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Comment by coolbreezetft22 | Hacker News Reader

How quickly times can change. A few years ago a CS degree and software job seemed like the most secure and easy way to a guaranteed high paying job while everything else was harder. Now it seems every software company is laying people off while the overall job market outside of tech is stronger than ever.

Sucks to be a new CS grad this summer

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Its the bootcamps that worry me and the endless YouTubers preaching how they became a so and so after 3 months.

But yeah nothing is secure.

> Its the bootcamps that worry me and the endless YouTubers preaching how they became a so and so after 3 months.

At one point we broadened our hiring pipeline to grads of a local bootcamp (their sales rep were apparently very convincing).

About two thirds of the candidates couldn't write three lines of code on a whiteboard.

I don't have anything against bootcamp but I see common pattern:

1. They are in it for money 2. They are in it for the lifestyle 3. They suffer big on by imposter syndrome

The programmers I've worked with over the years were just passionate about programming and thats why they entered the field. They spend years refining the craft. But, now it has drastically changed. The next generation what it "now". Everything "now". They want to buy a home "now". They want new shows "now".

I think the pendulum has swung back the other way on bootcamps, they're seen with the same kind of awful ROI as a college degree in a non-marketable discipline.

I'd worry more about the Youtube influencers you mention. They've littered my YT front page with all kinds of promises that just remind me of previous gold rushes...dropshipping, crypto, and now AI.

Bootcamps are great for people with non-CS STEM backgrounds. I'm happy to have engineers of other disciplines come into the field. But I do think companies should try to raise the bar of who they hire. Other engineering disciplines have government licenses to get. It would be nice if companies required Software Engineers to do the same.

Seems like there's always been a boom and bust in the tech world though? In all markets of course, but i am old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble?

Yeah, maybe this will have the same impact as well and we see a decline in people getting CS degrees and going into other (much-needed) professions.

I know some older people who started off in software and after the dotcom bust switched to a trade for more reliable work.

And I know I'm a big hypocrite for saying this but I really feel like a lot of places need less software developers building social media or video chat code and more nurses/teachers/trades-people/etc .

New grads will probably be fine, most of them. But IMO we have indeed produced too many programmers. But its the older ICs, 40+, that are going to get cast out, not the new grads. Older ones are the expensive ones with families and other inconvenient stuff employers dislike. First to go will be the ones that went full remote.

Overtime if we continue to overproduce CS grads the defacto age limit will drop lower and lower. So maybe in a decade or two there won't be many ICs over 30 (obviously some will survive).

At least that is how it seems to this unemployed near-50 programmer. My job leads started to dry up at around 41 or 42. Now its crickets. LinkedIn telling me I appeared in 2 search this week, if I get that message at all.

This is my fear too but does this apply to programming jobs at "non-tech" companies? Past few years it was very difficult for these businesses to hire software engineers because they couldn't compete with faang and hot tech startups. Now that those places are laying off and freezing hiring the time has come for non-tech companies to finally get people?

I would expect down-tier companies to still be hiring and at higher age thresholds, but in general too many programmers still applies. There will be openings but they will be low pay, probably <= median income. A Pareto principle situation where 80% of the comp is earned by 20% of the programmers (those at big tech), which we already sort of have and will probably get worse.

Of course this is just my generally pessimistic viewpoint. Could be wrong, I'd note however that I used to be more optimistic. 10 years or so ago, I did not expect the industry and my personal career to be in the sorry state they are in now. If I had been _less_ optimistic I would have made better choices, purely to mitigate risk. So I'm paying for that misplaced optimism now.

while there is some high profile layoffs, is the actually job market that bad? It still seems quite active still to me.

Jobs are plentiful. Jobs that pay $400k+ ... less so.

Jobs that hire new grads or juniors in general seem to be a lot harder to find as well

Oversaturation to some degree. The same thing happened in the legal field. Becoming a lawyer used to be a one way ticket to the upper middle class. Not so much anymore. The same thing is happening with CS and SWE degrees. They're still great degrees, and probably still worth the money. But much less so than they were even a few years ago.

Law and CS/programming are a bit different though. Law seems to tend towards a bimodal salary distribution where you have the top 10 school grads who clerked for a federal appeals court/SCOTUS/etc. and work at a white shoe law firm in a big city--and you have the public defenders/real estate lawyers in shopping malls/etc. It's not really that black and white--you have people who do well enough as corporate counsels and the like--but that's a common pattern.

Isn't it the same with programming? It seems to me there is one tier -- FAANG, certain well-funded startups, and finance -- that pay $400k++, and everyone else tops out at $180k or so.

Those were always outliers. I don’t zoom had very many

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