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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

#541

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

asdff wrote: post #515
Aurornis wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You probably don't realize that there are several thousands of people without a job who could work for a company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an imaginary worker. I screen hundreds of resumes a week when hiring. I know this very well. Hiring the wrong person can easily be a net negative to the team. Hiring too fast and desperately hiring anyone who applies is doubly bad because it occupies limited h…

Shame how the cost of the long game is paid by the future employee having to be lying in wait, applying to you and 300+ of your colleagues openings, praying for a bite.

The best applicants aren't lying in wait or filing hundreds of applications. They're happy where they're at, ignoring the dozen people a week who reach out trying to recruit them, until eventually they decide it's time for a change. Then they apply or get referrals to the handful of companies they find most interesting, and at least one is going to give them an offer.

So if you don't have a job opening posted on the day they're sending out applications, you may miss your shot to hire them.

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

#542

Post by pfannkuchen »

uncivilized wrote: post #432
windowshopping wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been able to get something like 25 interviews in 2 months despite having long gaps on my resume and nothing especially impressive to my name. So I suspect you might be going about this wrong. I haven't gotten an offer yet, that's another story, but getting the interviews hasn't been hard. Applying in NYC/SF, senior-only.

Senior level is doing the heavy lifting here.

Isn’t the person with 14 years experience at least senior? Or are you saying senior is low level enough to get interviews?

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

#543

Post by rps93 »

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 sold a house after being laid off in mid-January from a government IT contractor where I had worked for eight years. The sale and move took about five weeks.

Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad agency in 2009.

From 2016 to 2022, I worked hard in government projects and enjoyed collaborating with great, close-knit coworkers and receiving consistently positive client feedback. From 2022 to 2026, things changed as the company grew—my role narrowed to UX research and design while newer hires handled UI development. I often felt underutilized and raised it, but management assured me I was doing well. With little direction from my last manager, I focused on staying visible to the client by monitoring user chats, identifying UX issues, and proposing design solutions that the client appreciated and the development team implemented.

Looking at where the tech industry is now—with thousands laid off from government IT and the broader tech sector flooding the job market, creating rising competition, constant pressure to work harder (Elon wants us to work as hard as Chinese workers do) and AI rapidly reshaping creative and development roles—I’m not very interested in that level of stress. I worked hard for many years and enjoyed it, but I value MY LIFE and MY HEALTH more than participating in the current “battle royale” environment in tech.

Overall, now with AI I feel graphic & web design, as well as front design web development is a stupid career! It was a nice run, bought two houses from it, worked remotely, when things were slow worked from wherever in the lower 48 and now .... in April Im starting nursing school and Im not young (20 years left of work in me). Roll with the punches here yet the punches are gonna punch hundreds of thousands to millions in the face ... not sure how this any good for an economy and society but here we are! If you are like me sell your house and stash the money away to buy houses when the crash from AI happens!

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

#544

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

rps93 wrote: post #543
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 sold a house after being laid off in mid-January from a government IT contractor where I had worked for eight years. The sale and move took about five weeks. Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad age…

Good luck!

I suspect that nursing is an excellent choice.

I got pushed out, and slapped with the Dead Fish of SV Ageism. It was brutal, and I got pissed off.

But in the long run, it's been the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have liked the extra ten years of salary and saving, but I'm not entirely sure that I would have survived it.

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

#546

Post by sebgr »

this makes sense, in 2018-2022, I would get tons of emails from recruiters at meta, doordash, snap, stripe etc now I barely see any (maybe they've given up )

My friends who are still at Google also say that most job postings will end up going to someone internally - in fact people say they don't do that many external interviews anymore.

Finally the interview cycle seems to take a lot longer than I remember with quite a few added rounds.

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

#547

Post by Alex3917 »

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.

Having worked at both greenfield startups and unicorns, I've found that virtually every problem I've encountered at the unicorn startups was caused by folks being incompetent at the greenfield level. Maybe when you get to the scale of Google things are different, but it's certainly possible to build a business big enough to retire off that doesn't require any more technical knowledge than what you'd learn at a two-person pre-PMF startup.

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

#548

Post by Rohunyyy »

y-curious wrote: post #472
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

Referrals are also getting games. If your company has a referral bonus, then I promise you pretty much every single referral you have looked at, is from a guy who DIDNT know the guy. I applied to 20 Big Tech companies last month. All from "referrals". Check out teamblind.com if you don't know (Be careful. The site is like a tech version of 4 chan. Well maybe not THAT bad.) The whole game is messed up.

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

#549

Post by tom_m »

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…

It is more challenging, but I feel like it also has fewer people looking for that. That whole "move fast and break things" phrase messed with too many people's heads. I don't think people appreciate this segment of a product's life cycle as much as they should. They're always looking for the quick solutions.

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

#550

Post by abustamam »

OJFord wrote: post #72
causal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing this out - title is extremely misleading. Total tech jobs is not lower than 2008 just because YoY is down.

General media, news, etc. gets this wrong all the time , see any commentary on inflation, GDP growth, rate of change in house prices, etc.

As an aside, I remember some time ago that Tesla stock went down because the growth of the Model 3 sales went down... After years of being one of the best selling cars on the planet.

If number don't go up fast I guess people get scared.

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