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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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop. We'd all prefer a magical unicorn applicant that checks every box but it's never possible especially the more you're required to know about specifics that are best learned internally to begin with. The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations

> So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how hands on it was or how it took time to develop. There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for making obvious choices. If the perfect applicant happens to be looking for a job and it can save us the time and churn of switching someone internally, then yes: I would prefer to hire that person. > The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in terms of…

> There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for making obvious choices.

Elsecomment and on Reddit, you'll see the attitude that their years of experience should be sufficient assurance for their prospective employer that they can pick up whatever other technologies are out there.

This is often coupled with the "you shouldn't need to learn new things outside of your 9-5."

Here, you are presenting a situation where a company would rather promote from within (counter job hopping culture) and would penalize someone who is not learning about new things that their current employer isn't using in the hiring process.

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And you've mentioned it elsecomment too - it's about the risk. A company hiring an individual who isn't familiar with the technology and has not shown the ability to learn new material is more risky a hire than one who is either familiar with it professionally or has demonstrated the ability to learn new technologies.

That runs counter to the idea of the "best" candidate being the one who is most skilled but rather the "best" candidate being the one that is the least risky of a hire.

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

#382
post #10

The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever. Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days. Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view

Yes, but... The health of the market is not a function of the total number of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the number of people to fill them. The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires from the last…

YoY change in jobs is still probably not the best way to visualize overall market health. As you say, you also have to take into account the number of people of fill the jobs. To me it seems like the least misleading statistics would be a graph showing unemployment and underemployment % over time. I'd probably also toss in graphs of length of unemployment period as well as various median wage percentiles (quintiles or deciles maybe) over time.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.

In Atlanta in 2000, I was making $52K a year working for a medium size company that printed bills. By 2002 I was making $65K at the same company. For context, I had my 2600 square foot 3.5/2 bedroom house built that year for $175K.

[deleted]

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

#384

The graph does a really poor job supporting the conclusion, most obviously because it only goes back to 2016, the peak of boom times, it doesn't go anywhere near 2008 so why does the caption talk about that? Just this same graph alone going back to 1990 would be super eye-opening. The other thing is it's showing first derivative, not absolute numbers, which is a very questionable way to derive "worst employment situa…

Theres a zoomed out version immediately below that tweet.

https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916369056079975

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

#385
post #342

If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry don’t have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included. I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.

I know a very senior engineer who took their life the day after Trump was elected. He was unemployed for a while.

While I think a lot more was going on with him than being unemployed, I'm convinced AI hitting the scene had a bit to do with it. They were an older dev 50+.

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

#386
post #326

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.

[flagged]

Is this relevant to the question of whether we should replace the link? Seems like we're going to spend a lot of time running down the views of the UBO of every domain posted here.

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

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.

Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring. Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we…

> Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos ...

This is a person who you're going to be reviewing their code or reading the documentation that they write.

If there are typos and poor formatting in the resume (that they've had the leisure of reviewing themselves and correcting), what does this say about the quality of the code the code or documentation that they're going to write when under a time constraint?

Are you going to be faced with the decision of having code with variables that have spelling errors and documentation that is grammatically or factually incorrect go through because of the time pressure?

The resume itself is a demonstration of the applicant's ability to pay attention to the details that matter in software development without showing a single line of NDAed code.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This reply makes zero sense to me. 1. You start off by labelling both platforms as "extreme partisan" - care to explain? 2. This charge is used to minimize the original complaint (login requirement), which is a hard blocker to view replies, i.e. additional context. 3. This all then somehow morphs into a point about platform longevity? How exactly does any of this address parent commenter's statement that "bsky is jus…

You're right, I went off-topic for no good reason. I was just reacting to my personal bias against Bluesky and its stereotypical user and content.

Too late to edit / delete my post but I retract it and apologize.

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

#389
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…

> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?

100% this. AI is automating the code generation.

Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills.

AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.

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