521–530 of 1001 posts
edit: I've read wayyy more, still nowhere near done. This is like an SRE/Syseng/Platform manifesto. I relate to it all.
the only think drawing this lines show is correlation, by the power of the lines _no correlation can be proven at all_
and while there surely is some (high) causation it's also more complicated, e.g. the cause of why governments which close to zero interest rates and why they moved away from it have further effect onto the job marked beyond "no longer zero interest"
I'm hiring two senior SWE roles right now, after many many months alternatively cajoling and threatening various VPs in my org. They kinda admitted at the start of the year we were due some headcount after some other engineers left last year... But I digress. Today alone I spent three hours going through resumes generated mostly by ChatGPT to find anyone with even sufficient experience to make it to interview. I spen…
I've been wondering how I could go about making my resume not look 'ai generated', but I'm not sure how someone would go about approaching such a problem. Best I could come up with was keeping it down to one page, and only fitting in relevant skills, keeping it 'humble' in comparison to pages among pages that something like chatGPT might generate. Unfortunately it does not seem like such a strategy works when it comes to standing out from the piles of applications using AI, a good amount of which I assume don't even have the skills listed.
It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do…
I've worked with great engineers in Latin American and Eastern Europe, and these days the experience is almost exactly like working with a US-based engineer: they have great English skills, there is plenty of time overlap (especially for LatAm, and in direct contrast to the nightmare that was India offshoring in the mid 00s), and given I pretty much interact with everyone 99% of the time on Zoom/Meet anyway, it doesn't really make a difference to me where the person is.
So it becomes hard to pay a junior dev a US salary when you can get a great senior dev for that amount or less in LatAm or Eastern Europe.
I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…
> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…
No assessment should be over 1 hour and 3-4 hours of interviews for most jobs is excessive. I’ve trudged through long assessments. I can’t think of a single one where a better thought out 30 minute one wouldn’t better.
No.
I’ll tell you EXACTLY what is going on. The long interview and assessments are because jobs don’t train anymore and these unpaid or underpaid hours are the initial training. 3 hours of assessment means 3 hours getting used to their systems and workflows. You’re just reinforcing wage theft and gaslighting, that’s all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of his analysis about financial markets, can apply to all jobs, all hiring. Don't think he explicitly states that, but all hiring is down. Or at least all entry positions it seems like. From a SWE perspective. Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart? You can only cut back programmer/tech jobs for so long, someone has to know how it all works. This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how t…
> Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart? They always were. > This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how things work, are literally walking a knifes edge toward collapse, systems are failing all over, and yet companies wont staff up on tech people. You'd think that you would take digitalisation seriously in a company where 100% of your employees spend 100% of their working hours on a compu…
And I man it makes sense, the technology is constantly getting more complex and at the same time you increasingly don't have to know how it works to use it effectively/professionally. At the same time knowing how it works doesn't mean you can use it effectively, e.g. knowing how to program a Windows GUI app doesn't mean you know the keyboard shortcuts of any specific GUI app or where in the settings you find some important option etc.
To add on top of that there is a lot of artificial nonsense obfuscating proper technical understanding.
Just like "if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid", if you were smart enough to see all the problems in all your past jobs but those companies still went bankrupt, maybe you weren't actually the ideal employee you think you are. And if programming interviews are beneath you and only passed by your inferiors but you can't pay rent, maybe they're not actually so far beneath you. Using your l33t knowledge of AWS t…
If the marketing team does a shit job, maybe I can tell the marketing is shit, but I can't do more than trying to make people aware of it. Even with the best diplomacy skills you often can't fix that from the engineering side unless you are high enough on the totem pole. I've once expressed polite concerns about a marketing decision to the CEO whose good friend was newly appointed head of marketing, got told off by the CEO and the marketing lady proceeded to wreck our branding and confuse our customers.
The only thing this data shows is that the job market was briefly a bubble in early-mid 2022 and that bubble has now popped. To judge how bad things actually are, why cut the chart off at an arbitrary point (mid-2020) and not go back, say, 10 years? Are their more SDE openings today than 2012/2015/2018? I'm pretty confident that the answer is yes.
It would definitely be nice to have data going further back. I'm not aware of anything available with this kind of resolution though.