Can the market absorb this? If feels like it’s already saturated plus we have the steady stream of new grads. I do not envy anyone who has to look for a job right now
The way it plays out between our engineering management and hr is that we are hiring people who would have been evaluated at the top end of whatever level N we filtered on at the bottom of the N+1 level.
We obviously aren’t getting the people who did things like invent completely new technologies but we’re are grabbing a ton of people for seats we needed filled anyway, at a higher skill level than expected
Or does your company have generic openings, and you’re saying that people are now more comfortable with offers a lower level than they’d qualify for? (which puts them at the top of level N vs bottom of N+1).
In either case, it sounds very much like an employers market right now. The only exceptions would likely be individuals in high demand roles (like AI/ML).
1. Software engineers and others with specific technical skills are still in high demand. During the boom years, many companies simply couldn't afford the tech talent they wanted/needed because there was so much competition. However, I think it's safe to say some folks who got laid off from FAANGs will literally never make those total comp numbers again.
2. The people I see really struggling are more in the "tech adjacent" roles: think HR, recruiting, some product managers, lots of non-tech marketing folks like social media managers, roles like "agile coaches", etc. In some cases I've seen people completely leave tech because they just couldn't find work.
3. Lots of demand for good salespeople. Good salespeople are kind of always in demand, though.
But then again, I guess we're back to "I'm an engineer, all these non-technical people are non-value-add because I can engineer everything." Even when some of them are, actually, technical themselves and just chose another path to use their skills.
I've met some excellent ones that actually do what you claim as their purpose. But vast majority add zero value and many negative value.
But I admit it's very coupled with companies' cultures.
FWIW, in many of those "technically adjacent" roles I mentioned, I've found that good ones can be worth their weight in gold, where "good" is usually defined as having a very strong attention to detail. Unfortunately, I've found a large number of folks in those roles are not good and that there are "more places to hide" in those roles than strictly technical ones.
For example, I think that stellar product managers are invaluable, and I also think that since product manager can span so many functions it's probably the hardest role there is in tech. But I've been extremely frustrated, as an engineer, with many, many product managers who lack an attention to detail of how their own product works, and see themselves more as meeting-scheduler and jira-ticket-updater.
So I don't mean to denigrate those professions, but I have found that, compared to software engineers, that bad ones seem to be able to stick around longer. With software engineers, if you can't code it becomes quickly apparent and these folks tend to be forced out or leave pretty fast on their own volition (of course, good coders can have a host of other problems...) But with non-technical/less-technical roles I've found that there is more "chaff per wheat", so to speak.
The other early-career people I know are having trouble as well.
There's a lot of luck involved in getting hired right now, even for high performers. There are a lot of other high performers competing for the same jobs.
I know some people who were laid off and found jobs in a few weeks, several others who were on the market for many months, and there was not a significant skill-based correlation.
Given how little the tech giants seems to suffer from their layoffs, there's a pretty good chance that they where massively over-hiring for years, actively hurting other companies and inflating salaries in some areas of the country.
If I was an investor in Meta or Amazon, I'd start question if the company is actually well managed, when they apparently have had hundreds, if not thousands of people on payroll that isn't actually required to run the business.