An example to illustrate what I was working with:
Problem: input validation is too restrictive
Their solution: remove all input validation
For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.
The only way for me to protest is to leave, but the job market is terrible.
Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. The pay was just decent too. Not jaw dropping like today.
Exactly. Look at industries that also recruit smart college grads and pay well: consulting, finance, law. These jobs have very demanding schedules.
Not saying that's good, just that it is.
And I can't understand sorry, why should we go back to this scenario, exactly?
I had some clowns reach out to me for the same job it sounds like, promising that I could absolutely move up to employment with Chic-fil-a after my contract was up…
As if I haven’t heard that story before.
Id like to believe it isnt but its a copycat industry.
Sometimes, yes, but not always - if the load is high enough, employees are overworked even if headcount increases.
joking
So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
> Currently, there are almost 100K unfilled jobs with over 101K unemployed IT Pros – a skills mismatch.
Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job. Additionally, I suspect that a lot of these unfilled positions are either paying too low, or aren't real jobs.
Canada's latest economic report had a net positive of only 100 jobs in the entirety of the labor market.
Were it not for December hiring (which is usually pretty low in most years, but was the highest for any month last year according to the data) it would've been negative. That could mean that things are improving in the tech job market - have to see if the trend continues into January, February this year.
You can't take an online course or build a couple side projects and be qualified to run a 1M+ qps distributed system.
Gotta love capitalism. CEO sees some shiny new thing and all the sudden some poor shlub's entire livelihood is fucked.
It appears like continual learning should be a tax as it is non-negotiable for people living in a modern world. Just like roads, hospitals, military, etc.
(Maybe it is just my European midnset that speaks here)
A lot of hiring here is for low end work or at very junior levels (If you are a 10+ years experienced guy, good luck getting a job. I know a close friend of mine struggling to get one - ready for even a 40pc pay cut)
If you apply for a Principal or Staff position (few), be ready to grind out 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard Leetcode problem and doing a System design interview where you do FB with Instagram design reels all at once in 1 hour). Surprisingly when you attend meetups and talk with "Senior" managers who used to hire dozens with shambolic interviews, seem to be opting for getting "good" "resources" with DSA skills from this market (Imagine working in core engineering and then going on to do body shop consulting at an IT provider migrating from Java 4 to Java 17)
While the general sense on lot of jobs are going offshore is true, it is possibly very low paying entry level jobs.
You can now possibly correlate these to a lot of comments you see, junior folks who (no offense intended) :
* Given a spec hack something up and never think of how a customer will use this * Exceptions (sorry, we code Hail Mary scenarios) * Monitoring (sorry, that is ProdOps issue not mine) * Alert Management (this is non critical anyway & maintenance is someone else's job) * Testing (shambles)
Add to this targets such as "automate" with "Gen AI", We paid your co-pilot license where is the productivity increase number (you are an under performer and did not "customer delight" experience)
Sure is frustrating (onshore or offshore) & sad to see this where this is. One just thinks we'd have to live with this at-least for now. Hoping that things get better (overall in the world), sanity prevails and we can all have better lives ahead of us
Probably, one of the main reasons for layoffs in “US and what have you” is new wave of deglobalization and having your own google, visa, etc. “just in case”. This way possible markets shrink and big “IT troops” become less economically feasible.
We may even see in the not so distant future some IT migration from US to the countries outside of Pax Americana.
a) Hire some Junior devs, track them through spyware on the laptops b) Enterprise ChatGPT, Bard, <Insert my own> c) CoPilot d) Spin features out
Some senior folk reviews the code (we pay him top dollar, so 18 hours is reality he/she has to wake up to) As someone to whom this happened (I did not sign up, it was normal till management changed), I can tell you it made me go crazy. 85 hour work weeks (weekends included) took a toll and I quit and took a lower paying position (1 year ago).
Sadly its not getting better, Was conversing with a colleague recently and he told me his new task was to use GenAI to migrate IMS to Java microservices. Kind of chuckled to myself (console by saying: it gets worse, before it gets better)
India has had an “if you’ve got no better options” for most of my career to be honest.
Also, just like in the dot com bust, companies really start laser focusing on roles that are directly tied to revenue, but anything that is even slightly tangential/"a luxury" gets cut. In a non-scientific perusal of my LinkedIn connections, most of the software devs and sales people I know who were laid off found work relatively quickly, but I've seen people in roles like recruiting, content marketing, UX research, and product managers that have in some cases been unemployed for over a year. Middle management also definitely had a major thinning out.
You can't look at years of largesse and then when we get back to reality lament about how it's so horrible.
I am absolutely not convinced that if I lose my job I can easily get another one that pays as well, which is saying something because my wage is pathetic compared to most people on HN.
Well, we had people bragging about working 2, 3 or more remote jobs in 2021/2022, so I'm not sure that should be the expectations anchor. 2023 reversed some of that.
We're in a lull, no doubt. But there's still a lot happening.
Do we know how prevalent that really was though?
I just assumed those were extreme outliers, famous because they were so outrageous.
Coincidental to the overemployment stories, there was a trend of entry-level workers taking jobs and abandoning them at the end of the training period. They'd work a series of short-term "jobs" concurrently in which they collected pay for the time period in which nobody had any real expectations from them, and left when that changed.
Overemployment candidates don't hide it well, or the media was making news up based on viral bullshit someone exaggerated on Reddit based on the above trend. I figured someone would try this shit so I kept an eye out; we only ever caught two OE cases arising from unresponsive remote employees with low output. (One confessed.)
There's not exactly any mystery to catching this, and there's a ton of ways to get caught (as repeatedly reported by Redditors). I have a hard time believing this narrative was ever real for more than a handful of people. The story mainly seemed to serve as astroturf citable in support of eventual RTO mandates.
For example, if you drop 2 IT jobs, but each one is 150k, but you create 4x 60k jobs, it looks like you added 2 jobs, but in reality, you removed 60k worth of payroll income.
It really did. I choose that year to become an independent contractor, and thanks God the only client I found loves me and pays on time because otherwise literally nobody has ever contacted me on LinkedIn or anything with a single decent proposal.
I have a huge fear of losing that client and going back to European corporate job and salary again.
If you're a contractor you should be the one contacting. Sales is part of the job.
Similar for "jobs Americans won't do"... "at the wages being offered".
It drives me insane that people freely accept the concept of supply and demand, except when it comes to labor.
There would be riots, for example, if agricultural workers were paid rates that would make Americans willing to do this. If you think food inflation is bad now, that would be off the charts.
Like it or not, we benefit from cheap labor, across many, many different industries.
and it's not one party or another either. it's both parties.
https://theconversation.com/the-dip-in-the-us-birthrate-isnt...
It’s also my understanding that the people asking for more lenient immigration policies are essentially asking for more humane treatment of migrants (refrain from breaking up families, for example) and more effective processing, not typically advocating for an open border or an increase in overall immigration.
Remember that the meaning of “sanctuary city” is the refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement agencies like ICE that have a documented history of abusive practices. “Sanctuary city” was never intended to be an open invitation for immigration. Instead it’s intended to encourage the immigrants who are already here to do beneficial things like report crimes and enroll kids in school rather than existing off the books in an underground seedy under the table situation.
This isn't an argument against immigration as I'm incredibly pro. That said, trying to sell people on immigration based off the premise that it'd provide them with more minority groups we could exploit into accepting lower wages feels morally bankrupt.
Can anyone here comment on whether this horrible job market is a US specific situation or whether I'm living in some kind of weird bubble?
But yeah, EU engineers are very good in my experience.
With such restrictions you're obviously gonna encounter issues hiring and will hammer the restricted pool.
Slightly insulting to European developers?
Though I suspect a lot of European developers would say the same about their US colleagues…
You didn't specify, but I'm going to assume you're not new in your career. It's just fine in the US for staff engineer+ experience level also. New engineers? Mid levels? Probably less so, and probably similar in The Netherlands.
From the WSJ, so no complaining about liberal bias.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...
The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.
Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work done is incorrect. Most engineers can build stuff, but they also add complexity and require hand holding. Both suck time from the most productive engineers.
A team of 10 excellent engineers is easily better than a team of 100 good engineers, in my opinion.
It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering.
I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.
This is debatable.
Twitter hasn't added any meaningful functionality in recent years, which is fine if you think your product can survive stagnation for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't think so, but who knows.
Also, random Twitter functionality seems to be broken once a month, more or less. Last time I checked, new signups were having trouble following accounts and posting, which is as essential as it could be for Twitter to work.
It's not though. I assume you're trying to claim Twitters only problem is the Advertisers leaving and that the platform is fine but that's not the case.
Lets ignore all visible technical problems such as outages or broken features that have happened since the purchase.
You have to compare Twitter to FaceBook. Both of them have had similar outrage by Advertisers for the respective companies actions. However, Advertisers keep coming back to FaceBook because of the engineering. FaceBook has much better targeting and also staff that interacts with the Advertisers. Twitter has absolutely horrendous targeting; Jews don't want their 'buy a Torah' ad next to a pro-gaza post not just because they disagree with the post but also because that somebody isn't their target audience. This is an engineering problem; if Twitter had better engineering the Advertisers wouldn't be leaving.
We’re hiring exclusively in Canada and India. We have a handful of US positions open, but leadership wants us to prioritize Toronto. Now we’ve been asked what teams could operate 100% in Toronto without customer being the wiser. I don’t expect we’ll have a functional team that isn’t primarily leadership in the United States by the end of 2025.
Now... cost of living in Toronto is as high as the Bay Area. I wonder if the above commenter meant Waterloo (hour from Toronto), because that is where the bulk of the SWE staff is.
The post compares the number of "who's hiring" comments to "who wants to be hired" comments. (Or maybe top-level comments, I'm not sure.)
Some of the "who's hiring" posts indicate multiple openings, and I'm guessing there have always been more job seekers than there are "who wants to be hired" comments.
I'm just saying that the underlying reality may be messier than the title indicates.
i don't think so. from my first search from 2021, there were 202 seekers, and 857 hiring comments. not sure how to get the top-level comments number only, but that ratio is already way different from 2023 (1:4 vs 1:1)
For the past few years... crickets.
This told me everything I needed to know, regardless of the many whom have been in denial.
You can see a clear sign of the worst being over and I would expect 2024 to start a return to normalcy again, maybe people will even start hiring again
2022 was not a good time to be entering the industry, but I think for people with 5+ years experience it was not so bad.
The job postings are there, but they sure don't seem real. I've had 1 interview in past 3 months and that's only due to being internally referred at NVIDIA for about 20+ matching jobs.
Edit; According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemployment could be a signal of the singularity approaching; so we’ll have that going for us (if the job market doesn’t come back) at least.
That would imply a fairly widespread ability to predict the singularity which doesn’t seem plausible to me
This article blew my mind because we as software engineers have immense power, we just need to use our skills to build stuff and take advantage of social media to harness/sell it. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query
That would mean the messy parts are starting. Not great!
>But tech hiring over the fourth quarter led to a small net growth in IT jobs for 2023. There were 21,300 IT jobs added in the quarter, a positive signal for increased tech hiring going into 2024, Janco said.
Hopefully, the uptick in hiring trend continues and things improve in 2024. The tech jobs market is indeed, pretty bad right now.
(seems a bit odd as usually there's not much hiring going on around the holidays, yet in 2023 December had the highest hiring numbers according to that data)
Anecdotally, my job search started feeling more promising around mid-December.
Probably because of new budgets in the new financial year right?
My company tends to hire and promote a load of people in Jan
It seems for the last year or two the numbers are revised down once or twice after they are released.
In 2022, there were slightly more months (7) with upward revisions than downward (5)
There's always going to be a place for coders who can massage the API links between packages or run an ERP, but you don't need IT when your firm is disposable line staff, institutional knowledge lives in the codebase, and HR has mostly been replaced by Workday.
UBI when?
Don't get me wrong I would love shorter work weeks, fewer hours a day, etc. for the same pay. That was the promise of all this additional productivity, after all. But even that is still getting paid for work.
I just can't rationalize the idea of paying an entire population for nothing.
And the crazy thing is, that we actually have SO much that needs to be done. There's massive shortages of all type of roles that can be filled by pretty much anyone.
Because eventually, there will not be many jobs left that cannot be automated. Cleaning and some of the trades will remain as long as we get iRobot-style droids with dexterity and intelligence to match a human, as will politics and management, but everything else will get automated.
The question is, will we manage to shift our society away from the millennia-old model of "one's employment defines one's worth in society" to "everyone is worth the same in society" in time, or will there be bloody fights in the transition?
Because capital.
Software, as a whole, is the most capital intensive industry in the world after energy/transportation: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
We used to be dreamers now is like cant do
not enough jobs. too many applicants. interviews too damaging.
I'd like to spend the next 17 years doing something more personally meaningful as i'm quite jaded on tech now.
1.5 years ago, we posted a UX job and got maybe a couple resumes. Three months ago, we posted a UX job and got 900 resumes in just a couple days....
I do feel that there are signs of recovery now, so good luck to those that are still looking. I know it's very hard -- particularly if you're also supporting a family.
You did two superficial things and are surprised you didn't feel more qualified? Practicing / memorizing leetcode and having a rudimentary understanding of LLMs (if I were hiring, we're targeting advanced degrees with a focus in the space) -- yeah, probably not sufficient. This is a feature and not a bug as the employment market moves back to sanity.
There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on. Even though there may be economic downturns when it's harder to find work, and I was affected by this in the last two years so I understand what it's like, the long term trend until labor is irrelevant is that we'll always need IT and software engineers and software developers. The good ones will continue to earn a really great wage because it's difficult to become a really good one and a lot of other shops will want your great devs. It does not matter where you're located on earth - if you're great, a better shop will take you.
> There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on
Will putting additional effort and in turn paid man hours increase the profit margin?
Edit: to simplify my personal definition - if your report to the CIO - IT, if you report to a product group - not IT.
One of the factors that they looked at were remote workers when they wanted local, office based workers.
We are also seeing a glut of over hiring to deal with changes in pandemic demands and productivity.
Finally, many companies run on borrowed cash. This means they need to make repayments and with the high interest rates they need to adjust to that.
Once they are meeting their payments comfortably we will see a surge in hiring.
Despite business and investor hype around generative AI last year, information-technology hiring slumped as companies laid off workers and sought to cut costs
The information-technology sector grew by only 700 jobs over 2023, a drastic slowdown from the 267,000 jobs added in 2022, even as artificial intelligence and ChatGPT spawned huge interest from businesses.
Job losses in the first half of 2023, including layoffs at technology-driven companies that dominated the period, hurt overall hiring for tech jobs in all industries, said Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of consulting company Janco Associates. The firm bases its findings on data from the U.S. Department of Labor."
Once companies see how much they can save by spending less on IT, they might not go back to overspending.
Also I think the HN title is wrong; IT employment's yearly growth increase by just 700 jobs/year in 2023.
The analysis referenced by the article: https://e-janco.com/career/employmentdata.html#p7TP3c2_3
The table "Change In IT Job Market Size - December 2023" seems to indicate that 5.5k jobs were added to the 'job market' in 2023, contradicting what's being said. (Which isn't even representative of total employment in the sector, only the open job postings for the sector).
If you're currently jobless you have one amazing advantage for you: January is the best possible time of year to find roles. Don't be discouraged when you see jobs with hundreds of applications. Most people just mass spam and aren't even remotely qualified. If you have the experience the best way to get hired is to engage with the job post. Show that you've read it, that you understand the companies mission, that you understand how the company is uniquely positioned and what value they're trying to create compared to everyone else. Then talk about how you can help solve their main challenges to make them successful. I guarantee you will stand out above everyone else who is just spamming generic cover letters. But this means only applying to jobs that also stand out to you.
tl; dr: im getting interviews just like every other time when the market was actually healthy. At the very least this is the best time of year to apply. So take advantage of it while you can.
The H1B visa cap has been 65000 since the day it was introduced in 1990.
