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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

#321

Post by simonw »

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…

That matches an observation made in that report from the recent Thoughtworks retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...

> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.

> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.

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

#322

Post by bluefirebrand »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #144
stanleykm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes performance into account, but that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.

> that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done. Not that I disagree with you here, but it is hard to square this with people who are also saying not to worry about AI displacement because there's limitless demand for software.

> it is hard to square this with people who are also saying not to worry about AI displacement because there's limitless demand for software.

Well, that's easy to square: the idea that there is limitless demand for software is nonsense. Pure fiction

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

#323

Post by bdangubic »

bobanrocky wrote: post #156
groby_b wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead. So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at. The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironi…

Are you saying you want to be laid off with a nice package as you’ve been with the same employer for a long time? Couple of options: have a nice conversation with your manager and make this clear. The signs are clear that major s/w layoffs will happen in the next couple of years. Other option is to ease off - your high salary and low output will put you in the dustbin list

> your high salary and low output will put you in the dustbin list

you’d think, but in my experience, once you reach high salary - in a lot of places - you can coast for a long time with very little output

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

#324

Post by layer8 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #311
layer8 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems wrong? Like if you look at a collection of open SWENG positions, most of them are maintenance roles at large companies. Greenfield software doesn't have the revenue needed to justify much headcount. In my experience separating the roles out is silly if you're an engineer yourself. We do this a lot and that leads to silly mentalities. Greenfield developer vs maintenance engineer, MVP engineer vs Big Tech de…

I wasn’t talking about segregating roles, but about personal preference. People do tend to prefer building new stuff over maintaining projects long-term, and I’d like the scale to tip a bit on that. Linus is indeed a good counterexample: He didn’t leave Linux after 1.0 to build the next new thing. But the latter is what developers in practice often prefer doing.

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

#325

Post by girvo »

geodel wrote: post #204
JeremyNT wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true. The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing. A rando jr vibe c…

While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc a…

> Code now does not need much design.

I’ll bite: why? Genuine question, not a weird gotcha.

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

#326

Post by davidw »

schmichael wrote: post #272
jlhawn wrote: post #117

Here's the same post on Bluesky for those who prefer that platform: https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3mg...

Thank you! Could HN switch the links? bsky doesn't require a login to view replies. bsky is just a superior viewing experience.

[flagged]

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

#327

Post by mjr00 »

overfeed wrote: post #105
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. How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.

> How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open after 10 months.

On the hiring side, at least in tech: interviewing really sucks. It's a big time investment from multiple people (HR, technical interviewers, managers, etc).

I'm not saying it's impossible that companies are interviewing for fun, but it seems really unlikely to me anyone would want to do interviews without seriously intending to hire someone.

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

#328

Post by bluefirebrand »

Aurornis wrote: post #225
bluefirebrand wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings. That sort of critical position is for headhunters

> If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings. Why? Not everyone is on LinkedIn or has an updated profile. Some of the best candidates I've hired were people who were in other states who were planning to move, but waiting for the right job opportunity to come up. We also used recruiters. Why does it make people so angry that we posted job listings for real jobs that we were really hiring for?

If your real candidate pool is so small that you're effectively targeting a handful of people worldwide then you aren't "really hiring"

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

#329

Post by afavour »

gtowey wrote: post #235
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…

Yup. You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation -- a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.

I don't think they're mutually exclusive. You could just as easily describe someone with bootstrapping experience as being like an FAA crash investigator who investigates take offs. You get to know exactly what works when moving fast and looking for quick results, and what dooms a short timeline to failure.

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

#330

Post by eikenberry »

roxolotl wrote: post #24

How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely. EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124... There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expec…

Remember that the 2000 numbers are also out of a much smaller pool and the graph uses absolute numbers. So even if they were the same numbers in 2000 as 2020 it would have been a much, much larger percentage of all jobs.
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