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IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

wsj.com

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Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#271

Post by unixfg »

pram wrote: post #262
deadghost wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs. An example to illustrate what I was worki…

Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.

This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#272

Post by kypro »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #182
huytersd wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it coincides with there being no VC money and it’s hard to build something without funding.

Opinion and not a fact, have you heard of bootstrapping and using old computer as server We used to be dreamers now is like cant do

18 years ago I was 15 and I worked on my first startup with a friend before I was even able to code.

We hosted the website on the spare computer in my bedroom and within a few months had our first pay customer and we continued to grow it from there.

However despite working on countless startups since then none of them replicated that success, despite me since becoming an accomplished software engineer and knowing far more about business.

The truth is any idiot could launch a successful startup from their bedroom with a bit of effort in the early 2000s. When me and my friend worked on our startup we were like 1 of maybe 2-3 companies doing what we were doing. Today I suspect that number would be closer to 1,000, if not more.

Those old bootstrapping stories don't exist anymore. The low hang fruit is gone. There's a huge amount of competition even in the most niche markets. And if you have competition they'll probably have an ad budget many times your total bootstrapping budget.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to bootstrap a startup, but statistically it's insanely difficult these days. There was an article on Indie Hackers a while back where someone looked at the stats for successful Indie Hacker projects it the guy found that only something like 1 in 200 projects posted on Indie Hackers even go on to make profit if I recall correctly.

You're an idiot if you're a dreamer today. You're almost certainly better off just getting a second job.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#273

Post by Andrex »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #102
Workaccount2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it looks like tech is just falling more in line with other industries pay/workload. I think there are many who joined the tech workforce during the pandemic thinking the norm was to make $135k while doing 10 hours of real work a week from home, twiddling a few lines of bootcamp level javascript to appease your largely absent boss. Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notor…

Takes a low IQ person to accept ridiculous workload for kinda ok money

No offense, I'm curious: do you happen to be younger than 30?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#274

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

orochimaaru wrote: post #36
deathpanels wrote: post #25

Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditi…

I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.

Yep ours are hiring from India directly. Rumor says head of IT has a affiliated company set up...

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#275

Post by Gigachad »

Pepe1vo wrote: post #57

The cognitive dissonance I'm getting from reading the comments here is pretty staggering. Where I live (The Netherlands) me and every IT person I know is getting absolutely hounded by recruiters. As an additional anecdote I'll add that I've just switched jobs to a start-up on very favorable terms and the recruitment process basically amounted to being cold called and asked "hey you wanna work here?". Can anyone here…

I'm in Australia and I get recruiter calls all the time. I've said I'm interested to all of them, and then they just stop talking to me. No idea what's going on. Seems like recruiters are just spamming out first contact messages and then selectively picking the replies they want to respond to.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#276

Post by randomdata »

yesdocs wrote: post #178
badpun wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the people are better off with free, open markets long term. The theory only says that all the people globally will be better off. It does not say anything about citizens of a specific country that is applying protectionism. They may be better off for it, they may be worse - it depends on the particulars and, as most economic interventions, can only really be judged post-factum.

Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions? Did we forget that having weekends off and holidays off was not a thing until unions? Did we also forget that children were put to work at a young age until unions?

> Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions?

Is it still forgetting if it never happened? Both the idea of the 8-hour work day and weekends predate the first recognized union. The 40-hour workweek became the norm during the Great Depression by way of government initiative in an attempt to spread the work out across more people.

Unions have long supported the 40-hour work week, but are not meaningfully responsible for it. If showing support for something is necessary for something to exist, then you could probably say that just about everything exists because of unions...

Even still, we're talking nearly 100 (when it became common) to well over 200 years ago (when it was conceived). Even if unions actually were responsible, people are going to naturally ask "What have you done for me lately?". Where is the 10-hour workweek?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#277

Post by gedy »

pc86 wrote: post #108
yesdocs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s time we unionize as software developers. You saw what the UAW achieved, Software Engineering needs the same type of protections

Protectionism doesn't work beyond selfish short-term interests. American cars are not exactly paragons of technical or mechanical prowess compared to their Japanese or German counterparts. I've been a software developer for the better part of two decades, I'm not worried about the C-tier code coming out of rural India. You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.

> You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.

I dislike the tone as there are plenty of good devs who've been cut and replaced (sort of) by offshore. Don't equate laid off/replaced with "really bad dev".

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#278

Post by Havoc »

ravenstine wrote: post #90

For most of my career, I was being hounded by various recruiters virtually every day. For the past few years... crickets . This told me everything I needed to know, regardless of the many whom have been in denial.

Juniors are more commoditized though. Number of job opportunities decrease with seniority in most industries (but conversely potentially also become better quality)

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#279

Post by Havoc »

le-mark wrote: post #31

I’d been dodging layoffs for 20 years until I got laid off for the first time, late last year. My personal situation isn’t bad at all. Meaning my wife has insurance through her job and we have plenty of cushion. I’m spending time on a hardware startup and practicing leetcode. The job market will come back, it always does. Maybe not as hot but we’ll see. Edit; According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemploymen…

> could be a signal of the singularity approaching

That would imply a fairly widespread ability to predict the singularity which doesn’t seem plausible to me

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#280

Post by bsdpufferfish »

epolanski wrote: post #263
DebtDeflation wrote: post #9

That confirms my anecdotal experience. At times I felt I was losing my mind with all the "record low unemployment" and "soft landing" stories in the press. 2021 and 2022 felt like great years in terms of the job market. 2023 felt horrible.

> 2023 felt horrible. It really did. I choose that year to become an independent contractor, and thanks God the only client I found loves me and pays on time because otherwise literally nobody has ever contacted me on LinkedIn or anything with a single decent proposal. I have a huge fear of losing that client and going back to European corporate job and salary again.

> otherwise literally nobody has ever contacted me on LinkedIn

If you're a contractor you should be the one contacting. Sales is part of the job.

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