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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

#461

Post by crystal_revenge »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #437
crystal_revenge wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That's what I've come to realize. For most of the commentators here "greenfield" means typing in 'npm init', for me it usually means doing three different roles in order to iterate as fast as possible on the product to find your market, then figuring out how to scale it to the new users you've started acquiring.

The idea that this is means "you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons" is completely baffling to me.

Most people I've know with founding engineer experience or similar leave not because it's not challenging, but because it's exhausting.

Increasingly I've realized that the HN community and I are not even speaking the same language.

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

#462

Post by hn_acc1 »

boomskats wrote: post #230
sam0x17 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how…

What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice but learn how things actually work while having a safe space to fail during a period in your career when productivity expectations of you were minimal to none. That time when you got to internalise through first hand experience what good & bad…

Agreed. I remember (a long time ago) being on an internship (workterm) and after doing some amount of work for the day, I spent some time playing around with C pointers, seeing what failed, what didn't, what the compiler complained about, etc.

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

#463

Post by crystal_revenge »

csallen wrote: post #459
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…

> Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. You learn a ton of valuable lessons going from 0 to v1. And a ton of value is created. I guess I'm unclear how you're defining "actually valuable" here.

I suspect the issue is the parent has never worked in an early stage role at a growing startup still iterating on finding product-market-fit. If they had they would realize you learn a lot about "maintaining and expanding", especially when your prototype now has a bunch of users.

This is evident in my personal experience by the fact that I am often the one that sees scaling and maintenance issues long before they happen. But of course parent would claim this is impossible.

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

#464

Post by Karrot_Kream »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #461
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's what I've come to realize. For most of the commentators here "greenfield" means typing in 'npm init', for me it usually means doing three different roles in order to iterate as fast as possible on the product to find your market, then figuring out how to scale it to the new users you've started acquiring. The idea that this is means "you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons" is completely baffling to me.…

Some of the sharpest engineers I knew built tools and business processes at startups and watched them fail as they scale. I ran an internal presentation for years at a Unicorn where I was an early employee called "Failure at Scale" where I tried to capture lessons of huge incidents we had that were caused by us crossing scaling thresholds. Eventually the presentations stopped being meaningful because the company became too big and too removed from its origins.

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

#465

Post by Vibeguy900 »

detourdog wrote: post #331
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.

I was just thinking yesterday that knowing all the ways something breaks and behaves is the key to understanding systems.

and people that understand data it critical with storage supply getting tighter

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

#466

Post by jasonfarnon »

jjmarr wrote: post #188
sam0x17 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we figure out how…

> If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow and grow In my experience, target schools are the only universities now that can make their assignments too hard for AI. When my university tried that, the assignments were too hard for students. So they gave up.

What university is assigning undergrads assignments too hard for AI?

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

#467

Post by koonsolo »

dakiol wrote: post #70
lowkey_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engin…

> While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always. But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key question is whether the same person has the ski…

I don't see the value of a junior instructing an AI, because I as a senior can also instruct an AI.

I perceive the AI itself as a very fast junior that I pair program with. So you basically need the seniority to be able to work with a "junior ai".

The bar for human juniors is now way higher than it used to be.

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

#468

Post by tootie »

teagee wrote: 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

The post-COVID spike was also absolutely insane and much bigger than dotcom boom.

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

#469

Post by leptons »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #307
ptrrrrrrppr wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it looks like the longer you're looking for a job, the harder it gets for some reason. That's unintuitive for me, as you should be getting more confident in interviews etc

Companies take your unemployment length as a negative signal "He's been unemployed for 13 months? Why doesn't anyone want to hire him? Must be something wrong with him"

It's typically easiest to find a job when you have a job.

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

#470

Post by shagie »

ua709 wrote: post #431
nabbed wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

BLS had some classification changes over the years. I think it's interesting in the "this is how people thought about the role over the decades."

Today there are computer programmers (15-1251), and software developers (15-1252), and web developers (15-1254).

In 2018, there was a reclassification - https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/Presentation... where 15-1132, Software Developers, Applications and 15-1133, Software Developers, Systems Software where reclassified into the software developers (15-1252) group.

The other thing that confuses this is that a lot of positions were classified as Computer systems analysts because that's a position that a TN visa can be hired for (there is no software engineer in there... and it wasn't until relatively recently that one could be a "software engineer" in Canada without being an Engineer.

Back in 2010 ... https://www.bls.gov/cps/cenocc2010.htm

    Computer programmers    1010 15-1131
    Software developers, applications and systems software    1020 15-1132, 15-1133
Where the "Computer programmer" was the more junior classification and Software developers working on a word processor were classified differently than a software developer working on the operating system... and they were the more senior positions.

This division still shows up in the definitions.

https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1252.00

    Software Developers
    Research, design, and develop computer and network software or specialized utility programs. Analyze user needs and develop software solutions, applying principles and techniques of computer science, engineering, and mathematical analysis. Update software or enhance existing software capabilities. May work with computer hardware engineers to integrate hardware and software systems, and develop specifications and performance requirements. May maintain databases within an application area, working individually or coordinating database development as part of a team.
https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1251.00

    Computer Programmer
    Create, modify, and test the code and scripts that allow computer applications to run. Work from specifications drawn up by software and web developers or other individuals. May develop and write computer programs to store, locate, and retrieve specific documents, data, and information.
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