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IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

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Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#581

Post by hattmall »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #470
hattmall wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as a wave. Right now, the EU is getting a slightly smaller version of the hiring peak of 2 years ago in the US. EU wages are considerably less but the quality is nearly the same. Productivity is a bit lower, but the cost is still advantageous. The goal is to find the cream of the crop before the competition, so a ton of hiring, then assessment and in a year or so reducing the workforce and the wave moves…

> 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…

Maybe, but not really, obviously any one individual can have high variance. On a macro level though it's pretty easy to identify trends. The most ambitious European devs will come to America to get the much high salaries. The hiring standards for EU devs are considerably relaxed because of the reduced salary requirements. As a result many of the actively employed EU devs would be in a lesser role than their equally skilled American counterparts which results in the reduced metrics.

It's certainly not something any one individual should take personally.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#582

Post by stevenjgarner »

gumballindie wrote: post #473
stevenjgarner wrote: post #417

How much of this do you think involves senior programmers using LLM and AI-generated code to do a lot of the grunt work, thereby not needing to either employ, outsource or train? I am amazed how much more productive I have become with the leading LLMs, especially with specialized full-stack tasks that I do not do every day. Many things that I regularly outsourced once a year I now just get an LLM to assist. Could it…

Senior developers detect junior developers by how blown away by llms are. For instance, I can tell you a junior dev, or not a dev, by reading your comment.

Interesting. While I wear your grading me as a junior dev with pride, I think the opposite is true. Junior devs simply don't know enough and have not had enough experience to appreciate just how disruptive LLMs already have become. Most of the senior devs I know see this breakthrough in our industry as genuinely disruptive and without precedent. When I say "I am amazed how much more productive I have become", I have used a plethora of software (and other) tools to increase productivity over the past decades, and LLMs are the first tool I have encountered that are more profitable to use than simply outsourcing or employing additional expertise.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#583

Post by cableshaft »

closeparen wrote: post #173
orochimaaru wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.

At the same time, US salaries are either $300k+ in the Bay Area or $0 and unemployed, there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area.

There's definitely $150k jobs in a normal metro area. Chicago, for example, has a lot of posted software engineering jobs in that range (I've even seen more that are lower than that lately after this past year of tech layoffs, like around $120k, unfortunately)

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#584

Post by Andrex »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #494
Andrex wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, I'm curious: do you happen to be younger than 30?

No lol, why would anyone work crazy hours for not an impressive salary?

Off the top of my head:

- They're a founder

- They're a spouse of a founder

- They're a friend of the founder

- The worker is unskilled and needs to work crazy hours to break even

- They believe in the company and have equity

- The vertical is more politically compatible than alternatives

- The vertical punishes newbies before the career starts paying off (lawyers, doctors, academia)

- The work is interesting/fun on its own (in these cases, the type of work would never be paid well -- teaching, charity work, homemaking, niche tech, etc.)

- The worker is being compensated in other, non-monetary ways (aside from equity)

- The job is poorly paid locally but well-compensated elsewhere, and moving/remote work is not possible

Are such people idiots? Maybe.

That said, people who place money above all other factors trend closer to the "idiot" line, in my book. YMMV.

If you require the literal best pay possible, you'll be job-searching forever. Some people do not have that luxury.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#585

Post by nebula8804 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #410
nebula8804 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It remains to be seen if the UAW's achievements will work out in the EV era. They need to unionize Tesla or they will lose hard. Looking at the teardown of GM & Fords EVs vs Tesla, there is no profit being made whatsoever by the old guys. Everyone either loves to idolize Musk or downright hate him with a passion. At the end of the day, the union companies need to still sell a compelling product at a good price. Coupl…

The truck is a disaster, as is Twitter. I’d guess you have 18-24 months before something pops.

People have been saying 18-24 months for the last 15 plus years. Its not going to happen at this point. Lets say the truck is a complete flop, the amount of runway they have allows them to just pivot to something else. Plus these engineering achievements give them massive breathing room to cut costs compared to their competitors. This is what I said by people unable to look past their hatred or love of Musk and look at the actual details on the ground.

As for Twitter well, I can't explain why his other companies get 1 million plus applicants while this company languishes.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#586

Post by api »

nebula8804 wrote: post #585
Spooky23 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truck is a disaster, as is Twitter. I’d guess you have 18-24 months before something pops.

People have been saying 18-24 months for the last 15 plus years. Its not going to happen at this point. Lets say the truck is a complete flop, the amount of runway they have allows them to just pivot to something else. Plus these engineering achievements give them massive breathing room to cut costs compared to their competitors. This is what I said by people unable to look past their hatred or love of Musk and look…

I can explain why Twitter languishes. Other than the obvious troll hole he’s turned it into, it also doesn’t fit the brand he worked so hard to build around himself in the 2000s and early 20teens.

What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him. Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark.

People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go help him stan for a guy called "catturd2."

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#587

Post by boplicity »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #396
boplicity wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a second part to this argument. There would be riots, for example, if agricultural workers were paid rates that would make Americans willing to do this. If you think food inflation is bad now, that would be off the charts. Like it or not, we benefit from cheap labor, across many, many different industries.

Cheap labor needs cheap food and cheap housing.

Some of the "housing" for migrant workers would be considered quite appalling by most Americans.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#588

Post by nebula8804 »

api wrote: post #586
nebula8804 wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying 18-24 months for the last 15 plus years. Its not going to happen at this point. Lets say the truck is a complete flop, the amount of runway they have allows them to just pivot to something else. Plus these engineering achievements give them massive breathing room to cut costs compared to their competitors. This is what I said by people unable to look past their hatred or love of Musk and look…

I can explain why Twitter languishes. Other than the obvious troll hole he’s turned it into, it also doesn’t fit the brand he worked so hard to build around himself in the 2000s and early 20teens. What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him . Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark. People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go he…

I mean yeah its true. In fact I recall going to DEFCON this past Aug and they had a handful of Starlink engineers there. I tried to get them to discuss that whole Twitter saga, they absolutely were adamant that they did not care one bit. They really emphasized how they are doing cutting edge work at starlink and it definitely showed in the town down equipment that they brought to demonstrate. Tesla/Spacex get so many applicants thats its insane.

This leads me to want the OEMs to succeed, we desperately need a counterbalance to Musk because just shaming his employees won't change a goddamn thing but if there was another place where A players can be embraced well that would put a massive chink in the Musk armor. Hell I remember there were a whole group of furry employees at Tesla as well. Tesla has also participated multiple times in pride parades. I wonder where they are now...

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#589

Post by api »

nebula8804 wrote: post #588
api wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can explain why Twitter languishes. Other than the obvious troll hole he’s turned it into, it also doesn’t fit the brand he worked so hard to build around himself in the 2000s and early 20teens. What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him . Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark. People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go he…

I mean yeah its true. In fact I recall going to DEFCON this past Aug and they had a handful of Starlink engineers there. I tried to get them to discuss that whole Twitter saga, they absolutely were adamant that they did not care one bit. They really emphasized how they are doing cutting edge work at starlink and it definitely showed in the town down equipment that they brought to demonstrate. Tesla/Spacex get so many…

It’s worth asking why there aren’t way more Elon Musks.

He’s not superhuman. I think he was once quite smart but I feel like he’s fried his brain. (I think the fash brain worms are an opportunistic infection.) So what made him able to get these companies going?

A lot of lazy critics think it’s just luck. Founding a rocket company and a car company and having them even work at all is not luck.

Maybe he’s showing us that the bar is actually not as high as we think, and instead that the process whereby we promote people to levels of wealth and influence where they might have the opportunity to do what Elon did is horribly broken. We aren’t promoting competent people to pivotal positions as a society, and in fact are probably filtering them out.

I guess you can see that clearly in politics. Look at all Presidential elections 2016 onward. Look at the whole lineup during the primaries. You’re telling me these are the best candidates we can find for the highest government office? Really?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#590

Post by cdeutsch »

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…

You just have to be more hardcore

joking

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