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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

#551

Post by abustamam »

janalsncm wrote: post #194
teagee wrote: post #10

The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever. Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days. Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view

The chart shows the derivative of the thing people care about which is total cumulative change. The area under the curve shows cumulative change.

And they said we'd never have to use calculus in real life!

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

#552

Post by boppo1 »

post-it wrote: post #113
lowkey_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engin…

> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths of wri…

> think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are unable to describe what they want.

Basically, yes. I bought 'business tier' and I know about webdev but I'm somewhere between intern and junior, so I do a lot of discussing. One session is "I want [functionality and constraints], ask me relevant major design questions" then implementation, then me investigating and asking for fixes.

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

#553

Post by light_hue_1 »

Rohunyyy wrote: post #548
y-curious wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people are far more honest. I have never given a referral without knowing the person and what they can and can't do.

Sure, you can always find a website with someone shady on it. But that's always been the case.

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

#554

Post by mech422 »

loeg wrote: post #511
daheza wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe its over hiring I believe its offshoring. Blaming Covid after so many years doesn't make sense.

People have been booggeyman'ing offshoring since before I entered the industry and it's never been all that significant of a factor. Time zones are a big piece but there are a lot of other factors that make offshoring less appealing than a naive analysis of Fully Loaded Cost per head.

If offshoring started before your time, that might be coloring your perception.

I had already been working in tech for decades when the offshoring craze started. It was remarkably similar to the current 'ai craze'. Loads of jobs lost, predictions it was the end of (on-shore) programming, long job searches (and even longer ones for recent grads, etc. All in the name of 'cost reduction'. Thing is, in a couple of years when the savings didn't materialize/live up to expectations, companies started hiring on-shore again (and even paid better!). Now, offshoring is just one more tool. It still exists, it's still used - but it didn't destroy domestic programming market.

Personally, I think AI will follow the same trajectory. Its gonna be rough, but then it won't be the 'magic bullet' management wants, and they'll start hiring again. AI (just like offshoring) will still be there, still be used - it will just be a tool rather then a complete replacement.

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

#555

Post by boppo1 »

koonsolo wrote: post #467
dakiol wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always. But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key question is whether the same person has the ski…

I don't see the value of a junior instructing an AI, because I as a senior can also instruct an AI. I perceive the AI itself as a very fast junior that I pair program with. So you basically need the seniority to be able to work with a "junior ai". The bar for human juniors is now way higher than it used to be.

>The bar for human juniors is now way higher than it used to be.

What do you think that is now? How does someone signal being 'past the bar'? If I hand wrote a toy gaussian splat renderer is that better than someone who used AI to implement a well optimized one with lots of features in vulkan?

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

#556

Post by ehnto »

tootie wrote: post #468
teagee wrote: post #10

The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever. Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days. Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view

The post-COVID spike was also absolutely insane and much bigger than dotcom boom.

And I already thought we hired more devs than needed pre-covid. It was pretty well surmised that big tech was hiring to starve other companies of talent, and thus employees were underutilised.

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

#557

Post by Bombthecat »

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…

Funny, I was thinking about something similar. But I think I will go with something with retirement / old people. More demand for it in the future.

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

#558

Post by ehnto »

daheza wrote: post #493
cmiles8 wrote: post #252

Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion. The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.

I don't believe its over hiring I believe its offshoring. Blaming Covid after so many years doesn't make sense.

The hiring boom was post 2019, in the article's chart it is easy to see. It was a multi year hiring boom, that only slowed up in 2023/2024.

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

#559

Post by shagie »

raincole wrote: post #274
cmiles8 wrote: post #252

Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion. The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.

Things look crazy around 2022 in hindsight.

Even the ramp up in the late 2010s with the increase in "software publisher" hiring was crazy. Covid put a dent in that, but the increase in the increase in hiring goes back further than the post covid boom.

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

#560

Post by cyberax »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #355
gtowey wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup. Many of these comments make me wonder how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role. You learn a lot about what's maintainable and scalable, what breaks and what doesn't, in the process rapidly iterating…

I'm a founding engineer in a startup right now, and I was a founding engineer in a startup acquired by a large company. So then I became a part of a large company.

The technical challenges are _very_ different between these environments. In a small company you have to deal with technical breakages all the time, but you don't really have systems-level problems.

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