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Comment by autotune | Hacker News Reader

Here in the US I find this largely untrue. My job prospects have plummeted, almost everyone else in my network is also feeling the burn. I have had one interview in 3 months where I used to have multiple in a given week. Life ain't breezy any more from what I can tell, and I'm in DevOps for 10 years as mid-level/senior, which used to be highly in demand. Having to slash like $80k on my previous salary prospects just to get in the interview pipeline again.

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Dude, I don't even live in the US but I've worked with PR before (huge firm) and as soon as I started reading this my bullshit radar went off, this is clearly reads like a PR fake story, and when that happens it's always 1) to sell you a product or 2) to plant a fake idea on your head. Since there's no clearly a product, yeah, this article is clearly a psy0ps. Side note: when they report "...72% expects easier jobs..." they are talking about their expectations, while hiding employment data (which probably says otherwise). That's another cheap old "dark pattern" in lying PR article. They call it "soft data" (instead of real data, so you can lie easily. It's like Marlboro would tell you "...72% of smokers expects health improvements due to smoking...

What is the goal of this PR piece then?

A few years ago a similar move was making rounds in the US to promote increasing of the visa quotas or reforming the system due to the “shortage”

Edit: 2013

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/h-1b-visas-and-the-stem-s...

2021

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/h-1b-visa-reform-is-...

First you plant studies in the news, then you can quote those studies when lobbying lawmakers

Edit2:

The issue dates back to 1959. There’s always been a “shortage”

Kenneth Arrow: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1883726

And strangely enough, the goal of these articles is never to increase the number of Americans trained for these plentiful jobs. The idea is always to bring more workers from other countries, so the industry will have an easier time to pay lower salaries.

Increase the pool of software engineers, specifically in New Zealand, so companies can hire more easily and don't need to increase salaries.

Here's a tip for reading PR pieces: if a company is mentioned in the article and one of their executives is quoted, they are almost always the ones who paid for (and probably wrote) the article. Here, it quotes "NZTech CEO Graeme Muller". If you click through the one link in the article, that one also quotes NZTech CEO Graeme Muller, and all the source data is from NZTech. Reading through it, you see that NZTech is an industry trade association of New Zealand's tech companies. They have a pretty obvious vested interest in increasing the pool of tech workers in New Zealand.

Isn’t it more likely that the CEO of an industry wide association would be the best person to comment on trends impacting the whole industry?

Edit - I’m a recovering publisher so have a lot of experience being the target of PR and choosing what kinds of articles can be printed.

Not really. When assessing the credibility of a source, you have two main questions: do they have the information you need, and do they have an incentive to lie? Industry-wide associations usually have significantly worse information than people who are actually performing the jobs at companies in the organization, and they also have a responsibility to their member orgs to get the best outcomes for them (i.e. represent information in a way that achieves member organization goals).

If I wanted accurate information on the state of hiring in an industry, I would look for someone who had recently performed sourcing/interviewing/recruiting for one of the big companies in the industry but had also recently retired, left for another field, or become a stay-at-home mom/dad. They have the firsthand information as part of their job, but they also have no dog in the fight and hence no reason to distort that information.

You have never published, have you? Your last paragraph is all about finding impossible sources whose credibility won’t be apparent to average readers.

> Here's a tip for reading PR pieces: if a company is mentioned in the article and one of their executives is quoted, they are almost always the ones who paid for (and probably wrote) the article.

Here's another one that a surprising number of people still don't realize: If you're reading an article where any company employee or exec is "quoted", the quote is almost always something written by the company's professional PR team and not an actual quote from the person.

I had a manager once who said that "[famous company] executive, [name]" should be an anti-Hearst pattern that shows [name] is clearly not an executive.

Wrong things, often ridiculously wrong things get written all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s the result of a “psyop”. Here’s a roughly accurate flowchart for determining if you’re currently being subject to something that could non-ironically be termed a psyop: “is this a psyop?”—>”no”.

It sounds like you're saying there's No True (Scotsman's) Psyop.

Where are you drawing the line separating it from aggressive targeting marketing and PR?

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

If the actions are well precedented and widely known such that normal people would not find them shocking, I suppose. So things which we’ve made it since the beginning of the English language without finding the need to call them “psyops” and thereby assigning them fake intrigue. An article saying wrong things about the job market: no. Cambridge Analytica: sure.

I think you could replace "psyop" with "marketing campaign" for most of the times the expression is used today.

Cambridge Analytica is also entirely fake, in the sense that it's highly unlikely any votes were affected by it.

I doubt I would ever utter the word seriously to describe something, but operations can fail, no? If it indeed didn’t have any effect, the operation was still pretty shocking and intriguing.

Not really. It was more a marketing gimmick for the company. The kind of advertising targeting Cambridge did (based on cheap 2010s Era fb personality quiz responders) had absolutely no targeting value. It just sounded like techno magic to journalists.

Like imagine a developer consultancy said they used latex to fizzbuzz people's computers to get them to vote for Trump. If you understand advertising targeting, CA makes just as much sense as that.

Calling something a psyop is just a meme. But it is true that everybody has a perspective they want to promote. People have the ability to think and speak more or less objectively to differing levels, but people don’t tend to say things unless the want other people to think those things are true. If somebody makes a claim that is substantially different from your own experience of reality, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask yourself why does that person want me or others to think that that is true?

I can also create a roughly accurate flow chart to demonstrate this: “does this person want me to believe something that aligns with their own agenda/perspective/goals?” -> “yes”.

There’s a branch of the Canadian military that admitted that they were running an information warfare campaign against actual Canadians during COVID.

Small and insignificant as it may have been, there are real psyop’s out there, and dismissing them all as a meme is lazy thinking.

Use of the word is a meme. But any use of information to try and influence what other people think is basically what a psyop is, and everybody does that all the time. People only tend to call things a psyop if they think the motives are especially sinister, but that's just a pointless distraction imo, as you can never know what somebody's motives truly are. Every statement the government makes is a psyop, or an act of information warfare. Same for journalists, or social commentators, or HN commentators, or anybody else...

I live in NZ. Hiring is not easy at the moment.

Also our wages are low. Look at the current job postings. https://www.seek.co.nz/Software-Developer-jobs

Then take into account that $1 NZD is equal to 0.59742741 US Dollars. So if you are earning $100k in NZD that is not even $60k USD. Our national average house price is $888,999. It's much higher in big cities. Our food costs are rapidly increasing as well. I pay over $1,000 NZD for power and gas.

Smart developers are leaving.

> Smart developers are leaving.

I'm in Ōtepoti/Dunedin (best city in NZ!), and within my social network most developers work remotely for overseas companies.

Good to meet you. I'm in Palmy, (most average city in NZ).

That is something I need to look into. I'm guessing now is a bad time to be looking for international work. It seems like the job market is not great internationally.

Kia ora from Tauranga

100%. There are 2 NZ employment markets. Those working for NZ companies in the $100k region, and those working for US firms for the $200+k region.

I've had an annoying time explaining this to past US employers when they present median values for NZ salary fudge factors.

Where do people find jobs in the US that can be done from outside the US?

The few job boards I've seen all have either low salaries, or are US-only...

I got my first remote gig (firmware work) through a friend's referral, however that was years before COVID-19. These days I'd suggest looking for a remote-first company. Or, maybe apply for remote gigs that say US-only (assuming there's not an obvious or stated reason), then bring up your location when talking to a real human.

FWIW - technically I run a NZ company, so am a contractor and not an employee of the company that my day-to-day manager works for. This arrangement seems to be common among people who work for US companies, or are US citizens, which brings up some questions about the stats in the article...

People tend to post interesting jobs that they find in the #jobs channel on the DevelopNZ Slack if it's something you're interested in.

You forgot all the Kiwis working remote for Atlassian and Canva in the $200+k region.

My team of ~12 is nearly ~30% kiwi at this point.

this city is so damn small, I didn't even need to know your real name to know who you were :D

All you other NZ devs should join the Slack server I founded for IT people in NZ. https://dev.elop.nz/ a lot of us work remotely. We have a dedicated jobs channel and all - we also have some very good recruiters. (700ish people)

I'm also in NZ and everything you say is true, except wtf $1k in electric and gas?! I'm not a conservative energy user, and I'm paying around $280 (mid winter) for a family of 4. Hard to believe/understand the $1k remark.

I have a 1910 villa and a Vietnamese wife with a new born. She has been here for 14 years but still likes it warm.

I'm working on getting her to understand that we don't need to heat rooms we don't use.

But $280 is cheaper than I pay during summer. I'm averaging about 20KWHs in the summer. At the moment it's closer to 75KWHs per day. Our hot water is all gas. About 1 x $150 bottle per month in the summer. That moves up to 1 per week in the winter.

Double glassing is in the wish list. Then wall insulation. But we have a mortgage and an asbestos roof to deal with first.

> 75KWHs

That's a lot of energy per day, mate. I'm in the US and not particularly careful with usage and I'm averaging about 25KWH a day. You might want to get a usage meter that lets you check various appliances/lights/switches in real time to find the heavy usage

Yeah, that kind of thing makes me think 'why do they have six refrigerators?' or 'is the electric dryer running literally 24/7?'.

Three chest freezers, one fridge freezer, dryer goes five to six times a day, three heat pumps and two radiant electric heaters.

So you live an unbelievably excessive existence.

No, I don't think so. I just want to keep my family warm and in clean clothes.

We do need to get down to less freezers but we have some home kill that we need to get through first.

How big is your family and how big is your house? Your situation is so far from anything that I've experienced in my life that I cannot even imagine it. How can you use a dryer that many times per day? Do you even need to use a dryer? Can't you air dry things?

I normally don't stay in places with a dryer and just let things air dry. If you're running heating/ac, they normally lower humidity so things dry really fast anyway.

2 adults, 2 infants. 110 Sqr metres.

6 a day is on the high side. It's probably an overestimate.

When there are no new borns we might dry 3 loads a week.

But the house is a work in progress. The curtains blow on a windy day.

Yeah 75KW per day is massive. Throw whatever money you have left in solar.

I suspect insulation would make a bigger difference than solar.

You can get a hot water tank insulation blanket that should help a little bit.

We use a califont gas hot water heater. So it's on demand, no storage tank.

Kia ora from Hawke's Bay.

"Smart developers are leaving" - or working for overseas employers. This seems to be quite common. Too bad NZ is a small market which I feel make many jobs not that interesting.

You are probably right but this is about NZ. I can also attest to it being really difficult to find good hires in Australia at the moment. We have what you might call a grass roots tech scene, not heaps of startup activity, most work is in established businesses or new but bootstrapped going concerns. Sydney and Melb might have a bit more startup activity.

Wages here are good for the area, but not SV level good, and I think that makes it slightly less attractive but also less inflammatory. More sustainable as wages are pegged to real dollars in and out of a business.

Honest question: do you have resources or materials that you could refer me to so that I could learn more about how this part of the pr/publishing industry works?

I don’t doubt you, and it sounds like one of those “seedy underbelly of the industry” kinds of things that I’d be interested in knowing more about.

Ryan Holiday’s “trust me I’m lying” may reveal the corporate underbelly you are curious about.

I have at least one LinkedIn connection at nearly every company for which I'd like to work / for which I've been tracking open roles. In the past, getting a referral would almost guarantee a recruiter screen (vs just applying online).

Now, I get cold-rejected via automated email, even with a personal referral from someone I worked with directly, about 85% of the time.

I'm seeing 600+ applicants for a Bay Area FAANG+ EM role listed on LinkedIn, 2 weeks after posting the JD. That doesn't include those that applied directly on the company's career page...

Job market rn is wack, yo.

edit: specifically front-line EM roles managing ICs

Don’t conflate EM and IC prospects, EM are going to be considerably worse for the immediate future as companies try to slim up on middle management

The job market many of you all are describing seems to have been standard for new grads for the last few years

Correct, specifically front-line EM roles. I added clarification.

Not quite sure what you mean here. "Front-line EM" is still in much worse shape than ICs. While you may argue that front-line EM is not technically "middle" management, I think a lot of companies realize they can be much leaner at pretty much all levels of engineering management - e.g. have a "tech lead" or similar role do much of the work that was previously under an engineering manager.

If you're not willing/can't write and ship code, companies are taking a much harder look at those roles.

I think of front-line managers (of ICs) as part of "middle management" (anything "in the middle" between ICs and executives) but I can see how some might think of middle management as managers of managers. Anyway, that's why I added the clarification.

To your point, yeah, I'm also seeing a lot more "hands on" call outs in JDs for EMs, if not writing code, at least doing code reviews.

> IT employers

Idk what EM means, but IT is looking for admins. Try Kansas.

Engineering manager.

I suspect in the US there has been a shock effect of interest rates causing the big source of money for high tech salaries to fall off a cliff. Everywhere else VC is not as much of a big thing. You typically work for a bootstrapped company (all of mine have been, or taken their first investments at the $1bn valuation level) or a large bank or public sector job. These sorts of jobs are not impacted. You need a global crisis type recession like 2001 or 2008 to cause this.

You are slashing $80k. Over here (rest of the world, $80k is the TC typically, and often much less!)

This is going to be bad for SF real estate I suspect. People will leave to adjust to their new salaries.

$180k -> $100k -> ??. Not FAANG level salary from the outset, not going to be able to reach a comfortable retirement at this rate while retaining my financial independence.

Ok ouch that is a drastic cut, and must be hard to deal with if you have set up your life based on $180k income.

Just for comparison, $180k would be out of range for anyone outside the US, unless in High Frequency Trading, managing a team of > 200 people, or working for a hot AI startup, Crypto or similar. It is quiet exceptional.

I say this as someone who is, compared to East Europe, Indonesia, Cuba, India, etc, earning a high salary. Same thing could happen to me quite easily if I am out of a job and looking again. It is scary.

$180k? I never worked FAANG, but my understanding is the jobs were in the $250k+ range. I have a sister in law that works for oracle cloud computing and pulls in $350k.

Most tech jobs are not FAANG or similarly massive, super profitable goliaths. It's something we should all remember all the time. Most tech workers are second rate staff working for [name any big company that is not primarily a tech company].

Examples on the far end of the extremes only serve to skew our perspectives, unless we remind ourselves these are the extremes, not the norm.

It’s also out of range for most people outside of SV. There are definitely jobs paying $180k where I am (Southeast US), but they aren’t anywhere near entry-level and also aren’t abundant.

> Just for comparison, $180k would be out of range for anyone outside the US

I don't think it's too far off the mark for Australia. Mind you, that's gross. US$180 is about AU$280k. Of that, you'd pay around AU$100k in income tax (and then there's a 10% sales tax).

The implicit problem here is that US tech salaries have been far higher than anywhere else in the world for the past decade. You had kids graduating and starting their first job with zero professional experience who were getting TC that was a multiple of what seniors with a decade of professional experience would earn in places like Europe or Australasia. Most of the world was never able to get a job as an IC doing development and expect to retire comfortably and turn into an angel investor before their 40th birthday.

That was always going to make the US less competitive once the economic foundations that supported those very high compensation levels broke. Unfortunately for those in the industry in the US that probably means there will be a sharp contraction in both the size of the market and the TC being offered. Those affected have my sympathy but pragmatically they also need to realise that what they're going to have to get used to for the next few years is probably still (slightly) better than what everyone else in the world doing the same jobs with the same skills and in some cases with a similar cost of living has had available all along.

U.S. doctors’ salaries have been higher than anywhere else in the world for the last 5+ decades.

It all depends how effectively you can lobby for your rights & prevent foreign competition (and control the pipeline of new entrants / gatekeep / keep your industry profitable)

It doesn't necessarily tell us much to make comparisons across industries like that though. US doctors' salaries are paid to people who literally save lives. US tech workers' salaries are often paid to people who are working at a big firm with big past investment that found its golden goose a long time ago and has business people who have successfully defended its moat since. These are very different situations in terms of bargaining power for both personal compensation and larger scale effects like unionisation and regulatory capture.

But we are not far now from Github being all you need to manage a global dev project. There is no “coders without borders” as there are no real borders to begin with. The only sticky things are legal issues / culture / time zones.

Bad and good comparison. The bad part: unlike tech, a doctor consultation is really hard to transfer across border. The good part: the US is not a destination for doctors’ (not medical) exports. If we consider medical tourism as doctors exporting their expertise. In this case, the industry has failed to attract this additional flow and actually lost some (since many Americans will go outside of the US to seek medical professionals). All of this for the profit of some doctor’s establishment.

>(since many Americans will go outside of the US to seek medical professionals)

No, they won't. They will go to Mexican border cities for a routine dental treatment. Nothing more serious than that.

Certainly no equivalent of what various Canadian politicians have received over the years in trekking to the US, such as Chretien's secret trips to the Mayo Clinic while PM. <https://web.archive.org/web/20160624132234/http://www.ezrale...>

well in CA at least, we have a situation with housing that grew to be stupidly expensive. So $180k is really not very much. So if companies want to keep people here, they would have to pay up.

Money is a claim on energy, materials, and/or labor. Given that none of these are growing more abundant (except perhaps labor, depending how hard you squint), it may not make sense to plan for the same retirement prospects as the currently retired generation. This is neither fair nor easy to accept but internalizing it now may save some pain later.

This is not to say one should accept injustice handed down from on high. There are some who will try to exploit contraction for their own short-term benefit at everyone else's expense. Be wary, and be prepared.

My current plan is to live with my parents as long as I need to to at least get out of debt, hopefully that doesn't take more than a year but yes you're not wrong. Of course that raises another question of who is going to accept a 70 year old cloud admin/devops engineer/whatever-it-is-in-40-years on their team when the time comes but hey, you never know.

> neither fair nor easy to accept but internalizing it now may save some pain later.

that's a bit of a defeatist attitude though.

I expect a better retirement than the current generation of retirees right now, and i expect to achieve that by purchasing as many assets as possible, while earning as much as possible, before i retire. Of course, one does not know what the future holds - so the method i am using may turn out fruitless.

> Given that none of these are growing more abundant (except perhaps labor, depending how hard you squint)

While that sounds obvious, it’s not necessarily true. Empirically the real price of many commodities has come down, even in the face of growing population.

https://www.aier.org/article/review-of-superabundance-by-mar...

> This is going to be bad for SF real estate I suspect. People will leave to adjust to their new salaries.

Everyone disagrees with me, but I believe we're already seeing it. I moved down to the Los Angeles area after college, as I took a job down here. The houses here that used to rent for $3000 10 years ago currently rent for $5000+. Meanwhile in the Bay Area, I can still find a number of comparable houses for $4000 or less. Granted, those are more like - outer sunset, fremont, concord, etc...

But those are still pretty nice areas!

If I moved right now I'd have to pay $1000/mo more in rent - at least. Probably more. The housing market in SoCal is basically stuck because nobody can afford to move, and so nobody's moving unless they have to lol. And that drove the prices up.

As far as I can tell, the rent market is still fairly healthy in the Bay. So the prices haven't escalated quite the same.

Same, there have been a few positions I've applied to with a 100% match for the needed qualifications and even "nice to have"s, with basically a 0% response rate. At a point where I'm happy if they even bother to shoot a "we've had some many great candidates, no thanks!" email.

Compare to a ~year ago when I was easily making in the low single digit (1/N) millions.

Damn interest rates, I tell myself.

Luckily I saved enough in bigtech to give me a few solid years of runway for working on things myself. Wouldn't want to have a family right now, that's for sure.

Lately it's been seeming my best career option is to enlist in the armed forces. They seem to be the only ones with an actual "skills shortage" around.

"Same, there have been a few positions I've applied to with a 100% match for the needed qualifications and even "nice to have"s, with basically a 0% response rate. At a point where I'm happy if they even bother to shoot a "we've had some many great candidates, no thanks!" email. "

Feels like 2003. Back then I went from getting an interview whenever I wanted to not getting any response for almost a year.

You were making the in the low single digit millions and are now considering the military?

You could have saved in one year what you’d make in 10 years in the military.

He meant making in the medium hundreds of thousands : 1/N millions, where N is low. I have never heard anyone describe income this perversely

I thought maybe that’s what that meant but then dismissed it because I thought that’s just too odd to consider.

We're all making high quadruple digit (1/N) billions here.

still doesn't discount the 1/N drop in pay to go into the military.

I don't really care about pay as I've said I saved a lot already. Just looking to do something Good (USCG, for instance).

I assumed this to mean "around 1". But really, why be coy in a scenario like this? Just say the damn number... it's not going to change anything.

There's no single number. Ranges from 1/4MM to 1/2MM depending on when/how you account stock grants, 401k matching, ESPP, etc.

If it doesn't change anything why make a big deal about it?

>> wouldn’t want to have a family right now…

People had families during economic downturns, wars and famines. It is also a long term commitment so there are going to be bad times no matter when you decide to take the plunge.

Don't see the implied disconnect between people being in bad situations in the past and me not wanting to be in one now.

That said, I would like a family. Preferable I'd have some way to provide first though.

Good thing housing prices have at least come down with these high interest rates!

Sorry to hear you're struggling. Anecdotally, this hasn't been my or my friends experiences, but none of us are dev ops, we're all senior backend devs (mix of C# and Node) - all located in the U.S.

I wish we could get a more granular breakdown on demand in the tech world. There's a vast difference in skills, requirements and pay scale for strict DevOps positions versus more traditional software developer roles.

I. The tech world we need:

Less AI hype

Less HR personnel

Less restrictions on where tech work may be performed

Better hours for on call staff

Less spending on fancy HQ offices (from an aesthetic)

Hot-desks

Lower executive pay

Better transparency in business costs which companies hide in their compensation considerations based on their money

Etc etc etc

Sounds good to me. Now we just need someone to pay for it...

I also do mostly backend, mostly C#. I’m curious what kind of companies and projects you and your friends work on if you’re willing to share. Don’t need to name names or anything, I’m not fishing for a referral. I’ve just been in the same niche market for a long time and I’m curious what else is out there.

https://layoffs.fyi about as granular as it's going to get unfortunately and that is overly broad, but we can at least see it's been happening for mid 2022-2023 so far and it's not just me.

The idea that programmers should make $200k or $300k or $400k is irrational and unsustainable, only sustained for the time being by a tiny number of massive, hyper-profitable companies and an endless stream of easy venture capital cash that allows some startups to spend their money like complete idiots. We all know that most tech workers make less than $200k as base salary, just as we know that all skilled professionals typically make less than $200k. If you took an $80k paycut and are still living a comfortable life, consider yourself lucky to have collected as much cash as you did in the previous job and maybe accept that rational, sustainable salaries are the future for most tech workers.

Programmers should make what the market will offer, I'm not sure why you think otherwise. If there's easy money floating around on dumb projects, good on labor for capturing as much of that as possible, instead of it going towards another yacht.

I was explicitly describing distortions in the market that we should not assume are perpetual.

Citizenship used to mean that you had privileged access to your birth country's job market.

Slashing 80K from what baseline? 160k dropping to 80k is very different from 500k dropping to 420k.

Yeah the growth story hasn’t come back so most places aren’t aggressively hiring to meet future demand right now. We’re sort of in a consolidation phase right now. Use this time to improve your skills so when we begin to shift back into growth you’ll be ahead of the curve.

Learning TypeScript, Pulumi, and Argo Rollouts and such and reading every scifi book I can get my hands on while waiting. Moved back in with the parents so going homeless isn't an issue it's just extremely embarrassing given I had 10 years of career and financial independence before this. Ugh.

Yeah good call catching up on things you enjoy line reading. You’ve got skills and a desire to keep them up. You’ll be fine.

> Yeah the growth story hasn’t come back so most places aren’t aggressively hiring...

Dumb money (and unimaginative executives) waits for someone else to tell a "story" in order to act. Smart companies should be hiring like crazy, sucking up all the great talent these dummy companies are shedding. Tech companies, more than at any time I can remember, seem to have no ideas--they're just watching their competitors and aping whatever they are doing. Competitors are laying off? We're laying off! Competitors are returning to the office? We are returning to the office! Competitors are getting into AI? We are getting into AI. Everyone is chasing each other's tail and sniffing each other's farts and there isn't even a spark of creativity left.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34163233

7 months ago you got a new gig in two weeks and making bank. Now you're unemployed and can't find a single job?

Based on their post history[1], I would wager the poster’s job prospects have dried up due to their own circumstances rather than the state of the devops hiring market. They also claimed to be job hopping every six months during the pandemic.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116238

Entirely possible, I have been trying to find what the middle ground is. I have trouble believing my whole career is suddenly over because of a few short term stints during this pandemic.

Edit: https://layoffs.fyi shows 2023 has been fairly rough as well as late 2022 for confirmation. My troubles started around early 2020 so something to consider. 5 years or so of steady employment and gainful experience before that.

My employment history has been a mess of 6 month gigs since the start of the pandemic. I'd say it was just me due to additional circumstances but I did a poll of my LI network to see if anyone else was feeling it, most everyone said they were. Surprised some on HN aren't but these are additional data points to consider.

My compensation has been the same for the last 3 years... But the stock price and inflation mean that I'm making 25% less in real terms.

> Having to slash like $80k on my previous salary prospects

Reading in between the lines, these were mostly just prospects and they were also 2021 numbers which were aberrations.

You regularly do multiple interviews a week?

Did. Did multiple interviews per weeek. Not these days.

While actively looking to move? Or just a background level of interviews per week all year?

But regularly? How often were you hopping jobs?

Presumably this was while job hunting.

It got pretty bad at the height of the pandemic in 2021-2022 or so with job switches every something like 6 months due to mental health issues and the pandemic causing the instability that it has. My employment history was stable before the pandemic happened, HM's and recruiters should be able to understand the context of the pandemic at a minimum (most don't).

I've talked with a few people actively interviewing the past couple months, including myself, and fairly consistently people are passing hiring bar, having done the entire battery of interviewing and the company wanting to hire, but there not being any job which to hire them into. 'wait til next quarter maybe more headcount will free up'

What companies are spending time doing full rounds of interviews without a open role available these days?

Keep in mind that what you are experiencing is related to the compensation change you get when changing jobs. The article isn't completely clear on this, but I sounds like they are talking about the salary for all jobs, including people staying in existing jobs. That one changes much more slowly, especially when people don't change jobs.

Also I expect to see minor cuts to compensation for existing jobs to first come in the form of slashing of bonuses, yearly raises and promotions. For various, mostly social, reasons employers are reluctant to cut the nominal salary of existing employees, even more so than they seem reluctant to fire people.

Since the article brought up NZ, and so we are already talking about 'weird' job markets: here in Singapore the market is also supposed to be down, but I'm still getting pitched good jobs left and right by recruiters for my particular speciality.

Good heavens I'm feeling this. With my last few employers being acquired by private equity or having layoffs my resume doesn't scream, "Will grow in the role," anymore... and it didn't have the chance to do so.

Things are rough out there for sure.

Honestly I’m not seeing much point in even living nowadays with prospects so bad. I’ll give it like maybe another month or two but after that I’m out. The amount of suffering being laid off has caused me in my life is just not worth it.

Hey man, that’s never worth it. Please don’t. There are so many levers you can pull to get to a better place and you might just not be seeing that clearly now.

This has been my experience too. My son is starting college and was planning on studying software development. I’ve started encouraging him to look at other majors or consider the trades instead. It doesn’t feel like tech is going to be a good career path going forward.

I think that's probably because "tech" was never a career path. Just think about the word itself, what does it even really mean? I suppose most people would answer with something about making new technology, but then you've really got your work cut out for you, because damn near any company can make that sort of claim.

In my view, tech just means IT but you've got a ping pong table at work and can wear jeans. IT isn't going anywhere and can be a good career path still, but the wild salary increases were clearly driven by speculation, and there was absolutely a lot of hiring of less than qualified people going on, which will probably take another year or two to wash out.

If it were my son, I would tell him to do what he likes, and if that's computer stuff then that is still a better than average career path. That being said, I'd make sure they really understand that what they are really probably getting into is IT, i.e. its highly unlikely he will end up working at a startup that is going to make it big and change the world with some hot new invention. The reality is, you are probably going to be working at a bank or something at some point, and that's okay if you didn't get your expectations way out of wack.

People are doing short certifications for security and immediately earning more than people who racked up $100K debts over 4 year computer science degrees. Everything you need to work in IT (except actual science and engineering roles) can be learned through the Internet and experience, for free. There's no value in a university debt for such.

Except, of course, the companies like my own still require a 4 year degree to get hired. It doesn't matter what the degree is in, you just need to have one. I've asked HR if we can get rid of the requirement and have been told no. Sigh.

Do the HR people have 4 year degrees?

Absolutely. It is required for all full time employees.

“Tech” is very broad but it’s still a field where the impact of a single individual’s effort scales disproportionately, because for the most part it’s all 1s and 0s over a wire. That’s fundamentally why tech salaries are high imo.

You might be suffering from too much experience for DevOps? I am in the market for devops roles in SF and I’ve had about 2 interviews a week for roles from devops, SRE, and product engineering. I’m at 3 yoe

How's the contract scene?

There's a difference between hiring staff and getting a job done. Most companies choose one or the other, but they're peanut butter and chocolate!

IME consulting is where you can really win in a market like this. Especially moonlighting. If you can find an extra 10 hours per week reliably to work on something you can easily supplement your income by $60k or more. It’s not guaranteed to be interesting work, but there’s no shortage of people just trying to get a new thing over the finish line or an keep an old thing afloat for a bit longer. It’s a good value for the company because they don’t have to hire a “whole” developer, and it’s easier for especially smaller organizations to bucket all your hours into either CapEx or OpEx based on the project.

Do these opportunities come from your existing network?

Definitely. I’ve been working in the same general region building software for 15 years, so I have a lot of contacts.

Moonlighters getting locked out, from what I've heard.

Yeah, the article is ridiculous. In the past 15 years I've never seen it this bad for me or anyone else I know.

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