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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

#661

Post by wavemode »

causal wrote: post #52
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

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

No, the title is not misleading at all - your comment is misleading. Total tech jobs being up doesn't tell us anything, since there are also way more tech workers now than back then.

Over 100K people graduate in CS/IT per year, and that doesn't even count people who come in to the industry from overseas or from other degree paths.

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

#662

Post by throwawayk7h »

lukasm wrote: post #653

I tried to gather some numbers and the situation is not great. 10 years ago there were 10 jobs for a single dev, now is 1:1. https://lukasz-madon.github.io/hacker-news-monthly-top-level... I'd be great to access some data on how many SDE were in top 1000 companies and how many jobs openings there were in the last 15 years.

That was a 10:1 ratio of job openings to those seeking employment. That's not at all indicative of a 10:1 ratio of jobs to devs.

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

#663

Post by neilknowsbest »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #553
Rohunyyy wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both of these views are consistent with each other. Most people are honest and issue few referrals. But the few people who are dishonest issue loads of referrals. Therefore, most of the referrals a company gets are from dishonest people.

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

#664

Post by koonsolo »

boppo1 wrote: post #555
koonsolo wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

'past the bar' means you have to be smarter than AI, simple as that. You need to be able to tell when it delivers good work, and when not. If you are not smarter than AI, you will not be able to tell the difference. And then what is your added value?

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

#665

Post by eranation »

monero-xmr wrote: post #526
eranation wrote: post #520

In my very humble view, the mythical 10x developer can now be a 100x developer, and the 2x developer usually stays a 2x developer. We live in two parallel worlds right now. Some run an army of agents and ship somehow working and testable code, and some try to prove AI is not as good as them.

I haven’t seen any evidence of an army of agents producing unicorn companies. If this was the case we’d see a rash of < 10 employee startups being worth $1 billion, and to my knowledge that’s zero

Wait a few mouths. Also, Cursor made Microsoft’s 2 year blow their lead (with GitHub Copilot) with just 30 employees.

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

#666

Post by twistedpair »

I don't think everyone will easily make the jump to coding at warp speed. Pushing 6 agentic sessions at once, while seeing a half dozen new features/fixes out to prod is more mental gymnastics. If you're the "add a button to a form" enterprise developer, this is going to feel like a dramatic shift in how you're used to working.

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

#667

Post by Bombthecat »

JeremyNT wrote: post #120
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…

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true. The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing. A rando jr vibe c…

Absolutely agree, when we got our last junior one and a half year ago. He started with using AI for... Everything. If you told him research this and that topic and ways to do X and y and if it's possible. He just used AI which missed half the steps and information.

I'm not against research with AI. But using a search engine helps you go through a railway basically and helps you gather information step by step and you have time to notice it something is missing.

With AI you don't have the mental pause to process the information.

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

#668

Post by andai »

dasil003 wrote: post #476
markus_zhang wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think housing is the real index. CPI doesn’t make sense for individuals unless you build your own index.

It'll never happen because it shines a light on uncomfortable facts that would risk far too much cognitive dissonance across the political spectrum. Please keep the discourse to identity politics, culture wars, the Epstein files, and large-scale, unprovoked acts of international warfare; those will all be much easier for us to talk about as a nation than what we should do about housing prices.

Yeah you forgot the aliens ;)

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

#669

Post by cweld510 »

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 agree with this — there is at least some bifurcation by skillset and capabilities. Lots of engineers are overfitted to working on consumer web apps or SaaS products, but those are no longer an area of focus. You need to be adaptable enough to work on other kinds of systems too. Doing so either requires that you’re really good commercially (can lead development of a product over time, drive revenue, etc) or very good technically at a wide breadth of technologies and problems.

What makes this more extreme is that we’re in a paradigm shift, technically. Systems of the future look different than what’s been built before. Building agentic stuff is very different than web apps. The infrastructure side is also different. Moreover, both are uncertain so there’s no plug-and-play set of skills that would fit into any company in the way you could probably get hired reliably in the 2010s if you can operate Kubernetes, design a database schema, write Node.js APIs, etc.

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

#670

Post by lukasm »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #662
lukasm wrote: post #653

I tried to gather some numbers and the situation is not great. 10 years ago there were 10 jobs for a single dev, now is 1:1. https://lukasz-madon.github.io/hacker-news-monthly-top-level... I'd be great to access some data on how many SDE were in top 1000 companies and how many jobs openings there were in the last 15 years.

That was a 10:1 ratio of job openings to those seeking employment. That's not at all indicative of a 10:1 ratio of jobs to devs.

Yep, jobs as in jobs on HN
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