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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

#291

Post by blobbers »

If anyone saw that LinkedIn post about someone at Block resigning guilt of being offered a raise and retention after the layoffs, I'd say that is a signal that tech is heading down.

Most people would be thankful to have a secure well paying job in the post AI blow off; increasingly it's going to harder to differentiate yourself against anyone else using AI. That we have people still in the thick of AI that don't understand that is a strong signal that AI boom is still going to come take some jobs.

If you're in a software related role and AI isn't making you more productive, it's on YOU as a dev to figure things out quickly.

AI is coming for your job so you can either be an AI manager, or you can get managed out for AI.

caveat: This is my take as someone who used to do a lot of hand coding, and now regularly has a small team of AI doing anything that would have normally required mostly brute coding strength but not too much thought; that's facet'ed plots, refactoring libraries, improving pipeline efficiency, adding parallelization where possible, building presentations, adding test coverage.

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

#292

Post by nottorp »

ryandrake wrote: post #221
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.

When I did tech interviews, I used to think I could just jump right in with an intermediate level question and go from there. But the reality is that most of the candidates I interviewed couldn't even answer a trivial question that just required a basic for-loop with an if-statement inside it. These are not pressure-cooker interviews where they need to balance a binary tree while having Baby Shark blasted at them on…

There's the old Joel theory that the good programmers don't apply for jobs because they just get invited...

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

#294

Post by robryan »

Gigachad wrote: post #145
Aurornis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring. Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we…

At least in my experience, applying at jobs online has been entirely useless for the last 5 years. No company ever contacts you after using the online application forms. And the only way I’ve got interviews is from recruiters contacting me.

My experience recently was something like 2/3 from referrals (the third I think will eventually get back to me but way too slow), and something like 3/10 from cold applications. Obviously big differences depending on location and experience but I was pleasantly surprised that some of the cold applications went somewhere.

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

#295

Post by layer8 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #243
layer8 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

My intention was actually to inspire others to maybe also start preferring long-term/maintenance work, because I feel there’s a lack of enthusiasm for that.

Almost invariably after submitting, I see how I could clarify and/or expand on my thoughts, so I often do end up editing.

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

#296

Post by exceptione »

jjmarr wrote: post #201
zabzonk wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this here -"What are you actually developing?" People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post: - I am developing an X - I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc. - I have these ... testing problems - I have these problems with the V…

I'm hosting a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and trying to autoscale it to tens of thousands of vCPUs. The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstations (edit: transparently replace compiling ) because our codebase is really big and we've hired enough people this is viable. edit: to clarify, I'm using recc which wraps the compiler commands like distcc or ccache. It doesn't require developers to give…

  > The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstation
Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best engineers leave? I am half serious here. If you want your software to run slow, IT could equally well install corporate security software on developer laptops. Oops, I did it again. Oh well, in all seriousness, I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtualization. I am afraid you are replacing the hardware layer by a software layer with ungodly complexity, which you are sure of will be functionally incomplete.

Are you sure they don't have to fix the build pipeline first? Tens of thousands of vCPUs for a single compilation run, or to accommodate 100 developers who try to compile their own changes?

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

#297

Post by alwa »

conductr wrote: post #236
Aurornis wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answered elsewhere: If we're investing in someone's training we'll promote someone from within who is already familiar with the product and then backfill their simpler work.

So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop. We'd all prefer a magical unicorn applicant that checks every box but it's never possible especially the more you're required to know about specifics that are best learned internally to begin with. The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations

Or, it’s the kind of place or situation where it’s not about the job/role as some abstract commodity “function,” it’s about specialist > internal generalist > external non-specialist.

“We’re making do, but we’re kind of figuring out X as we go. That’s working for now, but the problems keep getting knottier as we grow and change—it works, but it’s expensive in terms of avoidable mistakes.

Nothing’s on fire, but if we ever got the chance, we’d value authentic expertise in this niche. But if it’s just ‘I could probably figure that out,’ we’ve already got plenty of that internally.”

Where a good hire ends up helping those internal people as they develop experience and expertise, and one that’s not right is worse than none at all.

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

#298

Post by ghaff »

atherton94027 wrote: post #233
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 not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that doesn't match their ideal candidate

And a lot of it is networks as opposed to applying to a job position. My last position--that I had for many years--was reaching out to someone knew for not even a posted position and having one created for me.

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

#299

Post by thcipriani »

This has a misleading title.

This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month change is worse than 2020.

But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020 (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even.

Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for what this chart shows.

(Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101 (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) + CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find other ones quickly and gave up :))

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

#300

Post by rustystump »

MrDarcy wrote: post #286
BoorishBears wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

And yet it is correct. The most valuable engineers today are those who have maintained and expanded the 0..v1 crap from others, and are now driven and ambitious enough to go build the next generation of 0..v1. Armed with that experience, the crap is minimal and value maximized.

Oof ima be the one to say it depends. This is personality based and the truth is a successful product has both. Even late on u want that person willing to break convention to find a new way of doing something. Early u need some seasoning in there too.
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