Panic at the Job Market • Hacker News Board

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#681

Post by armada651 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:15 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #583

cryptica wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found a job as a developer after about 10 months of applying for 100 jobs per month. It was very weird this time round. Especially weird considering that my resume is exceptional (lots of experience; corporate, startup, back end, front end, full stack, distributed systems, open source). The list of technologies that I'm competent with is long and, for most of them, I've got open source projects to prove my claims.…

> This time round, employers had all kinds of weird esoteric requirements which made no sense. I have often seen some jobs that sounded like a directory level manager mixed with principal engineer mixed with principal scientist all into one job with the title "senior engineer". It's just bewildering who these people are that they're looking for with such requirements that aren't even in the "nice to have" category. >…

> It seems like no one wants to do anything that's off the so-called rails. No risk. Do whatever everyone else is doing.

Fundamentally that's what high interest rates will do, there's no need to take risk and there are no cheap loans to spend on moonshots that might not go anywhere.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#682

Post by guywithahat » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:17 AM UTC

JonChesterfield wrote: post #390

jabowery wrote: post #93

Replace the 16th Amendment with a single tax on net assets at the interest rate on government debt, assessed at their liquidation value ... and use the revenue to privatize government with a citizen's dividend. https://ota.polyonymo.us/others-papers/NetAssetTax_Bowery.tx... When we got a law passed to privatize space launch services back in 1990 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boLdXiLJZoY we were in the midst of a qu…

Schemes like this tend to move assets to a better location and otherwise cause widespread restructuring to minimise the loss. Taxation is inherently complicated.

Not only that, but it would incentivize people to not own assets. People would live paycheck to paycheck, they’d rent longer, and they’d waste money on lavish trips or food (at least until the next economic downturn when they get evicted and lose everything).

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#683

Post by jarsin » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:17 AM UTC

__loam wrote: post #397

tdesilva wrote: post #386

Well this was an entertaining take on the job market. tl;dr he's salty other people ended up better off doing the same work for other companies, based on views of tech compensation that are very divorced from reality: > I look at my own place in the world compared to people who just started at Apple or Microsoft 20 years ago then never left, and now they have made eight figures just over the past 4 years while my lif…

This guy is definitely giving delulu vibes but I think there's some truth to the idea that there are inequities in the market. People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work. It's worth talking about because I honestly don't understand why bay area engineers are paid 3 times as much as thei…

I always wonder what happened to all those companies that went all in on Ukraine. I never worked for one but I heard many stories of US devs being replaced in droves by Ukraine devs.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#684

Post by whoknowsidont » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:18 AM UTC

theredsix wrote: post #448

The author's tone is condescending, angry and entitled. If everyday interactions with him followed the same tone, I would argue that he is the exact type of person behavioral interviews are meant to screen out (technically competent but a nightmare to work with).

Tone policing is the sign of someone who has nothing else to offer except their indignation.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#685

Post by GarnetFloride » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:20 AM UTC

It looks like we are in a hiring dark ages. Barely anyone can remember how to actually hire someone. Just this weekend I was talking to an electrical engineer who recently retired. He told his company that he wanted to retire FIFTEEN years ago. They never were able to find a replacement. Not that they didn't try. They hired senior engineers but they couldn't do the job. They hired grads right out of school but none of them knew calculus and didn't want to learn. From my point of view, something happened during the Great Recession and its hasn't recovered. At a couple of jobs I've seen those HR work anniversary emails and it's always interesting to see the cliff that coincides with 2008. I want to believe in Hanlon's razor, but I find it strains credulity that all companies are that stupid all at the same time. I also have a hard time believing that its sabotage, because that would be conspiracy theory zone which at this scale is unbelievable as well. Yet companies are saying they can't find anyone to hire. I am part of a job group with 25-30 people, most of which I would consider to be highly qualified. So I am thinking that something is going on that is causing companies to select against the very people they are trying to attract. But also it's not a new problem. Just after WWII the economy was flooded with veterans and companies didn't know what to do with them because military jargon is not corporate speak. Bernard Haldane came up with the Seven Stories Exercise to help veterans to figure out what they are good at, the transferable skills they have, and how to present that to companies in a way they can understand. We do know that 60% of postings are for ghost jobs that exist only to fool investors and/or employees. We also know that HR writes job descriptions and does screening without any knowledge of what the job actually entails. Obviously this is a failure in management, but it doesn't seem to affect them because reasons even though they are losing money from not getting the work done. It'll come to a head eventually but who knows when, probably not until after the US election.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#686

Post by guywithahat » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:20 AM UTC

mempko wrote: post #525

I blame the tax changes that went into affect at the time of the peak tlfrom the Trump tax cuts. It made engineers more expensive. While interest rates make bank money more expensive, they make government bonds more attractive and the government last year gave bond holders 1.2 trillion. That money is free money. I don't think layoffs happened because of the rise in interest rates since most of these big tech companie…

Well it made high-paid engineers in the highest tax states more expensive, which is basically just google execs or major project leads who live in California. If anything it made the average engineer cheaper to hire (unless you’re referring to something other than the reduced SALT deductions), but the real solution is CA needs to rely less on federal tax breaks and fix their tax code.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#687

Post by jojobas » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:37 AM UTC

bmitc wrote: post #249

evrimoztamur wrote: post #23

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably. Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideratio…

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. This is really key. I have applied for jobs before, and then get questions like: "what's your experience with C++ or advanced graph algorithms?". Only that, none of that shows up in my profile or resume. But they act surprised and completely shrug off how a decade of software and other relev…

>What it boils down to is that companies have zero idea how to hire.

Yeah, certainly doesn't have anything to do with hordes of people with make-believe degrees in everything.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#688

Post by leptons » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:38 AM UTC

twodave wrote: post #624

In my area at least, hiring isn’t slowing so much, but the quality of the average candidate has cratered in the last 5-10 years. My opinion personally on this is that if you can’t find a job building software, you are suffering from some combination of these factors: * Titles be damned, you aren’t actually a very talented engineer. Maybe this isn’t the right job for you. * You’re coming off as a jerk. Ask your friend…

Your last paragraph explains perfectly what happened to me during the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. We're seeing similar situations now.

This time when the music stopped playing, I had a stable job. I'm holding on to my current job like it's my first born child. I feel bad for developers who are in-between jobs now, I know it's really rough out there, and I know what it's like to go on interviews and see happy well-paid people with far less experience going about their day, while looking for a job was my only job and it paid nothing. I've sat at a bus stop in tears because I didn't know where my next rent payment was coming from, right after being in the fanciest offices in town with some of the dumbest developers that wouldn't hire me because they were protecting their job, they knew I was too good for their team.

Now I'm a lot older, and my current problem is ageism. My current job may be the last one I ever get unless the job market improves significantly.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#689

Post by jojobas » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:44 AM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #127

caesil wrote: post #53

>According to all the interviews I’ve failed over the years (I don’t think I’ve ever passed an actual “coding interview” anywhere?), the entire goal of tech hiring is just finding people in the 100 to 115 midwit block then outright rejecting everybody else as too much of an unknown risk. As a (now) senior/staff-level engineer back out on the job market for the first time in a while, I'm begrudgingly coming to accept…

There's coding interviews and coding interviews. Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure. Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure. Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come u…

The point is never to have a working graph clusterization algo. It's to see that you not only theoretically know the difference between deque and heapq, but also know which is the right thing for a particular task you're working on.

I've had people claiming 15 years of dev experience fail to find the 20th last comma in a file and not even being close after an hour.

You only start getting it once you see how bad 9 out of 10 people really are.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#690

Post by xethos » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 4:46 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #578

melbourne_mat wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country, last year it was definitely a candidate's market: I had recruiters reaching out all the time and I got the first job I applied for. This month I've been applying for jobs and not getting interviews. From the conversations I've had it seems recruiters want someone who has an exact skill match for the job. They don't care what else you have done or how many years you have under your belt it's gotta be th…

If the internet is to be believed the average software engineer changes jobs every couple of years. If that's true it makes some sense for a company to want to only hire people whose skills exactly match the specific thing they are hiring them to work on. If they only think the new hire is not going to be around long term why put resources into teaching them new skills?

Oh hey, I've heard this joke before -one manager says to another "But what if they leave after we train them?"

The other manager asks back "What if we don't train them, and they stay?"

Not investing in people (and jobs) is a two-way street; there's always someone young and naive to think hard work and investment will be rewarded, and most companies have been around long enough to have set the assumption that "No it fucking doesn't".

The new guys need the most investment. Companies hiring are actively teaching them to be jaded by not investing in their employees.