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Comment by throwing838383 | Hacker News Reader

In the bay area, Non-engineers, like product managers, MBA types and data analysts, etc are having a really hard time finding work (sometimes taking 1 to 3 years to find their next job!) based on what I've seen in my circle of friends. (unless your in a specialization that's in high demand like User acquisition).

It's the senior engineers (5+ years) which have multiple emails from recruiters and are in really high demand, not so much junior engineers.

Look at the last StackOverflow dev survey: the number of devs with 0-5 years of experience is almost double the number of devs with 6-10 years. That means the number of senior engineers will be increasing very rapidly over the next 5 years. You can bet it's going to be much harder to get a job in about 5 years or so, layoff or not.

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Your friends are not really good at looking for jobs if they are taking that long. Market for PMs and data analysts is absolutely red hot.

If it's harder to find a job in the next five years as a senior engineer, it will likely be because the economy is in a recession or because of simple reversion to the mean, not because of too many entry-level engineers entering the workforce. If there was any time when entry-level engineers were flooding the market, it was during, like, 2013, when Google and Facebook were hiring like crazy.

The unemployment statistics don't match what you're saying here, at all.

are there unemployment statistics for software engineers? The overall unemployment statistics are probably way off from the subset of professionals and or software engineers.

No, they aren't. The unemployment rate for software engineers was 2.2 percent in 2013 [1].

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-ste...

>> Look at the last StackOverflow dev survey

Just looked at it.

In 2018 there were 87,259 responses and 72,688 in 2019.

Developers with less than 5 years experience were 35% in 2018 and 13.4% in 2019.

Just confirmed it, and that's super interesting. I wonder if it's due to the phrasing of the question though (how long since programming vs. how long coding professionally).

For 2019 I see the following:

Less than 5 years 41% 5-10 years 27% 10-15 years 14%

As you can see, there has been a massive supply increase of junior engineers (probably entering the industry). And this massive increase will in a few years result in a massive increase in senior engineers. Right now being a senior engineer is still a huge advantage but that will diminish quickly over time.

Personal anecdote, at 12+ years in the industry I don't really go to StackOverflow anymore so I wouldn't have even seen the survey. The kind of questions I Google now are most often answered only in Github Issues.

As my sibling poster indicates, the SO survey is a convenience sample not a census of coders. If you look at the 2016 survey, the 0-5 years experience cohort is larger (50.3%) than than it is in 2019, so I am not sure we can make those kinds of conclusions about the wider industry.

> That means the number of senior engineers will be increasing very rapidly over the next 5 years

"Years since graduating" != "progress to senior engineer"

Plenty of people who graduated a few decades ago never reach a senior level. It is not about simply about whiling the time away until you have "10 years of job experience"

> That means the number of senior engineers will be increasing very rapidly over the next 5 years.

In my local job market I've seen this acting like a wave carrying people with the right number of years, jobs that once asked for 5 years experience will now ask for 8 or 10 because they can. Javascript is probably the only notable tech stack that's somewhat new and missing people with those requirements. This obviously sucks for the people who missed that wave, but if the same plays out in SV I'd expect the seniors now to be just as much in demand 6-10 years from now.

data analysts as in data scientists?

no, data analysts as in the ones who take data exports and excel files and turn them into meaningful insights. Analyzing retention for various cohorts, analyzing revenue, engagement, etc. Data analysts mostly use SQL and maybe some Python to extract insights.

data scientists is a step up from that, and typically requires a PHD and will utilize more sophisticated statistical models.

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