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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

#361

Post by oceanplexian »

globular-toast wrote: post #119

What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real, grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.

Repairing classic cars.

We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up forever.

They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding, drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering, cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all wrong and doing it again.

Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like to take on a classic car project.

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

#362

Post by sam0x17 »

boomskats wrote: post #230
sam0x17 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how…

What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none. That time when you got to internalise through first hand experience what good & bad…

> What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none

I would say that baptism by fire _is_ where the quality of an academic education comes from, historically at least. They are the same picture.

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

#363

Post by spacebuffer »

I am in my 20s. At the moment I've got a part time job, but I am preparing myself for the worse. In the next few years I am planning to volunteer at farms through workaway. Maybe one day I can become self sustainable,tech and nutrition wise

also getting into plumbing, curious to see what others are doing in this regard.

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

#364

Post by mariopt »

eitally wrote: post #348
mariopt wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU/UK

Have you considered roles in the EU countries that have been going gangbusters for US offshoring (Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia)?

The market in the EU is strange, it doesn't matter where you live. Every role is being advertised as a remote one, over 200+ applicants and it's virtually impossible to get noticed.

I blame this on people spamming fake AI CVs 24/7, no one is going to review hundreds of CVs.

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

#365

Post by in_cahoots »

fsloth wrote: post #345
crystal_revenge wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what type of "greenfield" startup experience you've had, but most of the work I'm talking about involves solving problems that most people simply don't have the combined skill set to solve. Typically problems that involve a substantial amount of quantitative skills combined with the ability to bring those solutions to prod. Nearly all of the teams I've joined had problems they didn't know how to solve and of…

FWIW this is the best kind of job ever for me as well: "when you started you didn't even know if there was a solution." Regardless what the problem is - as long as I know _nobody knows if there is a solution_ it's an instant sugar rush. You are free to bang your head against a stone wall for months trying to crack the damn thing. OFC you need to deliver in the end. And this requires then ruthless "worse is better" me…

Interesting, this is a trap that I've seen multiple senior hires fall into. In my experience "we have a problem but no solution" often means (a) there actually is a solution but it's too expensive to implement, (b) there are organizational reasons why this problem exists and a new hire doesn't have the experience or credibility to navigate it or (c ) there is no solution to the problem or the solution is very complex, and by the time the new hire onboards, digs into the problem, and figures it out their credibility is shot because everyone was expecting the senior hire to figure it out in 90 days.

I've found new hires to be more successful when they join, get some easy wins, and then find their own problems to solve. But maybe it's just an artifact of working at large companies where most of the day-to-day stuff is figured out.

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

#366

Post by milchek »

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…

I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring that took place just before this employment “crash?” - if it is as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then does that make it a good thing as well.

Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense.

Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.

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

#367

Post by dasil003 »

boca_honey wrote: post #344
schmichael wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know if switching from a extreme partisan site to another extreme partisan site is the right solution just because of the need of login credentials. In any case, Twitter/X has been online almost 20 years. Bluesky still has to prove its staying power long term.

The justification of better UX seems reasonable regardless of politics. I'd prefer not to have to log in on any HN link, and I also can't say I want to optimize for link health as this is super topical and I will never want to look at it again after this discussion is over.

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

#369

Post by not_ai »

simonw wrote: post #321
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…

Thanks for sharing this is the first I’ve seen this. I wish they had expanded on exactly what mid-level might be missing rather then just saying “fundamentals” and “practical intuition”

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

#370

Post by cyberpunk »

jokoon wrote: post #351

People constantly tell me "oh you're a dev it's easy to find work" I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience, and no degree in France. 3 years without a job. I yearn for a new pandemic. Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I have good savings. Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If there i…

I’ve never really found there to be all that much of a market for specifically c++ developers. If you do decide to look for work more seriously I wouldn’t be too hung up on language, if you can code in one you can pretty much code in all of them, and I’ve never hired a developer for specific language skill outside of a few rare cases it’s something really specific we are trying to fix (e.g erlang or something), even then it wouldn’t be a complete showstopper.

YMMV but that’s coming from a guy who writes in at least 3 languages at current $dayjob.

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