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IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

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Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#341

Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.

>Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.

This isn't an argument against immigration as I'm incredibly pro. That said, trying to sell people on immigration based off the premise that it'd provide them with more minority groups we could exploit into accepting lower wages feels morally bankrupt.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am realising that this is what taxes pays for in Denmark. I have a masters in computer science (5 year, postgraduate + thesis, Aarhus University which is top 100 and even higher for PL + semantics, which is my thesis subject) that I received tuition free and I am continuing with a professional degree in business at a reasonable tuition at 10k USD for the entire degree . It appears like continual learning should be…

it depends what skills you're talking about. when i see people complaining about always having to learn new things, it's related to new libraries, frameworks, technologies (e.g. now i have to learn graphql, now i have to learn to make things cloud-native, now i have to learn go because it's cooler than java). this stuff in my experience is either taught badly or not at all in universities, and i don't even mind that.…

None of its "new", its simply repackaged and slightly different, not really any better. Its just constant churn of frameworks, languages, and libraries.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#343
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in general, what do you think an alternate job would be for an ex-dev (without spending 10s of thousands on reschooling)? Seems like retail, warehouses, and other unskilled labor are the main options. Even something like teaching would require a certification.

Basically anything tech-adjacent - product, "business analysts," management. Maybe something like tech writing but there are going to a lot of decent devs who make terrible tech writers so that's much more on an individual basis. And then there's the devs who still code but that's not their focus - SDET, devrel, that sort of thing. Devrel would actually probably be the easiest thing to get into with a few years' fore…

Options:

Tech Writers - nope. Nothing dealing with boilerplate text is safe, in any field.

Twitch/YouTube - nope. That is just celebrity economics again. For every half dozen people that make it (and make it is just back to median dev salary) there are thousands that only get a few viewers.

Teaching - this is option. But as noted by others. Can have own problems and a lot of people leave.

I'm an old Dev looking for second career, and it is tough. The option is to just re-skill and be dev again in another industry. Dev's be Dev's. It doesn't seem like there are many upward paths, and limited sideways paths.

What, product manager, analyst, marketing? Tried them, they all have downsides.

Even with all the crap, I only find comfort in creating things. Coding.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#344
post #262

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 real answer. If they ask you why you didn't respond, you can honestly tell them you were waiting for them to ask their question.

If someone says "how are you?" that doesn't work though.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#345
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offshoring projects very commonly fail because companies dramatically overestimate the savings and underestimate the cost of communications, company culture, and experience. If you have a workforce which is delivering good results, there’s often a solid benefit to continuing that rather than chasing a mirage.

Not my experience at all. I've been part of successful offshoring at a few different companies. It wasn't "one and done", that is, we had to try different countries, different subcontractors, etc but it is totally possible to maintain quality AND lower engineering costs by 50-75% by offshoring. For those interested, my best experience has been with workers in LATAM countries. Pry 75% were Brazilians. Great timezone a…

I’m not saying it’s impossible but that it commonly fails due to those reasons. Timezones are a common source of problems but I’ve also seen a fair number of problems which basically boiled down to outsourcing putting more stress on existing management problems such as inability to produce specs or delegate, and micromanagement were amplified by distance and cultural barriers. Basically the organizational equivalent of saying “our monolith sucks, let’s use microservices” without first contemplating how the existing system got that way.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but over 100,000 people graduate in CS/IT per year. 700 net jobs is rough. (I should know - several of those graduates are old friends of mine who struggled massively to find jobs.)

How many retire/quit/die each year

Not enough, obviously

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#347
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People, particularly family, calling me on the phone and then asking me what I'm doing as if it's any of their business and it's their decision whether what they need is more important than what I'm doing is such a pet peeve of mine.

How do you start the conversation when you call your brother/sister?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#348
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re leaving out the massive amount of debt he added to the company as part of the buyout. That means they need to do something like triple their most profitable quarter just to be where they were before the buyout.

But that has nothing to do with the layoffs.

Nobody said it did? I was responding to a claim that they could end up in a better financial situation because they have fewer staff, which would be an easier argument if there weren’t so many extra billions in debt on the balance sheet now.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People, particularly family, calling me on the phone and then asking me what I'm doing as if it's any of their business and it's their decision whether what they need is more important than what I'm doing is such a pet peeve of mine.

How do you start the conversation when you call your brother/sister?

*ring*

"Hello?"

"IT IS TIME."

*click*

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#350
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvoted for this, but factually what you're saying is correct. He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't. Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work don…

> He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't. It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering. I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.

increasing growth most places in world

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026

heres a total feature map of what was released in 2023:

https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387

I think thats definitely a signal that the B and C teams werent needed, considering they cut 90% of staff LOL.

As for the bots, AI is making it easier than ever to bypass those systems. CogVLM is just sitting there menacingly on github https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM

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