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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#311

Post by ricardobayes »

ajkjk wrote: post #190
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…

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want,…

Most mechanics I know have long forgotten how to "connect the dots" and troubleshoot issues. Everything became computerized there and all they do is plug in a code reader. They literally don't do that "could it be spark, could it be fuel" kind of thing anymore. Most branded garages follow company instructions, "IKEA"-style, aka use a 10 socket and use it here.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#313

Post by mandevil »

aantix wrote: post #54
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #15

Wild that explanations of the tech job market like this are still being written without referencing the tax consequences of Section 174 changes.

Will Trump reverse these changes? Will he lower interest rates?

In theory, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve (who controls interest rates) is supposed to be insulated from political pressures: one explanation for the root of the "stagflation" malaise in the US economy during the 1970's was that Richard Nixon's chairman (Arthur Burns, who had been a direct advisor to RMN) kept interest rates too low for the economy at the time in order to help Nixon get reelected in 1972 (and then beyond, to make Nixon and then Ford more popular). Under this explanation- common among those who support central bank independence- it took Paul Volecker (a Carer appointee) to run interest rates very high for a long time (the so-called Volecker Recession of the early 1980's) to make up for the failure of Burns. This is where the tradition of Fed Chairman independence comes from. (1)

Donald Trump, as a real estate guy, instinctively understands the power of lower interest rates and definitely lobbied hard for Jay Powell (whom he appointed) to lower interest rates in his first term. So if he gets elected again I expect we will see that sort of pressure applied again, the question is whether the Chairman would continue to chart their own course or not.

1: The truth of this story is, as always with economics, impossibly hard to measure. There was a strong movement from the 1960's into the 1990's to try and create independent central banks- this is where the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics came from, among other things- but the evidence is such that the physicist in me recoils at the idea that this has been proven.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#314

Post by prewett »

csmpltn wrote: post #223

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 stuf…

"Employment vibes"?! "The entire industry was sleeping on SSL and DHE ciphers..."?! And that self-quote at the top, wow. No names of the companies he worked for. It's hard to take this seriously.

Over 15 years of experience each in Erlang, Smalltalk, Scheme, Objective C, regular C, Python, JS, and then 9 years of Swift. Seems... impossible. I'd be willing to believe C + Python + JS + one or two others, since that mix is quite possible and maybe a personal project on the weekends. Everybody is going to have years of Python + JS. But almost nobody uses Erlang, Smalltalk, and Scheme, so how are you going to be using them regularly? Where would one combine these with UI-languages like ObjC/Swift? Things like Erlang + C seem unlikely; their whole purposes are different. I think you'd need to have a completely different project in a different language every month for this, and I don't think 15 years of 1 month projects equates to 15 years of experience, even assuming this is what happened, which I doubt. This list looks more like "I started using this language N years ago and maybe have used it at least once or twice since".

The whole tone of this and the blog reminds me of the kid in Catcher in the Rye.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#315

Post by thayne »

Aurornis wrote: post #294
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…

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

> it adds up to around 4-5 hours total.

That's fine if you can get a job after a few interviews, but when a talented job searcher has to go through that dozens of times to get a job offer, and much of the interview is "leetcode" questions that don't evaluate the skills you'll actually use, is it surprising people are frustrated by the hiring process?

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#316

Post by prewett »

dude333 wrote: post #270

Stashing this nugget for future me: "interviewers often can’t reliably judge or measure people who have better answers than they expect"

I'd pick some nugget that wasn't so self-congratulatory and patronizing. Which are in short supply in the blog entry.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#317

Post by golergka »

Quothling wrote: post #143
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…

> Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart? They always were. > This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how things work, are literally walking a knifes edge toward collapse, systems are failing all over, and yet companies wont staff up on tech people. You'd think that you would take digitalisation seriously in a company where 100% of your employees spend 100% of their working hours on a compu…

Depending on who he went golfing with, it could actually be the right call.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#318

Post by jf22 »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #234
jf22 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let's clarify what you mean by FANG employee and safe harbor.

If you're trying to say a FANG employee making 400k in the US doesn't feel safe we'd have to dig into that.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#319

Post by golergka »

geraldwhen wrote: post #178
scottLobster wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

I run coding interviews. I would never give an esoteric algorithms question, or even really an algorithms question. I have prompts that test very basic concepts and nearly everyone fails. Resume fraud is rampant.

Algorithm questions are overrated, but asking a real life question where a naive solution is n^2 but basic knowledge of standard tools brings it down to log n is always a good idea.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#320

Post by chinchilla2020 »

xivzgrev wrote: post #42
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…

Yah I had no idea where that came from. Assume 250 working day in a year that’s…$1.25 - $2.5 million per year. At a tractor manufacturer. It was probably a typo, with extra zero. they probably meant $500-$1000 per day. That would be $125k-$250k which seems much more reasonable

Top reps at Caterpillar, Komatsu, and John Deere actually do make that much. I used to work in that industry.

Most people here are in tech and have no idea how heavily incentivized industrial sales is. Selling a fleet of D10 dozers to an excavation operation and selling a maintenance agreement is going to net caterpillar $1.7mm a dozer multiplied by number of dozers. They aren't paying someone 60k a year and free kombucha for managing those sorts of accounts.

These are the TOP folks though. I don't think most entry level college grads are going to making that any time size.

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