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IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

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Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#451

Post by vinniepukh »

achates wrote: post #237
selfmodruntime wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How people still believe that importing masses of immigrants from poorer nations who are used to a fraction of the standard of living and will be contempt with much less money has no effect on employment / wages is beyond me.

We even have an example of what a train wreck it is in Canada, with stagnant productivity, a housing bubble and overcrowded public services. But we're determined to make the exact same mistakes.

this is really annoying to read.

go open the careers page for most mid-tier tech co’s (Coinbase, Rippling, Affirm) and count the number of SWE jobs in India/Latam/Eastern Europe vs the U.S.

Say you get your wish of no immigration. How are you going to force these companies to not hire abroad instead?

At least if the worker who competes with you is in the U.S., they have the same cost structure as you and won’t undercut you as much or at all on wage.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#452

Post by hasty_pudding »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #157
lgleason wrote: post #113

Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.

How people still believe that importing masses of immigrants from poorer nations who are used to a fraction of the standard of living and will be contempt with much less money has no effect on employment / wages is beyond me.

They do it for VOTES in the short term, not realizing or not caring in the long term it's actually destabilizing the country.

and it's not one party or another either. it's both parties.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#453

Post by 7speter »

wyclif wrote: post #377
freddie_mercury wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a pretty forseeable event after US based developers repeatedly told their bosses that development could be done just as productively remotely.

just as productively remotely ...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.

>Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.

Management does.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#454

Post by hasty_pudding »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #417

How much of this do you think involves senior programmers using LLM and AI-generated code to do a lot of the grunt work, thereby not needing to either employ, outsource or train? I am amazed how much more productive I have become with the leading LLMs, especially with specialized full-stack tasks that I do not do every day. Many things that I regularly outsourced once a year I now just get an LLM to assist. Could it…

Just a random estimation but I'd say LLMs make me at least 5x more productive.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#455

Post by moandcompany »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #406
sosodev wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that make sense? Canadians are cheaper to hire than Americans but not by that much, right?

In the Google pay scale, not a huge difference really. At least for engineering. Or at least some years ago when there was an internal spreadsheet circulating. Big part of compensation is in RSUs, in USD. Now... cost of living in Toronto is as high as the Bay Area. I wonder if the above commenter meant Waterloo (hour from Toronto), because that is where the bulk of the SWE staff is.

Quite a few of the Google Cloud sales/consulting/TAM roles are based out of Google's the New York Office(s).

Using L3-L5 SWEs as a reference point, the typical difference between Toronto (Canada) and New York (US) for the same level and role was around 30%+ less if a person was based out of the Canada office.

There are/were a non-trivial number of Canadian Googlers that made New York their official office but were unofficially trying to live/work out of Toronto to take advantage of the compensation difference as well as trying to dodge the difference in income tax rates.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#456

Post by pjmlp »

agar wrote: post #432
unixfg wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net

I admit to being guilty of the "YT?" or "Hi" type messages, but it's for a reason: the person may be presenting to a client and shared their screen instead of their window. I've been on too many Zooms where the presenter's Slack pops up saying, "John, we have a call with about at 3:00. Can you join?" Multiple times, this information was probably sensitive. I'd rather avoid that by waiting until I get a response.

While you have a point, the golden rule is to shut down everything related to email and IM during meetings.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#457

Post by pjmlp »

nostrademons wrote: post #240
deadghost wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs. An example to illustrate what I was worki…

My company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code. It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.

In Germany, and Portugal (where I went through similar system), you still need to finish high school, and there is a programming related curriculum anyway.

The part-time work is like doing the labs part.

Also at the end of it, you can still go to the university if feeling like it. I did so.

Going through technical school was a secure way to have a job, in case the university exams weren't good enough for the engineering degree, which by the way is mostly state sponsored on this side of the Atlantic.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#458

Post by hasty_pudding »

ctvo wrote: post #190
lhnz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is very unfair. In the few months that I was looking, I put in more than 300 hours of study. It wasn't superficial and I didn't attempt to memorize anything — I wanted to understand fundamental techniques, and put a considerable amount of effort in to doing this, treating it as if it were my job. Nobody owes me anything but that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've…

> I put in more than 300 hours of study. It wasn't superficial and I didn't attempt to memorize anything — I wanted to understand fundamental techniques, and put a considerable amount of effort in to doing this, treating it as if it were my job. If you landed a job, do you think this new ability to implement a CS 101 data structure would let you keep it? Help in your performance in a measurable way? This is what I me…

Are you seriously saying practicing data structures and algorithms to improve your skills is 'superficial'?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#459

Post by ehnto »

photonbeam wrote: post #405
ehnto wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have genuinely never seen an in-house training program in the software industry. Maybe some bullshit industry certs that amount to a single exam. But nothing like an apprenticeship style program where over a year you are taught and mentored. Even university doesn't teach you how to work in the industry. It's a very DIY career, we should probably change that.

Training in CS is giving some new-grad a job, instead of not. Plenty of companies hire senior-only.

I agree we should be doing at least that. But we could do better too. Apprenticeships are a much better transfer of practical knowledge than university, and has been a concept in use for centuries.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#460

Post by dangus »

lgleason wrote: post #113

Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.

Immigration in the US boosts birth rates to an essentially ideal level. Without immigration we would be dealing with significant population bust issues.

https://theconversation.com/the-dip-in-the-us-birthrate-isnt...

It’s also my understanding that the people asking for more lenient immigration policies are essentially asking for more humane treatment of migrants (refrain from breaking up families, for example) and more effective processing, not typically advocating for an open border or an increase in overall immigration.

Remember that the meaning of “sanctuary city” is the refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement agencies like ICE that have a documented history of abusive practices. “Sanctuary city” was never intended to be an open invitation for immigration. Instead it’s intended to encourage the immigrants who are already here to do beneficial things like report crimes and enroll kids in school rather than existing off the books in an underground seedy under the table situation.

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