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IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

wsj.com

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Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#521

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

wizerdrobe wrote: post #506
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Nope, because productivity is output divided by hours worked, so working longer can decrease productivity.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#522

Post by kredd »

ehnto wrote: post #374
kredd wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatively young industry, the population pyramid of workers would have more people at the bottom. So gaining only 700 jobs isn’t that fun. That being said, I feel bad for newgrads, since it feels like nobody wants to train them anymore. Any job posting I’ve seen is mostly 2-3 year minimum experience at a professional level.

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.

Think of internship programs, streamlined hiring of new grads and etc. My previous companies had both, now I don’t see that on their website. Obviously not a real statistic, but a bit disheartening.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#523

Post by kredd »

grogenaut wrote: post #324
kredd wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatively young industry, the population pyramid of workers would have more people at the bottom. So gaining only 700 jobs isn’t that fun. That being said, I feel bad for newgrads, since it feels like nobody wants to train them anymore. Any job posting I’ve seen is mostly 2-3 year minimum experience at a professional level.

No one wanted to hire new grads when I first started working in 2000... Except startups. And it was very slim pickings until you had 3 years under your belt. This isn't a new phenomenon.

Well, that would mean we’re just rolling back to 2000s era? I did finish a pretty decent university to be fair, but had options right after grad even in mid-sized companies. So did my peers.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#525

Post by delphico »

wizerdrobe wrote: post #503
osigurdson wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Point taken, but there are no black and white options as you'd have seen. I have worked with folks from East European Geo's who are very good and you will find that everywhere.

The volumes (fresh and junior hiring) in India are staggering numbers

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#526

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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 also am getting multiple reports of fake job ads posted to show health in the market but internally those jobs are understood to never be filled.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#527

Post by BadCookie »

hackerbrother wrote: post #358

I may be dumb but is the second derivative of a job sector declining that disastrous? Is that not just normal ebb and flow? Also I think the HN title is wrong; IT employment's yearly growth increase by just 700 jobs/year in 2023.

No, the article says that total IT employment increased by 700 jobs last year. The first derivative declined but was still positive (barely), so the second derivative was negative.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#528

Post by grogenaut »

wyclif wrote: post #463
grogenaut wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not to nit pick but there are still many accepted forms of discrimination after ageism. My sample set is definitely biased. I see plenty of very conservative (doesn't want to learn, will only work in one technology) junior engineers, folks who are going to stall out. For senior folks I don't see many. This could be because older folks have jobs or are self filtering to the tech they like or maybe their resumes don't…

Thanks, this is a really valuable answer and makes sense to me. The only follow-up I would have would be if that dev with 10-20 years of experience applying for SDE2 did tell you in an interview that they didn't want to move "up or out" and their goal was to be a productive dev for as long as possible instead of applying internally for management roles, would you accept that answer?

So lead (3) isn't manager...

I'm in one of those systems where after lead you have staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier. You never have to be a manager in those. In that style system you can stop at lead (L1/L2/L3 lead/PE/sr PE/de). At those you can stop at L3. It would be very hard to explicitly stop at L2 there. You would have to opt out of hiring, peer reviews, and doing architecture and just do assigned tasks on jira.

We had one engineer who wanted this, they had a ton of stock and we're kinda set, had been there forever. Their super power was ops. You just let em go at a system and it just becomes more and more stable and better documented quietly over time. They had a manager explicitly protecting them that they didn't really grok was happening. They actually left after moving to a new product team and the new manager kept trying to uplevel them. But again they basically just retired at that point.

For me I always worry about people who just do what others tell them. I need feedback and have had projects go sideways when I didn't get it. "Wait you realized 3 months ago this wasn't going to work and you didn't mention it?" "Your the boss/lead I do what you say".

Another way to say it is I think small team lead is the minimum viable dev in places I've worked. That doesn't mean you cant step into a support role and rotate who's lead or work as a team but you need to be capable of doing it.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#529

Post by justinzollars »

notherhacker wrote: post #514
justinzollars wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.

This was a good position to get me through the tech recession. I was able to continue working on Go, and the system was interesting. But it wasn't an easy job by any means. I ended up going back to startups where I have more ownership.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#530

Post by sanp »

linuxftw wrote: post #413
pleasantpeasant wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there would be too many programmers who would be proud to take the jobs of other programmers trying to unionize. There are a lot of anti-unionists and Libertarian minded programmers in the US.

Libertarians aren't anti-union, they're anti-government enforced unions.

Unions are meaningless with collective bargaining enforced by the government.
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