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Comment by lanestp | Hacker News Reader

Since I'm old and I went through the .com crash (I didn't get to participate in the boom) I hope my input is valid. This feels like more of a correction than a disaster.

The job market has been super easy and mediocre workers have been commanding excessive salaries because of various socio-economic forces (high valuations and cost of living). At some point there had to be a cull of bad startups and workers. It's unfortunate for the individuals and companies involved but I think in a couple years we will be through this and it won't have been so bad.

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The problem is that these crashes hurt both good and bad workers.

Every week you see the nth article posted here on how hiring is broken, from HR filtering to recruiters to interviewing. So how do good developers survive, if their skills and experience are essentially worthless in an opaque hiring process?

One common answer is "networking" but that's a non-developer skill- a mediocre developer could be better at networking (maybe correlated - he's in the bar handing out business cards rather than working on his latest side project). A lot of good people get hurt in a downturn and either leave the industry or end up in low-paying, mediocre jobs just to hang on.

It is not a problem. It will HAVE to happen at some point.

Maybe the downturn of the market will drive companies to be pragmatic when choosing candidate, instead of trying to humiliate them with whiteboard teasers.

Nevertheless, I don't think there is that much you and I can do about this, not the market, nor the hiring processes. What stays unchanged is when looking for a job, don't put eggs in one bucket.

If companies aren't pragmatic now, when supposedly demand outstrips supply, why would they change when conditions are reversed? I suspect they'd just double down and network will become even more important (you'll have more unemployed friends needing a hand).

Yeah, network will be more important. I think they will stop looking at resumes that are not from internal referrals. And probably still some boring whiteboarding questions after that.

But my hypothesis is, they would really try to hire someone with experience, because they won't spend time training him/her, just like what happens in the IC industry.

If worker is good, and have enough cognitive power to learn all that algorithms and solve problems, he can land in Google/FB and enjoy life and safety.

I wish you are right, but I have a feeling this is beginning of more things to come. These things always pan out over much longer period than people predict. Unemployment rate is at multi year low.

so is participation rate

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