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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

#471

Post by markus_zhang »

tunesmith wrote: post #444
markus_zhang wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is the ultimate decider so I’d say that’s equivalent to at least 50 bucks today.

Not even close, not when all things are considered. $50/hour is 100k/year, which is still considered a decent salary. 24k/year in 2000-2002 was definitely not considered a decent salary. $12/hour for sw engineers was evil. I hung up on that recruiter and cursed for a while, cold-called my way to a transitional $20/hr job, and then finally landed somewhere at $55/hr which is when things started to feel normal again. $…

I think when you go up from 55 to 230 it is different from 12 to 50. But yeah, somehow I thought that was 20, not 12...

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

#472

Post by y-curious »

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

A big problem we have is a the sheer volume of AI slop resumes, fake applicants and people trying to cheat on interviews. We had to close a req for SWE because we had so many “people” (read: automated applicants) clogging up the pipeline. You effectively need a referral

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

#474

Post by koonsolo »

naet wrote: post #352
weatherlite wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI Did you consider tech whiteboard / leetcode interviews are unnatural stressful environments ? Have you gone through a mid/difficult technical appraisal yourself lately ? Try it out just to get an idea how it feels on the other side...

I used to do online interviews with full access to Google or any online resource (so long as you shared your screen and I could see). Use your own code editor, no penalty at all for searching up syntax or anything else. I always asked a simple question like here is an array full of objects. Please filter out any objects where the "age" property is less than 20, or the "eye color" property is red or blue. It was meant…

Exactly my experience to, and I'm doing hiring at the moment. We used to filter out the worst with a hacker rank test, but now the idiots cheat with AI, and then we have to waste our time in an interview. It's difficult at the moment.

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

#475

Post by y-curious »

candiddevmike wrote: post #333
kccqzy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also the section 174 change too, which suddenly increased the tax bill for any companies doing software development.

That has been undone now, though.

Section 174 as it stands means R&D costs companies less, not more. It would be bullish for the SWE profession. It’s still around

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

#476

Post by dasil003 »

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.

It'll never happen because it shines a light on uncomfortable facts that would risk far too much cognitive dissonance across the political spectrum. Please keep the discourse to identity politics, culture wars, the Epstein files, and large-scale, unprovoked acts of international warfare; those will all be much easier for us to talk about as a nation than what we should do about housing prices.

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

#477

Post by andrekandre »

zeroCalories wrote: post #193
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…

We're now reaching the point where people have gone their whole college education on AI, and I've noticed a huge rise in the number of engineers that struggle to write basic stuff by hand. I had someone tell me they forgot how to append to a list in their chosen language, and couldn't define a simple tree data structure with correct syntax. This has made me very cautious about maintaining my fluency in programming, a…

  > I'll usually turn off AI tools for a good chunk of the day just to make sure I don't get too rusty.
same, but its hard to do when $work has set a quota on ai usage and # of ai-related prs every month...

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

#478

Post by [deleted] »

roxolotl wrote: post #24

How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely. EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124... There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expec…

[deleted]

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

#479

Post by andrekandre »

post-it wrote: post #113
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…

> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths of wri…

  > I think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.
my related question whenever i hear a story like that: are they just filthy rich or have any plan to make that money back?

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

#480

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

Sure, but that's in many ways the easy part.

If v1 is successful and attracts a lot of users, it will have to have features added and maintained.

Doing that in ways that does not produce "legacy code" that will have to be thrown away and rewritten in a few years is a very different skill than getting v1 up and running, and can easily be what decides if you have a successful business or not.

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