Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#231

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

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #125

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 t…

This thing won't take long to collapse. We already see this happening when it comes to security: every major company has already been hacked, frequently quite easily. The web search industry is already serving 99% ads instead of proper results, the job market is completely broken, social networks are saturated with bots, and AI companies are proposing to replace knowledgeable people with machines that fabricate their own dreamed of solutions.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#232

Post by gtirloni » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

radiator wrote: post #166

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I read an assumption there, that if a company hires more tech people, the situation of its systems will improve. This contradicts the tao of programming, from which I quote: The manager asked the Master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?" "It will take one year," said the Master promptly. "But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I ass…

That's talking about one project, not a company. A company might have repressed demand and more people could allow it to take on more projects and/or take care of tasks that are being left behind.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#233

Post by kredd » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

Vegenoid wrote: post #225

nickff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ” 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.

They used to in 2020-2022 cycle. I don’t think they can right now, but the social contract of employees staying at the company for a long time has been completely broken. So now everyone just expects short retentions, and market forces drive for senior hires.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#234

Post by cjbgkagh » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

jf22 wrote: post #219

cjbgkagh wrote: post #89

This is what crushing of the middle class looks like, the Tech Market is no longer the safe harbor it used to be. This is also what demand destruction looks like. Mathematically we will end up with some sort of wealth tax but that just means it’s in the government’s interest to continue exasperating wealth inequality. A wealth tax won’t save the middle class, it’s more likely to be another nail in the coffin. At leas…

What? There are still millions of people with great high paying tech jobs.

Just to point out the obvious, something can be generally true even if it is not true for millions of people.

Of those millions with great high paying jobs, how many feel they still exist within a safe harbor. From my experience not even FANG employees in general feel that and there are not millions of those - we're really only counting Engineers not Amazon Wearhouse workers who are clearly a part of the working poor. Also the middle class is not what it used to be, in relative terms Tech is great, but what you may consider great high paying job I might consider a middle class job in historical terms and what you consider middle class I might consider working poor. Things really are getting worse, it's not just a meme.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#235

Post by UncleOxidant » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

5% interest rates are in no way extreme. Rates are at around the longterm average. What happens when rates go up is that businesses with shaky business plans that depend on low rates go under. In the longrun that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#236

Post by switchbak » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

mavamaarten wrote: post #126

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 t…

That's actually a good task though - do something that at least partially resembles what you'll do in the job.

I think these folks are moreso annoyed by academic quizzes cribbed from 70's programming books that don't flex anything we're interested in, and do focus on things that are typically not very relevant to the job. Oddly they do seem to both prioritize new grads that are willing to shovel shit, and at the same time reject experienced folks that don't have the time for said shit.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#237

Post by carabiner » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

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…

chatgpt 3.5 summarized it without issue/injection. also i'm quoted in the article lmao

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#238

Post by JohnMakin » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

Agree with a lot of this and have seen a lot of similar stuff as a former developer gone cloud infra guy for most of my career now. The core problem, as he gets to in a lot of this, is that if you work on infra, you are seen as a pure cost, and not adding anything to "revenue" or "product" (which is of course false).

One of the most common patterns in hiring I see now is so exasperating it drives me to despair sometimes. You'll get a HR person or some clueless lead/hiring manager and they'll ask something like, "do you have experience with $X technology?"

Me: "Well, not directly other than in my personal labs, but I've worked with $Y, $Z technologies that do the same thing, and written my own version of this functionality from scratch and pushed it to $repo you can view here"

Hiring manager: "So, no $X experience then" *jots something down and you know you just failed the interview"

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#239

Post by beacon294 » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

evrimoztamur wrote: post #209

beacon294 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your workflow to consume this via llm?

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

Thanks, simple is good. I guess this can be automated a bit more with some sort of firefox browser plugin.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#240

Post by leptons » Wed, Jul 17, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

slamn wrote: post #170

[flagged]

>the current D administration with its disastrous policies

Please cite the specific "disastrous policies" that are affecting the things you think are harming the economy. Being vague makes your comment just another pointless political attack.