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Comment by charliebwrites | Hacker News Reader

Everyone.

I am a very senior PM with two big name tech companies on my resume, and the track record of bringing multiple products from zero to one and creating revenue (and even profit!) from them.

In the old days, I had recruiters in my LinkedIn, I would breeze through the first 30 minute screener calls, and get lots of call backs. My hit rate for job applications for non-FAANG cold applies was fairly high.

Two months ago when I was looking, I was getting basically zero job application responses, half my screeners ghosted me, and I had very few recruiters reaching out. I think maybe 3 in 3 months-ish.

I got very lucky and landed a job, but it was a mild pay cut, and the company is basically on fire

Both them and my previous massively growing employer are not hiring ANYONE, even software engineers, which is the easier role to get picked up for.

My buddy who’s unemployed in PMM, can’t get a call back from anyone. It’s really bad

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Any idea / feeling, on if this is temporary?

I just have hard time understanding how 1 year ago, everyone was hiring SE and now nobody is. Shouldn't this be indicative of some huge economic meltdown? But economy isn't melting down. Can skills mismatch suddenly be so dramatically different? AI is great but it can't have this much impact already. Could over-hiring during Covid really have this much impact?

It just feels like there is something shifting below the surface.

My take is that for one reason or another (and I wouldn't count premeditated evil genius as high on the list of reasons), the FAANG and adjacent companies have been hiring the developer equivalent of people to dig holes and fill them up for a few years now. Think about it - does Google really need teams of developers with something on the order of half a million in total compensation each in order to develop some new product that they're going to cancel in a year or two?

Essentially, you've got an oligarch class in the US/World with more money than they know what to do with and it gets put to weird uses. Tech/VC seem to be the sexiest use of that money and so it gets directed in that direction and comes out everywhere. ZIRP exacerbates it. And it seems the end of ZIRP and other effects finally pop the bubble. What really sucks is when your family's healthcare is dependent on your employer playing the above game.

We were in a complete bubble the last couple of years. If you didn't work before the bubble, your perception of reality is entirely skewed. The mania was due to two things - tech companies outperforming everything else on the SP500 and easy credit for start ups. The response was over-hiring, a huge number of bootcamp grads, and everyone who could pivoting to an IT degree. Worries about the economy (record debt, etc) are just the icing on top of the tech over-saturation cake. Other, way overstated bubble is "AI destroying jobs". It's not reality, but the perception is there.

In short, it probably won't recover to bubble territory in the next 20 simply due to the huge supply of devs. On the other hand, the field does require some education, some IQ threshold, some persistence, etc, so there will be ok-paying jobs for a while. But again, if you started working circa 2021-2023, you will need to adjust your expectations.

Too many dumb ideas were overfunded (or funded at all). A lot of the bigger tech companies got into an overhiring and overpaying competition. And, as you say, companies are just being cautious for the future.

And it really goes beyond 2021-2023. The tech job market for the last decade or more has not been normal in the sense that tech jobs, especially on the US west coast (though also quantitative trading), have paid well out of line with pretty much every other STEM position which was not historically the case. When I was a product manager back in the day, I'm pretty sure the computer system hardware and software people were paid pretty comparably as I probably was as well.

I think there are questions about where adtech goes. If it has a major downturn, some companies are going to really feel it.

This isn’t due to AI, it’s due to layoffs and policy. Money isn’t free right now so companies have to turn a profit instead of over hiring and there are simply a ton of super qualified people competing for a smaller number of jobs.

It's unlikely to be permanent, it's just a cycle. The economy seems fine right now, but leading indicators (e.g. yield curve) suggest a recession is inbound. So everyone is playing it conservative. We'll get past the recession and things will pick back up again like they always do.

We've all secretly been benefiting from the dreaded "trickle down economics" which has shifted as interest rates have increased. What percent of HN users salaries are actually paid by the revenue from the customers of their business rather than burning down investment funding?

Most of us have had high paid jobs funded by some billionaire VC burning their wealth on unprofitable ventures, because they were willing to lose 10 bets to win 1.

Today, investors (whether VC, private equity, public markets) want to own businesses that are profitable or can reasonably be expected to be soon. Correspondingly, far fewer jobs paying six figure salaries while the company loses millions of dollars for their investors/owners.

Speak for yourself, I built the architecture that enabled a business to go from 50 mil to 3 billion revenue in the last 4 years and I have zero equity and a midwest salary. Really need to think about my life choices.

Similar. Saved company a few millions.

I compensated by taking the occasional long lunch.

Sticking it to the man.

The economy is melting down, but nobody is saying it out loud.

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