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.
It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.
With contracted outsourcing the root of the problem is generally a third party with misaligned incentives. But here this is no third party.
But there are frictions, too. Unless you go into management, comp tops out around $200k in most metros. HR -- instead of write-your-own-rules in a startup you have to take corporate training and get approval for things folks at the startups take for granted. Limited tools, externally managed corporate OS and software, Outlook instead of Slack. Office time requirements -- fully remote is very rare. And so on.
Not saying this is the wrong choice, just that there are tradeoffs.
There are "normal metro areas" that aren't the Bay Area where a $150k salary leads to a very comfortable life, with loads of $150k jobs for people with decent skills.
...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
It is predictable that remote work would lead to another wave of off-shoring. The question now is whether or not these companies can actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. We've all seen the abominations produced by offshore teams. Moving to a fully remote foreign workforce may be short-sighted.
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.
nobody is going to admit to other people they know that this (slacking off) is what they do. You only get this on an anonymous forum like HN or reddit. Of course, some of them might be lying, but where there's smoke, there's fire imho.
A large part of the IT community does indeed very little work.
As for having to work over 40 hours and being stressed, I guess there's a price to having to work in US under such lax worker's rights and benefits, in Europe you just say no thanks boss see you on Monday.
Looking at Rent Cafe:
SF: $3267
Santa Monica: $3956
Venice: $3844
Playa Vista: $3726
Marina Del Rey $3896
These are all places near Meta, Google, etc....
I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet but in LA on the west side it's all over the place. "Coliviing" where they rent out individual bedrooms for $2500-$3500 a month and you share the living room and dining room. It's like having a roommate except you have have lock on your bedroom door and no choice who your roommates are (and no responcibility if they don't pay their rent).
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.
Lowball, either because on ignorance (bro I have an app idea!), intention (fast buck artists preying on folks that don’t know better, maybe it’s a BS startup with 80k S.E. base and worthless ISO), or something like government.
Middle-Road, all the normal companies in all those “flyover” states or something to that affect. You’ll get paid a reasonable market rate for a reasonable expectation of work, e.g. an American 40 hours work week. If you’re lucky these might be a small tech-shop, but no flashy VC driven mania. I’ve worked at several, currently work at one. From the inside looking out the ZIRP issues are nonexistent, Cost-of-Living raises might not be as high as I’d like but I have 0 worries about the trends of tech layoffs I read of here.
Upper-Middle, places that are similar to Middle Road in that they are not flashy VC driven firms but “real” companies delivering profitable software or tech-enabled products and services but they also highly value their IT as a force multiplier. As a result the compensation might be a fair bit higher than Middle Road but nothing insane. You’re not walking about with 300-500k Total Comp. Nice 200k TC for a quality Senior here for a normal place of living. I’ve worked at one such firm but something of a unicorn.
Finally, VC world where the rules don’t matter and the points are made up… or something like it. Compensation is ludicrous and often detached from real-world value provided.
I know this is neither exhaustive scientific, but rather to play with the idea that there are different patterns of compensation than the 5 hours of work and 500k of compensation I see some thinking is both reasonable and deserved (trolling?)
And I can't understand sorry, why should we go back to this scenario, exactly?
The gravy train might be ending, I just wish it would end with the jobs that actually do nothing (product) rather than engineering first, but oh well.
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.
I was getting rejected from jobs that seemed a perfect fit for my resume. End up getting a job I wasn’t qualified for on paper via referral.
And some of those jobs that rejected me are still reposting the same damn job monthly.
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)
Maybe there is just less demand in Denmark? But I feel like demand surged here, and with easy access to capital it drove prices to absurd levels.
this stuff in my experience is either taught badly or not at all in universities, and i don't even mind that. the institution can stick to fundamentals applicable across the given hot tech on any day
personally i don't agree with the sentiment. constant learning is something i love about the industry. for one it's interesting, but it also means there are always opportunities to prove yourself by being interested in learning
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)
Happened to me too - I just said this shit is generated by ChatGPT and I won't be reviewing it. They didn't insist.
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.
The American worker has never had largesse, even the tech workers like ourselves, the largesse is and was and will still be going to the capitalist class. You're basically saying that we must accept that we're meant to live shitty lives where we grind and grind for very little gain while the capitalists and founders thrive on our labor. Reality is reality, but the whole "we can't complain about this" message you're sending is part of what's keeping us here. We should be fighting for the fruits of our labor.
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.
Companies bend and cut the throat of loyal hard working employees the moment they are not relevant yet people raged some ethics there which was very misplaced.
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.
But the company saves 60k, so the net (to the economy) is the same.
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.
That said, some people disagree with the ethics of importing a migrant underclass which we're knowingly underpaying, but I'd agree with you that the current system benefits us, although it could be better with more immigration and labour controls.
I don't have a stat but looking in past the manual labor costs of food is very small percentage.
go open the careers page for most mid-tier tech co’s (Coinbase, Rippling, Affirm) and count the number of SWE jobs in India/Latam/Eastern Europe vs the U.S.
Say you get your wish of no immigration. How are you going to force these companies to not hire abroad instead?
At least if the worker who competes with you is in the U.S., they have the same cost structure as you and won’t undercut you as much or at all on wage.
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.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2017/03/03/wi...
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...
They cut ~$1B in operating expenses, to go from $4.73B to $3.31B in advertising revenue, and forecasts don't look much better [0]
What has Twitter left to offer? They don't have the manpower to add new functionality, and they are bleeding advertising money.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis...
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.
Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product.
Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the workforce? That's much more impressive.
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.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026
heres a total feature map of what was released in 2023:
https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387
I think thats definitely a signal that the B and C teams werent needed, considering they cut 90% of staff LOL.
As for the bots, AI is making it easier than ever to bypass those systems. CogVLM is just sitting there menacingly on github https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM
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.
After telling the advertisers to go 'F themselves', those paying customers are leaving in droves plus the ad ecosystem is one of the worst in the industry.
The only alternative is to get enough paying users. Good luck.
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, unlike a lot of other shops, actually the people Google hired were mostly top notch, regardless of where they came from.
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.
Using L3-L5 SWEs as a reference point, the typical difference between Toronto (Canada) and New York (US) for the same level and role was around 30%+ less if a person was based out of the Canada office.
There are/were a non-trivial number of Canadian Googlers that made New York their official office but were unofficially trying to live/work out of Toronto to take advantage of the compensation difference as well as trying to dodge the difference in income tax rates.
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?
McDonalds and others have kiosks already. One place I frequent only has touch screens for ordering.
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
We hosted the website on the spare computer in my bedroom and within a few months had our first pay customer and we continued to grow it from there.
However despite working on countless startups since then none of them replicated that success, despite me since becoming an accomplished software engineer and knowing far more about business.
The truth is any idiot could launch a successful startup from their bedroom with a bit of effort in the early 2000s. When me and my friend worked on our startup we were like 1 of maybe 2-3 companies doing what we were doing. Today I suspect that number would be closer to 1,000, if not more.
Those old bootstrapping stories don't exist anymore. The low hang fruit is gone. There's a huge amount of competition even in the most niche markets. And if you have competition they'll probably have an ad budget many times your total bootstrapping budget.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to bootstrap a startup, but statistically it's insanely difficult these days. There was an article on Indie Hackers a while back where someone looked at the stats for successful Indie Hacker projects it the guy found that only something like 1 in 200 projects posted on Indie Hackers even go on to make profit if I recall correctly.
You're an idiot if you're a dreamer today. You're almost certainly better off just getting a second job.
A lot of people on here are workers that can do one type of task and not much else. Of course they cant understand that people can bootstrap by writing code and managing servers and designing databases and building uis themselves. For many, adding a button to a page is a career defining win. Leetcode doesnt translate to experience. A lot of NPCs will soon realise they not better than the factory workers they are looking down upon. And a lot worse than the outsourced people that deliver value they so dread. Perhaps they can look into bartending jobs.
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.
If on the other hand you're competing with senior sw devs with 5+ years of experience, there could also be other factors to keep in mind (age, ability in very specific tech stacks, etc).
I think companies are still hiring, but more focused, unlike in 2021-2022 when they over-hired "just in case".
If you want to be paid more than someone with 5 years, you have to generate more value than they do, and you have to persuade the hiring manager that you can generate more value. The fraction of places that can see that is smaller than the fraction that can see the value of a senior over a junior. (On the other hand, for those places, the competition for the jobs is also less severe - there aren't tons of people with 20 years of experience on the street at any given time.)
So it takes longer than it did when you had 5 years of experience. But keep looking. There are places that will see the value in what you provide.
The job category you're looking for is "principal software engineer" or "staff software engineer".
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.
Nobody owes me anything but that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it. It's very tough for those that have been laid off. Particuarly those have to support families as I did -- I am a sole earner and have two children.
You could benefit from practicing a bit of empathy and not lying to yourself that the market has merely moved back to "sanity" without gaining a bit of recent experience in it.
If you landed a job, do you think this new ability to implement a CS 101 data structure would let you keep it? Help in your performance in a measurable way? This is what I mean by superficial. The same applies to the LLM work. You studied enough to where you could buzzword it in a 45 minute interview.
My response, which I'll be more clear with: Maybe it's not that bad that we're more careful and these superficial techniques are no longer adequate to get someone a job in this industry.
> I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it.
Don't think anyone is preventing you from doing anything.
We are spoiled in this industry.
Lots of companies low-ball candidates because they are happy with Harbor Freight quality candidates, so long as they will work for Harbor Freight prices.
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?
I recently worked on a platform that still used Silverlight well after its deprecation. They needed to deprecate and then extricate that dependency. For a very long time, people would pursue features over this maintenance task since the maintenance wouldn't have increased revenue. However, eventually the very old dependency slowed down their ability to produce features that customers want and presented a security risk as well. These certainly will reduce profit margin...so a lot of the time, tech investment will be about not losing the profit margin that already exists, and biding time until new capabilities become available to add new features and decrease system costs.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_Visa_Reform_Act_of_2004
