Comment by weakfortress | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weakfortress | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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