Is the Job Market Dying?
rachdele.substack.com
rachdele.substack.com
For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.
1. Your best bet to get a job is your network. If you were a clock puncher, if you didn't go above and beyond, if you aren't the person who is gonna make the co-worker who vouches for you look good... you are not gonna get much help in your network.
2. The next best bet is to either a) start your own company or b) find someone who wants to start their own company. You know what got us out of the 2000 crash? Web 2.0 was the sexy name but it was ad tech that put money in the bank. Pop unders for Netflix, free iPods, and mortage sign ups... all sorts of nonsense... Today it's much easier to get something small going that pays the bills nothing is stopping you other than you.
3. If neither of these things are for you, and you want to be in tech then you might have to suffer. Job at the liquor store checking out drunks while you do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game.
Every one I know who survived not having a job when the 2000 bubble burst fit in one of these buckets. The rest left tech for good.
I know decent former tech company employees who are stocking shelves at Home Depot until hiring picks up.
I don’t think the next best thing is to start a company however. Because the people who didn’t get jobs from their network are more likely to be the people who won’t necessarily excel at this. Plus there are so many variables here.
Next best thing in my view is to grind the heck out of Hacker Rank problems and get a job out of pure spite from brute forcing software challenges. Not fun or interesting, but can work really well to land someone a high paying job without having to think about starting a company.
Next best thing, or parallel best thing if this is your preference, is probably to get a more local dev job. There are surprisingly many local companies who don’t post remote roles, don’t post roles on HN, pay less than FAANG market, but are comfortable, in person roles with medium expectations. This is way better than being a liquor store clerk.
Kids, life, have these things. Just make sure you are hitting your marks, that your helpful that your gonna roll your selves up and get shit done. If you have to leave, then leave, bow out.
If you cant come in, or have to go cause you need to be at the gym or your spin class or D&D night. No one is calling you back right now. They remember that you put you first and not the team.
It does NOT have to be, and SHOULD NOT be, toxic.
Door dash, lyft, über, liquor store. NOTE: dont end up in a back room some where! You want to keep your social game sharp and you never know who will want a web site, or a pc repair, do these things too, your networking while your working.
Start a side project: Build a CLI tool, in a new language... Go, Rust, Zig are all sexy for this right now. It doesn't have to be perfect just launch. Stay in the game make yourself hot.
Your job is getting a job. You will work at least 5 hours a day at this till you have a job. Thats on top of Lyft, and side project...
If you have a life, or a family your gonna see them less till your back on your feet.
like, studies have shown that most people think their jobs are, partially or wholly, bullshit. that may or may not be true, but once you've checked out, you're out.
meanwhile when you're a manager / owner / founder, you have a lot more control; no learned helplessness while swimming in an ocean of processes when it's just you and 6 other people.
Worst day in that job when I was trying to crawl out of bankruptcy was meeting a few of my ex-colleagues while wearing the crappy purple uniform. I was putting food on the table and they looked like I was a joke.
I still put food on the table, the job market always wants people who can just code. Networking is hard and requires longitudinal effort. But the jackpot remains elusive.
Keep trying
My first non-restaurant job (starting in high school) was Best Buy. Before they had the Geek Squad, they just had a generic tech area. You could get your VCR cleaned and your PC upgraded in the same spot.
Anyway, it seemed like once or twice a year someone would come in and take all the good sales people by offering them more money and fulltime hours. First it was the Gateway Country store (that didn't last long), then it was the local dial up ISP, then the regional DSL provider...
Do your job. Do it well. Your coworkers will know whose code works.
When someone leaves for a new job, get a personal email. Put it in a file somewhere (not in a work computer).
That's networking. It doesn't have to be going to the bar every night with your bros from work. It can just be that people know you, know your work, and have moved on to other places.
The trick in a bad market is to understand that mostly the cool perks are gone, and for a time you need to lower your expectations. I think that is going to be very difficult in this cycle.
It's always been through personal contacts but I've surely been lucky.
1. My entire network is struggling, even the ones who have jobs are worried. Despite being universally acclaimed and vouched for by my past coworkers, it seems to have no impact. Companies don't trust their own employees references right now.
2. Maybe this is changing, but it seems like entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. Nobody has ideas, everyone just wants to go to sleep at a comfy 9-to-5. Maybe bootstrapping a company is so outside of people's comfort zone that they can't even fathom it.
The entrepreneurship of ten years ago of two dudes sitting in a house coding apps is gone.
And, despite all the hype, there is a lot of unexplored stuff in this space that can be done on hardware that can be run in a home office.
Yes, it's not literally coding apps any more, but I know quite a few people working on small, funded teams having a lot of fun right now.
There are definitely pros and cons of both sides. Here's my take on working for the DoD:
- PRO: Having a long tenure means you really get to know the software systems you're developing, and the people with whom you're collaborating.
- PRO: Lack of commercial / profit pressure lets you focus on what seems good for the country, rather than for stockholders.
- CON: Congress is insane. They still haven't passed a defense budget for FY24. The DoD is the only employer I've ever had that missed payroll.
- PRO/CON: Supporting the U.S.'s military might is good or bad, depending on how it's used. A lot of soul-searching may be required to do the work. But working for the private sector can also feel awful, especially in this age of surveillance capitalism.
- PRO/CON: The pay is okay-ish compared to the private sector (PRO), but there's no potential for major bonuses / RSUs (CON).
- PRO: Layoffs are far less common than in the private sector. There's no boom-and-bust cycle tied to interest rates (AFAIK).
- PRO: The hiring process is 10000x better than what I've endured from the private sector since being laid off about 12 months ago. No LeetCode tests, no 5 rounds of interviews followed by being ghosted. And yet, despite the far simpler hiring process, my corner of the DoD generally managed to hire good people.
- CON: Bureaucracy. It can be soul-sucking. But since leaving the DoD, I've learned that it's just a symptom of massive organizations in general. E.g., I encountered a lot of the same frustrations working at Intel under Brian K and Bob Swan.
- PRO/CON: Physical facilities. At least where I worked, the DoD offices were generally run down compared to typical big-corporation offices. On the other hand, the DoD workspaces weren't under financial pressure to maxize programmers per square foot. So there weren't any open-office floor plans. Everyone at least had a cube, more senior people generally had offices.
- PRO: No significant ageism. If you start working for the DoD, and don't egregiously screw up, you don't need to worry about being laid off because of your age. But beyond that, many of these systems / problem domains have long learning curves, so long-tenured developers generally command a lot of well-deserved respect.
**
Right now I'm actually interviewing for private sector jobs (Microsoft) and DoD jobs. I might have to take an offer from Microsoft because of financial considerations. But I'm also kinda hoping I end up back at the DoD.
Probably a combination of factors:
- I finished my PhD in computer science shortly before looking for work outside the DoD, and that probably lent me some credibility.
- I'd had good success with several unclassified software projects while inside the DoD, and I was able to talk about them during the interviews.
- I put some effort into interview prep. E.g., I'd done very little with networking, so I brushed up on DNS, etc., before interviewing for a company that does internet stuff.
- Luck and timing. I'm sure there was some luck regarding which interviewers / hiring managers were interested in my resume.
For some it might be free work for their employer in return for something. Example might be in financial trading etc. to get a bonus or raise or promotion in a shop that is killing it.
For some it might be leetcode and reading everything on levels.io and teamblind.
For some it might be active investing for example property renovation.
For some a side business.
For some TOGAF and Scrum qualifications.
But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters.
Etc.
Yeah, at 50/hr that's $50,000 for a chance of someone vouching for you in the future that may never come to pass.
There's also the chance that maybe they were the manager that made you work 60hrs in the first place, so they don't see you as going above and beyond.
Whoopsie, you just wasted 1000 hours of your life.
No thanks. I'll get the job on my own merit.
Everyone has it hard during an economic downturn. Ugly people also have it harder, so do shorter and dumber people.
I don't find this exercise of comparing myself to others helpful. Despite having good feedback for my work, it doesn't really grow my network.
> who I would be happy to recommend or hire on the spot.
Yeah, assuming you don't have any biases and are a perfect judge of who's doing a good job. That's omegacap as the young kids say.
Bob: he comes in, he does his work, he goes home. He's a good productive developer.
Jane: She comes in, does her work, it's always documented and well tested. She is happy to roll up her sleeves and help the people around her out. She will pause to help you even if it means she gonna finish up at home.
Your boss asks you: Your call who do we hire. You're not fucking picking Bob.
Dont be Bob.
While I would agree with a softer form: "don't be a 9 to 5 clerk, do what is needed, including occasional long hours and weekends", if someone needs to regularly stay late it's a problem with the management, not with the Bob. My 2c.
Yes, this is why people start their own companies, and cash out.
>> Where do you draw the line in not being exploitable though?
Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I shit on company time... as the old adage goes.
The reality is that giving you a job only works if the company makes money off of what you do. If it lost money or broke even that would not be worth it. You're always being "exploited".
If you want to feel equal, there are plenty of companies that are collectives (mondragon look it up). I have a few projects going on right now that are structured like this. If one of them "takes off" it's a very even distribution for all involved as long as they are working there.
The beauty of capitalism is that if you hate how companies are run you can and should go run your own with the rules you want. If it was very equal, then everyone is incentives to go above and beyond... your still not gonna hire bob!
The balance is in being both: good, productive, amicable, helpful to others while also knowing that you deserve a life outside of work.
This infatuation with killing yourselves for work (mostly Americans but also in Brazil and some other cultures) have is really not healthy, to yourself and to other workers that you put under pressure because you do more than what you're paid for. You're not being a great employee, you're being an exploited employee, and leaving the door open to normalise this exploitation to others that might have other priorities after working hours.
From my time with leading teams I wouldn't hire Jane, I have done it before and eventually the team falls apart because others feel pressured to work more than they are being paid for/willing simply to keep up with the Janes of the world, it crumbles team morale.
Don't be Jane.
It's just something we pretend cannot happen in software.
Most industries don't want anything like software's "death march," "sleep under your desks," "eat pizza" cultural ideals. Well, pizza is maybe ok once in a while.
Who's going to burn out, Bob or Jane? Bosses, often completely untrained bosses who just "know" how to boss, say they want Jane, but they're probably better off with Bob. Assuming they want stable long-term businesses, of course.
In your scenario it's likely that Jane becomes a boss soon and hires people with her own "work ethic." That sucks. Don't get Janed!
Jane works hard but puts in long hours because she's just not very good and has to hustle to keep up even on basic tasks. She's helpful and kind to others because she understands their struggles, but can't hack new tech as well and will ultimately pause to help. Her well documented, working code takes 3+ weeks longer, and no one cares about Documentation.
I’d especially add that this can be good for people without extensive personal networks or who are worried about discrimination. If you’re on, say, https://usajobs.gov they are going to be a lot more fastidious about equal opportunity laws than many private companies and won’t think twice about hiring a middle-aged person with cubicle bod who has to go home at 5pm to pick up their kids rather than grabbing beers after work.
This is an important reality check for many people.
I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash. At that time software engineers got paid well, but not insane. Additionally, every software engineer I met was passionate about writing code.
Honestly, around 2019 I was really missing those days. The field has become flooded with people looking for a high paying job with essentially no interest in software or computer science beyond the paycheck it provides. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I do miss virtually everyone in the industry being genuinely fascinated with software and programming.
The good news is, if you're the kind of person who would write code even if it paid minimum wage, you'll survive this. People whose book shelves are filled with CS books, who find themselves working on coding problems at night because it's fun, who can't help hacking around with new ideas on the weeked, will very likely continue to work in software. You'll likely make less money, but you'll also have more fun.
Unsurprisingly, in this current market I'm getting paid less but having more fun at work than I've had in nearly a decade.
I do wonder if we are indulging in an “eternal September” mindset though.
Free everything, stock options, good pay....
Crush the competition before it gets its feet under it. It isnt that we dont have as many nerds, they are all just "locked up".
I think a lot of the "lifelong geek" crowd just finds more 'interesting' work (for whatever qualifies as 'interesting' to them...) in other companies without jumping thru all the hoops (and for less pay, of course). Lots of startups, niche companies, etc offer challenges that can make up for the lower pay.
like sometimes that bureaucracy is a good thing. i remember an uncle who worked for EMC talking to me about being a big company vs. small company person; each has an advantage.
It matters some but a very large private company still needs to organize and make money even if there's probably somewhat less immediacy.
>big company vs. small company person; each has an advantage
Yes. Small companies have limitations to what they can achieve even if they're impressive at small scale. And, certainly, software that doesn't involve enterprise sales allows for outsized effect.
But, in general, the level of just do what needs to be done that works at even a 1,000 person company totally breaks down at 10x and certainly 100x that scale. And that probably works well for people who abhor chaos and is anathema for people who sort of want to chart their own path.
For a company like Google, it's exactly the same. Even after going public, the founders still control the majority of stock voting rights. And there's no obligation in corporate law that you have to maximize profits.
It's just that you have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders; maximizing profits is one things shareholders can want, but it's not the only thing they are allowed to ask for.
Google has been publicly traded for most of its life, but things have changed over time regardless of that constant.
> like sometimes that bureaucracy is a good thing.
Employed right bureaucracy is one way to scale up processes.
Eg compare (1) keeping the whole state of your project in your head, or (2) in a personal notebook, or (3) on a share whiteboard with post it notes, (4) in Jira tickets.
Depending on the size of your project and organisation, you will find that the increased overhead of the higher-numbered methods might be worth it.
Of course, not all bureaucracy is the same. When I was at Google around 2014-2016 I found that they consistently achieved more benefits results from their bureaucracy at lower overheads than the big banks I used to work at (which weren't actually any bigger than Google).
Bureaucracy gets a bad rep but when done right (and defined broadly enough), it can help a lot.
Another example of bureaucracy done right is distributed version control: it's so convenient (after you get used to it..) that many people even use git on single person projects.
To be honest I don't think we'll ever go back to this. The only reason why this existed was that programming was socially unattractive, so developers self-selected to be people with certain personality characteristics. Once the society recognized the importance of IT jobs, it started pumping all sorts of people into the industry. There's no coming back, unless a) programming becomes a bad career choice again or b) all people get the luxury of working jobs that interest them
I find that if it's not an ick, it's resentment. Normies are catching on that huge amounts of tech bros are "overpaid" (working ~10 hrs a week at a rest and vest retirement home like Microsoft), and they're becoming luddites over the impact of AI in their industries.
They call San Jose "Man Jose" for a reason. Women don't like tech-bros, and it shows.
I entered in 1999, when there were plenty of jobs mostly filled with people who liked paychecks a lot more than coding. It was hard to find jobs doing anything hard or nerdy in the sea of webmasters.
I remember working at startups in the mid-late oughts after the bubble burst and the industry was awash in get-rich-quick, gimmicky companies. Those founders had learned the lessons of the dotcom bubble: make your money and get out before it happens again! There was a VC slot-machine for quick, happy exits. And if you don't do well at the slot machine, well you've learned important leadership lessons, so start another startup.
If there was a golden age of nerds, it must have happened before I was in the industry. But, on examination, I'm not sure those actually existed either.
I think it's worth focusing on the work and atmosphere and how makers get stuff done, but I balk at about appeals to former glories. Make Software Great Again? Hmph.
1. There was a massive amount of tech hiring not just over the pandemic, but really in the whole period from the end of the Great Recession until the latter half of 2022.
2. Many of those jobs were not just unsustainable pandemic hiring, but they were really just speculative hiring enabled by the ZIRP era, where more companies were worried about being left behind than overspending. Some examples: during the "Big Data Boom" there was an explosion of "data scientists" and "data analysts". I put those titles in scare quotes not because they're invalid jobs or something, but just that there was so much of a "just throw bodies at the problem" attitude that many of these roles were poorly defined at companies. Similarly, lots of companies staffed up massive user research teams. Turns out a lot of that low hanging fruit has been picked, and many companies have realized they can get by with much smaller, more targeted user research.
3. We are now undergoing a massive job restructuring, I would argue even stronger than what happened post dot com bubble, for a bunch of reasons: (1) the end of the ZIRP era coinciding with the end of pandemic-specific overhiring, (2) I've heard it said "Elon Musk showed with Twitter that you can run tech companies with a lot smaller teams" - while I strongly disagree (I'm always thinking, have you actually even used the complete garbage cesspool X has become, even more than before???), I think there is a valid point that a lot of companies just had way too many people than they needed, and (3) Gen AI really is having an impact on specific roles, e.g. copywriting roles and low-level data analyst roles.
It's simply a game of musical chairs where a ton of chairs were taken away all at once. Yes, the job application process is painful, AI-assisted ATS tools can feel like a labyrinth, and there are a lot more scams. But that is not the root cause. There are just a ton more people looking for jobs than there are roles available.
We spent the lion’s share of the 20th century building a vast “sovereign wealth fund” of technology via effective partnerships between the public and private sectors (substantially though not exclusively under “defense” budgets of one kind or another): everything from the transistor to the laser to the packet-switched Internet to Unix, the list goes on and on.
Then, somewhat abruptly in the scheme of things, a few things happened around the same time: “Dutch” Reagan was sharp enough to realize that he was a fucking movie star not a policy person, and needed some academic and intellectual heft to round out a serious presidential bid. The exact causal structure remains unclear to this day, it seems mostly to be related to cashing in on a Cold War that was winding down but good for one last corruption orgy, but somehow he and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan all got together and sold the public on a bunch of policies that were and remain disasters (Greenspan has since grudgingly admitted that he was wrong about pretty much everything in the kind of tortured language people like that use when they’re wrong about everything), Lewis Ranieri realized that in his words “Mortgages are math” and began a disastrous trend of extreme complexity financialization that created modern K Street (basically figured out how to buy up the commons for pennies on the dollar by gutting any remaining taboos against flagrant bribery of elected officials) and smoothly pivoted all of this into the Clinton Administration while codifying “Goldman Sachs is where we source finance people” in the form of Robert Rubin and his heirs, and the piece de resistance: brought Larry Summers into the mix, whose biography reads like the prelude to impeachment proceedings: everything the guy has ever touched has been illegal, icky, stupid, racist, misogynistic, kleptocratic, corrupt, or all of the above.
The last person to put up a serious fight was Brooksley Born, who was in the middle of preventing both the 2001 and 2008 financial meltdowns (and therefore almost certainly preventing the rise of reactionary populism in the Western World) when the cabal of incompetent Randian fuckups knee-capped her (using gender discrimination as a lever) and basically started running the “build a technology-denominated sovereign wealth fund” process in reverse: it’s been game on regarding raiding that cookie jar if you have the right “network” ever since.
The Department of Justice was taking time out of its typical day chasing around terrorists and human traffickers and what not to try to police stuff like trivial collusion and flagrant wage fixing in technology as recently as like 2011-2012, but seems to have kind of given up: it’s a losing battle. The last major legal action around big cap tech wage fixing wound down with a 400MM parking ticket in ~2011.
Three guesses where Summers is putting his greasy thumbs (the rest of that clique is dead or retired) on the scale now and who is the heir apparent to this nightmare.
I’ll be convinced when they do NVIDIA and wage fixing, but they’re at least making some noise.
But is the job market actually shitty? I still get plenty of recruiter spam on LinkedIn.
Regarding this...I was the guy on both ends of the spectrum. The Rockstar that goes above and beyond and the guy who was punching the clock (sometimes a little too early). It made no appreciable difference in the quality of my network - it is still essentially non-existent, since none of my peers or ex-peers have much influence over hiring decisions.
My best shot at networking into a job is through a personal friend who works in a non-tech sector at a high level position. He's probably the only person who can actually get my resume seen by hiring people out of several hundred that I have met over my lifetime.
Just as we saw in 2001, the market is worst for (a) recent graduates who have not yet established a professional network and (b) people who had poured into fungible commoditized job roles during the boom and were a dime a dozen when the bust came. (b) is roughly "programmer/analyst" in 2001, "Java developer" in 2008, and "data scientist" today. It's not that some people working under those titles don't have non-fungible skills, but that there are so many others with that job on their resume, that it's hard to differentiate. My advice is, _don't go looking for those jobs._ The opening anecdote in the article describes how terrible it is to try to get hired as a data scientist right now. And no wonder. The job market is flooded with low-quality data scientists.
My experience working with data scientists has drastically lowered my expectations: you get a mediocre Python programmer (you must be willing to accept Pandas + Jupyter notebooks as their work output), combined with a mediocre statistician (can do linear regression and ANOVA, but don't expect them to do it right), combined with a mediocre SQL programmer (probably SELECT, maybe JOIN if you're lucky), and a mediocre machine learning specialist (has a list of preferred sklearn functions in random priority order depending on training, plus maybe one other random library that stops working in the middle of the project due to an API change). They made up for their cheap salaries by spending lots of money on AWS.
Maybe I just got unlucky. Didn't know how to hire well. I'm sure there are good Data Scientists out there, but it's so easy to hire bad ones that it's no wonder people are reluctant to do it. If you're one of the good ones, and if you're in any way qualified for a job with a higher barrier to entry, or even just a job with a more unusual title than Data Scientist, go for that instead of trying to stand out in a sea of mediocrity.
Ha ha so true!
I entered tech in 2000, right as everything was going down. Hey, it was fun for the 8 months I worked for what we now call a startup in Miami. They closed abruptly, and luckily I was able to get another job within about 4 months.
The market in tech is definitely worse than 2020 (I don't know why some here say those were the days of wine and roses) and I was always able to find work during the financial crisis, though it could take a couple of months. So, I'd say that the job market for tech is not as bad as the dot com crash but worse than 2009 or 2020.
Data Scientists have become the “HTML programmers” of the tech bubble.
My advice: take a pay cut and pivot to becoming a business analyst or something.
For the last 10 years, every data team I've been adjacent to has had a near infinite budget, hired more people than the rest of the company combined, had an abundance of "scientists" for whom any sort of data process, version control, scientific method, or cost controls were never part of the equation. It really doesn't surprise me that companies have decided they're not throwing good money after bad.
There's absolutely good work to be done in Data, but it requires people who know what they're doing, and not just "here's 10 years of postgresql databases. I dunno, find us 10% profit somewhere in it". There's not many companies that really have the data or personnel to make it happen.
In reality, of course, there probably just isn’t that much money at play so the high-budget approach is unlikely to break even, and more critically it’s unlikely that people are prepared to change how the organization makes decisions. I’ve known some people who worked for places where they had data showing solid improvements but it either hit politics or was simply small enough that their executives didn’t want to go with it because it wasn’t the magnitude they’d promised to justify the data science program.
It's a field that's just been over-hired because it's been a field where you can go "we're 2 years away from something big" for 10 years and the money was cheap enough to just keep paying people with questionable results or prospects. It doesn't shock me at all that people are having a lot of trouble getting work in the field. Even 8 years ago, going to college job fairs, I almost had to herd away Masters students in ML and Data Science who were already having a hard time getting a job and were resorting to applying for QA positions at web dev companies.
It's like having the local police department check on the local police department.
I wonder how much survivorship bias is in there?
If the job market is strong, then people who are candidates now are only those left who have a harder time finding a job?
Or simpler: you'd expect the reported difficulties of the average person who's currently out of a job to stay roughly constant; a really good economy will shrink that population of people. (Ie people as a whole are better off on average, but the average of that specific, and shifting sub-group won't change much.)
The young grad with 2 years of job experience looking on the west coast vs the 45 year old with 20 years of boring enterprise crud on the east coast see very different things when markets are loose or tight.
Critically people experience each job market differently as they move between buckets. This happens even if not that much time passed. The guy who retired early at 45 then got bored and starts looking at 50 is just in a wildly different position.
The groups will be 25% each, ie .25 EH, .25 EE, etc., if you track only people who start looking for a job during the first month of their search. In the second month it will be 50% EH and 50% HH. So a total of 3/8 EH, 3/8 HH, 1/8 HE, 1/8 EE. Or 3/8 bad, 1/2 same, 1/8 better.
But 'that guy' will change: many more people will be 'that guy' during a downturn, than during a boom.
The problem is that the American hiring culture is uniquely toxic, and this is not at all limited to tech. I read stories of people who are desperately hiring but outsource the application and screening process, only to find the outsourcers put decent candidates in the bin for being from the wrong college, or merely having adjacent (and highly relevant!) experience but not exact experience. In other words, they will only accept a purple squirrel.
I once applied to a maintenance job at a facility where a relative works. No dice. I asked my relative. "Yeah they keep hiring construction contractors who quit immediately because they aren't paying enough, but I already talked to the manager and he would love to have you." Didn't matter, I couldn't get past the gatekeepers in HR. So because the "talent experts" didn't want to hire someone without carpentry experience to change air filters, or pay the carpenters they hired the $20/hour they wanted, they instead hired outside contractors for $150/hour.
In no other country would any of the above be tolerated. Even during the "job boom" of 2021, it was not as easy as it is in Europe to land a medicore position at a mediocre wage. We have a serious cultural issue with hiring and a high degree of arrogance on the part of those doing the hiring. I have no idea how this problem can even be tackled, except if maybe the federal reserve let the economy run hot for several years and forced employers to lower their absurd expectations.
Some company leaders just like to humiliate the people who work for them because they can.
like, just make some shit up. this shouldn't even be a thing. "I never learned how to ride a bike" or "I peed my pants while skydiving" or something. fake a couple of laughs, and then think about how much beer you're going to have after work.
• Internal referral – Sometimes a complete miss, sometimes a quick hire.
• External recruiter (rarely) – For some roles their network has been beneficial and we’ve negotiated down to as little as 8% of yearly salary in exchange for a case study or something.
• Direct Targeted LinkedIn Outreach – So much cheaper to pay for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite and reach out to promising candidates. I get a near 100% response rate and it’s been so much faster than twiddling my thumbs waiting and hoping for good applicants.
• Inbound queries through our careers page - We rewrote this to be honest about what it’s generally like to work with us, including what we like and what other people have disliked. Anybody who writes to us directly after reading it is guaranteed a 30-minute conversation to see if they’re a good fit for either now or in the future. I’ve been surprised how many people have found this page and read it.
This has cut our cost to hire for most roles by nearly 70% (also factoring in time cost) compared to promoted posts on job sites. Our time to hire is much faster as well.
Part of the trick is realizing you don’t really need The Best People. Find somebody who you’ve got reasonable confidence can do the job well and make them an offer.
Right, the whole industry seems to focus on Hunger Games winners, when most of the jobs can be done by normal people, the the superstars are likely to leave at the drop of a hat anyway.
Some big name layoffs aside, the market feels to be roughly the same size. What's missing is the churn.
If you have less churn, you have better efficiency and perhaps can get more done with fewer engineers.
Also interviewing and onboarding people takes a lot of time and effort from other employees, if it is being done right.
I don’t know to what degree this is happening but people staying in roles longer definitely helps. Even better if they are happy in those roles and not held hostage by a tougher job market.
True. But the downside is groupthink. New hires bring new ideas, new perspectives, etc. Heck, even something as simple explaining X or Y during onboarding forces the "teacher" to rethinking and reinterpret.
No chun? No new blood. No new ideas.
Churn is indeed down.
1. Leads and cold messages from recruiters are for roles that tend to pay a significant amount less than my current role. Easily 20%-50% less. This tells me that companies are still looking to play arbitrage and sell (fire/layoff) high, buy low. That's a losing game for me. No thanks.
2. I like my team and the work. There are quirks like any company. There's nothing that's motivating me to look for a new job other than occasional boredom or frustration that passes.
3. A fear I have is joining a new company, then getting laid off. Until the layoff trend subsides a job change is not appealing.
4. New hires need to contribute to profitability, not just growth. It's just plain harder to justify hiring and get reqs opened in the current business climate. Part of that is board and exec group think. Another part is higher interest rates and cost of capital. Not being able to depreciate software dev expenses anymore hurts too.
I'm seeing some self-taught quant/econ guys getting real software jobs without a ton of formal CS coursework, but a lot of practical experience. Turns out the employers love that shit.... go figure?? ;)
about sums it up
I just got calls back from two jobs I applied for in November and December of last year. Interviewed, got offers for both, had the luxury of being able to choose.
Found it interesting that both places pretty much knew they had their guy pretty quickly and said they were glad to finally talk to someone who knew what they were doing.
I'm not sure if they were getting tricked by AI-generated resumes and cover letters, then finding the applicants didn't quite have the knowledge expected. Nothing fancy either, mid-level networking, Linux, programming...
However, the scenario described in the post (that's somewhat backed in some of the comments here) is that it's become easy enough to apply to hundreds or even a thousand or more jobs that companies are forced to apply very simple heuristics or "AI" filters (which is pretty much the same thing) to deal with the volume. This means that, for a given job, you have a near-zero chance of winning the lottery to even talk to a person.
Therefore, your only chance is pretty much to have a direct path to a human (but, because it's not a great market, that's far from a guarantee either).
This has very much not been my experience.
(I imagine we're both drawing from personal experience, so I guess what we really want is some solid data.)
was metaphorically flirting with another group where the leadership were people I used to work for too, kept poking them to keep in touch, sounded like there may be some options. we'll see if they score more funding though; if not, they may not be able to offer roles or pay, but they keep talking like it'll happen...
Meanwhile on places like r/itcareerquestions and r/cscareerquestions it sounds like there are a lot of noobs and juniors fighting for a handful of roles.
I’ve ended up deciding to attend recurse center in the meantime and see where things are in a few months.
On the economic side it's more difficult to control inflation than it was in previous downturns so there isn't the option of dropping interest rates to the floor. There isn't much room to lower reserve requirements for banks either. I think stimulus measures will be largely ineffectual and the inflation produced increasingly unpopular. So it looks like the pending recession will not have the cushioning that we've had in the past and may be longer and more painful as a result.
Say, I am happy and confident to do all your leetcode/homework assignments + 8h interviews, but I want to be also top candidate as result.
To be specific, I am not looking for a job atm, but current approach seems broken, and wondering why companies don't like to use more efficient ways to hire.
One time around 2008 I was at a horrible conference put on by Blackberry (even then it was clear they were going to die), and I wound up talking to a guy for an hour about this and that, and it ended with an offer for a job at his firm.
Essentially you just need more hustle. When the standard situation is mass applications that are ignored, you need to try something novel and higher-effort.
Perhaps not a 100% guaranteed one. Some interviewers just do a bad job.
For example, in some of my recent interviews, the (always young) interviewer posed brainteaser questions that have approximately nothing to do with the skillset and knowledge that the job requires.
I'm sure those questions are good for identifying candidates with very high IQ and/or familiarity with that particular puzzle. But as a very experienced developer, it really pisses me off to be passed over because I didn't answer those to the interviewer's satisfaction.
Long story short: interviewing well is a skill, and as a candidate you can't guarantee a good interviewer.
as very experienced developer, should it be part of your skillset to deal with all kinds of people in the group efficiently and achieve your goal?
As future employee you can't guarantee perfect coworkers..
If you know of a way to convince a 20-something interviewer, during the interview, that the puzzle they picked isn't a good way to winnow down the list of candidates, I'm all ears.
Dealing with people is absolutely a good skill for senior developers. But there are limits to how much interview nuttiness can be overcome by mere mortals.
It would have to be more than a typical hired recruiter who just periodically sends me a few job listings and said “whaddayathink?” It would have to be: “Here’s my comp. Get me to a job offer paying comp+$50k and I’ll pay you $25k.”
Case in point, a buddy of mine is around 50, superstar programmer/manager and never really had to look for a job - was always headhunted - until getting laid off from a bank about a year ago.
I took one look at his resume and it was obvious to me that it was basically the same resume he had since College, with new jobs tacked on but never revamped to read like a "super senior resume." Which makes sense because he never had to rely on it to make a first impression.
It took me about 20 minutes with Google Docs comments to tag up his resume, took him about 2 days to totally revamp it, and go from "a guy with 30 experience who looks junior on paper" to "holly shit this is the engineering leader we need."
Perhaps coincidentally but he landed a role with a hedge fund very quickly.
That's obviously a personal anecdote, but if your job applications are failing to get traction, find SOME way to get an external perspective.
But you could argue that applications are automatically filtered because of the spam, but at the same time if you don't spam depending on your position you are a lost cause. It is terrible system that feeds on itself.
I’ve had a fairly consistent 100:10:1 application:interview:offer ratio for about 25 years, including bull and bear markets. It’s a numbers game. There is likely nothing wrong with his resume. You need to have a very wide top-of-the-funnel.
There are probably a few Captains Of Industry here on HN who can send 5 resumes out and get 5 offers. These are multiple-standard-deviation outliers.
I've gotten comments from colleagues about how putting out a hundred applications seems kinda desperate, but with the ratios that I've experienced, the only way that you can make the odds that you get a job palatable is to increase the number of applications. It's easy to run the binomial distribution analysis to prove this.
I don't need a job right now, but I'm applying to jobs because I see the writing on the wall.
Despite very strong, and publicly verifiable, bonafides, I didn't even get a response from a number of very good (but very large) companies. The smaller and more exclusive companies are responding at a much higher rate, strangely.
So if I'm making it past the harder resume screens, I have to assume that for larger companies, they're just completely failing to read my resume.
Ive probably sent roughly 500 resumes out over a 25 year career and got 5 job offers. Never even two simultaneous offers allowing me to choose. The ratio has been very, very consistent for me.
I don’t quite believe it myself (with people proffering 500 applications just to get one position) but I had a similar experience with online dating where my success rate was probably about 50% getting a positive response (and everyone seemed to bemoan their inability to get anyone to even talk to them).
Maybe this is just luck but I’ve also never been trying to work for google/microsoft/amazon.
I don’t consider myself particularly bright so I’m definitely not Carmack, and I’ve never seen the fabled 300-500k engineering positions, so my salary has been pretty modest for the duration of my career (always been comfortable but, well-maintained Honda civic money not Mercedes money). I just kind of try to make myself useful wherever I go.
When I apply for a job it has either been because a recruiter or former coworker asked me to, or because I was interested in what the company was working on, or both. I don’t go for jobs where I’m expected to performatively solve leetcode problems.
I get nervous around new people but I can get through a technical interview by knowing my stuff. I’m not particularly charismatic or anything.
Maybe I’m just lucky with target selection? I’ve always been about quality over quantity. I’m reasonably good at writing but nothing special.
It could be a sample size issue, my number of applications is not statistically significant compared to the overall market during the last 20 years or whatever.
Maybe timing? Because your experience is roughly what I also remember in 2010/2011. Only applied to like 5 jobs and got one.
I wonder how many of those people are saying "I've applied to X jobs and nothing!" Had they gotten feedback or maybe read the job listing they wouldn't have added our posting to their volume count.
There's no point crafting a love letter which won't even be read - just stick a bunch of bullet points together and broadcast.
Changing tactics to blindly applying for positions regardless of qualifications is just a waste of time. I for one wouldn't want an engineer who solves problems like that on the team.
I guess this is some high-handed attempt at a put-down.
I think you have to consider what game job-hunting/filling is.
IMHO it's essentially quite similar to mating.
In that case, you see all kinds of strategies, tailored to the environment, and other realities.
Have you thought about why you're getting all these applications that clearly don't match?
Is it because people are stupid, or lazy? Or do you think there might be some logic behind a strategy of just sending out semi-customized applications in search of a match, knowing that most are simply ignored anyway?
I mean, someone who thinks through why things are the way they are, and what to do about it, even if they can't get to an answer, is someone I would want on my team.
The last time I was in the market was September and I didn't have much trouble (I got a solid offer but decided it wasn't time to move yet). If things have changed in the past 6 months then yeah, I don't have firsthand experience in todays market. But I always see people complaining about this kind of stuff so I'm used to writing it off. If you think its gotten that bad I'll take your word.
I'm also in the market as a senior, went to a big name university and have been at a few companies that everyone knows so my experience being choosey may be different than others.
I guess this is some high-handed attempt at a put-down.
I would also compare it to mating. If you're on a dating app and write love letters to every girl who's profile you like you will get roughly 0 dates (this being the "spend hours applying" approach). If you are confident, believe you're the prize and try to find girls you're a match with then you will have a lot more success.
Stop right there. Yes.
When everyone you meet is an a*hole, maybe you're the a*hole