Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#221

Post by kredd » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

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…

As much bad rep as schools get nowadays, if you get into a good university (think of top 50 in the world), it will open up a lot of doors for you. Very anecdotal, but I have open offers from people whom I know from uni years. Connections matter, especially in bad market days. Everything else (bootcamps, diploma mills and etc.) are just noise though, I would say it’s not worth the money.

It’s also easy for me to say, as I have about 10 YOE, but I would still prefer a candidate who went to a rigorous school. Mostly because it’s an indicator that they can figure out and learn whatever is needed.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#222

Post by supriyo-biswas » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #103

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…

The last time I interviewed and did a few LC problems, it was my experience that most of them were trivially solvable by some combination of implementing an iterator, doing a fold, and maybe adding memoization. Not every problem obviously, but those 3 steps seem to pretty generically cover most easy/mediums that will come up in a coding skills interview. When I got my first job, I didn't know what any of those things…

This is true; however, based on my experience the interviewers are usually very dissatisfied to discover such "one simple trick", the implicit expectation being that you are expected to gruel through the problem without abstractions.

This part has been always funny to me, because the same interviewers also simultaneously expect knowledge of abstractions in their "low-level design" phase of the interview, where irrelevant abstractions are added in to satisfy some odd constraint that would never come up in the real world.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#223

Post by csmpltn » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

To the OP: I'm certain you're an experienced and seasoned programmer, but your CV (on your website: https://matt.sh/files/a-resume/resume.html) is an example of how not to write one. It's a wall of text and fluff, with too much focus on fanciness and design. I hire and interview people all the time, and your CV leaves me with zero sense of the impact of your work - only with the fact that you've done a bunch of stuff over the years...

"Designed & Built a Redis Replacement", "nobody really wants to buy it when free worse performing choices exist". Give me a break...

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#224

Post by nyarlathotep_ » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

gotaran wrote: post #197

PheonixPharts wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really sucks right now For me, it's been the opposite: the last 2 years have been the best time I've had working in tech since the early 2010s. Around 2019 I was seriously considering leaving the field (if it didn't pay so much) as the entire industry had turned into a bunch of leet code grinding, TC chasing, mediocre drones. It was incredibly hard to find people working on actual problems let alone challenging/…

I agree. Despite high compensation and a hiring boom, or perhaps because of it, 2020-2022 was the worst time to work in tech. I knew interns in 2012 who could code circles around those bootcampers turned “staff engineers” in 2021. Everyone at my series B employer turned into a “manager” or “leader” overnight. Being a shitty B2B SaaS meant that sales ran the show and our product was absolute dogshit. 2023 was awful to…

> I knew interns in 2012 who could code circles around those bootcampers turned “staff engineers” in 2021. Everyone at my series B employer turned into a “manager” or “leader” overnight.

Thought it was just me seeing this. The title inflation is out of control. "Senior" titles lacking basic fundamental "table stakes" skills.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#225

Post by Vegenoid » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #94

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…

> ” 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 the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce.” I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealin…

> I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late.

If juniors can consistently hop to another job that pays them more in a year, then the job market for SWEs is strong and employers don't have this ease of hiring seniors that is being described.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#226

Post by kredd » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

PheonixPharts wrote: post #134

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…

> It really sucks right now For me, it's been the opposite: the last 2 years have been the best time I've had working in tech since the early 2010s. Around 2019 I was seriously considering leaving the field (if it didn't pay so much) as the entire industry had turned into a bunch of leet code grinding, TC chasing, mediocre drones. It was incredibly hard to find people working on actual problems let alone challenging/…

Yeah fair, I could see why it’s good for us who has a decent chunk of experience. Kinda makes sense from managerial perspective as well - lay off bunch of under-performers/juniors, hire back other seniors from other companies that got laid off and save 25-30% while delivering about the same results. I’m over-simplifying it, but we’re going through an over-correction phase, in my opinion.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#227

Post by paxys » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

The only thing this data shows is that the job market was briefly a bubble in early-mid 2022 and that bubble has now popped. To judge how bad things actually are, why cut the chart off at an arbitrary point (mid-2020) and not go back, say, 10 years? Are their more SDE openings today than 2012/2015/2018? I'm pretty confident that the answer is yes.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#228

Post by trogdor » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #106

lovich wrote: post #25

I generally like the article but the author seems to have a really inflated view of what jobs are paying. At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k. Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in th…

It's absurd. He has no concept of market rates (and frankly I'm unsurprised that he's not getting hired if his expectations are this out of whack). His resume even confirms this[0], because he seemingly thinks the appropriate level at FAANG would be L10 which is extremely rare . There is a 0% chance that his experience would level him that high. The entire article can be chocked up to a massively inflated sense of en…

Oh. My. God.

His resume starts with a quote of himself stating that he has “seen things you people wouldn't believe.”

It goes on to highlight that he purchased a domain name in 1997.

He claims to have developed “the highest performing in-memory database in the world” but complains that “nobody really wants to buy it when free worse performing choies [sic] exist.”

The part about nobody wanting to buy his product is in his resume.

His current status is “Waiting for AI apocalypse.”

This is either mega-cringe, or the best satire I’ve read in a while. Unfortunately, I think it’s the former.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#229

Post by oldpersonintx » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #168

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…

> I have many friends (in Europe) EU kind of in a recession though. And there's a well known link between interest rates and unemployment. So it's really not surprising to hear that employment in the EU is harder after the ECB raised rates. And good news: they're lowering them now. What really needs explaining is why, despite the unusually strong general US job market[1] for several years now, the US tech market spec…

tech companies are in a long-term process of moving most roles (not all) to lower-comp

that often means relocating the job or just low-balling people here

there will always be an elite who are very well paid, but we are now seeing the long-term reformat of the rank-and-file

step 1 is to freeze hiring and let attrition move the numbers down...this builds up a body of desperate job-seekers who will work for less

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#230

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:51 PM UTC

ukoki wrote: post #88

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #67

What is hidden from all this is one of the greatest scams happening in the tech industry: recruiters. I think there is not enough light shone on these group of people but basically they have hijacked the whole process and are not technically skilled to understand good developers. UK tech companies for example have been decimated because of this.

How is it a scam? If it was that bad nearly all companies would just use in-house recruiters Someone has to do the work of pestering software developers on LinkedIn. If the external recruiters didn't do it, companies would just do it themselves.

I tend to believe you are right... But neither one of us can tell it for sure.

Notice that you have written a trademark on your comment? Only the people that work on that place get to know, or to decide if there will be a scam or not. They get full control of what's happening.