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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).

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 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.

> 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?

> Some legacy businesses have wildly out of touch expectations and a cargo cult mentality regarding tech.

Labor stats don't agree. The reason technworker pay has soared is scarcity.

    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....

Commuting though, oh no...

I think it’s fine, I wish they would just do one interview about that stuff though. Having to get lucky enough to solve 5 in a row is just cruel

> 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"

This just sounds like bad management. If people don't feel comfortable communicating their own skills then everyone is worse off

When I was a paralegal at a FANG I was referred to as a "tech worker" and I never understood it either..

"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.

Systems Engineer can also mean a presales role as well. The technical counter part to a sales rep.

Systems Engineer can also mean someone who designs jet fighters, robots, or medical devices

At my last corporate job, it meant I was in charge of maintaining and writing software for test stations in a r&d facility. That mainly meant Labview.

How many jobs did you apply for over that year?

Did you work with a recruiter?

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.

I agree with you for the most part, but there are a huge amount of employers that simply won't look at you without a degree.

> 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.

Yeah that’s not been my experience, that’s just what they put on the req.

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.

I don’t think it’s discretion so much as an understanding of the uselessness of undergraduate degrees in this industry.

> 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?

FAANGs overhired because they incorrectly assumed that the lockdown-induced revenue increase was the new normal.