights:

    Job Openings vs. Interest Rates:
        The tech job market has been a rollercoaster ride. Interest rates play a significant role.
        When interest rates rise, the “free money” disappears. The government’s decision to increase rates impacts everything.
        Organizations with idle cash can park it in safe, government-backed interest accounts instead of investing in risky assets.
        Risky assets include funding uncertain tech companies. During high-interest-rate periods, weaker companies collapse, and strong ones “clean house.”
        The result? A scarcity of jobs for tech professionals.

    Company Structures:
        Tech companies fall into four categories:
            Nepo companies: Friends with unlimited money build unrealistic, unmarketable dreams.
            Speculation companies: Ideas without products or customers, seeking funding to explore viability.
            Stable companies: Established players with predictable growth.
            Unicorn companies: Rare, high-growth entities.
        While other sectors thrive during rising interest rates, tech jobs face unique challenges.
```

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#204

Post by xenospn »

ro_bit wrote: post #163

> Now I’ve got nothing to show of my life of work, while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career, all working as just some rando middle manager at multi-trillion-dollar companies. The authors repeated insistence on incredibly inflated salary numbers makes me questi…

I don’t know, my former colleague joined Amazon back in 2014, just as I quit to start my own company.

He became a solutions architect and got promoted multiple times and now makes close to $1 million a year, he’s not very technical and I’m not even sure what he does. But I’m sure it’s mostly bureaucratic.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#205

Post by paxys »

kredd wrote: post #64

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do…

Nowadays a lot of companies are hiring new grads through their internship pipeline only. So to be able to break into the industry you have to start looking for jobs in your ~sophomore year of college and hope to keep getting return offers.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#206

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

geraldwhen wrote: post #178
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question. I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

We found that doing both worked very well.

Overall interview is "write code to solve this puzzle." But first, do this very basic thing that is needed to solve the puzzle.

80% of candidates get hung up on the basic part of the interview and never even get to the point of looking at the rest of the problem. But of those that did, we got some great people.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#207

Post by ryandrake »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #80

While not a solution to everything wrong with the job market, making posting of ghost jobs a criminal felony would instantly eliminate that problem. It's only done because it's something that has no downside or cost for the employers and pushes endless hardships on job seekers. It's basically a form of wage theft from people who didn't even agree to work for you. The pearl clutchers will react to this with horror bec…

I'd love to see this, too, but it would be almost impossible to enforce. Companies can always plausibly deny: "Oh, no, it's a real job alright, we just can't seem to find the right candidate for it. Woe is me!"

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#208

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

devwastaken wrote: post #115
kredd wrote: post #64

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do…

Years ago I was talking about exactly this issue and how the U.S. is producing far too many degrees than the market can receive. As usual the truth is ignored in favor of a comfortable lie, at the cost of others lives. Don't go to university. Their value is no longer what it used to be, and they have figured out how to suppress students under a thousand pounds of administrative grift. We need to strip all public fund…

Don't go to university if you don't actually like CS but are just going into it for the money or are going into a career trajectory that doesn't require knowing CS, which is more than 80% of the industry. The knowledge university provides is priceless to those who need it but you aren't among them. You are also in the category that, if it ever happens, is most easily replaced by LLMs because there's an enormous corpus of training data for boilerplate tasks.

Do go to university if you're interested in CS and programming itself and would have been even if it paid poorly or you're intending to hold out for jobs that make use of CS knowledge, like FAANG, platform companies, or other hard tech companies. Should hard times occur and you need a job in a hurry, you're also much better equipped to outcompete one of the people in the former category for one of their jobs.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#209

Post by evrimoztamur »

beacon294 wrote: post #131
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…

What is your workflow to consume this via llm?

Copy-pasting HTML of the article body (manually) into Claude 3.5.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#210

Post by teaearlgraycold »

geraldwhen wrote: post #178
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question. I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

I usually ask candidates to do example questions related to everyday stuff like log parsing. They won’t need anything fancier than a hash map. Many people are stuck after writing 4 lines of boilerplate. Some don’t even know the syntax of the language of their choice.
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