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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

#501

Post by pclowes »

I don't recall any recession with respect to tech in 2020. It was a hiring frenzy.

Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest.

Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse.

Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)

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

#502

Post by Lammy »

BoorishBears wrote: post #418
Lammy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're 100% correct, though.

They're incorrect, and my reply to a sibling covers why in detail. But to reword it: if you think the reason 0 to 1 work is typically a duct-taped mess is because of a lack of experience or understanding from greenfield devs, you'll probably fail at 0 to 1 work yourself. Not that a noob developer great at selling has never landed 0 to 1 work, crapped out a half working mess and left with a newly padded resume... but…

You must be “that person” who joins a team, creates IMPACT!!!, reaps the review-time award, and fucks off to some other new team to do it all again before any of the difficult maintenance issues arise. I've spent far too much time cleaning up after people like that to ever tolerate it again.

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

#503

Post by rudnevr »

layer8 wrote: post #214
crystal_revenge wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…

> 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…

Taking this to the extreme, I think most lessons represent sunset or dead projects. There's no sweet illusions anymore. No assumptions. No ego. No account for infinite flexibility. No shine. No excitement of a new thing. No holy wars. No astronaut architects. Only you, the ruins and the truth.

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

#505

Post by stock_toaster »

t-writescode wrote: post #455
candiddevmike wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been undone now, though.

Has it? I haven’t seen anything about that.

I thought it was mostly rolled back for domestic R&D as part of the terribly named OBBBA.

[1]: found a ref https://www.bnncpa.com/resources/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-...

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

#506

Post by Waterluvian »

leptons wrote: post #469
bluefirebrand wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. Probably? But I also sense a fallacy here. I could get a new job tomorrow. Maybe it took me 8 years to find that job and I didn’t realize that because I was employed the whole time.

Does that make sense?

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

#507

Post by usrusr »

gtowey wrote: post #235
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…

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.

Valuable in what metric? I'm very much in the brownfield-has-the-lessons camp, but one of the lessons is that this experience has a very low market value. In fact it's so impossible to downgrade from "senior in $outdated" to "junior in $whateverisconsideredhotrightnow" that any brownfield experience could easily be considered to have negative market value.

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

#508

Post by crystal_revenge »

BoorishBears wrote: post #409
shimman wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's correct tho. If your entire career is nothing but greenfield development, you'll never know the result of your decisions or the impact of tech chosen. Staff or principals that have a tenure of majority greenfield development are extremely dangerous to companies IMO. Especially if they get hired in a nontraditional tech company, like utilities, banking, or insurance.

Your list is places that treat development as a cost center, but greenfield-only devs don't want to touch that work with a 10-foot pole. And if your entire career is nothing maintenance and sustaining projects, you'll never know what decisions it takes to build a greenfield application that lives long enough to become a graybeard. You'll think you do because you see all the mistakes they made, but you'll only have cy…

This is an excellent point.

When working at larger orgs on legacy projects (which I have also done) you think "what sort of idiot did this?"

Then when you're the one tasked with getting a project shipped in two weeks that most reasonable engineers would argue needs two months, you start have to make strategic decisions at 2am about what maintainability issues will block the growth of the product on the way to funding and what ones can be fixed before 5pm by someone that will think you're an idiot in 3 years.

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

#509

Post by MattGrommes »

mjr00 wrote: post #15

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…

I'm also seeing companies looking at only hiring juniors from overseas because they're using the same generative tools as US-based juniors but cost even less.

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

#510

Post by jesse__ »

coliveira wrote: post #142
Aurornis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've interviewed for that's still open after 10 months When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title. It made a couple people furious because they assumed we were going to take the job posting down when we hired someone and then re-pos…

> some specific job listings we had open for years If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.

> If you need to wait YEARS ...

Imagine working on voyager II .. or some old-ass banking software that still runs RPG (look it up, I'll wait), or trying to hire someone to do numerical analysis for the genesis of a format that supercedes IEEE float .. or .. whatever.

There are many applications for extremely specific skillsets out there. Suggesting otherwise is, in my opinion, clearly unwise

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