My take is there are always positions open but only if you aren't paying market rates. The MASSIVE spike in whats considered a normal salary after inflation and COL has made it so a bunch of employers are perpetually looking.
If they raise their salaries to become competitive again they will fill their positions. If they keep going with normal compensation from 3+ years ago they will keep looking to hire and losing their best employees.
Yep. If there was such a big issue with hiring - we wouldn’t see these insane leetcode and system design interviews that require months of dedicated studying in order to pass them. (Even though you’re a perfectly adequate engineer and working already) This process isn’t just FAANG either. Most of SV does this and so do many other startups outside of SV.
We haven’t been ghosted on interviews since September. First half of the year was another story. Candidates wouldn’t show up to interviews and when we tried to contact them, they didn’t respond.
There are engineers complaining about not enough jobs/getting ghosted by employers, and employers complaining about not enough candidates/getting ghosted by candidates. It's easy to assume that the complaining engineers aren't qualified, or that the complaining employers have bad hiring processes.
In the end, I've learned nothing about the state of the job market.
I lost a contract position in September. I'm a Linux Admin guy who does DevOps with Ansible. I've mostly worked in Enterprise environments. I took a job in March with a Federal contractor and I ran into some difficulties getting up to speed with Terraform and a mac devops environment. I've always developed on Linux in the past.
There were, and still are a ton of recruiters hitting me up. Most of them are garbage, probably 95%. I still feel like a broke the salt circle by telling people I was actively looking for a new opportunity.
I have a family and need insurance for one of my daughters with special needs, so I went hard at interviewing. It took a solid 6 months, but I had half a dozen offers for Sysadmin work that met the pay I needed.
The hardest part about comparing offers is the benefits... Different copays, deductibles, OOP max, and premiums. Also different pay schedules can make it difficult to compare premiums. Then you have waiting periods...
I ended up with an excellent opportunity and I've been super impressed, but it was a rough 6 weeks.
The majority of offers I received were from companies I applied to directly. I had some I cut short in early interview phases because I started my new job. Stability trumps the chase for afew more dollars.
The market is still good, but remote hiring is slow, although in person wasn't really much faster at most companies.
More then I made last year, about the same as the DevOps position I left at the beginning of the year, but bonus opportunities and way better benefits.
In normal conditions - I wouldn't be surprised if >20% of people interviewing aren't really interested in working at the company.
You need competing offers to get a good offer - so you need to interview at places you have little interest in actually working for.
I would expect a lot of these people either got a good enough offer, or good enough competing offers, or just didn't get an offer from where they actually want to work - so don't need competing offers.
Additionally, there's a lot of people that interview for practice just to keep fresh for when they do need a job, and a lot of people that interview at a few places as practice before they interview at the places they're really targeting.
On the other side, in normal conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if >20% (probably far higher) of companies interviewing candidates aren't really interested in hiring anyone. They may be getting a pulse check on the hiring market. They may be interviewing simply to check off due diligence, but intend to only hire their already pre-determined candidate. They may need to have backup candidates if an offer they just extended falls through. They may be trying to pre-vet candidates so that they can quickly hire later if headcount suddenly opens up. They may be doing it because simply company policy is to always be interviewing.
A lot of the process seems to be performative and not really being done for the purpose of matching a real job seeker with a real job.
I would be surprised by this, given every time someone left at a company I worked for scrambled to get someone new and seemed to have no real infrastructure for actually hiring someone beyond maybe automated résumé software. If a recruiter was involved at all it would be a contractor, bur otherwise everyone involved in the hiring process were just people with enough experience who ‘volunteered’ their time to do interviews and rate candidates.
Over here we have requirements for applying for jobs to receive unemployment, to a ceetain degree. There are quite a lot of people who "just gimme the stamp". (Usually those got reported to the AMS)
They are ghosting on the call screen where I go over comp, process, role etc. Most of the times they took another job offer but have the common courtesy of telling us so I am not sitting on zoom by myself for 10 minutes.
I took the past six months interviewing to find a place I wanted to work at so went through quite a few companies. My observation was that most places haven't adapted their hiring process successfully to remote interviewing or engineers being in high demand. Even for places that were "desperate" to hire their golden path interview processes were fairly onerous or just really long calendar wise with all their gates.
They pretty much fell into two categories.
The first was person companies who wanted you to commit 1-2 days of in person interviewing after completing the phone screen and a at home test. If you are interviewing at multiple companies and are already employed, this is pretty much a no go unless you are already really enticed or want to work there. Even interviewing at just 3 of those places means taking off so much time from work that you'll either tip off your boss that you're on your way out, or use up all your PTO that you ideally use to have a life and not burn out.
The other category was remote interviewing companies. I observed that they did the same number of interview steps as the in person companies but instead of a day or two gauntlet they schedule an hour here, an hour there, an hour another day. This worked well for interleaving interviews in the regular work day without disrupting your current job, but it meant the full interview cycle would take 3-4 weeks on average as both your schedule and the schedule of their mandatory interview members(hiring manager, heads of various departments, whatever their companies "important" person was, etc) had to align. And that is all before there's interruptions like illness, or getting paged to an on call event.
Every company was doing a minimum of 4 hours and an average of 6 hours of interviews with the common gates being 30 minute phone screen, 45-60 minute take home code interview, 60 minute technical interview with 1-2 engineers, 60 minute system design with 1-2 senior engineers/architects, 60 minute interview with equivalent people in product to make sure you have similar philosophies, and then another 45-60 minutes with the hiring manager. Occasionally companies would also add in an hour with prospective teammates to see if you click, and/or an hour with some specific department they felt it was important to have engineering work directly with.
Its frankly a lot of work when you also have to prep for the typical interview questions that exercise a different skill set than the common job, and are likely doing this gauntlet with multiple companies simultaneously. Its also a high amount of spend on the company side when you add up all the man hours they are using per perspective candidate. My take is that the ghosting seen on both sides is because no one wants to deal with all of this once a match has been found.
It's really on companies to fix this. Candidates aren't clamoring for more and more interview time. When I speak to friends in professions outside of tech they are flabbergasted at the the length and depth of the interview process the tech industry has developed. Bad hires can be a problem but I think our industry has overcorrected for that. I won't believe that companies are truly "desperate" until I start seeing this interview process scale back. Desperate companies would be trying to hire a quickly as possible, not tick off all the checkboxes on a list of tests.
We had trouble hiring last year because in Seattle the competition is fierce and we’re not the top of the pile. Today it’s yeah maybe 10% easier but we’re still can’t be too picky
If I've learned how to code on my own but lack professional experience, what site(s) would I have the best chance of finding employment as a software engineer / QA / etc.?
I've been looking on Indeed, HN: Who is Hiring, and angel.co but have had zero luck this past year. I get that companies don't want to take on the risk of a potential bad hire but c'mon. I can't even get an interview.
If you have no experience as a software developer, it would probably be a lot easier for you if you have some other method of displaying your work. Extensive open source contributions, where I can read your code and see how you interface with other developers, is far more valuable to me when choosing a hire than even the recommendation of some other manager at another company that I don’t know and can’t really tease out what their inner team workings are like.
I have ten years of industry experience. To me, "extensive open source contributions" is synonymous with either deep industry expertise or academic research. It's the realm of people writing app frameworks, databases, and distributed software.
To be frank, "too inexperienced to get a job? time to contribute to open source!" is almost always a glib and unhelpful retort. If someone can't get recruiters to reach out, they probably don't have the expertise to build open source, and vice versa. Open source is not a dumping ground for inexperienced newcomers.
I’m not being glib, I was trying to be helpful. Open source shouldn’t be gate kept, if the person writing that wants to help and the patches that are accepted, what’s the issue? Or, do you think a formal CS degree and multiple years of industry experience should be required to submit to open source, so the maintainers don’t have to waste a couple minutes reviewing and commenting on substandard work?
That is certainly one way to treat someone willing to do free labor in service of something the maintainers love, but I don’t think it’s a positive way. If open source is to continue and grow, it will always need a fresh set of people to work on it, and bringing those people along is part of the work of shepherding an open source project, in my opinion.
What is your advice to the person saying they can’t get an interview?
I don’t have a bar, I interview everyone recruiting sends me. I’m a software engineer now, but a mechanical engineer out of school, so I was trying to give some guidance without just laying out my life story and saying do what I did, starting with jumping in a Time Machine.
You still haven’t given your advice. If you’re going to be critical of mine you could add something positive in counter.
I'm not sure I'd go that far. My suggestion there is generally work on something you use, want or otherwise need.
In general, getting something done counts for a lot. And many floss projects will welcome contributions. There will generally be feedback, need adjustments for testing etc. But there's room to do productive things.
You could pick up some contract work on Upwork. Set a really low rate and then work up. Pick a niche and specialize.
After you do some contracts and get some good experience under your belt, register as an LLC and give yourself a title - software engineer at your company.
It should be enough to get your foot in the door for an interview and from there as long as you are a good talker you will get the job.
It's even problematic in theory. If there's more open jobs than applicants, the jobs will absorb (filled) applicants pretty fast, and they won't have more chance to apply more.
My first hand observation is that many companies are still hiring. But it's much harder to get reqs for positions and the hiring is much more selective.
The hiring _can_ be selective. My group is hard to hire for (we are looking for a rare combination of skills). We had unlimited reqs before the crash. We are lucky enough to have unlimited reqs now. But we can be choosier now.
hiring requisition. Basically approved headcount to hire against. And a job description for the recruiters to post and also use as guidance for matching people to openings.
My recent experience lines up with the article's stated average of three months. But I would hardly call that "quick". I did close to 50 interviews, and some companies' processes took nearly a month, only to lead to a rejection without feedback.
When i was hired at my last job i made a phone call to a higher up that ended with "yeah we'd love to have you, consider yourself hired. We just need to work through the process". Even then, it was 30 days until an offer letter and start date was in my inbox. If you're starting from scratch then 2-3 months sounds about right to me.
The speed of the process seems to depend entirely on the company, and it has nothing to do with how weak or strong the hiring market is. We've all heard stories about you-know-who in FAANG who's notorious for taking months and months to go through the process.
I once applied for a really interesting incubator-within-telcom-giant role, which I thought would be a cool and unique experience. First red flag was it took about a month to just set up a phone interview, but I dealt with it because of how unique the role sounded. Then, after about two months, they flew me down to San Antonio for the onsite. They informally told me "You're a great match, we're going to get our ducks in a row and then call you with next steps!" Then... ghosted. After a few months, I gave up and found a different job. Moved my family across the country, signed the rental lease, and so on. Then, out of the blue, about a year after that initial interview, that telcom called me back with "Hi, [candidate], I'm calling to schedule a second interview for that [incubator] role. When would work for you?"
I'm not a big fan of using 3rd party recruiters. but, one advantage of using those is that they do a great of job of lighting a fire under the buts of all those HR folks. They find a way to create FOMO in the hiring manager and their HR process. this sometimes, greatly increases the speed of the hiring, at least in the bay area.
In my current role, which I've been in for quite some time at a tech company but not a developer, it was similar. Called someone (very) higher up I knew and, as far as I know, the whole process went smoothly but it still took a couple months with travel schedules etc.
Took a whole two weeks or so to go from reaching out to recruiter to offer letter with the current org. Coincidentally, I am now making more here than I have in any previous role while living in a MCOL area.
• Weirdly vague headline to the article -- no specificity, and could be talking about 2 people or 200,000. (To emphasize, I am not dogging the person who posted this on HN -- the HN thread title is a mirror of the article title.) Feels click-baity, but perhaps I'm being too rigid or cynical.
• The subhead is unrelated to the title. "Openings exceed unemployed Americans" is a different topic from "people who were laid off quickly found a new job.
• The article is based on 1 survey conducted by an online job-hunting portal (ZipRecruiter), and it took place in October, before ~5k people left Twitter, ~10k people left Facebook, and ~10K people left Amazon. 2,550 U.S. residents were surveyed.
• I'm guessing another person will notice this, but "tech worker" seems to be used loosely. I would not call a videographer who is now pivoting to social-media work a tech worker.
> VCs I talk to seem to expect it to get much worse.
Of course they would say that because it's what they want. They hoped to wrestle back power from the worker in 2000, then 2008 and now they think maybe this time. The fed is actively attacking wage growth this time around, so maybe?
What? VCs want the insanely optimistic no-interest rate environment. Giant speculative investments, overvalued IPOs and insane acquisitions are how they get rich, and those things all coexist with huge salaries for engineers.
My personal opinion is that the crunch will hit towards the end of Q1 2023. My thinking.
1. VC market was frozen towards end of 2022. VCs will point to seasonality; my guess is they were waiting for valuations to stabilize.
2. 2023 headcount has already been planned. While there are still some openings, many companies no longer seem to be in expansion mode.
3. Blitzscale startups will be hitting Sand Hill Road in a few days. Many will take severe downrounds and have to drastically downsize as a result; others will implode altogether.
4. There still might be a more severe market downturn, in which case even larger companies will be forced to make cuts.
Of course, there's a feedback loop in play here so the situation can change very quickly.
No one knows anything with certainty right now, but that doesn't stop people from speculating. Some people speculating will be right, some will be wrong.
I see almost as much speculation that "we've already seen the worst" for this recession as I do that "it's going to get much worse". Even among the crowd that thinks it's going to get worse in 2023 before recovering in 2024, they can be right and also wrong (it could continue to get worse until 2025)
I think this one is a little different because the Federal reserve is trying to induce a downturn, i.e. lower consumer demand in order to fight inflation. In spite of the Fed's efforts, consumer demand remains stubbornly high, as are unfilled job openings.
It's not really though, look at the reverse repos. The fed is literally playing both sides of the board. Raising interest rates to squeeze private equity and housing but injecting trillions to keep commodity and equity prices inflated. There is a very real and growing recession / equity crash, the fed has been inflating the market with reverse repos since early 21 to keep the markets somewhat stable. (2 Trillion, extremely unprecedented, look at the max table on St Louis Fed) That has resulted in inflation because the actual economic growth is not occuring. The only way to keep the GDP from showing a drop is for prices to go up outside of the inflation index. Part of the reason for the official calculation formula change recently. The trajectory here is anything but predictable.
Yeah, it seems a little crazy to me the FOMC FFR decisions are burying the lede on RRP and TGA activities. I can't think of another similar period in Federal Reserve and Treasury history to compare to.
I recently saw a headline that some economists' model showed a 100% certainty of a recession in 2023. Made me think, there's not going to be a recession. Economists have never been good at predicting anything.
Look at the signs. We have high inflation, rapidly increasing interest rates, declining stock prices. 2 negative down quarters, only 10k jobs added vs 1M estimated.
Why do you think the odds of recession are low? What signs besides, economists being in agreement, do you see?
Inflation is dropping like a rock, but it takes a while to fully show itself in the official numbers because it's measured year-over-year. The supply chain crunch is over. We've gotten through huge interest rate increases and only have one more half-point hike to get through before the Fed levels off. All those shocks should have put us in a recession in 2022 but didn't. Stocks and home prices dropped, but the real economy chugged along. So, why, now that we're through the worst of it, would we get a recession in mid 2023?
I'm not sure that we won't have a recession. But I'm not as convinced as everyone that it's a certainty.
The global trend is that the world consumes too much according to Greta-type of people, and those people are leading the world in EU and in the Biden admin. In parallel we have eased too much money with Covid and we’ll take it back. Third, GPT shows awesome advances. Fourth, China has production issues due to Covid so scarcity will reappear.
All this together: The VC money will get redirected from blockchain-type of startups to climate startups first, which doesn’t create as many jobs for devs, and then to AI startups if they show some results, but again this employs very different profiles from simple programmers. The rest of the economy will keep inflating a little, despite anything the Fed can do, because scarcity causes inflation.
i'm doing a presentation in Feb for a large, public sector, project scheduled for two years. If we win the deal then I can ride out the downturn there. If we don't then things get a bit more spicy. /fingers crossed
> 3. Blitzscale startups will be hitting Sand Hill Road in a few days. Many will take severe downrounds and have to drastically downsize as a result; others will implode altogether.
What does this mean (blitzscale, and sand hill road) ?
Sand Hill Road is a road in the SF bay area where a lot of VC firms have headquarters. People use "Sand Hill Road" to refer to the SF VC industry the same way people use "Wall Street" to refer to NYC based finance.
I'm not really what the official definition of blitzscale is (or if there is one). I assume it means scale (specifically grow head count) really fast.
All I see is people hiring programmers and IT workers. Basically the younger worker bees. Not managers who aren't programming or people with more experience than being a serf. The lesson is you're expected to start your own company at a certain point or be a construction worker (programmer, IT worker) the rest of your life. If you're not a manager on track to be a senior manager by your 40s, and you aren't just a programmer, you're screwed.
There's some glass half full/glass half empty in that story. So workers are still finding new jobs. But it's taking months on average (which is actually fairly normal for a lot of professional workers--though many US tech people probably consider that long). And this says nothing about what compensation packages look like.
I'm in the 20+ years of experience bucket. It took me about 3 months to find a new job, and luckily my start date coincided with the end of my WARN act garden leave. Compensation at the new role is about 50% of my previous comp, but I'm also much happier in the role.
What blows my mind is how are companies turning you down? You have 20 years of experience. You can do literally anything. It's crazy that companies are so broken they pick subpar candidates over you, even at similar compensation levels.
That means nothing (and I say that as someone with much more than 20 years of experience) - unless all that experience is in exactly the area the hiring company wants - someone with 20 years of the wrong experience (cobol for example) is going to be passed over for someone with 3 years of javascript experience, if you are looking for a JS developer. You probably won't even get passed the HR person if the skills and keywords on your resume don't line up exactly.
My wife just hired someone with 36 years of experience. She is probably not getting past the 90-day probationary period. 1) Too many opinions, 2) no breadth: more like one year of experience repeated 36 times.
I would rather work with someone with a lot of opinions than someone with few opinions, even if those opinions are very different from mine. Someone with few opinions isn’t really going to contribute new ideas. They’re not going to foster debate, or try to teach others. They need to not be stubborn though, and willing to go along with a decision that they didn’t support.
I agree - I like when people disagree with me - as long as either I learn something from them, or they learn something from me - if we both dig in our heels, no one learns anything.
It's not about the quantity of opinions, it's the strength for which they are held. I'm talking about people whose ways are set in stone, and if you don't agree they'll whine about kids these days or newfangled things like jQuery. Using an intentionally outdated library to represent how absolutely behind the person in question tends to be.
I get it, but at the same time, there's not really anything new in computer science for the run of the mill enterprise developer. We're paying massive, massive complexity penalties to get a little bit of gain in productivity in only a few areas. React is a great example. High complexity to the same thing we used to do in SSR but in the browser just to find out we probably want to keep doing SSR in most cases. Was the 10 year battle we've been fighting on front end toolchain worth it? Depends on whether you fought it or you just inherited the results. If you fought it, you were dumb.
I'm not the expert, my wife is, and she has been around. I'm in government so she has had to get all sorts of jobs in different settings and now has a demonstrably broad resume, but with that breadth has come depth. She attracts the highest-end clientele in the world (CEOs of companies you know and love) and can afford to be choosy about which clients she takes on. What I get from my wife is that, this lady keeps proposing the same set of ideas, which are clearly drawn from her one specific job, which she held for 36 years.
They are repetitive and frequently off the mark. A client has issue A, and she strongly advocates for solution B1. A client has issue B, and she strongly advocates for solution B2. A client has issue C, and she strongly advocates for solution B3. A client has issue D, and she strongly advocates for solution B2 again.
She lacks the knowledge to access solution spaces A, C, and D.
A lot of companies don't want or need strong engineers, even ones that claim they do. They want cheap worker bees to do the Jira tickets without question.
A less dire way to express this is that companies have needs for devs at different levels of experience. Very experienced people are going to be bored and feel unchallenged doing work that's not appropriate for their level.
In larger companies, hiring decisions is made by managers with a career agenda and projects in mind.
People who will bring new ideas, rock the boat, offer to do the same task but in an easier way... Don't make good peons for these managers.
That's why Microsoft loves contractors. Contractors will do what they're told and have very little leverage. Empire-building managers there can easily control their contractor work force even if speed and sometimes quality is sacrificed.
seems like there's a thin line between "This person would be a valuable contributor / I could learn a lot from working with this person" and "This person threatens my own career progression", especially towards the staff+ roles
I've heard it often said that it depends on what kind of experience, not necessarily its length. Someone could have one year of experience twenty times, or be working in old tech and hasn't kept up with modern practices, costs too much to hire, or a myriad of other reasons for not being preferable over greener candidates.
I work with people who have 20 years of experience and cause more harm than they do good. Experience is not a great indicator of skill in tech, beyond a certain point: like, I'd prefer someone with 2 yrs of experience over someone with 0, but not much preference for someone with 8 yrs over someone with 2.
As somebody who has 20 years of experience: I think I'm pretty good in my specific niche; there's wide areas to the sides of it where even if I haven't done that before I could get up to speed pretty rapidly; and there are some kinds of software work that are so far out of my field that you'd be much better off going for somebody with 2 or 3 years in that area rather than me. Programming is a massive field these days, and it's not all 100% interchangeable.
It might also be related to equity. I was laid off and went from a mature startup to an earlier stage startup, and on paper my TC dropped by 50%. But neither company is public yet, so who tf knows what either company will be worth at the point either of them IPO. My base pay went up by about 5%.
So I guess depending exactly on the specifics, "my TC dropped by 50%" might not really be a very meaningful statement without more context.
In this case, the drop is literally 50% in W2 income, as I went from a public company with RSUs to a startup. In the previous job salary was higher and RSUs were a decent amount, even after stocks tanking. Startup equity is decent, but that's more of a lottery ticket than anything else.
> Only in tech would someone casually take a 50% pay cut without it absolutely destroying their life.
That's usually because so much of the total comp is from options/RSUs. You can take a new job that pays more in base pay but take a huge cut because it's a startup (so the option are worth nothing on paper today) vs. a public company with RSUs that have value on the open market.
Or, as the current market is showing, you could take a huge cut in pay even while staying on the same role, simply because the RSUs are suddenly underwater.
My base salary has been on a slow but steady increase for decades. But my total comp has taken wild swings up and down. It's an industry where pay is very unpredictable, due to most of it being in options/RSUs.
Maybe it won't literally destroy their life--and I doubt that's what the parent actually meant, either--but even this ~25% pay cut would greatly affect their life. It's not the nature of life for most people to live greatly below their means, especially over time.
I can attest to the pay cut being impactful. With a teen in private school, the cut means things will be comfortable, but we're dialing back eating out, canceling a planned trip to Europe, etc.
It takes me almost 2 months of interview prepping (SRE: Leetcoding, brushing up on Linux syscalls, and low-level networking concepts) to pass FAANG+ interviews.
I'd say 3 months sounds about right as someone with 8 years of experience.
My main issue with these types of articles is that "tech workers" != SWEs.
Of the people profiled in this article:
- 1 videographer
- 1 "systems engineer" (not sure what this means, but doesn't seem like it involves programming since they taught themselves Python after getting laid off)
And that's it. The article makes the point that the number of SWE job openings are way down, -50% YoY. It's clear that there is less slack at the moment. What's unclear is when it will become a full crunch.
I heard the same thing in 2020 when I got laid off, and it took me __a year_ to get back on my feet. I speculate on why this was the case in Hard Truth #3 in a post I just published.[0]
Good luck to everyone searching! It was a really rough time for me, but I learned a lot about myself and, as trite as it sounds, forced me to take a hard look at my skills and be more targeted in my outreach. Now I'm the happiest I've been in my entire career. Feel free to contact me if you need to vent, contact information in profile.
BTW, I really enjoyed reading your article. There's some good advice there.
Tech skillsets are in demand because there's a huge backlog of unfilled positions at non-tech companies (take a look at US DOL JOLTS reports for November). Non tech CEOS talk about talent shortages and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers. The tech worker shortage is really hitting the bottom line for many non-tech companies who can't bring product to market, can't complete integrations or can't keep up with business demands (the problems at Southwest Airlines are what happens when you understaf IT for an extended time). If the DOL's numbers can be believed, barring GPT-4 making tech workers obsolete, you are still in a market where even with layoffs, demand will remain high for skilled tech workers (and not just SWEs).
All businesses are becoming tech companies, or are dependent on tech and looking for talent to move them from on-prem to the cloud, looking for talent to integrate SaaS tools with their existing systems and in many cases, looking to launch new tech enabled products. Most companies hire slowly (my company makes software to fix that), and so yes, if you get laid off, the average company will take 43 days to go from "Hi" to "Offer", so expect it to take at least a few months or more... but the prospects of a .com era style labor market collapse are minimal because the labor market is actually shrinking while demand for workers is growing (US DOL says this will be the case until 2045).
> Non tech CEOS talk about talent shortages and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers. The tech worker shortage is really hitting the bottom line for many non-tech companies who can't bring product to market, can't complete integrations or can't keep up with business demands (the problems at Southwest Airlines are what happens when you understaff IT for an extended time).
A big problem is that most of these non-tech companies are offering far less pay for a much worse working environment, and then wondering why they can't hire people. Even if they could hire, the aren't structured to let software engineering be involved with the product closely enough to actually have a reasonable ROI on their investments. I live in a medium sized city in the Midwest, and anecdotally the medium and large non-tech companies here are capping out at compensation far below even the cash part of the offer you could get at many series A tech companies working remotely. I know more than a few people working at non-FAANG companies whose stock price have taken a beating in the last few years who still have a TC roughly 10x the absolute top of market for these non-tech companies. Even if they can get close on comp, they still tend to use outdated tech, offer very little individual autonomy, and be highly bureaucratic environments.
All in all, I think that if working for companies like this is the fallback position for software engineers right now, it would count as being a fairly dire situation for the job market whether or not there are theoretically jobs to be had.
Tech skillsets are in demand because there's a huge backlog of unfilled positions at non-tech companies
This is the crux of the problem for many younger job seekers, is that they see "tech-first" / FAANG as the only career path.
But every Fortune 1,000 company today is fundamentally "tech-first". And it could be argued that "advertising-first" companies no longer offer the cutting edge tech opportunities of say, Financial Services or Transportation, who have all shifted to Cloud/GPS/AI in recent years.
> Non tech CEOS talk about talent shortages. [...] The tech worker shortage is really hitting the bottom line for many non-tech companies who can't bring product to market, can't complete integrations or can't keep up with business demands
In my experience, there has never been a shortage. Some legacy businesses have wildly out of touch expectations and a cargo cult mentality regarding tech.
In the end, they typically end up with contractors because they simply can't operate the culture shift requires to have good engineering (or get pushed out of the market by real tech companies).
> and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers
I assume by having California-style non-compete, top 5 universities and a world class VC ecosystem? Else what are they doing?
You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.
You will have to interview for jobs where you will use a language you despise. Maybe even Java. Definitely Javascript.
You might need to commute to the office again. Perhaps every day!
These were the best lines of your article. I laughed at the dynamic programming quip. :)
A lot of people view this stuff with cynicism but I found the leetcode practice to be useful, and learning new languages to be useful. Fun too! But I'm still young at 44....
> 1 "systems engineer" (not sure what this means, but doesn't seem like it involves programming since they taught themselves Python after getting laid off)
I met someone who was a "systems engineer" at a job orientation about a year ago. I thought that they did lower level programming or something, apparently they didn't know how to program at all
Someone who knows how to wrangle linux and cloud systems expertly may only know "scripting" and sometimes will claim not to know programming so as to defer to programmers but if they ever had to they would probably pick it up real real fast. Scripting is programming in my opinion.
If you've always been a SWE then you may not know this. If you work in the tech world in a non SWE position and the company finds out you can do some programming. You will quickly find yourself being manipulated and pressured into do SWE work except without the pay. Oh yeah and still having to do the job you were actually hired for at the same time. AKA job hell.
Companies love having more dev's they just dont like paying them. In the tech underclass (admins,systems, ect)you keep your mouth shut if you know how to do more than your job unless you want more unpaid jobs. "Sorry that stuff goes way over my head... aww shucks wish I was smarter"
"1 "systems engineer" (not sure what this means, but doesn't seem like it involves programming since they taught themselves Python after getting laid off)"
It's something of a catch-all term I think. When I had that title at an investment management firm many years ago I was mostly setting up external data feeds with bash and Perl to be loaded into a database and republished as datasets (in SAS) for consumption by portfolio managers and research so it did involve programming in that instance; probably closer to what a "Data Engineer" does today.
> The article makes the point that the number of SWE job openings are way down, -50% YoY.
I wonder what percentage of those cut job posts were actually needed by the company versus being vanity job posts or a “we’re always looking for random superstars that may apply, but we don’t really need anyone right now” posts.
Obviously some slack has been removed from the market, but I don’t really get the sense that a lot of postings in the “hot hiring market” were serious about filling the position with a market clearing candidate (i.e., the quality of applicant that would work with that specific company at the offered salary).
a "systems engineer" is synonymous with "system administrator" and is someone who manages "the machines" (servers, workstations, laptops). this involves using some sort of asset management and rmm (remote monitoring and management) like NCentral, SCSM, Ninja RMM, Connectwise (you get the picture, as there are dozens in this space) to make sure that machines are setup, patched, accounted for and protected.
i don't understand why this term is so foreign as i literally all the time.
I'm 50, this is really screwed up for me not sure what I can do they have blocked me from getting any unemployment but here in LA the economy is breathtakingly horrific.
Depends on your targets. I got laid off in 2020 and got a job right away. Within 3 months, and that was because I took a month and a half off afterwards.
There is no crunch right now if you have a degree and can program. Companies are tightening their belts and recruiters are not aggressively spamming you. This does not mean jobs aren't there. The only thing an environment like this changes for me is all extra expenses are cut hastily and I begin hoarding money.
Companies with infinite VC money are certainly slowing down hiring. FAANGs are slowing down hiring because they used PPP money to overhire and are now trimming down the fat. There are PLENTY of companies that fit in neither of these categories. The work may not be pretty, but it'll keep you fed and insured. I have friends in outsourcing jobs and they have have gone gangbusters the last two years. If there's one thing I fear it's not this alleged "slow down" it's that every job is slowly being filled by foreigners working for pennies on the dollar.
The article gets their data from Indeed. I do not use such a site, and I know of no one who uses such a site. I generally only take jobs through my network of friends I've made and only after that exhausts do I begin the process of asking recruiters whats up. I don't believe job-farm sites are a good proxy for actual industry jobs.
I would argue that a Bachelors degree is more or less obsolete for a 90% of job listings that require that if you have 2-4 verifiable experience in the field. Unless you need formal certification or clearance for the nature of the work you would be doing, you can get by without it.
That’s not to say there isn’t value in having a degree, like every component of a resume, it’s part of someone’s story on how they got to now. When I am hiring for tech roles, I staunchly cut back almost all requirements, limiting entry level SWE roles to something so basic as “Comfortable working with (almost) any programming language.”
People can learn the basics of Python in a weekend, but even senior engineers take some non-trivial time to onboard to how a sufficiently complicated and interconnected system works, team works style and dynamics, and repo/project layout and organization.
> there are a huge amount of employers that simply won't look at you without a degree.
I wish that was always the case, but not the way you initially read it. I WISH they wouldn't look at me if they cared that much.
I've had 4 interviews at places with "degree required" but been told to ignore it by the people recommending me. I explicitly state I don't have one in my resume, to the initial recruiter screen, and anyone else that will listen.
Only one of them actually mentioned it at the initial screen and said they were firm on it.
The rest of them have ended during negotiations, with someone in HR saying something like "oh you don't have a degree?" and all communication instantly being dropped.
I should probably mention that my post (GP of this one) was in part referring to the requirements of “B.S. or equivalent industry experience” which has been a much welcomed trend. This signals there is room for discretion on the part of the hiring manager.
> FAANGs are slowing down hiring because they used PPP money to overhire and are now trimming down the fat.
Do you have any evidence that any FAANGs took PPP money to overhire? I searched the PPP loan datasets (using fairly terrible online tools) and couldn't find any instances that would be aligned with your claim above. Did I miss some?
