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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#441

Post by infecto »

lovich wrote: post #25

I generally like the article but the author seems to have a really inflated view of what jobs are paying. At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k. Even assuming that’s including taxes so divide by two, and constraining to just software employees for that claim. There is no way the average pay is nearly a million a year. The average software engineer in th…

The whole post is hyperbole with not much to add beyond interest rates go up and VC money goes down. Even including benefits, those numbers are wildly overinflated, certainly there are some individuals that make that number but I was always told that it was the unicorn OG engineers at google that were making $1mm+ total annual comp.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#442

Post by darth_avocado »

Aurornis wrote: post #294
evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

> I think the expectations for interviews became really distorted during the period a few years ago when some companies were hiring anyone willing to do a short interview.

I find this whole thread really enlightening. As someone who has been trying to move around in tech in the Bay Area, outside of Amazon who hired en masse, most companies have had 6-8 interviews as a standard hiring process for almost the last entire decade. What's really happening is that most of the people who were on the other side, being very selective in who they hire, are now really coming to terms with how bad the process is because they are the ones now trying to find jobs.

The problem always existed for someone else, now it exists for you.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#443

Post by levlaz »

silenced_trope wrote: post #183
levlaz wrote: post #68

> manage yourself and manage your peers, but you also have an engineering manager and a project manager and the CEO is your skip-level manager and the CEO’s brother is also your skip-level manager too This is hilarious and I’m sad I’ve seen versions of this more than once. Overall I enjoyed most of this article but disagree about the objection to behavioral interviews. I think they’re an important part of the modern…

Behavioral interviews seem like the new way to reject candidates based on "culture" without saying that though, because saying a candidate was rejected due to "culture incompatibility" can be taken as a bias or discrimination. I interviewed at Netflix. The market is tough right now and they pay really well. I really wanted to pass. I did great on their tech rounds. Their "culture round" is notoriously hard, people th…

Apologies if I am misreading you, but the fact that you keep putting culture and EQ into quotes signals to me that you think these are not important things. If that is the case, then yes, your EQ is bad.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#444

Post by abvdasker »

fallinditch wrote: post #279

The current state of the tech job market, as discussed here, highlights a significant opportunity for grassroots innovation. While we're focusing on the challenges, we might be overlooking the potential for creating new, more resilient models of work and business. Consider the rise of digital cooperatives or platform co-ops. These could provide an alternative to the traditional tech company structure, offering worker…

I've thought about this a bit and have decided the main barrier to realizing a software development worker co-op is getting together the sufficient startup capital. A handful of regular tech workers probably lack the liquid capital to self-fund a company. And good luck convincing a VC to invest in a worker coop. The easiest business to build like this would be a software consultancy since it doesn't actually require a product (you could structure it almost like a law firm).

I agree unionization is a very good idea for software engineers and the industry should have tried to do it decades ago. I think it hasn't happened because of the overall weakness of US organized labor and prevailing ideological biases among software engineers which go against our own interests. If unions work well for other highly compensated professionals like athletes there's no reason they can't work for us.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#446

Post by devwastaken »

kredd wrote: post #221
devwastaken wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago I was talking about exactly this issue and how the U.S. is producing far too many degrees than the market can receive. As usual the truth is ignored in favor of a comfortable lie, at the cost of others lives. Don't go to university. Their value is no longer what it used to be, and they have figured out how to suppress students under a thousand pounds of administrative grift. We need to strip all public fund…

As much bad rep as schools get nowadays, if you get into a good university (think of top 50 in the world), it will open up a lot of doors for you. Very anecdotal, but I have open offers from people whom I know from uni years. Connections matter, especially in bad market days. Everything else (bootcamps, diploma mills and etc.) are just noise though, I would say it’s not worth the money. It’s also easy for me to say,…

People don't realize that in just the last 5 years admins have seized control of uni's, doubling costs across the board and have put it all onto the students.

It is no longer possible to get a degree without parents paying for it while you're paying on private loans while being rejected for few scholarships while being rejected from training and working in your field of study.

Student drug abuse and suicide rates are skyrocketing while opportunities to apply their study are gone.

It's time to remove these systems, they are predatory and don't work any more.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#447

Post by Peroni »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #299
Peroni wrote: post #86

Hiring people (mostly engineers) has been my full-time job now for about 15 years and I found myself emphatically agreeing with a lot of Matt's criticisms of modern hiring. Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration. Matt's…

> I do need at least one baker capable of drawing a valid orbital configuration. this way of thinking that contributes to such a toxic job market. there's too many people applying for too few jobs. that's it. this bullcrap about inflation, baking bread, interest rates, team building are all symptoms of entitlement. if you only had 2 applicants you wouldn't be thinking that way.

if you only had 2 applicants you wouldn't be thinking that way.

Well, yes of course. As you said yourself, there's an abundance of people applying for jobs. When you have two bakers apply for your job, you'll keep things simple and hire one. When you have two hundred bakers apply for your job, you can introduce levels of complexity in the hope it will help you identify the best bakers of the 200.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#448

Post by theredsix »

The author's tone is condescending, angry and entitled. If everyday interactions with him followed the same tone, I would argue that he is the exact type of person behavioral interviews are meant to screen out (technically competent but a nightmare to work with).

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#449

Post by Matticus_Rex »

rsynnott wrote: post #196
aantix wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will Trump reverse these changes? Will he lower interest rates?

I mean, given that he _caused_ these changes (they're a consequence of the 2017 Trump tax 'cuts'), probably not, though then again he's not noted for his consistency.

Both the Republicans and Democrats do intend to fix this (and the rumor is that they intend the fix to be retroactive to 2021). It's generally considered to have been unintentional on Congress's part. However the fix has been held up in the Senate by the Republicans (esp. Sen Crapo), because it's part of a larger tax bill, and the Republicans think they'll be able to get a better bill overall in the next term. Meanwhile startups affected by it are left to swing in the wind.
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