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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

#701

Post by guywithahat »

hshsiejensjsj wrote: post #406
jokoon wrote: post #351

People constantly tell me "oh you're a dev it's easy to find work" I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience, and no degree in France. 3 years without a job. I yearn for a new pandemic. Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I have good savings. Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If there i…

> Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous Oh to be French

Yeah this sounds like a curse. You can’t get hired after being unemployed for 3 years in tech, he likely would have been better off being forced to work in IT or something to make ends meet. This isn’t a reflection of the state of French tech, it’s a reflection on how to end a career in tech

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

#702

Post by jasonfarnon »

jjmarr wrote: post #580
jasonfarnon wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What university is assigning undergrads assignments too hard for AI?

Funnily enough, my Science Fiction class graded like that. If you didn't have high information density in essays you were torn into. AI was a disadvantage due to verboseness. Most people dropped the class and prof went on sabbatical.

Besides being tough, it's shaping students' writing in a specific direction. That dense style I think of as 19th century English philosophy prose, though I hear it may still be the ideal in parts of Europe.

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

#703

Post by RealityVoid »

luckylion wrote: post #690
RealityVoid wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your original post then, I interpreted "hybrid, remote first" as... You can be remote most days but you _need_ to be in office a couple of days. This just goes to teach mea hybrid model has _a lot_ of variants.

Back to the point, I think I'm pretty senior, mostly embedded SW, thankfully I still have work, but the job market seems to havecratered. I have friends that are pretty good that are looking for jobs for about half of year now.

I'm incredibly curious now what is your tech stack. And how do you guys view people looking to switch tech stacks.

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

#704

Post by gentleman11 »

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

Also for me. I cannot even get interviews anywhere. Enjoyed a really senior role at my previous position

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

#705

Post by ismailmaj »

tossandthrow wrote: post #648
hshsiejensjsj wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous Oh to be French

Well, they live on borrowed time before the EU is putting them on austerity.

Don’t need the EU for that, they are hitting everything in 2026 including unemployment, though nothing passed yet.

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

#706

Post by markus_zhang »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #573
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.

I don't understand why. People spend money on other things besides housing. Because people spend money on multiple things, it doesn't really make that much sense to say that our index of inflation should track be one thing. I mean, if the price of food and healthcare tripled, I think you would probably say that the inflation metrics should go up. Ofc, focusing on just one thing is very convenient for people who want…

I think it's because housing is the biggest expenditure for my family. Like I said, you should build your own index, not using the CPI or other people's index. Similarly, change in life can increase expenditures, too, e.g. getting a child prompts the family to buy a house instead of staying in a condo.

For my family, housing is easily the primary expenditure -- around 6,000 CAD while (food + vehicle) amount to less than 2,500 CAD monthly. For a similar family in the same area with on vehicle, I estimate that housing probably takes at least half of their expenditure.

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

#707

Post by cmiles8 »

daheza wrote: post #493
cmiles8 wrote: post #252

Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion. The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.

I don't believe its over hiring I believe its offshoring. Blaming Covid after so many years doesn't make sense.

The roles that were, or could be, offshored are being replaced by AI. Those jobs aren’t coming back and the ones that went to India et al are going away. It was low-value stuff that got offshored. Folks in the west upskilled and tech jobs actually grew, a lot, as did comp.

The story that all the US tech jobs disappeared and got replaced by offshore simply isn’t what happened.

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

#708

Post by luckylion »

RealityVoid wrote: post #703
luckylion wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your original post then, I interpreted "hybrid, remote first" as... You can be remote most days but you _need_ to be in office a couple of days. This just goes to teach mea hybrid model has _a lot_ of variants. Back to the point, I think I'm pretty senior, mostly embedded SW, thankfully I still have work, but the job market seems to havecratered. I have friends that are pretty good that are…

We're very boring, our stack is PHP/postgres/mysql. A lot of Symfony, a lot of Symfony-style-code on top of Wordpress (mentioning that usually puts people off but it's all PHP in the end, and you can choose to write clean code on either).

Lots of people see PHP in general as a dead end career-wise and WP specifically as almost an insult, so there aren't many that advanced their skills and have continued to work with PHP (or Wordpress, but I believe that an experienced PHP developer has no trouble picking up WP).

We're generally very neutral on how someone arrived where they are, we don't require certificates or degrees, we focus on experience and skills. I wouldn't hire someone who isn't experienced with at least one side of our stack though (unless they're extremely good) because it takes time from other developers to upskill them and that's the one resource we don't have.

I won't disclose where I work though as that would dox myself and I much prefer anonymity.

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

#709

Post by Eridrus »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #318
Eridrus wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're just as capable as using AI as anyone They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?

Because a lot of stuff doesn't need to be good it needs to be done. Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it apart and fix something in a year it'll either take n…

This isn't really an argument for hiring junior folks though.

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

#710

Post by stackedinserter »

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.

What is their plan once they're hired somehow? Say inspiring words and delegate 100% of their actual work to others? AI?
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