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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

> Job market realities. It’s tougher than it’s been in a decade, with fewer jobs, and more qualified candidates. This is great if you’re hiring, but harder for applicants.

Is this true? Layoffs make the headlines, but the unemployment rate for software engineers seems to be low, at least in the most recent numbers I can find.

The rest of the items ("Compensation changes", "Negotiating offers", etc.) just follow from that premise.

Of course, everything could tank tomorrow, but it's probably not smart to get into a defensive crouch earlier than you have to.

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It is definitely true in my experience, and for those seeking 100% remote or with only 0-3 years of real experience (not school) it is even worse.

I have posted this comment before on HN, but ~8-9 months ago we posted a job for a lead engineer at my company - we got 3 applicants (this was for a fortune 50 company, and comp, while not FAANG, was very respectable with good benefits and decent bonus and stock options to boot).

~5-6 months after that we added another exact same position, and advertised it in the exact same places and got over 300 applicants - many ex-FAANG which we never used to get.

So based on my personal experience, there are a lot more people looking and applying for jobs and a lot less jobs to choose from - and like I said, if you are dead-set on being remote, it is even harder - my most recent employer (100k+ employees) will no longer allow hiring managers to interview people who state they are only looking for remote (they don't have to, plenty of people are willing to show up at the office because they have rent/mortgage and bills to pay).

> Is this true? Layoffs make the headlines, but the unemployment rate for software engineers seems to be low, at least in the most recent numbers I can find.

Absolutely true. It's the worst I've seen. I'm looking to fill 5 positions at our place and the scene is just sad. People out of work since feb-june of last year, highly senior engineers unable to land interviews because they want fully remote, leads having their work outsourced, heads unable to find head positions and having to settle for senior roles.

The worst ones hit are the ones that have spent a decade working in ibm/oracle/vmware stacks, now, due to layoffs, entering this new k8s dominated ecosystem, where they're finding their skillset to be undesired, even by big institutions as those have too begun migrating to k8s/cloud.

My anecdata says it's true. Where before I didn't get a single rejection (so applying was sending out four applications and getting four interviews) in this round suddenly some even did not invite me for interviews, they just declined. Strange experience! And I only applied to more positions this month because a position that seemed a safe bet did not materialize at the end of last year, the project evaporated when the (one would think unrelated) automotive market catered, the linked agency instead scrambled to find projects for their existing devs.

So yeah, definitely got harder I'd say.

Just like the dating markets, a small shift at the margins can influence the culture quite a lot.

You would not think that there would be much difference between a city with a 50-50 gender ratio and 52-48 (theoretically). But if you assumed that 80% of people are in relationships (1-1), and 20% are looking, suddenly that 4% difference turns into 33% more of one gender than another (hypothetically with 100 people, it would be 12 of one vs 8 of the other). So the culture between those two similar looking cities will be completely different.

A similar thing happens with jobs. Going from 99% employed to 98% employed without changing number of jobs available can completely change the employment market dynamics overnight.

Anecdotally this seems to be true, if only because companies that aren't actively doing layoffs are at least restricting hiring.

Unemployment can be low statistically, but for those 10s of thousands who find themselves unemployed it seems like a rough job market.

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