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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

#501

Post by wizerdrobe »

justinzollars wrote: post #269
deathpanels wrote: post #25

Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditi…

I was on a 24 hour on call for months, a two man team, managing Chick-fil-A's Doordash, UberEats and GH Go integrations for thousands of stores. It was literally insane. I survived this recession - but I was way way way overworked. The balance has definitely tipped towards the employer.

Sorry to hear that!

I had some clowns reach out to me for the same job it sounds like, promising that I could absolutely move up to employment with Chic-fil-a after my contract was up…

As if I haven’t heard that story before.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#502

Post by hotpotamus »

nemo44x wrote: post #360
hotpotamus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience as an American working with people in the EU (particularly the UK/Western Europe), the developers there are every bit as capable as Americans and get paid less than half of what an American would - seems like quite a deal to me.

You’re not including all the taxes that need to be paid and that employment bonds are far more difficult to break. But yeah, EU engineers are very good in my experience.

In the US there are also taxes and a huge expense in the form of private health insurance - my employer says costs increased 9% this year. I don’t know that it balances, but there are additional costs to employers in the US as well.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#503

Post by wizerdrobe »

osigurdson wrote: post #403
delphico wrote: post #339

While a vast majority of comments here seem to indicate a lot of jobs being moved offshore, there are massive layoffs (even entities shutting shop in India. Github closed its office here, Twitter reduced its presence dramatically etc. Where I work, there are no back-fills for voluntary attrition or restructuring). Layoffs are a taboo of some kind here too, affected are treated as "non-performers" and recruiters will…

I thought offshoring happened 20 years ago. I think today, it is more about aishoring, or the dream that it will be possible to do a lot with very few people.

The trend I’ve seen, and one that actually seems to have decent results, is “near-shoring” to Romania, Ukraine, Brazil or similar.

India has had an “if you’ve got no better options” for most of my career to be honest.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#504

Post by dukeyukey »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #313
giantg2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company is actually doing mostly Europe and ex-US North America

At my company many of the new hires are within Canada. You get similar talent, similar culture, native English, and same time zones for about 2/3 the cost of a USA dev. You also don’t have to pay for healthcare of your Canadian employees since they pay for it on their income taxes.

Being in the UK I see a lot of that too - we're cheaper than Americans, speak the same language, are pretty close culturally, and while we're a few timezones off, we're far enough east to overlap with both the West Coast and India.

Plus, London alone has 10 million people, and if you lump in the London commuter belt that adds up to aroun 15 million people, more than all of Ontario! That's a hell of a skilled worker base to work with.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#505

Post by dukeyukey »

wyclif wrote: post #395
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.

There was a tech company in the UK who was doing it (irritatingly, I can't remember their name atm) with Oxford and Cambridge humanities grads. Just googled it and couldn't find it. If anybody remembers what I'm talking about, please reply below because now it's bugging me.

Lots of UK companies do it - google Software Engineer Apprenticeships. Vodafone, BAE, Softwire, BT, Rolls-Royce, the BBC, HMRC, tonnes do.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#506

Post by wizerdrobe »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #470
hattmall wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as a wave. Right now, the EU is getting a slightly smaller version of the hiring peak of 2 years ago in the US. EU wages are considerably less but the quality is nearly the same. Productivity is a bit lower, but the cost is still advantageous. The goal is to find the cream of the crop before the competition, so a ton of hiring, then assessment and in a year or so reducing the workforce and the wave moves…

> but the quality is nearly the same. Productivity is a bit lower Slightly insulting to European developers? Though I suspect a lot of European developers would say the same about their US colleagues…

Don’t Europeans typically work less hours than Americans and do so as a point of pride? I’ve spent over a decade lurking HN, Stack Exchange, later Reddit - and I always seem to see Europeans coming in with the “We work 32 hours at most in my country” or “We have a 35 hour standard here.”

Wouldn’t that necessarily imply a reduction in productivity?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#507

Post by [deleted] »

alasdair_ wrote: post #371
sidlls wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some tech is. Meanwhile large tech companies that are actually innovating (FAANG, near-FAANG, and FAANG-adjacent companies) are not. My comp has never been higher, and we're hiring. In the bay area.

I’m honestly unable to name a single innovation from a FAANG that wasn’t just buying another company or cloning a competitor in the last five years. What has Meta or Google or Microsoft actually innovated on recently?

[deleted]

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#508

Post by paulryanrogers »

unixfg wrote: post #271
pram wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.

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

At one point I installed a filter on my IM client to silently discard trivial messages like "thanks" and "OK". There were already delivery indicators so nothing was lost.

Perhaps a hello filter and "yes?" auto responder could help, at least during business hours. Then send an OOO message if after hours.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#509

Post by marcus0x62 »

unixfg wrote: post #271
pram wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.

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

Bottom Line Up Front - opening your message with the core request or message first - is a related practice from the military that works really well for email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

The way I apply this to emails is to ask myself: if someone only reads the first sentence would they know what I need and if they need to act on it immediately, read it at their leisure, or file it away?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#510

Post by saalweachter »

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.

There may be a middle ground. In this example, you could say, "Are you available to join a call at 3:30?"; that gives a little information about the topic and the time sensitivity, but it may still require a follow-up.
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