What SWE job hunting is like right now

There is a lot in your comment to unpack, so I hope this is helpful:

1. Yes, there is an industry-wide downturn in tech. There was just massive over-hiring during the pandemic, and then a huge number of layoffs, which means there are tons of people on the market. Many people have been reporting a strong shift in mentality, lead times, etc. in the tech job market.

2. There is, however, still a lot of demand for tech workers, even if still less than the ZIRP years. Many companies and institutions simply couldn't compete with high paying FAANGs and startups for tech talent, but their need to tech work didn't go away. So in places like government, consumer-focused companies, non-profits, etc. are still hiring. Salaries are often considerably lower than pure tech companies.

3. Despite the huge number of remote jobs, location still matters, primarily because relationships still matter, and those are easier to build face-to-face. This is not unique to tech. If you want to make it big in the fashion industry, there are maybe 4 -ish cities worldwide where you should live. Movie-making, pretty obvious. So while tech is just an overall much, much larger industry, it's not surprising you're disillusioned by St. Louis.

You say that you're a contractor. What does this mean exactly? I.e. are you a contractor by choice, or would you prefer a full time job? How do you normally find jobs (is there a recruiter you usually work with, do you do your own searching, get jobs from past contacts, etc.)? The answer to these questions is important when it comes to optimizing your job search.

As a hiring manager for a relatively small company, a major problem is misaligned salary expectations.

Real world example: I recently interviewed an engineer hit by layoffs at Shopify/UPS. The candidate had 4 years of total work experience, and was making $175k in the role that she was let go from, and they won’t accept anything less when looking for a new role. With 4 years of total experience in the workforce.

I would have loved to hire them at $120-140k, but for $175k I can easily find people with 5x more years of experience.

It’s a tough pill to swallow but it is possible to get offers, but they might not be at the salary levels from 2-3 years ago.

Edit: Above anecdote is for 100% remote in US. Full stack node/react/mongo.

Edit 2: Another anecdote to share. The recruiter our company works with (who sources all our candidates) used to only work on a 25% commission of first year salary. About a year ago we were able to negotiate that down to 20%. And a couple months ago we negotiated it down to $90/hr with 0% commission (which comes to roughly 10% or less of first year salary on average). The market for engaging recruiters is a good proxy for the overall supply/demand of the job market.

4 years experience at 140k is an insult IMHO. You claim you can easily find ppl w 5+ years experience, but I find that claim dubious. What you're willing to pay and what value we add seem to be vastly different.

I can’t argue with your viewpoint.

All I can say is there are a lot of people with 10-15 yrs experience who will happily accept $140-150k with 10+ yrs experience in the US remote market (more specifically full stack node/react)

I will change my opinion if you can provide evidence beyond anecdotes. Honestly, it helpful information if it's backed up my facts.

I think it's unrealistic for someone to post "evidence" in this case. Not worth the risk of doxing/etc. Think all we can do is take people at their word, or explore the market ourselves and get data from our own experiences.

> I will change my opinion if you can provide evidence beyond anecdotes.

It is noteworthy that you did not provide any.

Adding to the anecdotes: Plenty of people in my company with 5+ years of experience make less than $150K.

Go to salary.com and look for software engineering salaries in most major cities.

You don’t even have to do that. Go to levels.fyi and look at the compensation for places like Delta, Walmart or one of the insurance companies

Wow that's quite the high and mighty response. I have about 10 years experience across multiple domains and can program across a dozen languages. You know what my salary sits around 150k.

You're attitude reflects part of the problem. There are a bunch of still relatively new people or especially boot camp grads that were sold on the always unrealistic expectation of making $150k right out of the gate. That was always a bubble that wasn't sustainable, but now a bunch of tech workers feel entitled to it rather than being willing to adjust to reality and be grateful for the fact that most of us can make over $100k relatively quickly. Compared to most other jobs in the US tech is still one of the best places to get into, I have a friend who has her master's degree and has been teaching for close to 15 years who is estatic about recently getting a raise to $75k. I have another friend that works as a project and procurement manager in the construction field and after 4 years and with a degree he was still making < $80k.

When all that is considered some new "full stack developer" (which really means "I can do JS so I can do full stack if you're backend is mongo your app server is Node and your fronted is React, no I can't do jQuery that was never covered in our 2 weeks on frontend") acting insulted at $140k sounds spoiled, whiney and entitled.

Thank you.

The market is the market, for better or worse. I do think SWE are overvalued socially/monetarily, but I don't see why you're so emotional over someone saying they deserve what they can get. Or if they make more than you if they can swing it.

A lot of people are actually anti-worker but don't realize it explicitly as such; it's also the "Crab effect" (pull down those trying to escape the pot).

Accusing someone you disagree with of being “so emotional” is some bottom-of-the-barrel kindergarten crap.

These discussions are always the same, two sides of a bi-modal distribution talking past each other.

There is not just one “tech” industry that hire software engineers.

Right, and the point of this whole thread is that one end of that bimodal distribution just got a lot smaller than it was 3 years ago, while the other end sits where it always has. There are a lot of people who the FAANG end of the spectrum doesn't have room for anymore who are disappointed to find themselves back on the more sustainable modality.

I agree a lot of people got pulled over into the right hand side during the weird boom and now things are adjusting. But neither side is more "sustainable" than the other (just some individuals expectations). The work is different, the skills are different, the expectations are different. FAANG are not wrong to pay what they pay.

This whole thread serves as evidence that the upper modality wasn't sustainable at the levels it was operating at, while the lower modality is still going relatively strong. That strongly suggests that one is more sustainable than the other.

FAANG employees like to tell themselves that their salaries are/were well deserved and not merely the result of a bubble, but a lot of them are finding out the hard way that that isn't the case.

There were a lot of these jobs even pre covid. Google had like 40k engineers.

And there are 2.7 million software engineers in the US.

I never said anything about COVID—the software bubble I'm talking about started in the early 2010s.

I mean, your response basically proves the point of the comment you are responding to.

First, salaries are still local, so 140k may be an "insult" in some places, but not in others.

But more importantly, this is the market at work. If the recruiter can get talent for what she's willing to pay, more power to her. If the ex-shopify person can get a comparable job for 175k, more power to them.

But there is an adjustment to be had. The free money spigot has dried up for many companies, and so the salaries of the past 5ish years are in for a reckoning.

I think sometimes when people call a salary offer "insulting", they really mean the offer is disappointing, worrying, and/or a threat to their sense of value vs. other professionals.

So I think there's value in reflecting why some job offer felt insulting. It may help the person recognize some thoughts or worries that were lurking in his mind.

On a less touchy-feely level, getting an "insulting" job offer can be a useful data point regarding the state of the job market, and/or that particular employer.

You have no idea what enterprise dev salaries are

> What you're willing to pay and what value we add seem to be vastly different

Wow…I think you have that mixed up. You have a very inflated view of the value you add at only 4 years of experience. I am nearing 4 decades in tech and I can count on one hand the number of devs (out of hundreds) have met in my career that when they were at 4 years of experience brought enough value to justify a $140k salary in 2023 dollars.

It doesn’t take much. Since software has close to 0 marginal cost. You could easily develop a feature that by itself bring in more than that over the lifetime of the feature if your company is large enough.

That’s “lottery ticket = possible jackpot” mentality and doesn’t scale. The flip side and obvious counter argument is that a relatively inexperienced SWE is more likely to be responsible for a bug that could cost a company a lot of money—frankly it’s more likely than the jackpot.

My contention is that any show stopping bug makes it to production, it was a problem with the system and process not one individual.

And it’s not a lottery ticket. Have you seen the stats of developer/revenue for Google, Microsoft and Facebook?

It’s a lot lower for Amazon because of the warehouse workers, drivers etc and Apple because of Apple retail

So the “system or process” that spreads the blame of a bug, can also allow a junior dev full autonomy to release a feature of their invention solely and on their own and deserving of all the credit?

Those are incompatible in my experience.

> It’s a tough pill to swallow but it is possible to get offers, but they might not be at the salary levels from 2-3 years ago.

This goes both ways. People teams will prefer to pay less than they have before, and engineers should usually ask for more than they currently make.

Anecdotally as a hiring manager, I would always encourage folks to have savings to cover the time it takes to avoid settling for lower salaries if they lose their role. The folks not making that much already should be moving up to those “lower paying” positions.

This isn’t mathematically logical. Every month that you are out of a job, you need to make 8% more once you are hired to make up the difference in loss pay.

While I wouldn’t have taken just any bullshit low paying full time job after getting Amazoned (full time in the cloud consulting division), I was more than willing to take a contract job and just to keep interviewing while I’m working - especially now that jobs and interviews are remote.

Apologies, but can you clarify what “this” is when you say something isn’t logical? Unclear to me if you mean taking a lower paying job, choosing to stay unemployed, using savings to cover income while unemployed, something around contracting, something else perhaps.

Contracting between full time positions can certainly replace the need for savings, if that ties into what you were arguing for.

“This” is holding out for the perfect paying job instead of taking the first thing that comes along temporarily and keep looking.

Say I’m looking for a job paying $200K and it takes me 3 months to find it. Now just to make $200K over the year, I need to have a job paying $266K.

Why hold out for the job, go through savings, and then when I finally get the job need to replenish my savings instead of just sucking up my pride taking a lower paying job and keep looking?

In my case, when I got Amazoned with a more than $40K severance package. My goal was to have some money coming in before I had to touch it.

I was willing to accept any old enterprise dev remote contract to keep the money flowing. I said in a previous reply that I did spam jobs left and right as a backup plan.

I ended up getting two offers with the type of job I wanted and my desired compensation target before even my 10 days of paid PTO (on top of the severance) was depleted. But that was dumb luck and having contributed to a few official open source “AWS solutions”

> But that was dumb luck and having contributed to a few official open source “AWS solutions”

Was it dumb luck, though? Your situation reminds me of the concept of "luck surface area." You contributed to "a few" open source AWS solutions. You've said in the past that you network well, so I imagine you have lots of other little things you do that get your name out there.

This is something I've been horribly negligent of this far in my career. I thought it would be enough just to do good work and that I would be recognized for that work via osmosis or something.

Maybe?

I knew the reputation of Amazon before I started working there and did start laying the groundwork from day one for my next job.

It’s just part of what I do to always be prepared to look for another jobs

Well, not quite.

Laid off people do get paid unemployment benefits, and they also get the non-monetary benefit of not working. I don’t really consider that lost money to be 1:1 in value when considering you aren’t beholden to a work schedule.

If you have a working partner I would say it’s a no brainer to take your time. Jump on their healthcare and chill.

Oh yeah, if you have kids, you can put childcare costs on hold so you aren’t really losing 100% of your salary when you’re put out of work.

In my previous state of residency GA, unemployment maxes out at $375 a week. In Florida my current state, it’s $275 a week

To put that in context, the day I found out I was being Amazoned and a week before my last day, I reached out to a former CTO that couldn’t afford to hire me. But he did need some work/troubleshooting done in my area of specialty and I billed at $135 an hour and that was cheap. Trust me, I know how much AWS ProServe charges for consulting.

Even run of the mill enterprise dev staff augmentation W2 contracts pay $70/hour.

Wait until you hear about Louisiana.

120k is bottom of the barrel wages.

It's nowhere near.

Yeah, you'd think. I've seen a handful of job advertisements via Google Jobs or LinkedIn that are closer to $60-80k, in the U.S.

I have no idea if they're real positions, or if / when / by whom they'll get filled.

Even on the enterprise dev side, I would expect at least $150K after 5-7 years for your standard full stack dev

You’d think that. But a few weeks ago I interviewed a full stack dev working for IBM who was making $110k with 8+ years experience.

I was a bit floored. I know IBM isn’t FAANG, but I was expecting them to be making a lot more based on their resume and working at a big co.

The issue is that they worked there for 8 years. You have to be an aggressive job hopper . Salary compression and inversion are real.

These conversations make no sense without talking about location. OP is talking about a remote (US) position. $120k is a 90th percentile salary in much of the country, and there are tons of people who would be willing to take that salary if it means not having to move to the coasts.

I guess your POV is influenced by your surroundings. I know plenty of people getting 7 figures either remote or they could easily switch to remote if they preferred it.

> I would have loved to hire them at $120-140k, but for $175k I can easily find people with 5x more years of experience.

Where are you easily finding someone with 20 years experience for 175k?

Europe probably.

US remote node/react. I updated the original comment

While they put 5x I think they meant to put 5

> Where are you easily finding someone with 20 years experience for 175k?

This actually matches my recent job-search experience.

More specifically: The number of job postings advertising > $200k seems way down from a few years ago. (At least for U.S. remote who's not an expert in distributed systems development.)

Especially after the recent mass layoffs from Google, Meta, etc., there are a lot of very senior devs competing for those sub-$200k positions.

Recently-retired military veterans with STEM educations, especially if they were in a communications/signal/intel field. They won't have 20 years of direct SWE experience hacking on codebases, but they have tons of practical real-world knowledge and probably know their way around Python or JS as well as any bootcamp graduate.

Outside of the bubble, that’s what most ICs are making if not less working “enterprise Dev” in most metro areas.

“20 years of experience” is meaningless. The difference in 7-8 years and 20 is meaningless. This is coming from someone who has 25+ years

Inflation alone in the last few years has made $100k achievable by janitors. $175k today is just $48,800 in 1980 dollars. It doesn’t seem like a lot of money anymore, an experienced SWE could do better changing fields if that is a top end salary.

No janitors are not routinely making $100K. Again, look at the facts. Go to either salary.com or levels.fyi and look at salaries for software developers in most major cities.

Look at salaries for well known non tech companies like Delta, Coke, Home Depot, or UPS. I know those off the top of my head because they have a heavy presence in my former hometown (Atlanta). Also look at insurance companies.

Please tell me all of these fields where you can on average make more with just a four year degree.

I’m not sure where you live, but it’s a standard easy to archive salary here in Seattle. It also isn’t very much money, even in the rest of the country.

Wow, so your entire worldview is based on Seattle?

Let me put it this way. I had a friend who worked in Finance at Amazon and his $1.2 million dollar 2400 square foot home that was 20 years old was relatively shitty compared to the $350K home I had built in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 that was 1000 square feet larger than his.

Yes I know about Seattle salaries - I turned down a chance to interview for a role at Amazon Retail as an SDE because there was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and deal with the high prices and shitty weather.

However, I did get a remote role working (full time) at AWS ProServe.

BTW, I had my 3200 square foot house built in the “good school system” in 2016 making $135K.

People making $150K (which puts you in the top 20% of earners) are not going around homeless

My opinion is DEI hires are way out of whack with the market.

Low skilled / low talent in many cases and lower competence but in a ZIRP environment I saw so many situations where women and minorities were hired and given leadership roles, with massively streamlined hiring processes.

When the bottom line doesn’t matter these kinds of hires really proliferated.

I wonder if we will see a hard reset back to competence as the most in demand quality.

And yes I am assuming she is a DEI hire, $180K for four years of experience unless she was like a backend or ai engineer is crazy.

I haven't checked the statistics, but I suspect you're mistaken about the DEI angle here.

Until about 1 year ago, I think many companies were paying new-ish software developers well north of $150k. Especially VC-funded companies.

$180k within four years is more than reasonable if you get into FAANG. I've had plenty of kids right out of college asking for $140k and getting it from other companies, and this was 5 years ago, so within four years of typical ZIRP job hoping I'd say that's relatively normal.

Please don't assume anyone is hired for diversity reasons. That's really awful.

> this was 5 years ago

That was then. This is now. Salaries fluctuate, both up AND down. Just ask anybody who was around in 2001 or 2008.

Four years?!? $180k is pretty typical first year new grad compensation in faang.

I don’t think the salary level was due to diversity.

I think it was due to the person being hired by a hyper growth VC backed startup which was acquired by UPS/Shopify (who then went on a cost cutting campaign post-acquisition)

Cringeworthy dichotomy between "women and minorities" and "competence" you established there.

That this is a remote position makes a huge difference that most people seem to be missing—by going remote you're able to draw talent that would otherwise be looking at earning a very respectable $80k from a local company. In those areas (which represent most of the US), $140k is a solidly upper-middle-class salary that enables a very comfortable lifestyle. If coastal residents won't take it, there are plenty of people in the middle of America who will.

I don’t understand some of the dynamics sometimes. For instance, I am 44, been coding professionally since 18. Zero college.

I make 106k in CT in a position focused 75% with Java/Spring for modbus/motion control. (Industrial automation) My other 25% is in what I could label “big data” but is really ETL for a crap ton of near real time transactions.

I enjoy it. I would love to make more money; 106 is hard with a family and such.

But when I look and align my skills, history, and ability to speak in front of anyone - I see listings for 150k+ - and I totally don’t feel “worth” that at all.

Not just because I’m self taught, or have a history doing almost all “it roles”, it’s because I’ve spent 90% of my time in the gloriously underpaid healthcare sector. (Still there.)

What is it like making an offer to someone for 150k for a fully remote position? I could never imagine.

You don’t earn what you are worth, you earn what you negotiate. Unless you are unusually terrible, you are worth more than $106k even in CT.

Did you post a salary range in the job posting?

I have been interviewing. Everyone is confused right now. Hiring companies are confused. Recruits are confused.

My opinion is we are at a severe dislocation period.

I have noticed massive changes in the emerging skills, tools and platforms. Pretty much no code, low code and AI.

Everything else looks useless or outdated.

Meanwhile, tons of startups and big tech companies are dying and laying off.

The skills those people have are dramatically out of whack with what the market actually wants.

They are also dramatically out of whack compensation wise from what the current market will tolerate.

It means we have a flood of garbage and ultra talented people who can’t plug in anywhere.

The ultra talented person will laugh at the offers that employers are willing to make right now and turn them down.

Employers are not staffing senior or skilled hires and want to low ball the ultra talented people who want nothing to do with these corny offers and companies.

So basically employers think they will get someone “good” and underpay them and people who are actually good are not yet willing to capitulate.

And salaries are dropping by like 20-30%.

And anyone in the market who has seen their bills going up due to inflation will not tolerate a salary drop on top of a downlevel / demotion.

People who have debt and a family think the idea of a salary cut is crazy.

So with all the dead and dying startups, tons of people flooding the market, interview process going to hell, people getting upset about the salary and skills disconnects, rapid change in which projects are getting funded and which skills are in demand.

If you are unemployed right now you are likely to be in pain for six months and you will likely need a salary or career reset and you will likely need to reskill and possibly relocate.

That’s where we are.

What skills do you think are in demand?

I think that's an excellent analysis. There's another issue I'm not seeing anyone talk about:

I'm currently unemployed. But given my life circumstances, I need to make about $170k/year to avoid long-term money problems.

I've seen a few jobs in the $140k-$150k range that I'm pretty sure are mine for the asking. But I know that once the market improves, I'd need to move on to other companies for better pay.

I'm avoiding applying for those jobs because it feels slimy: I'd have to deceive the employer about my intentions to stay.

Have you found a method to exchange your pride for goods and services or have you overcome the widespread addiction to food and shelter that most people seem to still have?

What you’re missing is that you don’t need someone “good” to do your bog standard enterprise framework dev. You just need someone “good enough”.

And since many if not most people in the higher income tax brackets own their homes with fix rate mortgages and they aren’t spending every penny they make, they aren’t really seeing the full affects of inflation.

> The ultra talented person will laugh at the offers that employers are willing to make right now and turn them down.

I'm unmotivated to look for this reason. As an IC6 SRE, I won't get out of bed for less than $250k TC. I have a TC negotiator and an IP employment lawyer to pay before accepting any offer.

If were temporarily unable to find employment, monetizing SaaS product(s) would be my backup plan because there's plenty of potential upside by choosing the category and market fit with solid pricing.

I’m going to say something that at first is going to sound really insulting. But please hear me out.

If you’re just another enterprise CRUD developer like most of the 2.7 million developers in the US, there are literally thousands who can do the job good enough.

When I worked and lived in Atlanta pre-Covid, I could throw my resume in the air and reach out to local recruiters I had worked with for years and have multiple offers within less than a month. This was for your standard Enterprise CRUD jobs.

This was my life from 1996-2018.

A remote job at AWS working in the Professional Services department (full time) consulting fell into my lap in 2020.

I got Amazoned a couple of months ago.

As a backup plan, I started spamming my resume on LinkedIn Easy Apply for bog standard C# CRUD jobs. I never do this. But I had time on my hands this time so why not? I applied for 70 jobs this way and most of my applications weren’t even looked at and my resume was only downloaded twice. LinkedIn shows you this. I heard crickets from doing this.

I had 15 years of C# experience including 7 leading projects and 3 leading projects at AWS in the consulting department. Every job I applied to had 100s of applications.

Before when I was looking I was only competing in the local market. Now I’m competing nationwide.

From my prior network, most companies wanted hybrid or in office.

Don’t cry for me. I had three interviews and two offers within the two weeks for full time consulting jobs that paid around 20% less than I was making in all at Amazon. But one was because of a referral for a mid size company as a “staff architect” and the other two interviews were interested because I was the third highest contributor to a popular complex open source “AWS Solution”.

But, if you take away my AWS account, I turn back into your bog standard “enterprise dev” with above average soft skills

Edit: I see the comment is dead now. But when I was “carrying Amazon’s water” I guess they were referring to a month ago - I had already been Amazoned then.

Amazon was my 8th company in 27 years I’m now on my ninth. It was just another method to exchange labor for money.

I’ve been consistent in my distrust of government power whether it was targeting Amazon, Apple or Google.

This isn't unique to your role.

John Deere is the same here. They directly posted 2 IT Admin jobs. I applied and was denied. Now I get spammed with phone calls, emails, and texts many times a week from recruiters who insist I'm ideal for the position but never get beyond the recruiter. It's been months at this point.

US Army, via one of their contractors, is the same. Open rolls didn't fill. Now the contractor seems to have these rolls perpetually open and staffing agencies hiring constantly resulting in...nothing.

Truly bizarre and frustrating.

Your problem is using recruiters. There’s a shitload of remote jobs available. Just look at HN Who’s Hiring.

Also drop the CI/tests attitude. Many modern startups don’t bother with security-theater either.

I sent out plenty of resumes with nice cover letters to jobs I felt overqualified for over the 4 months I was just looking, and had maybe one response.. from a recruiter.

But I worked with a recruiter for a few of those months and they got me to a few final rounds. I think having a proper recruiter, who knows the hiring manager, is pretty powerful. Them shaving whatever % of the top is lame but it's better than being unemployed.

The last time I switched jobs was in October of 2020, so I haven’t experienced this personally, but I have a lot of friends in the same boat.

Lots of said friends were affected by layoffs at various tech companies over the last couple years, but I also have some junior dev friends that are finding it basically impossible to even get callbacks. Everyone seems to only want senior devs at the moment.

I'm a senior dev and I'm also finding it hard to get callbacks. I've come to the conclusion that cold applying to positions is no longer viable. You won't even get a callback if you don't have a referral.

Are you just looking for local to St Louis? How much experience do you have? Do you have a broad skillset or are you pretty focused? Each of these things has a huge effect on your job search, and you didn't really mention any of them.

I can't speak to St. Louis, but about the tech stack, my personal experience is that the bigger the company (outside of formal tech companies), the older/slower/more bloated the stack. They tend to choose stability and longevity over modernity, so a lot of Oracle, Microsoft, etc., and whatever their people were using ten years ago. It kinda makes sense at their scale. It's not the core of their business, and they don't like change for change's sake.

If you want a more nimble tech stack, small companies are where it's at -- the ones who don't have much to lose, who are often working on greenfield projects and have both the personnel and the lack of legacy baggage to be able to explore more modern stacks. But even then, you're probably just catching them at the start of a cycle, and if they survive 5-10 years, they'll probably be using an old (by then) tech stack.

I will say this: You can have a lot more sway about the stack once you're hired, especially if you're a full employee. I've convinced several companies to modernize their stacks only after working with them for a year or two, doing good work on their old (terrible) stacks, and then showing a demo of how much easier a new stack could be for the people involved. On the other hand, if I go in swinging during an interview and say "your stack sucks, I want to rewrite it right away" they'll never hire me. Makes sense, because I don't know their pain points and workflows yet; I'm not in a position to make that sort of judgment call from the outside.

Just my 2¢.

You're painting with a broad brush a religious view of an idealized tech stack rather than the problem of motivations at different scales that aren't equal or necessary for each.

Large companies reward resume-grade impact, not cleaning up code, because there is literally no value added (that can be claimed) unless code is used or directly saves money. So spending expensive engineering time refactoring code for future hypothetical concerns isn't viewed as achieving anything, even if it sounds good. It's a shitty reality but necessary to collapse the often disconnect between software engineering and business.

Very large companies also have the staff to roll their own custom everything because COTS FOSS just can't scale up or out well enough at a reasonable cost.

By contrast, startups lack standards and working infrastructure, and are often forced to rely on force multipliers such as potentially expensive SaaS services where they own nothing, not even their data. The upside of startup startups is that there's nowhere for average or lazy engineers to hide: everyone must produce and do things in a maintainable manner or face the consequences of poor operations or paying the price of tech debt.

There are no free lunches, religions, or perfect solutions in real-world web ops. There is only minimizing classes of fires and being able to respond to them in a lasting manner in order to move forward.

I think this makes sense, but might be more of an adjacent argument than a counterpoint? What you said rings true especially for large tech companies, but the OP and I were thinking more of large enterprises whose primary focus isn't in tech (like the St. Louis businesses). Sorry if that wasn't made clear, especially in my post.

The difference, I think, is that large non tech companies don't necessarily think that deeply about their tech stacks. The entrenched bureaucracies and existing vendor relationships (with Microsoft or ESRI, for example) seem to have more sway than the merits of any one stack or another.

Nobody should be refactoring code all the time just for the heck if it, but looking at the architecture once in a while can get you generational improvements in performance, security, user and developer experience, etc. But that's a hard sell in a company that looks at tech as just another basic tooling/infra cost, as opposed to a core part of the business.

> Nobody tests, CI automation is unheard of.

This seems like a very dangerous attitude from a plane maker, a drug maker, and a healthcare data provider.

They are more documentation driven. Every line of code and every change is meticulously documented and reviewed. This is the pre-agile, pre-automation way of doing things.

Easy - just build everything on top of "enterprise" platforms that offer indemnification clauses. Then nothing is ever your fault, it's always the vendor.

While you joke, at my n-3 job, I was the first hire by a then new director to lead the charge of integration efforts and migrations as they acquired companies. It was a non tech company.

After a few months, I told him and the CTO that they shouldn’t be staffing up a technical team of software developers. It wouldn’t give them an advantage. We transitioned two of the long time Powerbuilder developers who maintained a 20 year old in house EMR to writing reports and overseeing vendors.

We outsourced everything and used COTS and hired contractors when needed.

After that was complete over two years. I walked in and told the director, “you don’t need me anymore you just don’t admit it and are trying to keep me busy”. I had purposefully put myself out of job.

But I had a hell of a story to tell in STAR format when asked at my n-1 job various “tell me about a time when…” interview questions.

Automated testing is only as good as the tests you write. Most of those industries have very strict formal specification and verification that doesn't lend itself well to the "move fast and break things" attitude of the 2010's web.

In fact, the major health org I am working with second-hand (customer of the company I work for) has a hard code freeze mid-November. The remaining 6 weeks of the year prior to Jan 1 is nothing but QA, then QA'ing bug fixes, rinse and repeat.

It is very un-agile, and it isn't likely to change. The closest they will ever get is back to true waterfall, which is planned iterations.

The agility is a bit irrelevant here- that place still sounds like a good place for automated testing.

>not interested in the tools of the trade etc

You’re looking at this wrong. Enterprise tools of the trade are not the same as start up tools of the trade.

You’re not going to get in to an enterprise order management codebase and be pitching nodejs and huge lift and shifts. It just won’t happen.

I went to St Louis for contract work several times in the late 90s. It was a horrible place back then and I am glad I never went back. Seems it hasn't improved.

I'm 7 months into unemployment, so I've been doing a lot of job searching as well.

I too have noticed multiple, unrelated recruiting agencies advertising for the same position. This is the first time I recall seeing that. No idea what changed.

Location also seems to matter more than it did a few years ago. There definitely seem to be fewer employers open to fully-remote work.

yeah I occasionally meet recruiters in the midwest for jobs in the midwest, and they don’t seem to understand how ridiculous and nonstandard their approaches are to anything. the recruiter or the organization with the role.

I've lived there and tried to find work when I was at a Junior level and had no luck. That was during Covid. I had more luck just networking a lot and trying to make connections with people who work remotely.

I call this write up the St Louis blues

> It used to take two-weeks max to find a new position. It's now been two months, and I have no leads.

I’ve had a similar experience, albeit with different details.

Just FYI one data point, I live in Austin, Texas, I'm a contract python programmer, and the details are different but I am in the same boat right now. I'm taking the opportunity to learn new stuff at home, and if finances get tight I'll take a non-SWE position and wait it out until the software job market comes back, but right now it's definitely not just you and not just St. Louis.

Doesn’t Bayer’s Ag division have a data science org out of St. Louis

Is that a question?

Bayer has a lot of modern stacks, literally cutting edge, on some of their departments. Depends on the department and what you're doing.

"modern stacks" yeah... they use GraphQL sometimes. I'm sure they'll say Node is cutting edge too. That was exactly my point about tech stack. Dangling shiny keys in front of me in the form of technologies doesn't really cut it. I'm sure it helps for the recent grads though.

What's wrong with GraphQL? "CAN-OPEN-WORMS-EVERYWHERE"

Try looking in Kansas City, there has been quite the uptick here recently. I’d be happy to put you in touch with recruiters I trust.

This is basically every other industry.

Somewhat related, I heard from a contact that Accenture needed consultants with my skills in the US/Canada. I got a referral, and put was contacted by someone in HR.

I said I wanted to work in the US. They told me that they aren't sponsoring visas in the US right now. I was thinking, they're Accenture, how can this be possible?

Tell HN:

St. Louis is a wasteland if you’re looking for more modern software jobs. And the employers haven’t learned their lesson. You can though, by looking for remote work.

Have you looked for any remote opportunities?

in the same boat

What's your ideal tech stack or position you're looking for?