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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

#611

Post by dijit »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #404
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.

So what do you attribute your success in getting interviews to? What are you doing right, or better than other people?

Location has always been a huge factor in these discussions. There are usually significantly less opportunities outside of hubs. It’s a cart/horse problem- because companies go to those hubs to hire due the talent pool.

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

#612

Post by socalgal2 »

This feels like one of those "damed statistics" type of posts. In 2008 Google employed 20k people. Now they employ 190k people. So from that point of view they'd have to fire 170k+1 people to be "worse than 2008". In 2020 they employed 135k people so they'd have to fire 55k people to get back there.

Facebook: 2008: 0.8k, 2020: 58k, 2026: 74k

Apple: 2008: 32k, 2020: 147k, 2026: 155k

Microsoft: 2008: 91k, 2020: 163k, 2026: 220k

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

#613

Post by BoorishBears »

Lammy wrote: post #502
BoorishBears wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're incorrect, and my reply to a sibling covers why in detail. But to reword it: if you think the reason 0 to 1 work is typically a duct-taped mess is because of a lack of experience or understanding from greenfield devs, you'll probably fail at 0 to 1 work yourself. Not that a noob developer great at selling has never landed 0 to 1 work, crapped out a half working mess and left with a newly padded resume... but…

You must be “that person” who joins a team, creates IMPACT!!!, reaps the review-time award, and fucks off to some other new team to do it all again before any of the difficult maintenance issues arise. I've spent far too much time cleaning up after people like that to ever tolerate it again.

See I thought how nuanced my argument was towards both sides, and calling out worst cases like:

> Not that a noob developer great at selling has never landed 0 to 1 work, crapped out a half working mess and left with a newly padded resume...

Would be enough to smooth over the minor complex that some career maintainers pick up: "I'm doing the cleanup to make their crap piles work and they're the ones getting treated like they make the industry go round?!"

But I guess for some that feeling goes really deep, and at that point you're just chomping at a chance to pattern match... so the fact my career spans from app agencies boringly maintaining top app store listings to safety critical HMI work for AVs wouldn't sway you that I've been on both sides: since I am now working on a startup! :D

There's your side and there's the other side, and no one who doesn't unilaterally deride the other must be against yours. Tough way to live to be honest.

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

#614

Post by exceptione »

jjmarr wrote: post #343
exceptione wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstation Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best engineers leave? I am half serious here. If you want your software to run slow, IT could equally well install corporate security software on developer laptops. Oops, I did it again. Oh well, in all seriousness, I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtu…

> I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtualization Sorry, I wasn't clear. I am not virtualizing the workspace. I'm using `recc` which is like `distcc` or `ccache` in that it wraps the compiler job. Every developer keeps their workstation. It just routes the actual `clang` or `gcc` calls to a Kubernetes cluster which provides distributed build and cache. > Isn't there a le…

Thanks for expanding on it, now it's more clear what you want to achieve. If I see things like this, it seems Linus was up to something for banning C++. That sounds like a nasty compilation scheme, but I guess the org has painted itself too deep into that corner to get out of it.

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

#615

Post by citrin_ru »

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

Absolute numbers are still higher than they were 5 years ago but the number of jobs going down means that the same (or about the same) number of people are starting to compete for a smaller number of jobs. Many people have chosen to study software development in recent years so nowadays the workforce is much larger than it was 5-10 years ago.

This imbalance of supply and demand shifts power toward employers and it's hard not to feel the pressure even if you're not looking for a job right now.

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

#616

Post by orangecoffee »

ramijames wrote: post #301
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'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.

Sending you empathy. I think we have to get used to the lower pay expectation. This is the biggest negative, which does not make up for all of the AI's upsides.

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

#617

Post by willis936 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #612

This feels like one of those "damed statistics" type of posts. In 2008 Google employed 20k people. Now they employ 190k people. So from that point of view they'd have to fire 170k+1 people to be "worse than 2008". In 2020 they employed 135k people so they'd have to fire 55k people to get back there. Facebook: 2008: 0.8k, 2020: 58k, 2026: 74k Apple: 2008: 32k, 2020: 147k, 2026: 155k Microsoft: 2008: 91k, 2020: 163k, 2…

Recessions are contractions: getting smaller, not being smaller.

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

#618

Post by ponector »

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

Same for vacancies: half are fake, almost all are filled with ai slop.

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

#619

Post by ponector »

eitally wrote: post #348
mariopt wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU/UK

Have you considered roles in the EU countries that have been going gangbusters for US offshoring (Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia)?

Do you think they would like to consider $60k annual salary there?

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

#620

Post by swader999 »

empath75 wrote: post #310
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…

I have found in the last 3 months that there are two clear tiers of developers in the company I work at, the ones that can code with AI and the ones that can't, and the ones that can't are all going to be unemployed in 6 months. We have a lot of people where if you gave them clear requirements, they could knock out features and they were useful for that, but I have an army of agents that can do that now for pennies.…

In a few months the 'you' part of your apt description of the current state of things will also be automated.
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