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Comment by greatpostman | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen the threads, but asking again, anyone tried finding a dev job right now? How hard is it? There must be 50k software engineers looking for work. Gotta wonder how long it will take for the job market to recover

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Haven't tried, but I've been doing this for several decades and it has always been hard to find good people and 10 years on you can't even remember which years were the downturns and which were the booms.

Dot-bomb is something of an exception to that. I made it through myself but a lot of people ended up long-term unemployed and changing careers.

Yep. live thru that myself - never got laid of in either the 2008 or 2000 busts, but I know a lot of folks in tech and finance (especially) that it took them years to find anything close to comparable once they were let go.

I am not yet convinced we are not heading there again.

I got laid off right after 9/11 and I was lucky enough to get an offer from the CEO at a very small company who I knew from prior work--and didn't get so much as a nibble anywhere else. Never earned as much as my relatively modest comp of the prior decade. Then 2008 rolled around and that didn't seem the best time to be beating the bushes for something else. But finally landed something new with someone else I knew in 2010 and that set me up pretty reasonably.

I even remember the 1998 'crash'. I am convinced we are heading there again, but in much slower motion. It may never hit rock bottom, but we are definitely not in a bullish market at this point.

Agreed... it was more segmented at the time, as employment was more regional... so seemed to affect the West coast more/earlier... didn't hit Phoenix until nearly a year after it was already bad in NorCal. Was out for about a year, and it was rough, to say the least. Was denied unemployment because I had done side work the year prior, and all that had dried up too.

Took almost 8 months to be working again (at half where I was prior) and a few years to get back to that level again. Given the number of remote workers, can see the effects being broader and more impactful much more quickly if it keeps going this way.

This time I have a house and other people relying on me... so it's a bit scarier. I'm on C2H right now, after getting let go in October, and just hoping to convert to FTE in the next couple months. Fortunately, in an industry unlikely to be affected by the tech downturn.

I don't know if it was so much regional--except as a side effect of different regions having different types of companies. It was probably mostly startups, especially web-related startups, that took the brunt of the initial impact and the contagion probably spread at a rate more or less related to the degree of exposure to the startup ecosystem. There were some other areas like optical networking too.

The company I was laid off from had a lot of exposure to startup spending whereas the one I was hired by mostly had big blue chip computer company clients which were (at the time) still only modest affected by dot-bomb.

Could be... the Phoenix area is generally more business and banking industry in terms of most software development jobs... even the startups that are here don't tend to operate in the same way as most of the rapid growth startups do, more about getting positive revenue and conservative growth earlier on. Though the couple I'm familiar with, still got bought/swallowed by larger companies as an exit.

I got laid off in 2009. It took me roughly six months to find something new, and this was with three years of experience and transition from driver development in C to full-stack web development. I got a token raise in the process. In hindsight, 2008 wasn't fun, but it wasn't that bad.

That said, I could see this being worse than 2008 for tech. Parts of tech really did binge on hiring in 2020 and 2021. In 2007, companies were just getting over the scars of 2000.

I also had to crawl through garbage contracts in 2009 to make ends meet - took me over a year to find a good job.

It’s not as easy as getting a job in 2021, but then again that was an outlier.

When we post job listings we get a lot of great applicants now. It’s hard to choose between all of the great candidates. Some of our best candidates are getting multiple job offers from different companies so it’s not impossible to get offers right now.

We have access to salary statistics data for the market. The comp ranges have dropped a little, as is expected in a mass layoff situation.

A disproportionate number of laid off candidates were working remote when laid off, from what I’ve seen. Among my friends, the only people laid off were remote. I also sense that remote positions are slightly harder to get now, though not impossible.

> A disproportionate number of laid off candidates were working remote when laid off

I did not want to go remote. I had to because my SO's job required us to move from New York to basically rural America. I hated moving here, and now I feel like my career opportunities are fucked because of the move.

The situation is honestly probably better today than it once was. 20 years ago if someone got a position at a rural/small town college, most of the national labs, etc. a partner would have basically no options other than whatever the local jobs were.

Today in technology, remote may mean you don't get to be as picky as if you live in NYC etc., but there are probably options.

I wouldn't lose hope. I'm still seeing plenty of remote jobs. Out of the six interviews I did recently, the single one that doesn't offer it is tip-toeing around the subject and even promised "two days a week at home" off the cuff during negotiations.

I can see more bureaucratic companies or some FAANGs not allowing for it, but then again it's not really a surprise.

I looked for a job for 3 months and found one last December. It was tough.

I shared details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33882074. Unfortunately I didn't realize I had replies until it was too late and could no longer reply there :(

More people shared their experience there, and a lot shared super nice comments which were nice to read.

Since then, 32 recruiters sent me message request at LinkedIn whom I have not yet accepted, 21 more sent me in-mails or I accepted them and have a conversation, and maybe 3 cold-contacted me via email.

Wellfound (angel.co) seems to be a good place to be, too.

I suspect difficulty in finding a job is related to how much quality and money you're looking for. If you're willing to accept anything you'll probably still find a job quickly.

Context: I live in Argentina, and we do get contacted a LOT because we're generally cheaper than first-world-country developers, specially USA. That makes getting offers really easy, but getting an equal-work-equal-pay job that pays good salaries regardless of where I live is super challenging.

Based on my experience most people employed at larger companies are not software developers. They don't say what roles they terminated. It might be support, project managers, HR, recruiters etc. that gets removed first.

It's surprising to me to continue seeing this myth that engineers are spared in most of these layoffs. That may be true in some cases, but most of the large tech layoffs have included plenty of software developers.

How could anybody know what % of the big tech layoffs were software engineers?

Laid off in November. It's been basically impossible to get an interview with a good paying large company.

I have one offer from a start up that is okay, but I'm interviewing with a fairly big tech company that would pay me very close to my old salary. They paused hiring for a bit and I luckily have some experience on my resume that aligns with one of the few positions they want to fill.

Fingers crossed.

I’m not laid off but was putting my feelers out and I’m getting lots of denials/ghosts at the first stage. In the last few years I had a very high return rate on the initial contact. I have a phone screen tomorrow but unless that goes amazing I’ll just chill for 6 months and hope my company doesn’t do more layoffs

Most people laid off in all those companies are not in engineering. It seems they are mostly cutting support, HR, administrative, etc.

If anything I've noticed that salary ranges are starting to catch up to inflation and salary ranges becoming more common in initial communication, at least when people reach out to me.

This is mirroring what I’m seeing. I’m actually noticing a lot of senior dev jobs with base salaries extending to 200k+. This is new to me as before Covid this base salaries were very hard to come by even for higher level staff and principal roles, even in Faang

As the stock market slumps, so does the value of stock compensation. Salaries have to rise to compete instead.

Is 50k really that much?

IIUC, Google's attrition rate is ~1/3 and they have ~250k people so each year there are ~80k people just from Google looking for a new job. Then take into consideration there are a lot more companies with their own attrition rate.

Sure, but that’s presumably a stat from a potentially more favorable hiring market.

Those are insane number, do you have a source for them...? 30% yearly attrition rate is the stuff of call-centres, I find it hard to believe 1 out of 3 googlers quits the free-everything "googleserf" lifestyle (@ Douglas Coupland) every year.

Google's attrition can't be 33%, did you mean 3%?

33% seems high but 3% seems absurdly low.

FWIW, this article puts the tech sector at a bit over 20% in 2020. One would think Google was on the lower side given that at least on the engineering side is probably going to find it hard to walk into a higher paying role from Google. (Though obviously people leave for other reasons.)

currently on the market for a job since November, its a bit rough. I was interviewing with some companies last Nov/Dec that didn't go anywhere as these companies are also having layoffs. Most large companies are either still laying people off or has frozen hiring. Only startups and financial companies are still hiring, but TC for these are a bit lower.

It's not too bad tbh.

It was definitely lighter than it used to be in 2015 - 2019 but for an experienced dev, roles definitely existed.

I applied to ~60 companies over three weeks in the first weeks of January and had 5 or so interview processes running at once. The response rate definitely seemed lower but again, I was applying in the first weeks of January.

If you have less than 2 or so years, it's definitely going to be harder. For senior+ though, there are still startups that need engineers.

My analogy on this is that tech is a very, very large iceberg and FAANG is the little bit that sticks out of the water.

The summarized experience of my social network (in USA!) is that for relatively junior labor (1-5yoe), across many job types dev and not dev, startups are hiring and big firms aren't, and in between there is some mixture .

Essentially, don't expect an offer from a firm that just did layoffs, and do expect tougher competition at smaller firms during interview loops, but there are jobs available. Just my two cents.

It’s probably a lot less than 50k.

BigTech has basically stopped hiring with a few exceptions. I suspect that’s for specialized skills/critical projects.

Lesser tier companies are still hiring (Robinhood, Flexport, Reddit etc).

Startups are still hiring a lot. There are many that raised a bunch of money but didn’t overhire so they’re in a pretty good place.

So the market isn’t super hot like 2021 but we’re not at the breadlines stage either.

It's funny how spoiled people have been the last few years. For a long time the rule of thumb was to plan 1 month job hunting for every 10k of salary. Salaries have definitely gone up since then so the rule can likely be revised to something like 1 month/20k-30k of salary. The point is that the higher salary required, the longer it typically takes to find a position. The last few years were the outlier times, and it seems we're settling back to normal.

You think the average engineer making 200k will take a year to get a new job?

They could. That rule of thumb has helped me plan for how much of an emergency fund I need to have. The more you make, the longer it will likely take to fully replace that salary.

Another thing people should realize is that salaries do not always go up. Making 200k today does not mean someone will make 200k+ forever more. Plan accordingly.

Post dot-bomb I didn't really recover salary for a decade. (Which still is probably not especially spectacular by tech standards--although I did very luckily get a new job pretty quickly.)

Last year I applied to and then interviewed with roughly 15 companies between about March and August. It wasn't terrible but toward the end some of them stopped the process during freezes, which was a bit frustrating.

I'm not an amazing engineer or interviewer so I took the one offer I got.

If not for that I'm not sure if I'd have a job by now with everything going on.

about 4 months. Granted by a lagging metric

> Overall employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 25 percent from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations.

> About 162,900 openings for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers are projected each year, on average, over the decade. Many of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

I don't know how bad it is in the US. The EU market has plenty of L5+ positions and their recruiters are cold messaging as usual. I would argue it's even easier than before the layoffs, since it's really easy to justify short gigs and gaps right now.

European market lags behind the US in everything. In the dot com bust there was a few months' delay too.

Juniors have it in those times always a bit harder, but seniors get along well.

Yes it’s really unfortunate that this happens. Especially for folks with student loans.

Word from coworkers is that friends who were recently laid off are getting new jobs in like a week.

Personally, I've noticed a huge drop in recruiter spam on linkedin.

Probably slightly harder if you are in the bottom x%.

Lots of junior people looking for work, thats for sure.

No luck since December applied to 700

Maybe focus a bit more? I never came close to that even shotgunning out of school ages ago. And everything since then was very tightly focused on people I knew.

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