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Panic at the Job Market

matt.sh

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Re: Panic at the Job Market

#861

Post by Draiken »

weatherlite wrote: post #851
Draiken wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to complain about literally everything you just said. The entire system is broken. Everyone should be entitled to live their lives without being subject to these awful conditions, but we as a society keep allowing this to happen because we don't really see them as equals. As long as we individually can get by, we can easily dismiss what everyone else endures. I would happily live with less if everyone else co…

> This attitude of "be happy our bubble isn't as bad as the other bubbles" is a tragedy. Its not really what I meant. Being a bit more stoic about life (which is what I suggested before without using the term Stoic) doesn't mean you don't care about other people's suffering or that you won't do anything to help. In fact the opposite, a part of being stoic is looking at the ugly parts of life and dealing with them. An…

I agree that having a more realistic mindset that we are already in a great position can help if the person's comparing themselves with others earning a lot more.

But I argue that this alone is not enough. Phrasing it merely as something we have to deal with as individuals to cope with the insanity of the current affairs is insufficient and perpetuates this individualistic thinking.

I don't believe the comment was mean spirited or anything like that, but when seeing a list of very bad realities we have today, we can't stop at individually coping with it by comparing ourselves to those that have it even worse.

I consider myself a stoic too and totally understand where you're coming from. But I'd argue stoicism is an individualistic solution that cannot really be applied to something systemic as the job market crisis

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#862

Post by sage76 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #563
Aurornis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

> unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. "We don't want you to spend more than 3-4 hours on this", where "this" was: Build a log parser for streaming Apache CLF. The parser should: Keep a rolling monitor of the top 10 requests, displaying their velocity in req/sec as a rolling average. Display aggregates of visitor counts over the last ho…

There is a YC company that wanted a 4 hour recorded session of me coding up a problem they had given, with me explaining what I am doing for the entire 4 hours.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#863

Post by atemerev »

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…

Nice try, but Trafilatura (which is the most popular web fetching library for AI pipelines) doesn't include the text in in the output.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#865

Post by hajile »

Tao3300 wrote: post #559
wnolens wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped at (paraphrased): "I've never passed a coding interview. Coding interviews hire the wrong people!"

He's not wrong. 90% of coding interviews are completely unrelated to the job. Here are some experiments for you to try in your next one: - if it's a super difficult problem, remark how fascinating it is and ask the interviewer how often they're doing this stuff - if it's FizzBuzz or something else that is solved and has a known value, propose hardcoding the answer as a constant and printing it without doing any compu…

I ask about FizzBuzz in coding interviews because (to my shock and horror), something like 90% of the applicants I've been handed to interview can't think through how to do it.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#866

Post by awesomeMilou »

globular-toast wrote: post #718
weatherlite wrote: post #701

Sometimes I feel really bummed out I am getting 1/2 (or less?) of Google compensation. But then I open my eyes - see the workers in my daughter's kindergarten slaving away taking care of 30 toddlers for less than half what I make, nurses and doctors working in conditions I wouldn't be able to tolerate for more than a few months without mentally collapsing, the people in the supermarkets, gas stations, police, fire de…

So much this. My dad was a school caretaker, recently retired. He said how relieved he is because the work was grinding him down so much. My partner is a nurse and actually dreads going to work on a regular basis. I never dread going to work. Far from grinding me down I feel like I'm growing. I would honestly still do it even if I didn't need the money. My job gives me an outlet for something I really enjoy. A way I…

> you can't take anything away and they don't want to go backwards.

I'm considering switching occupations and becoming a registered nurse (in my country in europe).

The demographics here are so bad, I don't think we will need a large STEM workfore in ~15 years. Your shiny Vision-GPT model is useless when there is no one that wipes the asses of the elderly.

And I don't think Silicon Valley has the capabilities to solve this problem, no matter how often Sam Altman assures that it does.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#867

Post by stogot »

Etheryte wrote: post #800
voiceblue wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Xoogler, I have to say Google isn’t what it once was. You pay for your high salary with the fact that the one thing you can be sure most people you work with care about is how much money they extract out of Google and how they could get more. Taking care of toddlers is ostensibly a better use of the one life you get.

You know that feeling you get when you see a screaming toddler board a plane? Now imagine that's your work, times a dozen, eight hours a day, every day.

I’m thankful for those people and they should be appreciated, awarded, and compensated more. We need more people able to handle stress in this world

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#868

Post by jknoepfler »

ipaddr wrote: post #477
Aurornis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make. I’ve done some mentoring of CS grads for the past few years. We some times get people with unreasonable interview demands, like companies asking them to make an entire app or website for the interview process. We advise them to decline the really excessive ones. However, it’s rare to see tha…

I entered the workforce 25 years ago and interviews were less than an hour many times hired by the time you made it home. Somewhere in the last 5 years someone thought I don't want to be on the hook for a bad hire and I will not get in trouble for not hiring so unless someone else recommended a person don't hire until it's not your decision. Get as many people in the loop as possible and make sure they meet with ever…

This is so very wrong it's almost shocking. How have you been working 25 years that you've learned bad hires get weeded out in three months? (They don't, at a minimum there's usually a PIP for legal reasons, but it takes a six months if you're lucky and usually at least a year) Or that the cost of onboarding a dud is just that person's salary? (It's not, it's at least triple that in terms of time and resources... a bad hire is vastly, vastly worse than no hire over the same period of time).

The "good hiring process" of "spending an hour chatting with someone" isn't good, it's noisy. Why would a more restrictive hiring process that has a lower false-positive rate cost my company "millions" in the long term? Especially compared to what you're advocating?

"Back in the day you had small teams and little managment" - what? Big Corp programming wasn't an invention of the 21st century. If anything it was more endemic twenty to thirty years ago at airlines, banks, tech, logistics/shipping, government agencies, big box stores, and all of the major groups hiring software / database / etc. hiring engineers.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#869

Post by jpgvm »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #134
kredd wrote: post #64

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route. It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do…

> It really sucks right now For me, it's been the opposite: the last 2 years have been the best time I've had working in tech since the early 2010s. Around 2019 I was seriously considering leaving the field (if it didn't pay so much) as the entire industry had turned into a bunch of leet code grinding, TC chasing, mediocre drones. It was incredibly hard to find people working on actual problems let alone challenging/…

I agree but for different reasons.

The whole AI thing is renewing interest in self-hosted infra which happens to be a specialty of mine. Cutting out the "cloud" means having people that actually understand how things work, which means better colleagues, bosses that appreciate what I know and can do and less dealing with bullshit vendor garbage.

I don't know how long this AI fad will last or if the cloud providers will find a way to make their offerings affordable vs self-hosting going forward but for now I'm just enjoying renewed relevancy of one of my more enjoyable skill sets.

Re: Panic at the Job Market

#870

Post by graemep »

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…

> 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.

Any particular industries or countries? The UK is currently 4.4%, the EU's 5.9. Both low by historical standards.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/18426688/3-0...

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