Ask HN: What do you guys think of the current job market in tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you guys think of the current job market in tech?

34 pointskapitanjakc91 comments

Many of my friends with varying range of experience 5-9 years, have been looking for a job.

Almost all of them have been looking for a job since past 6 months.

As of now all of them are not employed since last 6 months or so.

Earlier these same people used to get offers left, right and center.

HR people were ready for interviews with them even at mid-night. And now, those same people won't even get replies from anyone.

And they all have varying tech, some in Django, some in React, some in DevOps, some in pure python, some in frontend. etc

Also, I know for a fact that these people are not bad at interviews, I've worked with them, I've seen them interview at other places. I've seen them grab those jobs and be good at what they do.

I am wondering, is the job market that bad ?

I thought it was bad only for freshers, but it looks like that everyone is struggling.

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I'm in the EU, I just picked up a new job as a senior dev. I had been a team lead / manager but struggled to find another role as I only have two years experience in management. Picking up a dev role was easier.

Things I've learned in the process (and from being on interview panels myself)

1) I tend to stay in a job a long time (5 years plus) and this is highly valued by interviewers

2) in tech interviews you need to constantly remind yourself that you are not really coding, you are demonstrating knowledge. Talk through every thing you do, explain why you did it, or what an alternative way could be.

3) referrals really help. I've gotten interviews from referrals when there wasn't a position advertised yet

4) every place out there is doing something with AI. Put a bit of python on your CV and play with ChatGPT, ask them about it, work in into conversation that you're learning it.

5) I put side projects on my CV and I get asked a lot about them. If you have something semi serious, employers will listen.

> 1) I tend to stay in a job a long time (5 years plus) and this is highly valued by interviewers

I believe this is an EU thing for us. I had informal discussion with friends from US/CA, and there, it is somehow seen as stagnation and something something about pay not improving.

Company loyalty is valued way more in Europe than across the Atlantic.

Comparing EU to US job market in IT is a bitter joke (for EU). IMO "Loyalty" and similar traits that you usually would use for describing romantic relationships is a sign of how immature the EU market is.

Also, the job market in EU is healthier I believe. I also picked up a new job this year. Having less than 5 years definitely makes it very hard. Between 5 and 10, is not impossible, but hard. 10+ is good.

Good insights, thanks, I'll pass these on.

It's pretty brutal here in Australia.

Higher interest rates mean companies are aggressively reducing headcount.

Insanely high immigration means statistically for every 1 job being created we're importing 1.4 workers.

Job vacancies across the economy are down 16.4% yearly change according to ABS.

Also according to ABS, Job vacancies, change from February 2020 to May 2024, for IT is an increase of just 1.8%.

In summary, jobs market is getting ugly out there, triply so for IT.

The simple solution to this & the housing crisis is to restrict immigration, but instead we have record immigration because without it we'd be in recession(our economy grew 0.1% last quarter, GDP per capita went down).

This seems like a highly politicised answer

Australia has 1/3rd the population of the UK on a literal continent.

In Ireland we also have a housing crisis, because ironically all of our young construction workers have emigrated to Australia because there's a huge construction boom there. If you restricted immigration you'd have a bigger housing crisis

Ireland also has some of the strictest planning laws in the world.

See the case study of a housing development of 52 flats that was prohibited because it’d harm the view out of a pub garden.

https://m.independent.ie/business/irish/smithfield-eight-sto...

Not only that, but Australia has about as much population as Romania (26 vs 20 million)

The solution to a housing crisis is to limit immigration? Wouldn’t it be to build more dense housing (thereby spurring economic activity and lowering a primary expense of households)???

Here in Canada we literally cannot build housing fast enough. The government is targeting half a million immigrants annually, and we recently set an all-time housing starts record of only about half that number.

Sometimes it actually is immigration that is causing problems.

Same in Australia. The government keeps making big noise about these 'big' housing plans and then the number is like 30,000 new houses, which is enough for a couple months. There is zero systemic approach to this problem. I feel like I am going insane.

Amusingly, this is one of those cases where it’s obviously correct and people jump through all sorts of hoops to not accept it.

>Wouldn’t it be to build more dense housing

No, because the NIMBYs don't want that, and if the local government has power over whether dense housing is built or not, the NIMBYs will be sure to get their local legislators to prevent it.

Sorry for interrupting your religious moment. But in the real world you need capital for that. There’s absolutely no fucking reason to consider immigration a human right.

The human rights declaration

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

There are reasons, although one might disagree with them.

Article 13 absolutely does not imply that unrestricted immigration is a human right. To do so would be to stomp on national sovereignty.

Article 13 concerns freedom of movement within one's own country, and the right of return thereto.

> There’s absolutely no fucking reason to consider immigration a human right.

Many articles in that document provide hints/the spirit of reasons one _might_ consider immigration a human right. I think it is easy to entertain the idea and think of potential reasons for it.

A different matter is if that is indeed the case (your point). Still, I believe there are good reasons for it: the human rights declaration points at many of them, in many different articles.

For example, here is one reason (even for self-interested people, Milton Friedman-style): equality of opportunity might give an opportunity to somebody who is more capable (who knows who is the next Einstein). It will? not necessarily. But it might? definitely, it might. That is one reason.

I a not naive in regards to implementation. But there are reasons (like the above) for considering it.

5-9 years is a "bad" spot for developers: devs are too skilled to be cheap or to accept "junior" job & pay, and have not enough experience to be a "jack of all trade"

Here, in France, the job market is really slowing. More than before, companies are looking for cheap people... so they let go people with some experience and try to recruit engineer out-of-school to replace them. Obviously it doesn't work really well... neither for the juniors (too much pressure/expectation) nor for the rest of the team (knowledges & experience loss, need to teach the basics of the company to the new...)

ChatGPT is sometimes a bit used by junior to help them "day to day"... but not really more than "google / stack overflow" 20 or 30 years ago.

Interesting. I have the exact opposite experience. Being a Junior developper in france is hard right now. The profession got a lot of traction from the average french guy and not only nerds. In 2020 - 2022 Many training centers were teaching coding to people who were out of work because their industry was affected by covid (in France, studies are often free of charge and, in many cases, are even paid for by the government if you're working on your employability, so there's virtually no risk). This has led to an overload of junior developers on the market who aren't needed. I've given training courses for Dev-web-mobile and concepteur and I can tell you that out of 50 people, 5 have found a job. I also know a lot of masters students who want to find an alternance (work-study program) and can't find anything. Meanwhile, I have 10 years' experience and am called 3 times a week by headhunters when I upload my updated CV to a job search platform.

I do agree that they want cheap people though. They rarely offer me more than 43k (which is ok in france in the region I live in but really not stunning either). I have friends that earn 70k-80k (really good in france) and they get called by headhunters for similar position but for 40k, its silly.

Is this before or after tax?????

before tax. Employer costs for 43000 is about 60000. (So employer brut salary + Occupational injury and disease contributions, Unemployment contributions, Health care contributions, Family allowance contributions, retirement contributions)

There was a deleted comment saying that it helps if you learn your domain and bring skills/knowledge aside from just programming. I agree, although I think it also helps if you have a non-CS background relevant to this sort of thing, as it implies some base level of knowledge too. I've met people that have been in one domain for a long time but still don't understand it, so it's not a given.

My background is in Physics but I've worked on software in the Engineering industry now for 10 years nearly. My most recent project at work drew on maths I used in my doctorate (various bits of Fourier analysis applied to mechanical systems). Not that someone who hadn't got my background couldn't do it but I could jump on that project and finish it in 2 months and I doubt anyone else in my team could have picked it up and done it in less than 6-9 months just because of the research and needing to understand the maths + algorithms.

I regularly get contacted by companies working in the same or adjacent domains, whereas some of my more 'pure' software friends are hearing nothing at the moment.

I have been on several hiring panels in my current job and I always looked for people with non-tech skills. We had a coder who was twenty years in finance and then did a boot camp, she was better than many mids because she could talk to people and understand requirements better, had understandings of office policies, meeting etiquette, and was great at making relationships with other devs and building a network so when she didn't know something she knew exactly who to ask.

I'm sure down the road that time in finance will probably give her a leg up in finance related tech too. Non tech experience can definitely be a boon

After I quit my last job, I ended up starting my own thing - wasn't ready to go through the hassle of interviewing again.

This is the way. Software devs can make so much money and have so much more control over their lives, instead of grinding FAANG.

It doesn't always work out like that. A lot of people out there who take a run at doing their own thing and can't make it profitable.

It's fun to reduce a job to "the grind" but sometimes dependable income and benefits are better than freedom and risk

That's great, how's that working out ? Is it more or less the same ? Or are there major differences ?

It’s very different. Love not having to deal with others’ stresses, hate that I internalize a bunch more stress of my own instead

How’s that going? Do you see yourself going back to a 9-5 job in near future?

Getting to choose what I work on is great. Chasing down VC leads is not so great but I’m growing into it. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I run out of savings and support - I suppose I’ll look for a job with enough flexibility to let me keep building part time. Maybe contract work.

Good luck!

what did you do? Consulting or your own product/startup?

Thanks! I'm building a new robotics framework, a competitor to ROS - https://www.basisrobotics.tech/

I'm in the US and It's bad. Really bad. I feel terrible for anyone without a job trying to find something new. It seems like the only option is to go hunt for recruiters or ask someone to make a recommendation for you at the company you're interested in. Otherwise your resume is probably never looked at. In my experience I tend to see more jobs available in Midwest than anywhere else right now. The pay is pretty average but it isn't terribly low. We're definitely nowhere near the salaries we had a couple years back.

I thought my greatest asset was being a coder. AI has shown me that it isn't. Recruiters are dropping their interest on that front similarly.

I now have to learn other talents to make me relevant. Not entirely sure what that is yet, but I feel a sense of urgency

I feel like at least part of the problem is that tech hiring as a whole just hasn't adapted to remote work. Companies are still using the same hiring pipelines from when everyone was naturally filtered by being within X miles of the office (or motivated enough to relocate), so they get bajillions of applications they're unable to handle properly, which leads to devs who would previously stand out also having to apply anywhere and everywhere to get noticed at all, which exacerbates the problem even more, and the entire process slows to a crawl for everyone because of the sheer mass of applications on every side of the equation.

For all of those candidates remote is a taboo word, if they even mention remote work, any potential interview gets blown.

Companies are treating it as a crime to ask for remote work.

I only look for remote jobs, I don't try and convince non remote jobs to be remote.

That's essentially the same issue that applicants to selective colleges have faced for decades.

/u/kapitanjakc, are your friends in US or EU or APAC?

The market is reacting to global events, as we live in an uncertain time after a full and half decade of unprecendented innovation and prosperity. If I understood my parents correctly, this is just the economic cycle. However, the massive global scale pandemic, immediately followed by mass inflation, wars, rapid rise in living cost, anticipation of a massive generation retiring soon etc.. makes everything a bit slower to recover.

Also, due to money suddenly becoming expensive and eternal global downturn as well as political turmoil made businesses clamp down and make-do with whatever they have now until this storm has passed. It will take some time before demands will rise again. Until then, need to find something to continue, like working at a local business or that uncool startup which can't pay SV money and doesn't use the most fancy tech.

Also, there is lack of investment despite apparent(according to new media reportings I read) massive generational wealth transfer. Unlike PG/Elon era, people now use inheritance or windfall towards luxury(instagram) lifestyle instead of investing in ventures.

That all being said, I don't see a lot of problems in my corner of EU. While, my linkedin inbox has been unspammed since 3-6 months now, I haven't heard anything from my circle, except some of my friends looking slowly or taking that desired timeoff/break after their employer dissolved due to lack of funding/runway.

Hey, yeah, I get the cycle thing, it's just that I was generally wondering if it's the same around the globe or is it just few places.

They are from US, UK, Germany, India and Australia.

Latvia here, the company I work at is actively looking to hire for embedded but so far haven't had any luck. We don't even have any hard constraints for applicants like degree requirements, etc. It's surprising how many developers don't know what a syscall is.

I would recommend expanding your field of view and learning a bit of everything. It's become a trope nowadays that one cannot understand the entire stack from top to bottom but that really isn't true.

We just advertised a role, that typically get's 2-5 applications (we'r e a small org), and had over 80 applicants. There seem to be a lot of people looking for roles at the moment.

Its pretty brutal here in the US.

Tons of fake job postings, bad actors, and real opportunities are not differentiable from the fake. I've easily submitted several 1000's of CVs over the past two years and only gotten a handful of callbacks, this with 10 years of experience in IT Operations; I've seen a lot of entry level people giving up and retraining into other professions; HVAC and other trades. I've seriously considered it myself.

You have to go where the jobs are available, if there are no jobs there are no jobs; doesn't matter what they claim in the reports if there are no positions actually hiring.

Currently, there is overall less than a 0.01% rate of conversion to phone interview. Many of the posting platforms also do not remove known bad actors. PatternedAI being a very prominent one on LinkedIn (where they simply collect your information and never have a position, recycling their postings every 3 months). There are quite a lot of companies like this.

I'm getting 3-4 recruiter emails a week, which is much less than a few years ago. I've noticed an uptick recently. There certainly was a period where I didn't get any for weeks on end.

I'm a generalist with 25+ years experience. I'm on the more employable end but I can't command as much salary as a specialist.

I've been moving back into contract work though, which is different than the salary world.

As a generalist with half the years of experience you have, I'm looking to get into contract work, too.

Do you have any tips on how to pull it off successfully?

I am one of the people looking for a full-time job for 6+ months. I have a side project that keeps me afloat and the job search hasn't been my "main" goal, but I am now becoming increasingly concerned about the relatively long period that I am technically "unemployed". I usually don't advertise myself as much and I don't have a linkedin or any socials. Do you think it makes sense to make a linkedin to improve my chances? I usually just monitor platforms and apply to positions that fit me. I do realize that there is a subset of potential employers not really advertising positions anywhere but instead using linkedin to find potential candidates. Also, how long do you think this situation will persist? Some of the comments mentioned a "rebound", so is it likely to slowly start recovering, or is it accurate to say that it will persist for another year or so?

In London.

My sense is that there are plenty of junior level opportunities still out there, although fewer than before.

But senior level positions which pay a decent salary (which i define as £200k+/year in London) are especially hard to find and get nowadays, compared to years prior.

Lotta openings, but no one seems to be biting.

Meanwhile I know a lot of folks who can't find people. In most cases it looks like they're searching for a hyper-specific candidate.

At this point I don't know whether to blame new HR tools which seem to suck even more, HR putting out a lot of bunko posts to get data and look like they're hiring, or a Post-COVID job market that's absolutely flooded with marginal candidates, all of whom want remote.

I was in tech and now I work in immigration in Germany. All the relocation consultants in the industry report a massive drop in clients, meaning that companies are hiring fewer foreigners. Some talk about their worst year in a while.

Companies require German speakers more and more, because there are enough German speaking candidates.

> Many of my friends with varying range of experience 5-9 years

> I thought it was bad only for freshers, but it looks like that everyone is struggling.

It's better for people with 10+ years of experience. For everyone else is harder than in previous years.

I'm based in the EU as a fullstack developer and nothing changed much, I'm hearing that there's a crisis on the US market but it's not reaching the EU yet or it's so small that it's not visible to me.

I know people in germany who struggled more getting a job than 'usual'

There's definitely been a dip in the UK since 2021. Hiring went crazy and has calmed down a lot, back to pre-COVID levels.

I think people just expected the mad hiring to continue but it clearly wasn't sustainable.

Which country are you from? And how old are your friends? I heard a lot of this from the US but from my impression it's quite different in the EU (or maybe just in my bubble?)

I don't think it's just there.

I am from India, but the people I am talking about are from everywhere, but specifically, US, UK, Germany, India and Australia.

What market are you in? We can only speculate based on presumptions.

It's tech market for senior dev positions for almost all of them.

They are in all sorts of tech like Django, React, pure python, full frontend stacks etc.

Do they have CS degrees?

Yes, all of them.

Software developer who is Overemployed here.

No issues landing offers fairly regularly. I never stop interviewing as I don’t want to be out of practice so I get about 1 offer a month.

Definitely slower, but far from dead.

So you are interviewing just for practice and rejecting all the offers? Not afraid to get on some kind of black list because of that behavior?

No, the poster is "overemployed". That's when people commit fraud against their employers by accepting multiple concurrent full time salaried positions and then phoning in their jobs until they're fired or the employer folds.

If the person is able to complete the job, it's not necessarily fraud.

Yes, that’s right!

Good wage slave, here’s your pizza and happy Friday.

Let me know if you want to outsource!

The market feels crap compared to the years before.

I used to be spammed few times a week, if not per day in previous years, now I get contacted like once a month at best.

Market is in the gutter.

Many job ads are fake and only there to confuse shareholders about the company health.

Interviewers are looking for the tiniest bit of excuse to fail you along the process while quite often they are looking for lesser engineers than themselves as this buys them job security.

Offers, when they come, are much worse (terms + money) than what they were 2 years ago.

Most of the companies don't want to invest even a day on you so you have to have the exact package they're looking for.

It is fully a (job) sellers market. OTOH if you are a company and you find it hard to find people in this market then you're doing something really wrong.

EU-Greece here.

Good luck.

This is such an important point. I know several startups that are running on fumes, and have about pages with 15 employees who were actually laid off over a year ago and job postings they have no intent to even reply to candidates.

Some of these got a small bump by slapping ai on their marketing site or product but so many companies just playing a shell game with vcs hoping to survive to the next zirp era

Are programmers being replaced by ChatGPT finally?

There’s no way you can replace competent programmers with ChatGPT. I still have to check the output all the time and it’s often wrong or just doesn’t even know what I’m asking about.

But many people are claiming that chatgpt increases their productivity by 50-100%. Doesn't it mean we need less programmers now?

No, it means we are building even more stuff with the same developers.

The limiting factor still is the number of software developers, not the software demand.

What stuff are you building? Everything is falling apart. I can't read without an account most of the sites that were accessible just a year ago: twitter, reddit, youtube etc.

I'm in some B2B business. I don't know a single company where the limiting factor is the roadmap. Everybody is using AI to push even more stuff out.

> Everything is falling apart.

This is an overly dramatic take.

In my experience there is way more work than you can conceivably get done. There is no way the work is running out.

It's easy to be 50% faster at coding when you spend a lot of time discussing with the LLM before you start coding.

It is indeed helpful. It takes care of lot of mundane statements which I used to type earlier or use macros for. But AI at this point, still cannot write core logic - it will help in creating envelope but core business logic you still have to plugun.

Entertaining the thought that it is indeed the case maybe it would make late projects (IMHO most of them) less late.

my impression is that you can't replace competent programmers with chatGPT, but that hasn't stopped companies from trying (or simply accepting incompetency).

ChatGPT and other AI are useful at generating functions based on patterns of text they've learned, but at the core they have no awareness or intelligence, and never will. You can't trust it.

They only need to learn patterns and apply them contextually to be useful. What they don't have is human lived experience, so we are still necessary to guide it

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