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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

#431

Post by ua709 »

nabbed wrote: post #360
oblio wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers (US). Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9. Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m. Different ball game.

>Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m. I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000. Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to a larger group.

I'm not sure the nation wide raw statistics are that reliable in the field of software engineering without interpretation.

In the 90s tons of people who were de facto software engineers were listed as "Information Technology Workers". I suspect a lot of that still hasn't been shaken out of the system.

According to the BLS in the year 2000 there were 3.4 million information technology workers.

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

#432

Post by uncivilized »

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.

Senior level is doing the heavy lifting here.

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

#433

Post by dlivingston »

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…

Greater Boston area here. I've worked in C++ roles at two companies over the past three years and both times we were desperate for competent C++ developers. Similar trends for both companies: we had positions open for ~six months, interviewing many candidates, and being disappointed at their quality. We eventually filled the positions (about a half-dozen in total) but it was not easy. My current company, but different team, still has a quite a few recs out for C++ devs.

TL;DR - at least in my little bubble, the C++ systems engineer market has been consistently hiring people, though good engineers are hard to find.

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

#435

Post by koliber »

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…

It sucks from both sides.

I am on the interviewing and screening side and understand what you're saying. I also empathize with the people I routinely reject who don't understand why they were rejected. It's hard to see why you might not be a right fit for a role.

> it seems really unlikely to me anyone would want to do interviews without seriously intending to hire someone.

I keep seeing this accusation thrown around and like you, I have a hard time seeing this. On the flip side, looking at it from the eyes of many disenchanted candidates, I can see how a theory like this is appealing and self-reinforcing.

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

#436

Post by butterisgood »

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…

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.

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

#437

Post by Karrot_Kream »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #355
gtowey wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation -- a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.

> You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup. Many of these comments make me wonder how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role. You learn a lot about what's maintainable and scalable, what breaks and what doesn't, in the process rapidly iterating…

I don't think HN has been frequented by startup engineers with leadership responsibilities in any density in a long time. It's very obvious to me reading a lot of the comments here that most folks are ICs somewhere in a large, bureaucratic software organization. That's why there's so much BOFH style commentary here these days.

(For readers, I don't think there's anything wrong with that but it just means that certain perspectives are overrepresented here that may not be more reflective of the broader industry.)

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

#438

Post by dlivingston »

cyberpunk wrote: post #232
stackedinserter wrote: post #64

Are there real positions these days? I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward". At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their…

It’s bananas how many utterly crap candidates we get at the moment too. One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with his current work laptop and couldn’t find the $ key on it for a basic scripting question. I can’t make it make sense either.

We had a guy interview for a senior C++ position that hadn't used Git before and had no idea what a "merge" was.

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

#439

Post by Sharlin »

dainiusse wrote: post #335
layer8 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory…

Everyone can do 0 to 1. Because delivery drives dopamine. The it is the boring thing, but there comes experience to find interest in that part

Oh boy you're wrong. Many people (including myself) are experts at doing 0 to 0.8. The rest is much more difficult.

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

#440

Post by overgard »

stego-tech wrote: post #75

It's bad, yeah, especially for folks on the job market (it me). Some statistics first, from my own job search logs: * Since I hit the pavement in late January, I've tracked 100 job applications * Of those 100, only 7 have turned into interviews * Of those seven interviews, 3 turned into second-round * ~50% of all applications never receive a response * ~20% of rejections for any reason have the role re-posted within…

I'm early in my search, but compensation seems all over the place. From the recruiters I've talked to they've been pretty baffled too about compensation given the market. I know one place a recruiter called me about was looking for absolute unicorn talent (like 15 years of experience in multiple very different domains), but their salary was like 70k less than I made at my previous job and when I asked about titles they said it was "flat" and everyone was just a "software dev".

I don't want to sound like it's all a horror show though, I've had some interviews that have gone well with companies being sensible, so I think there's good stuff out there. But it's overall a rough market.

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