Tech jobs market normalizing as July unemployment dips | Hacker News Reader

Tech jobs market normalizing as July unemployment dips

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58 pointssizzle57 comments

I would hardly call this normalizing.

> Finding the IT workers they need to meet hiring goals or complete projects is a struggle for more than two-thirds of executives

This should tell you everything you need to know about the market. Jobs are being added, but the quality of jobs has deteriorated. If 1000 people were laid off from Google and 1000 jobs opened up for contract roles in consultancies that pay below market wages, I would not call that normalizing.

Anecdotally, it is still very hard to find a reasonable paying job. I’m not talking Google/Facebook salaries, I’m talking engineering at Albertsons salaries.

Seconded. Plus what is up with recruiting culture lately? The ghosting is worse than online dating at this point.

There was a time I was annoyed at the canned rejection emails but I'll be damned if I even get a one word "no" these days.

> The ghosting is worse than online dating at this point.

Honestly, when I do several rounds and travel 2 hours to your stupid office, I’d hope I’d at least get a fucking yes/no.

Ask for a timeframe for the hiring decision and if they don’t respond by then, assume it means no. No use working for someone who will string you along anyway because they probably do that will all of their work.

Yeah I hate it. I do think folks should name names for companies like this. Glassdoor (ironically) did this to me, and they were the ones to reach out first.

It's laziness.

Recruiter head count got whacked. I hear back but weeks later. Summer vacations add lag time.

* HR turnover -- they want to be remote, too, and market forces have been impacting them as much as any other field.

* market research -- at a previous gig (F500 multi) our HR team would periodically put out fake listings to gauge the market, see what is available, and as part of the Taleo application, asked about salary range. I'd bet my hat that they're taking the "temperature" of developers to see what is out there and what they'll ask for. I filled out a couple of those job adverts for "generic VMware Admin" for HR.

* high volume -- lots of layoffs and everyone wants to be a remote STEM worker. no time for interaction, no reason to reply, and no shortage of punters.

Part of the problem is that tech salaries jumped enormously in 2021/early 2022.

Settling back to something more reasonable is now a pay cut.

Something reasonable needs to factor in the waves of inflation that have also occurred. TC was definitely over inflation at one point but in many places I suspect people are operating at a pay cut still.

The never ending war on labor rates continues.

> needs to factor in the waves of inflation

Yes, I would like that to be true, but inflation historically can and does happen independently of wage growth.

that's called "making you poorer" and is not something to defend or rationalize

Certainly. Inflation is terrible and yet rationalized at every turn by economists.

> I’m talking engineering at Albertsons salaries.

Anyone from Blind can confirm that a tech job at Albertsons is going to be the peak of anyone's career.

Are the engineers allowed to sit at all or are they written up if they do?

Yeah, I've been seeing tech contracting jobs paying in the $60 to $70/hour range that are very similar to what I was doing last year making $100+/hour.

You don't read Blind, do you? Albertsons is highly respected in that community.

Yeah here in LA its especially bad with the hollywood strikes competition for work has never been more intense.

I’m having trouble reconciling this with several threads over the last few days lamenting how hard it is to get interviews right now. Different position levels? Different sectors within tech? Not sure what’s going on.

I asked the HN crowd's perspective just over a week ago [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111560

I guess we can ask again. HN readers, what's it like for you right now trying to find a job?

Just wanted to point out that the way you presented the question, and the forum you presented it in, made it more likely that you would hear from people that agreed with you. Generally, if people don't have a problem with something, they just don't bother chiming in. If they're already concerned, they're more likely to respond. So you may not be getting a representative sample of the actual opinions that people hold on the issue.

Do you have a suggestion for a more neutral way to ask this question to avoid bias?

You could have simply asked something like, "What are peoples opinions on the job market?"

> My conclusion, so far, is unless you've got strong connections it's hard right now to find a job.

By including this take, you may have primed people to respond with a similar opinion.

But actually I think it might be almost impossible to eliminate the bias. You're very likely to hear back from people who are job searching. And job searching is an inherently stressful activity that breeds a negative state of mind. So you're very likely to hear back from people who think the situation is bad.

@davesque, I guess I cant reply directly to you.

I've updated my question so it's more neutral. Thanks for the suggestion

@frfl No problem. Thanks for being receptive to my observation.

Intern I just hired as a junior compiler dev said he got silence from all applications.

Guy had three prior internships, and great GPA from a top school.

It was a really hard to advocate for his hire because we could get somebody with ten years of experience. And this is even with my policy of ignoring anybody from Google.

Why ignore Google peeps? Cuz of salary expectations? Or cuz they suck?

If you do a search for "google"/"amazon"/"faang" on the link below, you find some relevant discussions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111256

For me its because they sucked: they had come to depend on a large Google ecosystem and were disruptively process oriented, occasionally "this is how we do it at Google." The expensive thing was also annoying, although we do have ICs making $300k.

For director level staffing and people management Google guys were too abrasive, and didn't have their hands in the code - but that is a different story.

But anyways can wax poetically about why to avoid folks from Google for days...

Fuck. I need to quit

Layoffs have disproportionately affected high tech, VC-funded companies, which (...obviously, given its sponsor...) dominate the HN base.

Walmart, Nike, Ford, etc have just as many IT workers as before.

I'd hardly call it normalizing. The acceleration of layoffs has decreased, nearing a zero-crossing, but we've still got 100,000s of unemployed engineers floating around in the market.

BLS says tech sector unemployment is down to 1.8%. Given the size of the tech sector there can’t be hundreds of thousands of unemployed software engineers.

which market? where?

layoffs.fyi suggests 964 tech companies w/ layoffs ∙ 231349 employees laid off in 2023, and if you look at the actual site, a whole freakin lot of them are in different countries. additionally they don't make a distinction between DEI and STEM workers, just layoffs.

there may be 100k actual programmers -- IT staff, Product Managers, DEI, etc. -- but 50% of them are in India, London, Israel, or Croatia, and most of them were never going to interview for jobs outside of their country.

We published the Levels.fyi 2023 mid-year compensation report earlier: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/2023-mid-year-report.html

While volume of hiring may have been lower overall so far this year, median compensation has generally remained steady or increased in the first half of 2023 relative to the last half of 2022 for most roles. In particular, the median for software engineer compensation stayed the same, while roles such as software engineering management saw a 5% increase in overall pay.

Augmented reality was quite in-demand so far in 2023. AI engineers have also seen elevated compensation compared to their engineer counterparts, which we analyze on our post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/ai-engineer-compensation.html

being just a regular IT person with 15+years experience and getting paid fairly well for what the local market is, whats the chance of a normal person working at a place that pays $700,000 as a SWE? How do you even approach that? Does someone mid career have a chance to pivot?

Almost nowhere pays $700k for a SWE. These numbers come from stock grants or similar financial instruments; that money gets realized eventually, but it's not guaranteed in the same way that a fortnightly bank deposit is.

If we are discussing the levels.fyi pay report, then they are only including the numbers you get in a single year, you are incorrect. $700k is obviously top top band, but this is referring to annual pay.

Yes stock grants is a big part of it but I don't think they are counting unvested stocks. It's your gross income on w-2.

Ok 356k then?

Stock grants are typically vested quarterly, sometimes after an initial waiting period of 1-2 years. RSUs are just cash, I don’t see how they would not be considered being paid. They certainly show up on my W2.

I didn’t say they aren’t considered being paid; I said that they’re speculative instruments in a way that a paycheck isn’t.

In other words: 700k is 700k when realized, but there’s no particular guarantee that so-and-so many units of stock are worth that much; it depends on the market. Comparing TC as if 700k is guaranteed is misleading.

You could also get fired even with salary income.

Amazon in particular has RSUs 80% vesting only in the 3rd and 4th years resulting in these spectacular TCs.

To answer your question on how to make lots of money mid-career, think about how you're scaling yourself. Are you an IT person supporting a 20-100 person team at a small company? You gotta learn how to scale your time and effort by impacting more than that. You'll have to impact more than 2 million people to get to 700k.

I went from making barely $100k to a senior engineer at a FAANG simply by passing the interviews. No special background, I worked at the same function at a 50 person local SEO marketing company before that. I did take 1 year off to "find myself" and do some hobby projects that helped catch recruiting attention - nothing anyone would have ever seen here, but enough materiel to discuss in an interview

Didn't get up to $700k -- that's L7/Director territory (hard to reach) -- but it's definitely possible to get into the $300-400k range just by being a run of the mill engineer at big tech.

Looking at the number of open jobs on https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

It was flat since March '23 and had a slight uptick in July

It will take until 2024 for the job market to recover. The ARM IPO will be the first bell weather this year to gauge confidence in the tech sector.

There are many other factors that could cause the ARM IPO to do poorly other than the tech sector's health. See: https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1693995783715278957

Take with a grain of salt of course given Chamath's public performance history.

I highly doubt it. I hope I'm wrong but there were far too many companies that raised 100s of millions with no kind of business model during the 2021 bubble. Those companies would have to go out of business before the market can go back to exuberance again. As an example this company https://www.gather.town/ has raised $76 million.

lol, do they have virtual bathrooms?

The potential ripple effect is too big to ignore for much longer. 100,000 engineers is tip of ice berg when it comes to number of people feeling the squeeze.

Social media commentary has been trending towards outright hostility towards the rich and politicians, not just in the usual discourse hellholes like Reddit and Xitter, but even here (I have access to dashboards that model and weight discourse; technically proprietary though so I can’t divulge too much.)

Too many people with too much time on their hands, with little expectation of help from the system will foster sentiment it is time replace the system. I don’t disagree but think it should be handled intentionally, not waved off until last minute like we did with covid and climate change.

In the US there are only 1 million LEO but an order of magnitude more of people who stand to lose it all if austerity for the proles goes on too long.

Ok i'll concede that a few people will get modest raises through protests and strikes but thats just after years of stagnent wages and being cheated. But please, you've been looking at your dashboards for too long. This country is too fat and too scared of their government to do anything. Especially upper middle class SWE in between jobs. They probably just vote in Trump again as a form of "revenge" completely forgetting that he did squat for the regular person last time. Thats the highest level of uprising you can come to expect in this country.

The fact that so much capital is fleeing everywhere else into the US shows that the people at the top have gotten everything locked down here. Nothing major is really coming. The progressive left is effectively dead, the far right is gasping its last breath. Where is this rebellion going to come from?

Some dumb shit like the murder of an Archduke.

It won’t be an organized revolution but single unknowable moment which triggers a bunch of people say “fuck this shit”.

Because you’re right; traditional political groups are fading away as people realize everybody is being boned.

The people in charge today have things locked up. Generational churn is an active process. New leadership may be intentionally worse or unintentionally inept.

It’s like trying to predict the next pandemic, not so much a market crash. Markets are social systems and can be sorted socially. Moments that trigger sudden social unrest are more like pandemics; less frequent, trying to predict them involves many more variables.

We've had tons of layoffs in the past year, I don't think we'll see the effects of them until next year.

Let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.

This article is about hatched chicks

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