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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

#361

Post by burnte »

burnte wrote: post #248
thomascgalvin wrote: post #212

> Based on analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Janco, news that the IT industry added just 700 jobs following an estimated 262,242 jobs lost amid mass layoffs is shocking, but not surprising. So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth. > Currently, there are almost 100K…

> So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth. ^ This guy reads.

Oof, tough crowd.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#362

Post by Infinitesimus »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #332
spacemadness wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am dumbfounded this idea gets trotted around HN so freely. I’ve met nobody like this in the industry. Most people I know are burnt out from many years of having to work over 40 hours.

I work at FAANG. People here coast while making mountains of money.

Google is the big tech company with that reputation though. MS has pockets but pays considerably worse

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#363

Post by alasdair_ »

mschuster91 wrote: post #300
nostrademons wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code. It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.

> It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future. German here. The secret sauce behind the Duales System is that it's, as the name suggests, a split system - one part of the training is at government-run schools ("Berufsschule"), and the other pa…

Can you list some things graduates of this “secret sauce” have built?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#364

Post by alasdair_ »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #337
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…

I've had them confidently tell me they verified functionality by decrypting a TLS session even though that was impossible because I hadn't yet implemented a way to expose ephemeral TLS keys and there was no way to do it from the other side of the link.

Maybe you encrypted with 8-bit keys? :)

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#365

Post by alasdair_ »

ptero wrote: post #200
closeparen wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, US salaries are either $300k+ in the Bay Area or $0 and unemployed, there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area.

There are many large, stable, profitable companies that are hiring software engineers. They are not software houses, but they pay well for a comfortable life (outside of NYC and Bay Area) and offer good work-life balance. For some examples you can look at medical devices, utilities, manufacturing, IBMs and Walmarts and R&D departments of virtually any large non-software company. But there are frictions, too. Unless y…

I just looked at Walmart. Base pay was 240k remote plus a lot of bonuses and benefits. Even Walmart isn’t paying Walmart wages any more.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#366

Post by ehnto »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #43
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…

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…

Software industries outside of VC are still pretty normal, decent pay but in line with other local industries, nothing jawdropping. Working pretty hard still, but balanced enough compared to the overtime all the time days. That's going to depend on your company.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#367

Post by rr808 »

grogenaut wrote: post #281
wavemode wrote: post #245

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

Probably more relevant is how many over 40 give up coding because they're bored and/or employers dont want them any more. (I'm over 50 and finding it much harder to get piad compared to when I was younger despite kids moved out and I have lots of time to dedicate to working)

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#368

Post by freddie_mercury »

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.

This was a pretty forseeable event after US based developers repeatedly told their bosses that development could be done just as productively remotely.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#369

Post by mschuster91 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #363
mschuster91 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future. German here. The secret sauce behind the Duales System is that it's, as the name suggests, a split system - one part of the training is at government-run schools ("Berufsschule"), and the other pa…

Can you list some things graduates of this “secret sauce” have built?

We don't make glamorous "unicorns" in the US style as we lack both the financials (aka enormous amounts of dumb money floating around waiting to be invested - remember, we don't have 401k, we have rolling-contribution pensions so no need for that) and the culture (we're very risk averse)... but our "Mittelstand" has produced hundreds of small and medium size companies that are world leaders in their respective market [1], often dominating their market with 70-90% [2]. And the foundation of that, especially for the older companies, isn't academics, it's trades, training and apprenticeship. Many of the Mittelstand companies, you enter in your youth and remain there for the rest of your life.

Our pride as a nation, our role models, is not a few people who struck it right to become multi-billionaires, our pride is the millions of people working for the Mittelstand and the consistently high quality of the stuff they produce. Boring, but wildly profitable and very, very resilient.

PS: You actually might know some of these things our tradespeople built. BMW/Audi/Mercedes/Volkswagen cars, MAN trucks, Rheinmetall, KMW and ThyssenKrupp military hardware from tanks to the massive Panzerhaubitze 2000, Diehl's IRIS-T anti-air defense, Heckler & Koch/Walther guns, anything with "Siemens" on it built before Siemens fell to MBA shenanigans, all developed and prior to globalization also built in Germany. And a lot of it, especially the military tech, is up to par with what the US military builds - for IRIS-T SLM and PzH 2000, the Ukraine war shows that they are even better to some experts.

One thing we sadly lost was pharmaceuticals - up until the 60s-70s, Germany used to be the "apothecary of the world" [3], but we lost that to India and China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

[2] https://hbr.org/1992/03/lessons-from-germanys-midsize-giants

[3] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2018/daz-44...

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#370

Post by ehnto »

closeparen wrote: post #174
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…

Jaw dropping pay is inextricable from the jaw dropping Bay Area housing market. Standard white-collar pay for Bay Area-only roles is a pretty bad deal, and most tech workers would be better off learning something else. But standard white-collar pay with the geographic distribution of other white-collar work (i.e. any mid-sized and up metro is fine) would be a perfectly good equilibrium.

Makes you wonder if these mega corporations wouldn't be better off lobbying to resolve the housing crisis instead of paying more in salaries.
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