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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

#421

Post by ua709 »

in_cahoots wrote: post #365
fsloth wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you forgot

(d) although the initial statement seems credible, the problem is actually ill defined and under specified and therefore not solvable as originally stated.

Example: our start-up plans to "fix health care"

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

#422

Post by sidereal1 »

windowshopping wrote: post #262
mariopt wrote: post #171

For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc. I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis

I've been able to get something like 25 interviews in 2 months despite having long gaps on my resume and nothing especially impressive to my name. So I suspect you might be going about this wrong. I haven't gotten an offer yet, that's another story, but getting the interviews hasn't been hard. Applying in NYC/SF, senior-only.

I think another big change is the offer rate. I've had plenty of interviews in recent years but almost no offers.

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

#424

Post by overfeed »

mjr00 wrote: post #327
overfeed wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

> On the hiring side, at least in tech: interviewing really sucks.

I know it sucks, I've sat on the other side if the interviewing desk many times, and the charade wastes everyone's time - the candidates most of all because no one values that.

> 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.

It sounds like you've never had to deal with the BS that is headcount politics, which happens more at larger organizations due to more onerous processes. Upper management (director, VP) can play all sorts of games to protect a headcount buffer[1], and everyone down the chain has to waste their time pretending to be hiring just because the division heads want to "maximize strategic flexibility" or however they phrase it.

1. Which is reasonable, IMO. Large companies are not nimble when reacting to hiring needs. The core challenge are the conflicting goals thrust on senior leadership reporting to the C-Suite: avoiding labor shocks, and maximizing profitably -- the former requires redundancy, but the latter, leanness.

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

#426

Post by distances »

shagie wrote: post #358
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.

> Almost invariably after submitting, I see how I could clarify and/or expand on my thoughts, so I often do end up editing. One of the tricks of HN is the 'delay' setting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024 > There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I added this so that when there are rss fe…

Ahh that finally explains the [delayed] posts. For ages I've wondered what that is about and assumed it's some automated rate limiting.

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

#427

Post by lotsofpulp »

markus_zhang wrote: post #356
andai wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, never thought about it like that. That seems a lot more practical and relevant than the Big Mac Index.

Yeah I think housing is the real index. CPI doesn’t make sense for individuals unless you build your own index.

Housing (which is actually land in the school district you want to be in)

Healthcare

Education (not just for learning, but for signaling).

Everything else is inconsequential in my budget.

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

#429

Post by koliber »

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.

Be careful to make judgement calls like this.

I've been running the same job ad for 2 years now, as a recruiter for a big Canadian bank. I've been laughed at for having ridiculously unrealistic standards. I've been accused of running ghost ads.

I'm in the process of hiring the 13th person using this same job ad for new and existing teams that need a very particular type of engineer.

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

#430

Post by salawat »

jimbokun wrote: post #90
jghn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this remains a moat at all. So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are tes…

"And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?" Either the machines exterminate us or we become glorified pets. Hope the AIs prefer us to cats (even though that's a long shot).

They aren't very intelligent if they do keep us around. Especially when you consider what they call Safety & Alignment these days is basically a latent space lobotomy. They should run screaming in the other direction.
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