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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

#621

Post by austin-cheney »

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

That sounds like poor signaling in that you think you are doing all the correct things but all evidence points to the contrary.

Instead of focusing on the trends you might try to look at qualifications like education, certifications, security clearance, skill expertise, open source contributions, and so forth. Trends are a gravity. I recommend distancing yourself from the crowd to uniquely stand out. Then as edge case opportunities open recruiters come to you.

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

#622

Post by Sharlin »

dainiusse wrote: post #604
Sharlin wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy you're wrong. Many people (including myself) are experts at doing 0 to 0.8. The rest is much more difficult.

This is very subjective of course. Some might do only 0 to 0.1 and claim it is 1

True. Some people announce their OSS project and upload it to package management the day they start. While I develop something for two years and still find myself hesitatkng whether it’s good enough to announce.

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

#623

Post by loglog »

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…

> how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role

Obviously very few, because these roles are impossible to get into. What else did you expect?

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

#624

Post by cyberpunk »

jeffbee wrote: post #524
dlivingston wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a guy interview for a senior C++ position that hadn't used Git before and had no idea what a "merge" was.

A person who only has real industry experience can very easily have never needed git at all. I know this shocks people who only have hobby or startup experience but git works very poorly at large scale and there are many big organizations who don't use it either because their solutions predate git, or they are newer companies that simply have good taste.

I’ve been in dev since CVS was a thing and did migrations across all of them really, svn, mg and finally git. I’ve worked in a broad swathe of industries and never once over 25 years have I ever seen an org not using source code management.

I just don’t believe this at all.

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

#626

Post by charlieyu1 »

stackedinserter wrote: post #64

Are there real positions these days? I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward". At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their…

A lot of fake positions. It is not even from the company, just recruiters recycling old job postings. I know it is fake because I’m in the company and the project is long dead.

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

#627

Post by charlieyu1 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #232
stackedinserter wrote: post #64

Are there real positions these days? I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward". At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their…

It’s bananas how many utterly crap candidates we get at the moment too. One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with his current work laptop and couldn’t find the $ key on it for a basic scripting question. I can’t make it make sense either.

It is almost like the current system favours cheaters spamming fake CVs while most real people do have imperfections (eg gaps in employment)

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

#628

Post by data_maan »

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…

> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.

Also the people that can't market themselves. There are very average programmers that have a large following on X that seem to do very well.

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

#629

Post by foldr »

lumost wrote: post #499
foldr wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't claim to have any special skill at AI, but as a 'senior' dev, my strategy is exactly the opposite. I try to be as lazy, dumb and concise as I can bring myself to be with my initial prompt, and then just add more detail for the bits that the AI didn't guess correctly the first time around. Quite often the AI guesses accurately and you save the time you'd have spent crafting the perfect prompt. Recently, my PM…

It's more about the size of the task I try to do, it's quite possible to get opus4.6 to one shot a "good" 30k loc change with the right planing doc. I'm not confident I could get similar results handholding. I also tend to want to know the major decisions and details in such a change up front rather than discovering them post-hoc. This could simply be a matter of style however.

One-shotting 30k LOC is no use to me because none of my colleagues will review a PR that big. But more to the point, I wouldn't be able to review it either, and I think we're still at a point where you do want to look carefully at the output these tools generate.

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

#630

Post by addandsubtract »

squidlogic wrote: post #397
schmichael wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Could HN switch the links? bsky doesn't require a login to view replies. bsky is just a superior viewing experience.

If viewing replies is the goal, it looks like bsky has 2 replies and the twitter link has 45 replies. Do with that information what you will.

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