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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

#81
Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems to be doing better then most sectors...

"Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year

"Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries"

"Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is the only area to grow under information.

This seems different then what the post says. They also said worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree.

I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are the using different BLS data then me?

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

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

#82
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

Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers.

Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.

Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.

Different ball game.

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

#83

Those are raw numbers. I would look instead at the job changes over total employment numbers. I don't have the numbers but I would wager we have many more people working in tech today (overall) than we did in 2008. Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical nature.

Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers (US).

Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.

Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.

Different ball game.

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

#84
post #55
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…

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engin…

I was skeptical but I'm really starting to see the productivity benefits now.

I very much follow the pattern of having the whole architecture in my head and describe it to the AI which generates the appropriate code. So now the bottlenecks are all process related: availability of people to review my PRs, security sign offs on new development, waiting on CI builds and deployments, stakeholder validation, etc. etc.

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

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but there is also a massive proliferation of ghost jobs. Dirty secret for a bunch of Series A places

I see everyone say this but what is the point of making a fake job opening? Are companies just doing that to see if a unicorn applies?

AI training?

There's a IT careers site that was sold, I believe, went through a re-branding. And now they also offer AI and "personal" resume reviews _and_ writing, cover letters, and they even have members do a 10-15 minute AI virtual interview that ostensibly could be shown to a hiring manager.

I was unemployed as a PM for about three month. I applied to in the order of 100 roles at this site, as well as applications on the other sites you'd expect, from LI to more niche.

I felt that this site was "underperforming". Jobs I'd applied to that I'd only really seen on there I'd never heard from. I saw jobs that were advertised in other places on there too.

What sealed it for me was that towards the end of the three months, I got an email from the site. "Your profile has been viewed". I open it, "An employer is looking at your profile". I'd never seen this type of email from them before, and sure enough: "Your profile has been viewed 1 time in the last 90 days". That was it. No contacts, and only one employer has even looked at my profile on the site (and this is the kind of site where that'd be the only place they could look at your application). And that employer didn't even have positions open.

But the site does ask you questions to "submit to the employer" about "why you want to work here" "why you'd make a good fit", etc.

And I'm entirely convinced that the jobs they're advertising are only (a very small) fractionally "real" and ever reviewed by anyone at all (maybe the "promoted" jobs?), and they're harvesting positions and jobs from other sites or employers (there's no positions that don't actually seem to exist, or at least not ads)...

... and that their chief motivation for this is getting all your answers to train their models for their actual revenue generator - AI resume writing, cover letter writing, etc. All pre-seeded with other people's real answers to such questions.

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

#86
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…

> just as capable as using AI as anyone

This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.

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

#87
post #55
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…

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engin…

Could you provide an example of your “very simple tests” ?

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

#88
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see everyone say this but what is the point of making a fake job opening? Are companies just doing that to see if a unicorn applies?

Two reasons. One, they have already filled it internally but legally have to post the job. Two, they are gathering data on market trends and what salaries people will take, which is useful if they are considering firing people and rehiring with lower salaries. I've applied for many jobs where I was perfectly qualified and got rejection notices immediately. I applied on a Sunday and got rejected on Sunday an hour late…

> and if that's the case, what other explanation is there than "ghost jobs."

You didn't pass some arbitrary ruleset given to an AI or machine learning algorithm.

Companies can be very selective now, and usually implement this selectivity fairly stupidly. There also is the problem of being genuinely swamped with bullshit applicants for positions, so the false positive rate is likely quite high at the moment.

I've found it extremely difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff right now. Finding competent people is more difficult than ever, but the sheer number of applicants is at least an order of magnitude higher. Botting has made applying to jobs exceedingly low friction, so there is very little downside to someone entirely not qualified to apply to 600 jobs a day and hope they get lucky.

We have positions that have been open for months that go unfilled simply due to lack of time to sort through applicants, and the few we do have time to interview usually are obviously unqualified within the first 5 minutes of talking to them.

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

#89
post #68
post #8

The ideal software engineer will code himself out of a job and be happy about it. Be that ideal. The shareholders are counting on you!

Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead. So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at. The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironi…

> Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.

What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished one project but your employer had another one for you, which you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"?

My comment was just mocking the foolish selfless ethos of many software engineers, who don't look out for themselves and idealize giving to psychopathic organizations that will screw them the moment that's advantageous. Many software engineers have a pathological level of naivete and confusion about the role they really inhabit (e.g. righteously going on about buggy-whip makers).

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

#90
post #67
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engin…

I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this remains a moat at all. So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are tes…

"And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?"

Either the machines exterminate us or we become glorified pets.

Hope the AIs prefer us to cats (even though that's a long shot).

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