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Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

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Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#241

Post by darth_avocado »

teagee wrote: post #10

The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever. Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days. Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view

> The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth.

Can’t believe how many people are commenting without looking at what the chart means. We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#243

Post by BoorishBears »

layer8 wrote: post #214
crystal_revenge wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…

> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory…

This is unironically my favorite kind of HN comment: to say something incredibly rude and/or condescending but wrap it in the right kind of thoughtful language to qualify as HN nice

The original punchline ("you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons.") was just a bit too sharp, so you even edited in a psuedo-clarification which actually just repeats that punchline but in a softer way, masterful!

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#244

Post by conductr »

Aurornis wrote: post #223
conductr wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough. Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and you can hire them by other means that full-time employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were meant to do for your situation. Nothing about this w…

> So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough. I don't know why you assumed that. We had teams. We just wanted to grow them. We weren't sitting there waiting.

It's implied by you wanting more people, that you had more demand than could be fulfilled. Even if you have teams, it stands to reason that the device repair would have been running into backlog territory that had negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#245

Post by smelendez »

overfeed wrote: post #150
Aurornis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've interviewed for that's still open after 10 months When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title. It made a couple people furious because they assumed we were going to take the job posting down when we hired someone and then re-pos…

> When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title It's a small engineering org, allegedly head-hunting one principal engineer for the whole org, so it's a single opening. 10 months later they are still hunting for their special snowflake. > I can recall some specific job listings we had open for years because none of the people we interviewed rea…

You expect more nonessential roles and slower hiring in a slower growing economy, especially if companies only hire for full-time roles.

For example, your company might need a full-time network admin once its network grows to a certain size and complexity. You won’t hit that level for three years but you’d hire the perfect person now if you found them even though they might be spending a lot of idle time scrolling Hacker News for the first year or two. At 5x the growth rate, you’d need that person within less than a year, and you might be less picky about whether they are coming from a TV or telecom shop.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#246

Post by majormajor »

coliveira wrote: post #142
Aurornis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've interviewed for that's still open after 10 months When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title. It made a couple people furious because they assumed we were going to take the job posting down when we hired someone and then re-pos…

> some specific job listings we had open for years If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

>If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

There's a difference between "critically needing" and "would benefit from."

If you can find the specialist who's done what you're doing before at higher scale and help you avoid a lot of pain, it's awesome. If not, you keep on keeping on. But as long as you don't start spending too much on the search for that candidate, it's best to keep the door open.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#247

Post by dolebirchwood »

zeroCalories wrote: post #209
xeromal wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of this is probably attributed to being maintenance devs who don't build a lot of greenfield stuff. I got this way in one of my past jobs. I think us as devs really need to practice creating things from scratch from time to time. Working out those kinks is a good skill (less with AI) but also good practice for those baby components you'd need to make in an interview.

TBH I'm like that, but how hard could writing a React component be? I'm not even a React programmer but I can probably write working code on a whiteboard.

The best candidates would have that question wrapped up in 5 minutes. Like they're not even having to think about it, which is honestly all I cared about testing for -- do something really easy really fast so I know you're not BSing me, and then we can move on to just having a conversation about your past experience.

One of the worst guys took 20 minutes, with me having to coach him through it the entire time. It was a true exercise in patience, but I don't mind helping people learn new things. When he got his rejection email, he actually complained to the recruiter because he thought he did really well. Dude...

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#248

Post by andai »

fny wrote: post #218
mjr00 wrote: post #15

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…

As the kids say, AI makes everyone a 10x engineer. Who would you you want to 10x?

But it's measuring quantity, not quality.

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

What we really need is the -10X engineer ;)

Alas, his job would entirely consist of debloating the slop everyone else is pumping out "at inference speed".

https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#249

Post by majormajor »

conductr wrote: post #202
coliveira wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some specific job listings we had open for years If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

Exactly. Hire someone 80-90% there and invest in their training FFS.

How do you know if someone is 80-90% there without having the job posting for the profile up, and interviewing candidates who come along?

That still takes a long time if random Senior Engineer X who's looking on LinkedIn is only 10% of the way there for what you'd need for a very specialized role.

Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

#250

Post by mjr00 »

ptrrrrrrppr wrote: post #234
no_wizard wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think its being used to filter out people that aren't basically a mirror for the interviewers in many instances. I've noticed a huge tightening of the rope around that sort of thing. I can't tell you how many times I've passed all the tests, all the interview things, get to the final round with the team and the rejection email comes in despite having good conversations. By all accounts, I believe any person wo…

Other angle: often interview with candidate A goes well, but then you meet candidate B who is comparable but wants less money. From my experience that happens more often now, as there are more people who are desperate and willing to lower their salary expectations to a level that I wouldn't consider reasonable few years ago.

I have hired a lot of people and I have never seen a situation where candidate A and B are both within the target salary band but one was chosen because they were cheaper. You'd always choose the one that was better. I can only see a slightly lower expected salary being a factor at extremely early stage startups with very little funding.
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