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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

#681

Post by [deleted] »

js4ever wrote: post #607
jjmarr wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you really recompiling 6000 things each time a dev in the company needs to add a line somewhere in the codebase? It happens when someone modifies a widely included header file. Which there are a lot of thanks to our use of templates. And this is just our small team of 300 people. > Have you thought about splitting that giant thing in smaller chunks? Yes. We've tried but it's not scaling. Unfortunately, we've ba…

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. The template header cascade problem makes total sense, I underestimated how bad it gets at scale with heavy template usage. The semiconductor fab constraint is interesting too. When test time costs that much per minute, banning pImpl on hot paths is a pretty obvious call, even if it makes compile times painful. Appreciate the real-world context.

[deleted]

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

#682

Post by causal »

wavemode wrote: post #661
causal wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020" says the unemployment rate is higher today than in 2008 and 2020, but that is NOT what the chart shows.

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

#683

Post by RealityVoid »

luckylion wrote: post #419
RealityVoid wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locality. People want to work close to where they live and not all places are bustling with all kind of activity. I suspect you're hybrid or on site only, right?

not GP, but we're hybrid but remote-first and 80% is remote and we have the same experience. Getting juniors is easy, getting seniors+ is very difficult.

The model I am mentioning matches with this. Speaking from my own personal experience as well, when you're junior and young, you can move anywhere, especially if you're ambitious. As you gain experience, you also settle down a bit in your life, you have a wife, kids, a house. Their jobs and schools. Moving then is a _big deal_.

Of course, there are other factors that make juniors more abundant on the current job market, namely, most companies don't want them.

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

#684

Post by shimman »

BoorishBears wrote: post #409
shimman wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's correct tho. If your entire career is nothing but greenfield development, you'll never know the result of your decisions or the impact of tech chosen. Staff or principals that have a tenure of majority greenfield development are extremely dangerous to companies IMO. Especially if they get hired in a nontraditional tech company, like utilities, banking, or insurance.

Your list is places that treat development as a cost center, but greenfield-only devs don't want to touch that work with a 10-foot pole. And if your entire career is nothing maintenance and sustaining projects, you'll never know what decisions it takes to build a greenfield application that lives long enough to become a graybeard. You'll think you do because you see all the mistakes they made, but you'll only have cy…

Green work isn't hard to find or do tho, it's much harder to find a job worth sticking around for 5-10 years and understand true impact of projects and decisions being made.

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

#685

Post by shimman »

unselect5917 wrote: post #531
Lammy wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Build one to throw away" comes to mind. You'll figure out what you should have built after it's been used in prod for a while. Possibly years.

I have only met one company that was willing to do this in my career and it was a company that had a massive monopoly in the space with little regulation. Most of the time, what gets done stays this way until the project gets abandoned completely, it's a luxury that the vasty majority of companies will ever have.

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

#686

Post by gloryjulio »

abustamam wrote: post #550
OJFord wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General media, news, etc. gets this wrong all the time , see any commentary on inflation, GDP growth, rate of change in house prices, etc.

As an aside, I remember some time ago that Tesla stock went down because the growth of the Model 3 sales went down... After years of being one of the best selling cars on the planet. If number don't go up fast I guess people get scared.

The issue is the company's valuation has priced in ridiculous growth in the future. The trajectory matters here. Not saying you should short the stock

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

#687

Post by Toutouxc »

eranation wrote: post #660
guywithahat wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m at this point too. I desperately want to hate AI, but it’s so incredibly competent. People who say LLM’s aren’t good generally just aren’t good at them

Exactly

I would love to see what you two are working on, and who you're working with.

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

#688

Post by antonymoose »

rwyinuse wrote: post #267
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…

In my experience juniors are simply being replaced with intermediates and seniors who are willing to work for junior wages.

This seems closest to my experience. There is work out there but it’s of lower quality.

I turn on LinkedIn “Looking for Work” a few times a year. The only recruiters I get now are those trying to run an agency, farm you out to their Blue Chip clients like BOA or Duke Energy for a low-ball salary on a 12 month contract while they dangle the hope of future hiring as a carrot.

I live close enough to a small/mid city that I could get a proper job quickly enough… except I would be taking a 30-40k pay cut and transition from remote to having an 80-mile / 3-hour commute daily.

Meanwhile at my day job we’re trying to hire a Senior Data Engineer to manage our data pipelines in AWS. Nothing too crazy, it’s remote, it’s advertised on LinkedIn, but we cannot find qualified candidates to save our life. All the while I open HN daily and see the complaints about job hunting and layoffs all over. Where are all the laid off applicants?

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

#689

Post by greggoB »

boca_honey wrote: post #388
greggoB wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reply makes zero sense to me. 1. You start off by labelling both platforms as "extreme partisan" - care to explain? 2. This charge is used to minimize the original complaint (login requirement), which is a hard blocker to view replies, i.e. additional context. 3. This all then somehow morphs into a point about platform longevity? How exactly does any of this address parent commenter's statement that "bsky is jus…

You're right, I went off-topic for no good reason. I was just reacting to my personal bias against Bluesky and its stereotypical user and content. Too late to edit / delete my post but I retract it and apologize.

I appreciate that you can so readily admit that - definitely not something commonly seen.

Could you say a bit more about what's behind your dislike of Bluesky? I'm curious as I don't know much about it, other than it's possibly become a home of the more liberal/left-leaning base that found themselves disguested by Twitter/X once Musk took over (fairly so IMO, given how that's led to things like Grok AI's sexualized photo).

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

#690

Post by luckylion »

RealityVoid wrote: post #683
luckylion wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not GP, but we're hybrid but remote-first and 80% is remote and we have the same experience. Getting juniors is easy, getting seniors+ is very difficult.

The model I am mentioning matches with this. Speaking from my own personal experience as well, when you're junior and young, you can move anywhere, especially if you're ambitious. As you gain experience, you also settle down a bit in your life, you have a wife, kids, a house. Their jobs and schools. Moving then is a _big deal_. Of course, there are other factors that make juniors more abundant on the current job mark…

That absolutely makes sense, but I'm not sure it is the reason. I mentioned we're remote first: we hire _everywhere_. I've been with this company for 7 years, and haven't traveled to HQ even once, and have worked from home or a spot of my choosing (but honestly, that spot is almost always home!) every day, that's how remote first we are - nobody has to uproot their life to work with us.

But it's still extremely hard to find senior+. I'm sure our tech stack plays a role, and naturally senior developers are much less common than juniors. But whenever I hear about the job market being super hard, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

AI is not replacing anyone from my perspective, but AI might become our only hope at some point, because we're growing aggressively. I have to keep mediocre people because I can't even replace at that level easily - the only ones I'm pruning are the ones that are net-negative contributors.

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