IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023
wsj.com
wsj.com
It's hard not to get angry at the company when you see them hiring at median US wages ($100-120k US equivalent) but specifically refusing to hiring folks in the US, when the company is US-based.
Mexico City, especially -- general consensus is that the level of expertise is good, it's not hard to find a Spanish speaker in the US, better cultural fits, and the timezones overlap better; MXC is on Central Time. Not India-level cheap, but competitive enough.
Canada is even better in that sense, but at a higher price.
NAFTA TN visas are also attractive there, too. No H1B nonsense, and can easily bring personnel over for short (~3 year) tours.
Disclaimer: USA-ian of Hispanic extraction in Canada, so I follow these gigs reasonably closely.
You also don’t have to pay for healthcare of your Canadian employees since they pay for it on their income taxes.
Plus, London alone has 10 million people, and if you lump in the London commuter belt that adds up to aroun 15 million people, more than all of Ontario! That's a hell of a skilled worker base to work with.
I've been a software developer for the better part of two decades, I'm not worried about the C-tier code coming out of rural India. You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
If we can mandate EV batteries be built in the US to get subsidies (Inflation Reduction Act), other protectionism mechanisms should be on the table. Otherwise, businesses will do their best to maximize profits in the market they’re offering in without any labor contribution back, extractionist style.
The evidence does not show the American worker being better off after these policies you support were enacted and have had decades to run. Free trade is great for shareholders and some consumer cohorts who get excess utility, but terrible for workers. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/
https://www.epi.org/publication/botched-policy-responses-to-...
https://www.epi.org/press/globalization-lowered-wages-americ...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...
The theory only says that all the people globally will be better off. It does not say anything about citizens of a specific country that is applying protectionism. They may be better off for it, they may be worse - it depends on the particulars and, as most economic interventions, can only really be judged post-factum.
I don't think unionizing will help with off-shoring for development. I do think unionizing could bring about more equal treatment though. It seems most companies ignore their own policies when it comes to ratings, work assignment, hours, etc. Devs have very little recourse. Of course the assholes that do well and aren't afraid of c grade coders are the ones who don't want unions since they might loose their edge over others comp-wise.
Consider the common refrain: I'd rather negotiate for myself
It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work, as if you as a solo person in a 1000 person company could somehow EVER be more valuable to the company than the entire labor pool.
Newsflash: If your company doesn't throw a fit any time you try to take time off, like CEO comes and talks to you personally fit, they think they could replace you just fine. 40 years of project management has attempted to build things just for that.
The misunderstanding is yours. Workers understand what you say just fine, but don't care about out-negotiating the company. They will never meet the CEO at the bar, so it means nothing to them. They want to be able to out-negotiate their neighbour so they can peacock dominance over someone they actually interact with.
The purpose of a union is to establish a brotherhood between metaphorical neighbours so that they don't try to be assholes towards each other. While that does, indeed, improve the overall worker position against the company, it hinders the power dynamic between them. And that's where you find the pushback.
It's much like you find in 'middle-class' neighbourhoods where you see households trying to outdo each either with nicer yards, or fancier BMWs, or whatever, all while racking up crazy debt to pay for it all. If they invested the money they pour into that stuff instead they would be way better off, but being better off isn't the motivation.
Is it still forgetting if it never happened? Both the idea of the 8-hour work day and weekends predate the first recognized union. The 40-hour workweek became the norm during the Great Depression by way of government initiative in an attempt to spread the work out across more people.
Unions have long supported the 40-hour work week, but are not meaningfully responsible for it. If showing support for something is necessary for something to exist, then you could probably say that just about everything exists because of unions...
Even still, we're talking nearly 100 (when it became common) to well over 200 years ago (when it was conceived). Even if unions actually were responsible, people are going to naturally ask "What have you done for me lately?". Where is the 10-hour workweek?
Besides, let's say youre right and unions have given us all those things. Those standards are over 100 years old. If it were true, it would mean nationwide unions did some things 5 generations ago and have collected literal trillions in inflation adjusted dues* since and have provided nothing in return.
* 11% of the US is unionized, representing about 1.1 trillion in annual payroll. Average union due is 1.5%, that's $16.5B per year in union dues collected, over 100 years = $1.6 trillion. But union membership used to be much much higher than 11% so its actually a much bigger number than $1.6T. But you get the math.
Eh, maybe not. It depends on the demand and availability of skill/labor. If you have a high percentage of low skill labor and you can outsource low skill labor to cheaper markets, then what are the current low skill citizens going to do? Surely the rust belt is not better off now than when coal and steel (and other manufacturing) were still a domestic thing. Maybe other areas of the county faired better, but with median wages dropping over the past 50 years, it doesn't seem like a strong case.
You're almost certainly correct in the sense that the people of the entire system will be better off, but your own domestic market could suffer at the gain of the other market where the business is now being outsourced to.
A good example of this might be tech in the EU. The EU basically has no major tech companies because we "import" all our tech services the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc). It's great for us in the sense that we didn't have to pay anyone to build amazing online services like Facebook, Google, etc – it's just free stuff we get here from the US. But who benefits the most from this arrangement, is the US or the EU? I'd argue that the EU allowing the US to provide all of our major tech services has been great for US growth, but it's stagnated the EU economy in recent years as we've had no real reason to build 21st century companies here. The free stuff we get from the US actually comes at a cost for us even if overall the economy as a whole (EU + US) is better off for it.
Similarly, imagine an extreme scenario where US companies outsource all work to low-cost labour countries (I know this is impossible, but assume the US is 100% service sector jobs which could be outsourced). Would this hypothetical scenario be good for the US economy? It might be good for companies registered in the US because now they can provide their services to markets they serve for a fraction of the cost, and it would be great for those low-cost labour countries getting all this foreign work, but it would be awful for the actual US economy that's allowing this to happen in the pursuit of efficient markets.
So yeah, you might be growing the whole pie at a faster rate, but it's possible mass outsourcing doesn't help grow your share of the pie. And like with manufacturing, you also need to consider how you'll lose technical competency within your domestic market over time if you outsource too much, and this will likely lead to the country you out sourced to eventually out competing you in your own industries. We see this today in China.
If you want to cripple tech innovation in the US, outsource all your software engineers so there's no one in the US with the skills or resources to start the next Google or Facebook.
Short and mid term matters a lot to people.
If I lost my job right now, I'd be totally fucked. I'd end up working at Walmart. Masters degrees might as well be toilet paper.
It's a pretty big leap to go from a software engineer to Walmart. The median software developer (~$110k/yr last I checked but could be outdated) is somewhere in the upper teens as far as income percentile (20% being around $100k and 10% being around $150k[0]). Pretty much any non-management role at Walmart is going to land you in the bottom half.
I'd be curious (but it's none of my business) what about your situation makes that the most likely outcome. I'd bet there are ways to head that off.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States
Seems like retail, warehouses, and other unskilled labor are the main options. Even something like teaching would require a certification.
Devrel would actually probably be the easiest thing to get into with a few years' foresight. Building a following on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter/X, etc. will make it infinitely easier to land that first devrel role.
You bringing up teaching is a good point - I'm not sure about where I currently live but where I used to live you could get a substitute teaching cert basically by just passing the background check and having a college degree. It was pretty easy to get an add-on certification as well to teach your subject or closely related ones. I can't say what it's like everywhere though, and to be honest most of the people I know who have teaching degrees have left or wished they could. But if you can get a job and can deal with the bullshit you're basically set from a put-food-on-the-table standpoint.
Can't wait till I'm out.
Tech Writers - nope. Nothing dealing with boilerplate text is safe, in any field.
Twitch/YouTube - nope. That is just celebrity economics again. For every half dozen people that make it (and make it is just back to median dev salary) there are thousands that only get a few viewers.
Teaching - this is option. But as noted by others. Can have own problems and a lot of people leave.
I'm an old Dev looking for second career, and it is tough. The option is to just re-skill and be dev again in another industry. Dev's be Dev's. It doesn't seem like there are many upward paths, and limited sideways paths.
What, product manager, analyst, marketing? Tried them, they all have downsides.
Even with all the crap, I only find comfort in creating things. Coding.
I see a lot of very qualified people coming from India, around a big University here.. They have had twenty years to build to this.
I have been assigned to lead offshore teams with engineers that need direct guidance on very basic coding tasks, produce low quality code and become combative when receiving feedback.
So many times I’ve reviewed and requested the same changes to code, classic example: a try/catch then completely ignore a caught exception, just to get some code “working” for the example inputs. When I call this out as a problem, it’s met with “well you did not say that in the specification, I have completed what was asked”. Another commenter had a similar anecdote where all input validation was removed to get test cases passing… are we expected to write things like that into a work spec? Seems like this would take longer than for me to write the damn code myself
There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.
As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way, that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.
Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.
That's why these outsourcing threats from companies make me laugh, they don't understand that software is a global market and they also are competing in it.
The world class FAANG-level Indian engineers which are underpaid just do not exist.
I dislike the tone as there are plenty of good devs who've been cut and replaced (sort of) by offshore. Don't equate laid off/replaced with "really bad dev".
I think the solution here has to come from the federal government to explicitly increase sw development employment in the US. Just like we find ourselves in a bad place with scaling chip manufacturing, we will find ourselves hamstrung in sw dev.
I doubt unions can help here - except maybe pressure the government (and that too works mostly on democrats if at all).
There are a lot of anti-unionists and Libertarian minded programmers in the US.
As for Twitter well, I can't explain why his other companies get 1 million plus applicants while this company languishes.
What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him. Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark.
People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go help him stan for a guy called "catturd2."
This leads me to want the OEMs to succeed, we desperately need a counterbalance to Musk because just shaming his employees won't change a goddamn thing but if there was another place where A players can be embraced well that would put a massive chink in the Musk armor. Hell I remember there were a whole group of furry employees at Tesla as well. Tesla has also participated multiple times in pride parades. I wonder where they are now...
He’s not superhuman. I think he was once quite smart but I feel like he’s fried his brain. (I think the fash brain worms are an opportunistic infection.) So what made him able to get these companies going?
A lot of lazy critics think it’s just luck. Founding a rocket company and a car company and having them even work at all is not luck.
Maybe he’s showing us that the bar is actually not as high as we think, and instead that the process whereby we promote people to levels of wealth and influence where they might have the opportunity to do what Elon did is horribly broken. We aren’t promoting competent people to pivotal positions as a society, and in fact are probably filtering them out.
I guess you can see that clearly in politics. Look at all Presidential elections 2016 onward. Look at the whole lineup during the primaries. You’re telling me these are the best candidates we can find for the highest government office? Really?
It is predictable that remote work would lead to another wave of off-shoring. The question now is whether or not these companies can actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. We've all seen the abominations produced by offshore teams. Moving to a fully remote foreign workforce may be short-sighted.
As distinct from a remote, largely local, expensive workforce?
Innovation is often the mix of vision, direction, and implementation. AWS for example, was implemented by an offshore team. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#:~:text=....
But there are frictions, too. Unless you go into management, comp tops out around $200k in most metros. HR -- instead of write-your-own-rules in a startup you have to take corporate training and get approval for things folks at the startups take for granted. Limited tools, externally managed corporate OS and software, Outlook instead of Slack. Office time requirements -- fully remote is very rare. And so on.
Not saying this is the wrong choice, just that there are tradeoffs.
In the past decade (i.e., when the money was plentiful) when a startup is young, the TC of its engineers rarely makes or breaks the startup. Being able to get an MVP out and iterate quickly is more important, so it was a rational choice to stay in the Bay Area even if it means 30% inflated TC. And after that moving is expensive in both time and money and risky (e.g., a key engineer might not want to go).
And having a critical mass of tech companies helps attract talent: if a company goes under or has large layoffs it is perceived to be easier to find a new job in the center of the tech hub.
I think covid helped nudge along the process of moving tech development out of SV, but it is a slow process. My 2c.
What has Meta or Google or Microsoft actually innovated on recently?
Google has a way of starting something and then shutting it down.
There are "normal metro areas" that aren't the Bay Area where a $150k salary leads to a very comfortable life, with loads of $150k jobs for people with decent skills.
Except oops Amazon would absolutely decimate my yearly comp because they base it entirely off where you live, and adjust it if you try to move somewhere cheaper
Though of course that's all moot anyway since we've all gotta go back to the office because the people who own all the realestate are weirdly chummy with all the management of these companies. Weird how that worked
There are other employers hiring tech people other than Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.
In fact, a teammate of mine is a software developer just got his Starlink connection up and running replacing his WISP in a rural area where he's farming as well on the side. Another friend works as an SRE and lives way out in the desert pursuing his amateur astronomy hobby. I know of several other friends and coworkers who live similar lives.
Technically I'm 100% remote, but personally I enjoy the metro life so I'm living in an affordable metro area living a lifestyle I enjoy.
An example to illustrate what I was working with:
Problem: input validation is too restrictive
Their solution: remove all input validation
For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.
Pivot! Lean startup! Four hour workweek!
It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.
German here. The secret sauce behind the Duales System is that it's, as the name suggests, a split system - one part of the training is at government-run schools ("Berufsschule"), and the other part at the company that trains and pays you. And since the curricula are virtually the same across the schools, even if they're a bit outdated, they still produce decent graduates.
Our pride as a nation, our role models, is not a few people who struck it right to become multi-billionaires, our pride is the millions of people working for the Mittelstand and the consistently high quality of the stuff they produce. Boring, but wildly profitable and very, very resilient.
PS: You actually might know some of these things our tradespeople built. BMW/Audi/Mercedes/Volkswagen cars, MAN trucks, Rheinmetall, KMW and ThyssenKrupp military hardware from tanks to the massive Panzerhaubitze 2000, Diehl's IRIS-T anti-air defense, Heckler & Koch/Walther guns, anything with "Siemens" on it built before Siemens fell to MBA shenanigans, all developed and prior to globalization also built in Germany. And a lot of it, especially the military tech, is up to par with what the US military builds - for IRIS-T SLM and PzH 2000, the Ukraine war shows that they are even better to some experts.
One thing we sadly lost was pharmaceuticals - up until the 60s-70s, Germany used to be the "apothecary of the world" [3], but we lost that to India and China.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
[2] https://hbr.org/1992/03/lessons-from-germanys-midsize-giants
[3] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2018/daz-44...
The stuff you need to know for most jobs can be learned through books (DS&A); everyone, including grads, learn to actually code on the job. Systemic thinking and breaking problems down into manageable chunks is harder to train for; this is where I think something that's akin to apprenticeship could really help. At least the way I view it, and maybe I'm wrong, is that in the early 2000's, much less the 90's, there weren't many CS or CE schools - much less accredited ones that followed CAC standards. If your company is doing this then they're just getting back to the roots of what a computer programmer used to be.
1. In weekly one on ones we may discuss a topic. I ask them to apply that topic.
2. They pick up sprint tasks and look to apply the knowledge they've gained.
3. They may ask some questions along the way; it's important that other engineers are also available for question asking - the same way peers may depend on each others knowledge.
4. You peer review the outcome in a PR.
Rinse and repeat.
I'll add I end up having to do this with everyone if they're fresh to industry or came from a place with poor standards for code writing and/or problem solving.
Remember that they're not just mashing code straight to the main branch; they're apprentices, so other engineers paired with them, others read their pull requests, etc. It wasn't a free-for-all, nor should it be.
This sounds like the kind of situation he'd excel with - is your company currently hiring U.S. based folks?
The part-time work is like doing the labs part.
Also at the end of it, you can still go to the university if feeling like it. I did so.
Going through technical school was a secure way to have a job, in case the university exams weren't good enough for the engineering degree, which by the way is mostly state sponsored on this side of the Atlantic.
At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."
And by an even higher percentage of overseas colleagues in some countries.
Especially those who for whom American business culture might be foreign. "Oh, they have politeness and trust-building conventions, much like we do. This is more pleasant than Hollywood led us to believe. It seems the difference is that you also verbalize what you are doing in their conventions. Maybe that's because they are a nation with a diverse immigrant mix, so they evolved that to reduce misunderstandings, and to help integrate people to common conventions. That's nice of them, and I will be sure to emulate."
I think the subtlety on that page is tuned for humor to those who already know, not to educate or persuade those who don't.
"Hello?"
"IT IS TIME."
*click*
I've been on too many Zooms where the presenter's Slack pops up saying, "John, we have a call with <company name> about <topic> at 3:00. Can you join?"
Multiple times, this information was probably sensitive. I'd rather avoid that by waiting until I get a response.
Stop having such low expectations of grown ass adults.
Forms filled out wrong after explicit instructions, vital information needed for a proposal due at 10 in the morning not received until 5pm the day before (and even then it's missing half of what they were told was needed), and then after asking for it again, finding out half an hour before it's due "oh I'm out running an errand, I'm not in the office, I can't get that to you", people taking pictures of handwritten notes in sloppy handwriting and sending them to other coworkers instead of typing them up themselves, people refusing to click a link on their iPads to access a document and demanding email attachments instead, people refusing to store important documents in CRM tools and instead saying "well it's in someone's email somewhere".
She's worked with several of these types before, but not this many people at one company, and not with such an intense workload (I think she was expected to submit a proposal every other day this month while wrangling these people, which is very short. At past jobs she usually only had to juggle 1 or 2 proposals in any given week).
She had no choice but to work holidays and nights and weekends and it still looked like she wasn't doing a good job because they weren't doing their jobs (her boss knew she was though, since she had to do the job before she was hired and knew what it was like, and begged her to stay).
I guarantee none of these people would have bothered turning off a notification, and then something confidential (legally not supposed to be seen by certain employees) could have been revealed.
Not that I ever usually bother to think about that myself, personally. It's rare that I start a conversation with someone with 'Hey blah! Here's some information that I can get in trouble if other people besides you see!'
Perhaps a hello filter and "yes?" auto responder could help, at least during business hours. Then send an OOO message if after hours.
The way I apply this to emails is to ask myself: if someone only reads the first sentence would they know what I need and if they need to act on it immediately, read it at their leisure, or file it away?
If someone says "how are you?" that doesn't work though.
If they don't want to talk business then a friendly greeting is appropriate.
With contracted outsourcing the root of the problem is generally a third party with misaligned incentives. But here this is no third party.
Suppose you go to a country and talk to a charlatan who tells you that they have many qualified people and they'll work for 30% of what you're paying in the US. You hire them and tell them to hire more staff there.
Then it turns out there are many qualified people in that country, but they don't work for 30% of what you're paying in the US, because it's a global market and actually they can command the same wages as their skills imply anywhere else. But there are plenty of unqualified people who will sign on for lower wages, and you've been promised workers for lower wages, so that's what you get.
There are other problems like timezones etc. and maybe payroll taxes are higher here too but I think the possibility for labour arbitrage is definitely real.
Eg Europeans usually had much more time off. The costs of that time off scale with salary.
I do think labor arbitrage could work, I just don't think it would be in Europe. I suspect the total employee cost in Europe approaches that of the US, the money just goes to non-salary places (taxes, time off, labor protection, etc).
Which is basically what happened. When the earliest companies figured out that you could do a lot of computer things remotely, they would hire some quality staff in e.g. India, pay them a little more than they'd usually get in India but a lot less than they would in the US, and that was great. Then everybody wanted to do that... but there isn't an unlimited supply of qualified staff.
So the competent staff started demanding more money, because they could, until they got paid enough that the savings was only just offsetting the inconvenience of different timezones and laws etc. But the current CEO still remembers that case study they read in business school from 1985 about how great outsourcing is at saving money, from before the arbitrage opportunity was eliminated by everybody trying to do it.
...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
And you likely have experience, domain knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge and so on, so I'd argue you Are special.
But then you leave, and need to be replaced. Since I'm hiring from a pool where no-one has this special, I may as well hire from overseas. Its cheaper.
Equally, when you work remotely your special is invisible. The way you keep the customer happy is invisible. The way you enable your team (assuming your special is passed on) is invisible.
Of course there are very smart people, with lots of experience, and lots of special of their own. Finding them is hard (of course) but the reward for finding them is significant.
FAANG companies are skipping the labor broker, and building subsidiaries offshore. Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing.
So your point us well made- existing employees have value. But companies deal with churn. And we don't need 300 people onshore with your special skills. We can offshore 200 posts, and wait for them to come up to speed.
Being a remote worker makes this process easier.
Everybody goes into these arrangements believing, against all history and experience, that they aren't going to lower their hiring bar. Good luck with that.
We saw this trend happening with manufacturing overseas. Chasing the cheapest labor is not an effective strategy in the mid to long term because it means that eventually your supply chain is at risk and the savings delta shrinks to the savings being irrelevant.
Management does.
The only way for me to protest is to leave, but the job market is terrible.
Sometimes, yes, but not always - if the load is high enough, employees are overworked even if headcount increases.
Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. The pay was just decent too. Not jaw dropping like today.
Exactly. Look at industries that also recruit smart college grads and pay well: consulting, finance, law. These jobs have very demanding schedules.
Not saying that's good, just that it is.
The gravy train might be ending, I just wish it would end with the jobs that actually do nothing (product) rather than engineering first, but oh well.
- They're a founder
- They're a spouse of a founder
- They're a friend of the founder
- The worker is unskilled and needs to work crazy hours to break even
- They believe in the company and have equity
- The vertical is more politically compatible than alternatives
- The vertical punishes newbies before the career starts paying off (lawyers, doctors, academia)
- The work is interesting/fun on its own (in these cases, the type of work would never be paid well -- teaching, charity work, homemaking, niche tech, etc.)
- The worker is being compensated in other, non-monetary ways (aside from equity)
- The job is poorly paid locally but well-compensated elsewhere, and moving/remote work is not possible
Are such people idiots? Maybe.
That said, people who place money above all other factors trend closer to the "idiot" line, in my book. YMMV.
If you require the literal best pay possible, you'll be job-searching forever. Some people do not have that luxury.
A large part of the IT community does indeed very little work.
As for having to work over 40 hours and being stressed, I guess there's a price to having to work in US under such lax worker's rights and benefits, in Europe you just say no thanks boss see you on Monday.
And I reiterate, a large parte of our sector does very little practical work.
1) People who can leave will leave if the work load is too high. Those who can leave are usually the best team members.
2) It does not work. Research has shown most people are incapable of producing more than 40 hours of work a week over the long term. They can do it for a week, maybe a month but after that their productivity is either the same as a 40 hour/week work or maybe even less. People are not machines and just because they are asked to do something (or ordered to) does not mean they will or even can.
One last thing, what keeps employers inline in the US is people can leave. If you are in a bad job, you can switch to a good one.
nobody is going to admit to other people they know that this (slacking off) is what they do. You only get this on an anonymous forum like HN or reddit. Of course, some of them might be lying, but where there's smoke, there's fire imho.
Looking at Rent Cafe:
SF: $3267
Santa Monica: $3956
Venice: $3844
Playa Vista: $3726
Marina Del Rey $3896
These are all places near Meta, Google, etc....
I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet but in LA on the west side it's all over the place. "Coliviing" where they rent out individual bedrooms for $2500-$3500 a month and you share the living room and dining room. It's like having a roommate except you have have lock on your bedroom door and no choice who your roommates are (and no responcibility if they don't pay their rent).
There was a startup for just this a few years ago. Home share is what it was called.
And I can't understand sorry, why should we go back to this scenario, exactly?
It will still be insanely cushier and well paid than other jobs.
Lowball, either because on ignorance (bro I have an app idea!), intention (fast buck artists preying on folks that don’t know better, maybe it’s a BS startup with 80k S.E. base and worthless ISO), or something like government.
Middle-Road, all the normal companies in all those “flyover” states or something to that affect. You’ll get paid a reasonable market rate for a reasonable expectation of work, e.g. an American 40 hours work week. If you’re lucky these might be a small tech-shop, but no flashy VC driven mania. I’ve worked at several, currently work at one. From the inside looking out the ZIRP issues are nonexistent, Cost-of-Living raises might not be as high as I’d like but I have 0 worries about the trends of tech layoffs I read of here.
Upper-Middle, places that are similar to Middle Road in that they are not flashy VC driven firms but “real” companies delivering profitable software or tech-enabled products and services but they also highly value their IT as a force multiplier. As a result the compensation might be a fair bit higher than Middle Road but nothing insane. You’re not walking about with 300-500k Total Comp. Nice 200k TC for a quality Senior here for a normal place of living. I’ve worked at one such firm but something of a unicorn.
Finally, VC world where the rules don’t matter and the points are made up… or something like it. Compensation is ludicrous and often detached from real-world value provided.
I know this is neither exhaustive scientific, but rather to play with the idea that there are different patterns of compensation than the 5 hours of work and 500k of compensation I see some thinking is both reasonable and deserved (trolling?)
Id like to believe it isnt but its a copycat industry.
I had some clowns reach out to me for the same job it sounds like, promising that I could absolutely move up to employment with Chic-fil-a after my contract was up…
As if I haven’t heard that story before.
joking
So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
> Currently, there are almost 100K unfilled jobs with over 101K unemployed IT Pros – a skills mismatch.
Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job. Additionally, I suspect that a lot of these unfilled positions are either paying too low, or aren't real jobs.
Canada's latest economic report had a net positive of only 100 jobs in the entirety of the labor market.
Were it not for December hiring (which is usually pretty low in most years, but was the highest for any month last year according to the data) it would've been negative. That could mean that things are improving in the tech job market - have to see if the trend continues into January, February this year.
Gotta love capitalism. CEO sees some shiny new thing and all the sudden some poor shlub's entire livelihood is fucked.
It appears like continual learning should be a tax as it is non-negotiable for people living in a modern world. Just like roads, hospitals, military, etc.
(Maybe it is just my European midnset that speaks here)
Maybe there is just less demand in Denmark? But I feel like demand surged here, and with easy access to capital it drove prices to absurd levels.
In Europe all countries have tuition free universities, in Denmark people even get a government stipend of ~1000 USD/month by the government. And yet, there is availability on most programmes (like computer science)
It seems like the market powers do not apply for American universities? When tuition (demand) surges, it should be profitable to expand supply (new unis, added seats on programmes, hire more staff).
Regardless, the supply seems quite inflexible?
Though it is convenient to blame the government for supporting the ones most in need (young people starting their careers) it seems to be more appropriate to blame structural issues that inhibit the creation of supply – which is also very anti-American.
The UK doesn't (and didn't before Brexit either).
this stuff in my experience is either taught badly or not at all in universities, and i don't even mind that. the institution can stick to fundamentals applicable across the given hot tech on any day
personally i don't agree with the sentiment. constant learning is something i love about the industry. for one it's interesting, but it also means there are always opportunities to prove yourself by being interested in learning
They can go do whatever they want to themselves. Either tell me what cool new tech you want me to try out and what problems we might want to solve soonish and I'll see which of those and how it might be applicable to or you tell me you want to build <whatever it is> in whatever tech I think will get me there best and fastest. If you know so much, do it yourself. Oh you can't? Well then STFU (not you you but that proverbial manager type above you that seems to know so much)
Even university doesn't teach you how to work in the industry. It's a very DIY career, we should probably change that.
As a result everyone knew how things worked and everyone by far exceeded the minimum level of knowledge needed to meaningfully contribute. It was a great department to work in and I miss it still.
Sadly, the company had that insane policy of only 3-4% annual raise irregardless of performance, so most people, including me, would leave after a few years.
My sample set is definitely biased. I see plenty of very conservative (doesn't want to learn, will only work in one technology) junior engineers, folks who are going to stall out. For senior folks I don't see many. This could be because older folks have jobs or are self filtering to the tech they like or maybe their resumes don't make it to my desktop. Of the folks I can recall that were going for a jr position with many years of experience had some pretty obvious personality issues. Everyone else I interview that's been in industry over 12 years is trying for Lead/Staff/PE. I'd definitely want to know why someone with 20+ years of experience in development is applying for a SDE2 job.
"Just needs a job" and "moved into software" are good reasons. But I'd be really worried about "just needs a job" person getting mad/frustrated if they were that experienced and banging heads with manages that didn't know how to leverage their skills.
When I was younger (~2005) I worked as a peer with one of the dads of a kid who was one year older than me in highschool. He actually became a good friend and mentor. I also worked with a guy who had been a CTO of a 500 person dev shop for years and went back to being a dev. He relished not making decisions or dealing with politics. They were both great mentors. It was a 2 way mentorship as I had a bit more core CS than they did and was more willing to experiment on new tech. They were great with doing whatever they needed to to get the job done. And they'd been in many techs stacks, that helped me break my single language bias and my "not my job" quickly.
I think these days my bias would come from everyone I work with that's older is also quite senior, level wise. On the engineering side they're people who are also constantly trying new things and really leveraging their experience. They're all very introspective. You can call into question pretty much anything with them and you'll get a good discussion.
Companies I've worked with definitely expect engineers to at least reach the lead position for the most part. Up or out in some ways. But the megaco I worked at definitely has really solid non-lead, non-entry-level engineers who have been there forever, esp in critical systems, ignoring their up-or-out guidelines. The main risk there was a new manager being biased and just assuming a 15 year tenure L5 engineer should be managed out. As a contradicting factor there was general consensus anyone over 10 years "really knows some shit" as the default assumption.
I'm in one of those systems where after lead you have staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier. You never have to be a manager in those. In that style system you can stop at lead (L1/L2/L3 lead/PE/sr PE/de). At those you can stop at L3. It would be very hard to explicitly stop at L2 there. You would have to opt out of hiring, peer reviews, and doing architecture and just do assigned tasks on jira.
We had one engineer who wanted this, they had a ton of stock and we're kinda set, had been there forever. Their super power was ops. You just let em go at a system and it just becomes more and more stable and better documented quietly over time. They had a manager explicitly protecting them that they didn't really grok was happening. They actually left after moving to a new product team and the new manager kept trying to uplevel them. But again they basically just retired at that point.
For me I always worry about people who just do what others tell them. I need feedback and have had projects go sideways when I didn't get it. "Wait you realized 3 months ago this wasn't going to work and you didn't mention it?" "Your the boss/lead I do what you say".
Another way to say it is I think small team lead is the minimum viable dev in places I've worked. That doesn't mean you cant step into a support role and rotate who's lead or work as a team but you need to be capable of doing it.
wow people do love their titles )))
^ This guy reads.
I was getting rejected from jobs that seemed a perfect fit for my resume. End up getting a job I wasn’t qualified for on paper via referral.
And some of those jobs that rejected me are still reposting the same damn job monthly.
You can't take an online course or build a couple side projects and be qualified to run a 1M+ qps distributed system.
A lot of hiring here is for low end work or at very junior levels (If you are a 10+ years experienced guy, good luck getting a job. I know a close friend of mine struggling to get one - ready for even a 40pc pay cut)
If you apply for a Principal or Staff position (few), be ready to grind out 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard Leetcode problem and doing a System design interview where you do FB with Instagram design reels all at once in 1 hour). Surprisingly when you attend meetups and talk with "Senior" managers who used to hire dozens with shambolic interviews, seem to be opting for getting "good" "resources" with DSA skills from this market (Imagine working in core engineering and then going on to do body shop consulting at an IT provider migrating from Java 4 to Java 17)
While the general sense on lot of jobs are going offshore is true, it is possibly very low paying entry level jobs.
You can now possibly correlate these to a lot of comments you see, junior folks who (no offense intended) :
* Given a spec hack something up and never think of how a customer will use this * Exceptions (sorry, we code Hail Mary scenarios) * Monitoring (sorry, that is ProdOps issue not mine) * Alert Management (this is non critical anyway & maintenance is someone else's job) * Testing (shambles)
Add to this targets such as "automate" with "Gen AI", We paid your co-pilot license where is the productivity increase number (you are an under performer and did not "customer delight" experience)
Sure is frustrating (onshore or offshore) & sad to see this where this is. One just thinks we'd have to live with this at-least for now. Hoping that things get better (overall in the world), sanity prevails and we can all have better lives ahead of us
Probably, one of the main reasons for layoffs in “US and what have you” is new wave of deglobalization and having your own google, visa, etc. “just in case”. This way possible markets shrink and big “IT troops” become less economically feasible.
We may even see in the not so distant future some IT migration from US to the countries outside of Pax Americana.
Some reasons for better than ever demand in IT are the creation of alternatives to some gone paid western products like SAP or migration of the existing solutions to open-source stack: e.g. from Sql server/Oracle to PostgreSQL and/or adding Linux support instead of just Windows.
a) Hire some Junior devs, track them through spyware on the laptops b) Enterprise ChatGPT, Bard, <Insert my own> c) CoPilot d) Spin features out
Some senior folk reviews the code (we pay him top dollar, so 18 hours is reality he/she has to wake up to) As someone to whom this happened (I did not sign up, it was normal till management changed), I can tell you it made me go crazy. 85 hour work weeks (weekends included) took a toll and I quit and took a lower paying position (1 year ago).
Sadly its not getting better, Was conversing with a colleague recently and he told me his new task was to use GenAI to migrate IMS to Java microservices. Kind of chuckled to myself (console by saying: it gets worse, before it gets better)
Happened to me too - I just said this shit is generated by ChatGPT and I won't be reviewing it. They didn't insist.
India has had an “if you’ve got no better options” for most of my career to be honest.
The volumes (fresh and junior hiring) in India are staggering numbers
For example, if you drop 2 IT jobs, but each one is 150k, but you create 4x 60k jobs, it looks like you added 2 jobs, but in reality, you removed 60k worth of payroll income.
But the company saves 60k, so the net (to the economy) is the same.
No, it's entirely true. The economy is a closed system. Employees can't "put that income back into the economy", because it has never left.
How it gets redistributed will vary, and you can make normative arguments about spending the money at the local coffee shop. But the net effect on the economy is the same.
This is sort of not true. The biggest example of why is the concept of the velocity of money. If you’re unfamiliar with this concept, it’s the idea of of how many times a single dollar is used in a given time period. It’s a very important measure, and it’s historic low at the start of the lock downs was why the fed dumping so much money into the economy was not a mistake (at the time). It’s an effective multiplier, and has very real impact as to the total utils that everyone in the spending chain collect.
What this means, is that when money is spent outside a country, there is a very real risk that that the local velocity of money goes down, even though the gdp of the global economy is going up.
No, its not; value (and, separately, money) can both be created and destroyed. And, when examining any scale smaller than the global economy, value and money can each enter or exit the universe of analysis from or to the outside, as well.
4.1% sounds nice, but inflation has been at, what, 7% over the last couple of years?
You can't look at years of largesse and then when we get back to reality lament about how it's so horrible.
The American worker has never had largesse, even the tech workers like ourselves, the largesse is and was and will still be going to the capitalist class. You're basically saying that we must accept that we're meant to live shitty lives where we grind and grind for very little gain while the capitalists and founders thrive on our labor. Reality is reality, but the whole "we can't complain about this" message you're sending is part of what's keeping us here. We should be fighting for the fruits of our labor.
I am absolutely not convinced that if I lose my job I can easily get another one that pays as well, which is saying something because my wage is pathetic compared to most people on HN.
Also, just like in the dot com bust, companies really start laser focusing on roles that are directly tied to revenue, but anything that is even slightly tangential/"a luxury" gets cut. In a non-scientific perusal of my LinkedIn connections, most of the software devs and sales people I know who were laid off found work relatively quickly, but I've seen people in roles like recruiting, content marketing, UX research, and product managers that have in some cases been unemployed for over a year. Middle management also definitely had a major thinning out.
Well, we had people bragging about working 2, 3 or more remote jobs in 2021/2022, so I'm not sure that should be the expectations anchor. 2023 reversed some of that.
We're in a lull, no doubt. But there's still a lot happening.
Coincidental to the overemployment stories, there was a trend of entry-level workers taking jobs and abandoning them at the end of the training period. They'd work a series of short-term "jobs" concurrently in which they collected pay for the time period in which nobody had any real expectations from them, and left when that changed.
Overemployment candidates don't hide it well, or the media was making news up based on viral bullshit someone exaggerated on Reddit based on the above trend. I figured someone would try this shit so I kept an eye out; we only ever caught two OE cases arising from unresponsive remote employees with low output. (One confessed.)
There's not exactly any mystery to catching this, and there's a ton of ways to get caught (as repeatedly reported by Redditors). I have a hard time believing this narrative was ever real for more than a handful of people. The story mainly seemed to serve as astroturf citable in support of eventual RTO mandates.
Do we know how prevalent that really was though?
I just assumed those were extreme outliers, famous because they were so outrageous.
Companies bend and cut the throat of loyal hard working employees the moment they are not relevant yet people raged some ethics there which was very misplaced.
It really did. I choose that year to become an independent contractor, and thanks God the only client I found loves me and pays on time because otherwise literally nobody has ever contacted me on LinkedIn or anything with a single decent proposal.
I have a huge fear of losing that client and going back to European corporate job and salary again.
If you're a contractor you should be the one contacting. Sales is part of the job.
go open the careers page for most mid-tier tech co’s (Coinbase, Rippling, Affirm) and count the number of SWE jobs in India/Latam/Eastern Europe vs the U.S.
Say you get your wish of no immigration. How are you going to force these companies to not hire abroad instead?
At least if the worker who competes with you is in the U.S., they have the same cost structure as you and won’t undercut you as much or at all on wage.
and it's not one party or another either. it's both parties.
Similar for "jobs Americans won't do"... "at the wages being offered".
It drives me insane that people freely accept the concept of supply and demand, except when it comes to labor.
There would be riots, for example, if agricultural workers were paid rates that would make Americans willing to do this. If you think food inflation is bad now, that would be off the charts.
Like it or not, we benefit from cheap labor, across many, many different industries.
That said, some people disagree with the ethics of importing a migrant underclass which we're knowingly underpaying, but I'd agree with you that the current system benefits us, although it could be better with more immigration and labour controls.
and those very same people would also "disagree" with higher prices for essential goods/services.
When people cite the benefits of mass immigration, eg, "where are all the nurses going to come from it we don't import workers?". I'd argue what they're actually saying here is, "if we don't create a migrant underclass who is going to work for the crappy pay we give nurses?". The only reason we need migrant workers to fill these roles is that they don't pay attractively enough for natives to apply to them.
The main benefits of immigration on a native population is that you create a migrant underclass. So if that's what we seem to want then our current immigration system could be improved. That's really all I argue.
How are you going to compete with other countries doing the same thing but offering a better deal?
I don't have a stat but looking in past the manual labor costs of food is very small percentage.
This isn't an argument against immigration as I'm incredibly pro. That said, trying to sell people on immigration based off the premise that it'd provide them with more minority groups we could exploit into accepting lower wages feels morally bankrupt.
https://theconversation.com/the-dip-in-the-us-birthrate-isnt...
It’s also my understanding that the people asking for more lenient immigration policies are essentially asking for more humane treatment of migrants (refrain from breaking up families, for example) and more effective processing, not typically advocating for an open border or an increase in overall immigration.
Remember that the meaning of “sanctuary city” is the refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement agencies like ICE that have a documented history of abusive practices. “Sanctuary city” was never intended to be an open invitation for immigration. Instead it’s intended to encourage the immigrants who are already here to do beneficial things like report crimes and enroll kids in school rather than existing off the books in an underground seedy under the table situation.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2017/03/03/wi...
Can you explain how this would even work? Why would any company agree to this?
I've been part of successful offshoring at a few different companies. It wasn't "one and done", that is, we had to try different countries, different subcontractors, etc but it is totally possible to maintain quality AND lower engineering costs by 50-75% by offshoring.
For those interested, my best experience has been with workers in LATAM countries. Pry 75% were Brazilians. Great timezone and culture match also most of them have good written/spoken english.
This is like asking how are they going to offshore McDonalds workers when discussing moving steel production overseas.
Can anyone here comment on whether this horrible job market is a US specific situation or whether I'm living in some kind of weird bubble?
You didn't specify, but I'm going to assume you're not new in your career. It's just fine in the US for staff engineer+ experience level also. New engineers? Mid levels? Probably less so, and probably similar in The Netherlands.
But yeah, EU engineers are very good in my experience.
Pubs started as "public houses". What's the point if you don't know the regulars? Why go out?
Imagine Cheers with robo Ted Dansen. (Actually, that might be awesome, for very different reasons...)
I sit at my usual wine bar and chuckle watching across the street, people standing in line for 30 minutes to get into a loud club with mediocre drinks. Then again, that club is hugely profitable.
Slightly insulting to European developers?
Though I suspect a lot of European developers would say the same about their US colleagues…
Wouldn’t that necessarily imply a reduction in productivity?
Maybe I've just been lucky with the people I've worked with. In one company we had a representative of pretty much every major European country working there along with quite a few guys from the US. Everyone worked hard to get stuff delivered.
It's certainly not something any one individual should take personally.
With such restrictions you're obviously gonna encounter issues hiring and will hammer the restricted pool.
Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work done is incorrect. Most engineers can build stuff, but they also add complexity and require hand holding. Both suck time from the most productive engineers.
A team of 10 excellent engineers is easily better than a team of 100 good engineers, in my opinion.
It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering.
I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026
heres a total feature map of what was released in 2023:
https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387
I think thats definitely a signal that the B and C teams werent needed, considering they cut 90% of staff LOL.
As for the bots, AI is making it easier than ever to bypass those systems. CogVLM is just sitting there menacingly on github https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM
From the WSJ, so no complaining about liberal bias.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...
They cut ~$1B in operating expenses, to go from $4.73B to $3.31B in advertising revenue, and forecasts don't look much better [0]
What has Twitter left to offer? They don't have the manpower to add new functionality, and they are bleeding advertising money.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis...
I've never personally believed in Twitter as a business model, so you're preaching to the choir there. As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
They're not unrelated. Advertisers like to know that their ads work; you need staff to do that.
Look at how much tailored the FaceBook ads were vs Twitter [1]. Advertisers would be sticking with Twitter if they thought the ads were worth it.
> Facebook targeting allows advertisers to drill down, ensuring your ad is targeted at those most interested in your ads’ content.
> The Facebook ad targeting based on interests looked like this:
> Science > Mari Smith > Joel Comm > Social science > HootSuite > Post Planner > Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn > Kim Garst > Sprout Social > Social Media Examiner > Buffer
> Twitter’s targeting is not quite as refined, but we targeted these keywords:
> instagrammarketing > socialmediamarketing > socialmediaexaminer
[1]: https://www.agorapulse.com/social-media-lab/twitter-ads-cpc-...
However, my point is that the top parent's claim of Twitter's problems aren't engineering is wrong. Their targeting is god awful to the point that Advertisers don't want to bother with it anymore. If they had better ad targeting (aka Engineering) then Advertisers would sweep the problems under the rug.
There are also many non-engineering examples of this.
- "If Jeffrey Dahmer ran a 4.3, we'd call it an 'eating disorder.'"
- Russian Oil / Gas is still buyable by western countries.
- Lack of repercussions for Jamal Khasoggi assassination [1]
- Massive amounts of advertising on FaceBook post-Cambridge Analytica
- USA Companies selling your active location (to journalists pretending to be not-journalists).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
Unrelated in the short term. In the long term, I disagree.
Twitter is not that interesting of an app that users are flocking to it, nor it is so fundamentally different from any of its competitors and essential as a social network, that it would have a captive audience.
Twitter user base peaked in 2022. There haven't been any new major features, no concrete plans, but regardless, they have not enough manpower to implement them even if they wanted to.
> As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
Good luck with that. People in the US, and especially the EU, don't like to have their payment apps linked to their social media. It's not like big tech hasn't tried already, e.g. Google Wallet, Facebook Pay, SnapCash, etc.
East Asia runs on a different gear. They have their own "everything apps", e.g. Kakao, Line, WeChat. Musk is not going to convince them to switch, that's for sure, and I highly doubt he would succeed where so many others have failed, definitely not with a withering platform like Twitter.
Why wouldn’t everyone use Apple Pay? And as successful as Elon has been in his other companies, is it wise to go up head on against Apple, literally one of the most valuable companies in the world? Making Twitter into a payment app sounds like one of the worst ideas I could possibly think of.
or may be they dont need new functionality. It works fine as it is today.
What twitter needs is revenue sources, and i don't see how they are going to get it.
The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.
Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product.
Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the workforce? That's much more impressive.
This is debatable.
Twitter hasn't added any meaningful functionality in recent years, which is fine if you think your product can survive stagnation for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't think so, but who knows.
Also, random Twitter functionality seems to be broken once a month, more or less. Last time I checked, new signups were having trouble following accounts and posting, which is as essential as it could be for Twitter to work.
After telling the advertisers to go 'F themselves', those paying customers are leaving in droves plus the ad ecosystem is one of the worst in the industry.
The only alternative is to get enough paying users. Good luck.
It's not though. I assume you're trying to claim Twitters only problem is the Advertisers leaving and that the platform is fine but that's not the case.
Lets ignore all visible technical problems such as outages or broken features that have happened since the purchase.
You have to compare Twitter to FaceBook. Both of them have had similar outrage by Advertisers for the respective companies actions. However, Advertisers keep coming back to FaceBook because of the engineering. FaceBook has much better targeting and also staff that interacts with the Advertisers. Twitter has absolutely horrendous targeting; Jews don't want their 'buy a Torah' ad next to a pro-gaza post not just because they disagree with the post but also because that somebody isn't their target audience. This is an engineering problem; if Twitter had better engineering the Advertisers wouldn't be leaving.
We’re hiring exclusively in Canada and India. We have a handful of US positions open, but leadership wants us to prioritize Toronto. Now we’ve been asked what teams could operate 100% in Toronto without customer being the wiser. I don’t expect we’ll have a functional team that isn’t primarily leadership in the United States by the end of 2025.
Now... cost of living in Toronto is as high as the Bay Area. I wonder if the above commenter meant Waterloo (hour from Toronto), because that is where the bulk of the SWE staff is.
Around 2014 I recall a spreadsheet making the rounds that people voluntarily and anonymously submitted to, and it showed, yes, about 3/4 the total comp. But if you live in Kitchener-Waterloo like most SWEs do, that was an incredible package as housing costs there were about half of Toronto's.
In general since then all salaries in Canada have not come close to keeping pace with the broken cost of living / housing price bubble here.
Using L3-L5 SWEs as a reference point, the typical difference between Toronto (Canada) and New York (US) for the same level and role was around 30%+ less if a person was based out of the Canada office.
There are/were a non-trivial number of Canadian Googlers that made New York their official office but were unofficially trying to live/work out of Toronto to take advantage of the compensation difference as well as trying to dodge the difference in income tax rates.
Now, unlike a lot of other shops, actually the people Google hired were mostly top notch, regardless of where they came from.
The post compares the number of "who's hiring" comments to "who wants to be hired" comments. (Or maybe top-level comments, I'm not sure.)
Some of the "who's hiring" posts indicate multiple openings, and I'm guessing there have always been more job seekers than there are "who wants to be hired" comments.
I'm just saying that the underlying reality may be messier than the title indicates.
i don't think so. from my first search from 2021, there were 202 seekers, and 857 hiring comments. not sure how to get the top-level comments number only, but that ratio is already way different from 2023 (1:4 vs 1:1)
For the past few years... crickets.
This told me everything I needed to know, regardless of the many whom have been in denial.
The info I put on Linkedin, I'm comfortable being publicly available. Linkedin does block anonymous viewers, but you can't see everyone who views your profile without some premium subscription. But it IS possible. So slightly better than just hosting a resume on a public site.
If you're not willing to post the information publicly, then I think you just have to put in more work, find places you want to apply to, and directly send them your resume. But it just won't really be possible for people to discover you on their own.
You can see a clear sign of the worst being over and I would expect 2024 to start a return to normalcy again, maybe people will even start hiring again
2022 was not a good time to be entering the industry, but I think for people with 5+ years experience it was not so bad.
The job postings are there, but they sure don't seem real. I've had 1 interview in past 3 months and that's only due to being internally referred at NVIDIA for about 20+ matching jobs.
Edit; According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemployment could be a signal of the singularity approaching; so we’ll have that going for us (if the job market doesn’t come back) at least.
That would mean the messy parts are starting. Not great!
That would imply a fairly widespread ability to predict the singularity which doesn’t seem plausible to me
This article blew my mind because we as software engineers have immense power, we just need to use our skills to build stuff and take advantage of social media to harness/sell it. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query
>But tech hiring over the fourth quarter led to a small net growth in IT jobs for 2023. There were 21,300 IT jobs added in the quarter, a positive signal for increased tech hiring going into 2024, Janco said.
Hopefully, the uptick in hiring trend continues and things improve in 2024. The tech jobs market is indeed, pretty bad right now.
(seems a bit odd as usually there's not much hiring going on around the holidays, yet in 2023 December had the highest hiring numbers according to that data)
It seems for the last year or two the numbers are revised down once or twice after they are released.
In 2022, there were slightly more months (7) with upward revisions than downward (5)
Anecdotally, my job search started feeling more promising around mid-December.
Probably because of new budgets in the new financial year right?
My company tends to hire and promote a load of people in Jan
One company is planning to make me an offer, but they have to wait for the new FY to start in February before they can seek approval for another remote employee.
The other company is hiring to replace someone who recently left. The team is pretty lean, so IIUC they can't easily cover the departing employee's skillset.
There's always going to be a place for coders who can massage the API links between packages or run an ERP, but you don't need IT when your firm is disposable line staff, institutional knowledge lives in the codebase, and HR has mostly been replaced by Workday.
UBI when?
Don't get me wrong I would love shorter work weeks, fewer hours a day, etc. for the same pay. That was the promise of all this additional productivity, after all. But even that is still getting paid for work.
I just can't rationalize the idea of paying an entire population for nothing.
It sounds like your problem is less with your specific job being obsoleted (or made less lucrative to you) by AI and more with just having to work in the first place. I can't really help with that.
McDonalds and others have kiosks already. One place I frequent only has touch screens for ordering.
And the crazy thing is, that we actually have SO much that needs to be done. There's massive shortages of all type of roles that can be filled by pretty much anyone.
Because eventually, there will not be many jobs left that cannot be automated. Cleaning and some of the trades will remain as long as we get iRobot-style droids with dexterity and intelligence to match a human, as will politics and management, but everything else will get automated.
The question is, will we manage to shift our society away from the millennia-old model of "one's employment defines one's worth in society" to "everyone is worth the same in society" in time, or will there be bloody fights in the transition?
We used to be dreamers now is like cant do
We hosted the website on the spare computer in my bedroom and within a few months had our first pay customer and we continued to grow it from there.
However despite working on countless startups since then none of them replicated that success, despite me since becoming an accomplished software engineer and knowing far more about business.
The truth is any idiot could launch a successful startup from their bedroom with a bit of effort in the early 2000s. When me and my friend worked on our startup we were like 1 of maybe 2-3 companies doing what we were doing. Today I suspect that number would be closer to 1,000, if not more.
Those old bootstrapping stories don't exist anymore. The low hang fruit is gone. There's a huge amount of competition even in the most niche markets. And if you have competition they'll probably have an ad budget many times your total bootstrapping budget.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to bootstrap a startup, but statistically it's insanely difficult these days. There was an article on Indie Hackers a while back where someone looked at the stats for successful Indie Hacker projects it the guy found that only something like 1 in 200 projects posted on Indie Hackers even go on to make profit if I recall correctly.
You're an idiot if you're a dreamer today. You're almost certainly better off just getting a second job.
A lot of people on here are workers that can do one type of task and not much else. Of course they cant understand that people can bootstrap by writing code and managing servers and designing databases and building uis themselves. For many, adding a button to a page is a career defining win. Leetcode doesnt translate to experience. A lot of NPCs will soon realise they not better than the factory workers they are looking down upon. And a lot worse than the outsourced people that deliver value they so dread. Perhaps they can look into bartending jobs.
Because capital.
Software, as a whole, is the most capital intensive industry in the world after energy/transportation: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
not enough jobs. too many applicants. interviews too damaging.
I'd like to spend the next 17 years doing something more personally meaningful as i'm quite jaded on tech now.
1.5 years ago, we posted a UX job and got maybe a couple resumes. Three months ago, we posted a UX job and got 900 resumes in just a couple days....
I do feel that there are signs of recovery now, so good luck to those that are still looking. I know it's very hard -- particularly if you're also supporting a family.
If on the other hand you're competing with senior sw devs with 5+ years of experience, there could also be other factors to keep in mind (age, ability in very specific tech stacks, etc).
I think companies are still hiring, but more focused, unlike in 2021-2022 when they over-hired "just in case".
Welcome to my world.
In-company recruiters are often quite helpful and accommodating, but, as soon as one single tech person gets involved, the temperature drops 30 degrees.
Standalone recruiters send me these breathless emails, extolling my qualifications, but, as soon as they find out my age, they ghost me. I have actually had recruiters hang up on me, as soon as I told them my age. I learned to just mention that up front, to get the ghosting out of the way.
Apparently, they aren't very good at math. I list 30 years+ experience, yet they seem to think that I'm under 35.
After a while, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired.
It's not the money; it's the "culture." Many folks, much younger, and much more inexperienced, are paid more than I ever made, in my entire career. I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.
Also, don't be above lying about your age.
I don't lie; especially in my profession. It's a thing. I know that personal Integrity is considered a "quaint anachronism," in today's world, but I won't compromise on that.
Just don't go with Neptune, it takes almost 165 years before you turn 1 there.
We need an acceptable way to express this, without desperately extolling you'll take less money. I think a lot of us "old guys" are in the same boat; I don't need 150k, I'll take 100k if the work is interesting, and I'm more likely to be loyal to boot.
The funny thing, is that I've been told that "Old people are just cruising to retirement," but it's OK to establish your entire business infrastructure on the idea that your young, energetic, engineers will not remain at the company for more than 18 months.
That is just BS. In my company we have quite a few 50+ and it's nice to work with them. They add exactly what younger people can't.
Reality is: They need to squeeze every dollar as much as they can. If they could, they would never hire:
1. People with kids
2. Older than 33-35 (more often than not also 1)
3. Disabled
4. Often sick People (give me your history of sick leave, that kind of stuff)
5. Anything else I am missing?
Just freaking replaceable robots.
Yeah, it's a tough nut.
It's understandable that SV companies want ambitious strivers that move on every 2 years, for the same reason many of these CEOs consider the "job done" as soon as they get "an exit". The life of the company is measured in months.
But if you're building a company for the long term, you need smart, loyal people who build institutional knowlededge within the company. This isn't something you can fast track, I don't care if you're the brightest MIT AI grad.
You need both.
We're in the final stages of releasing an app, so we're spending a lot of time on that Web app.
It's...challenging. I know that they have big issues with security, privacy, and sheer scope (I'll bet they get millions of submissions, every day), but the site is dog-slow, the CDN breaks constantly, I need to refresh the page quite often, and they seem to forget where I was, the last time; necessitating that I follow the breadcrumbs back to where I was (I have admin accounts on several orgs).
I've released over 20 apps on the store, and have dealt with this, for a while. It's actually getting worse.
But Apple is a multi-trillion-dollar company. I think they could afford for this to work a bit more smoothly, and, quite frankly, I'm surprised, as they have some of the best, and most experienced engineers on the planet, working for them. These are the types of things that lots of sites seem to be doing quite well.
</rant>
It seems that many startups don’t actually have a product, other than the startup, itself.
A “successful exit” means that the company is sold. The company is the product.
I have spent my entire career at companies that made actual products, for use by actual end-users. These corporations never had any “exit strategy,” because they were meant to be ongoing, perpetual, concerns. They had “future planning,” and “growth strategies,” that often looked a decade into the future.
Things have changed.
It's probably not even legal to ask in some jurisdictions.
They just start saying "Hello?, Hello?, Are you there?," etc. It's a convenient way to hang up on people.
Things like age, gender, and ethnic group are harder because you can't always conceal that. Still, "don't ask, don't tell" during the hiring process seems like the best option here.
I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but the tech economy seems much worse recently and I don't think I'm suddenly worse, stale, or less productive.
If you want to be paid more than someone with 5 years, you have to generate more value than they do, and you have to persuade the hiring manager that you can generate more value. The fraction of places that can see that is smaller than the fraction that can see the value of a senior over a junior. (On the other hand, for those places, the competition for the jobs is also less severe - there aren't tons of people with 20 years of experience on the street at any given time.)
So it takes longer than it did when you had 5 years of experience. But keep looking. There are places that will see the value in what you provide.
The job category you're looking for is "principal software engineer" or "staff software engineer".
A 5 year software engineer may have more perceived value per cost than a 20 year software engineer. Sure, if they have the same salary, you hire the 20 year engineer, but they don't. The 20 year engineer expects more pay, and (rightly) won't work for 5-years-of-experience wages. So you have to find an employer that perceives the additional value of the additional 15 years of experience.
You did two superficial things and are surprised you didn't feel more qualified? Practicing / memorizing leetcode and having a rudimentary understanding of LLMs (if I were hiring, we're targeting advanced degrees with a focus in the space) -- yeah, probably not sufficient. This is a feature and not a bug as the employment market moves back to sanity.
We are spoiled in this industry.
Lots of companies low-ball candidates because they are happy with Harbor Freight quality candidates, so long as they will work for Harbor Freight prices.
I was able to get offers in this percentile but the companies making these offers didn't usually hire at this level. If anything, I want to be around people that are more competitive than me, that put a lot of effort into what they do and that can easily walk into high paying roles. I definitely don't want to be the highest paid engineer in the room at a company that frankly doesn't need this.
I know this can be seen as entitled but I'm the sole provider of a 4-person family and willing to work hard and prove myself. I'm happy to say that I now have a higher income than I did before being laid off and at a company with more successful people than me and a higher ceiling, however, that doesn't mean I didn't find it significantly more difficult to get a job this time around than I have in the last decade.
There are people that are going to have a much harder time than I have.
Nobody owes me anything but that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it. It's very tough for those that have been laid off. Particuarly those have to support families as I did -- I am a sole earner and have two children.
You could benefit from practicing a bit of empathy and not lying to yourself that the market has merely moved back to "sanity" without gaining a bit of recent experience in it.
If you landed a job, do you think this new ability to implement a CS 101 data structure would let you keep it? Help in your performance in a measurable way? This is what I mean by superficial. The same applies to the LLM work. You studied enough to where you could buzzword it in a 45 minute interview.
My response, which I'll be more clear with: Maybe it's not that bad that we're more careful and these superficial techniques are no longer adequate to get someone a job in this industry.
> I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it.
Don't think anyone is preventing you from doing anything.
As for LLMs, it's probably the best thing to learn right now, especially by building something. I personally believe it will lead to an explosion in potential jobs. It's hard to describe but imagine a software engineer learning how to create a rest api for the first time after doing soap. And then integrating various apis to harness saas products, cloud deployments, etc back in the 2000s.
Then again I also talk to an ex-googler I met on Hacker News who built an LLM app and is now spending most of his time selling his saas product because he can't find a job either. That's a very positive go-getter attitude.
There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on. Even though there may be economic downturns when it's harder to find work, and I was affected by this in the last two years so I understand what it's like, the long term trend until labor is irrelevant is that we'll always need IT and software engineers and software developers. The good ones will continue to earn a really great wage because it's difficult to become a really good one and a lot of other shops will want your great devs. It does not matter where you're located on earth - if you're great, a better shop will take you.
> There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on
Will putting additional effort and in turn paid man hours increase the profit margin?
I recently worked on a platform that still used Silverlight well after its deprecation. They needed to deprecate and then extricate that dependency. For a very long time, people would pursue features over this maintenance task since the maintenance wouldn't have increased revenue. However, eventually the very old dependency slowed down their ability to produce features that customers want and presented a security risk as well. These certainly will reduce profit margin...so a lot of the time, tech investment will be about not losing the profit margin that already exists, and biding time until new capabilities become available to add new features and decrease system costs.
Edit: to simplify my personal definition - if your report to the CIO - IT, if you report to a product group - not IT.
One of the factors that they looked at were remote workers when they wanted local, office based workers.
We are also seeing a glut of over hiring to deal with changes in pandemic demands and productivity.
Finally, many companies run on borrowed cash. This means they need to make repayments and with the high interest rates they need to adjust to that.
Once they are meeting their payments comfortably we will see a surge in hiring.
Despite business and investor hype around generative AI last year, information-technology hiring slumped as companies laid off workers and sought to cut costs
The information-technology sector grew by only 700 jobs over 2023, a drastic slowdown from the 267,000 jobs added in 2022, even as artificial intelligence and ChatGPT spawned huge interest from businesses.
Job losses in the first half of 2023, including layoffs at technology-driven companies that dominated the period, hurt overall hiring for tech jobs in all industries, said Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of consulting company Janco Associates. The firm bases its findings on data from the U.S. Department of Labor."
Once companies see how much they can save by spending less on IT, they might not go back to overspending.
Also I think the HN title is wrong; IT employment's yearly growth increase by just 700 jobs/year in 2023.
The analysis referenced by the article: https://e-janco.com/career/employmentdata.html#p7TP3c2_3
The table "Change In IT Job Market Size - December 2023" seems to indicate that 5.5k jobs were added to the 'job market' in 2023, contradicting what's being said. (Which isn't even representative of total employment in the sector, only the open job postings for the sector).
If you're currently jobless you have one amazing advantage for you: January is the best possible time of year to find roles. Don't be discouraged when you see jobs with hundreds of applications. Most people just mass spam and aren't even remotely qualified. If you have the experience the best way to get hired is to engage with the job post. Show that you've read it, that you understand the companies mission, that you understand how the company is uniquely positioned and what value they're trying to create compared to everyone else. Then talk about how you can help solve their main challenges to make them successful. I guarantee you will stand out above everyone else who is just spamming generic cover letters. But this means only applying to jobs that also stand out to you.
tl; dr: im getting interviews just like every other time when the market was actually healthy. At the very least this is the best time of year to apply. So take advantage of it while you can.
The H1B visa cap has been 65000 since the day it was introduced in 1990.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_Visa_Reform_Act_of_2004