Tech Jobs Have Dried Up–-and Aren't Coming Back Soon
wsj.com
wsj.com
If you're passionate about this work and having trouble getting paid for it, remember:
You don't need anyone's permission to start solving problems.
The last time I looked, we weren't running low on problems that need to be solved.
Every contraction I've seen hurts some really good folks, but mostly weeds out the poseurs and wannabe's, the parasites and bureaucrats, while those of us who make, just get back to the business of making.
Trend should continue until big tech stops subsidizing the gpu farms, at which point bootcamp coders may become competitive again.
Zirp also drove supply of capital. Inflated cloud and now gpu farm business. In the absence of gpu farms churning out code, it drove demand for bootcampers. If normal interest rates deflate supply of capital, it will also deflate supply of automatically produced low quality code, so it should be possible that normal interest rates actually accelerate a reverse to mean as in structural demand for low quality code supplied by bootcampers primarily.
Inflated pay for low quality code was an artifact of zirp. Supply and demand should settle at a place where bootcampers are not getting rich anymore which sounds more normal.
Most problems in society today require less tech, less software, and better quality hardware.
This sentiment feels like something that maybe works in parts of Europe or BFE where a house is still $80k.
Because my experience is exclusively limited to software dev, I'm also getting rejected from positions in retail, and if I try to "dumb down" my resume, I'll have nothing but a blank page.
Seriously, any advice would be appreciated. I feel stuck.
But don’t give up on software just because of some bad articles. Trends are trends, you only need to get one job. A lot of companies like to bring in college grads as a way to save money as they push out more seasoned people, while also bringing in new ideas and more modern approaches (for better or worse).
Also, think beyond “tech” companies. Nearly every business out there could benefit from a developer, and most don’t have anything at all.
I also had no safety net, no money and developed health issues that ruled out physical labor when I was getting started in life and it was terrifying.
It sounds like you're on the right track looking for any job that's available.
You really can do this, keep showing up and don't quit.
This is being spun as a great anti-worker effort, but these companies have been mindlessly attached to cycles of hiring-at-all-costs regardless of reason. There's some upside to that, yes, for the workers, but the tale of grimdark no-tech despair we are hearing right now are so so out of line versus reality. It's to all the fatcat's advantage to spin this as dark days for workers, but this massive massive reflexive over hiring was an unprecedented boom, which does not necessarily imply a a bust, especially when these companies so carelessly are willing to shed their known great talent to mobilize against workers.
If anything, AI investor FOMO is probably having a fairly positive effect on hiring, but nonetheless it's a good scapegoat if you want to wage a war on tech worker compensation and keep it on the down low.
Not exactly Grapes of Wrath type material there.
The trend has been going up for the last few months. It's looking like the startup scene is about to warm up again (in the next year or so).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/tech-jobs-have-dried...
It’s no surprise that the grifters in my professional network all shifted to AI stuff 2-3 years ago. The people who wanted to deliver genuine and good work have all (foolishly?) stayed the same - the folks who chase fame and money all shifted to AI.
I’ve been on “sabbatical” for 2.5 years. I saw the downturn and decided to not work. I figured we’d be back to normal by now but considering FB just rescinded my offer - we’re far from it.
There was a huge boom around Covid, sure, when infrastructure was clearly not ready to cope with the demand so as many people had to be dragged into the equation. There were also companies aggressively hiring tech people partially because of the demand but also to establish a monopoly. And the rise of one-online-course developer programs was the cherry on top. That was bound to collapse and Musk's campaign over at Twitter gave everyone the confidence that there's no need for anyone but a few managers and prompt "engineers". And we are reaching the "find out" part for all players involved.
If you are a tech worker with skills, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about: AI can only write trivial code which normally would be thrown at an intern - stuff like "write a function that takes in a hashmap containing key-value mappings and a second hashmap to swap out the said keys", which you will likely still need to tweak to make it safe. But for any serious or critical code, if you are relying on a LLM to do the logic for you, you are basically walking around blindfolded, holding a loaded gun pointed at your head. Sadly I know a lot of people who actively do that exact thing.
The other part is that the market is over-saturated with products that no one needs. How many more social medias do you need? None. How many more trading platforms? None. How many more messenger apps? None? Dating apps? None. Yet new, "revolutionary" ones pop out daily. Guess how many of them fail? Their marketing campaign was "blockchain" 5 years ago. Now it's "ai". My coffee machine needs neither of those, who are you trying to sell this to?
When it comes to the tech sector, people should understand that this is not a bottomless pit and it all boils down to a finite amount of people that will use your product(consciously or not). And by implications you need a finite amount of tech workers. The jobs have not dried up, it's partially normalization after the Covid hype and to a lesser degree managers thinking AI will do their tech work - the same people who have become Musk cult members. I used to work for one and guess what - the company he founded in 2017 with very noble intentions and received a really good funding is collapsing cause they are unable to roll out a product. Those are bound to fail either way.
As for courses - there are talented people who have only done a bunch of those, but they are the extreme exception and realistically most of the people who enrolled in those were simply there because they thought that's a cheap ticket to a 6-figure salary.
If you are over 50 years old (maybe 40), your job is probably in danger. Read up on Age Discrimination if in the US. IBM is in the process if having a stealth firing, most people being let go are over 50:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/ibm_job_cuts/
Personally, I still think AI is heading to a crash like the dot-com crash 20+ years ago.
It pains me to say this, but I agree with you on the subject of AI. I think people are wildly misusing it and creating yet another bubble. It is good at digesting and sifting through data but it's terrible at providing good solutions and people are using it for the latter. I've been actively using it for months at work specifically for sifting through large, completely unstructured documents and pull out the relevant data from them and it has done wonders. So much so that the management has invested in some beefy GPUs for the occasion. And by beefy I do mean BEEFY, coming from someone who owns 2 * 24GB VRAM nvidias for personal usage. I also feel like the day when new models become a rare and unexpected occurrences is not far.
The elixir, go, is, and rust discord servers have pretty active job boards.
Also yconbinators job site seems good if you live in sf.
But you are wrong.
Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc.
I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary).
But you can think it through step by step.
No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve.
So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".
Unfortunately at the moment we have several trends in the industry that interfere with matching up people who have real problems and people who can figure out how to solve them.
Years of cheap money have flooded the industry with low-skilled workers, completely broken recruitment, destroyed any kind of trust between employers and employees, and created astronomical expectations of compensation in some parts of the industry that were never competitive outside their own bubble.
Then there are the hype cycles. Right now the big one is AI. As usual there are plenty of people in management positions who don't really understand the issues at all but have delusional expectations of game changing results that will let them dramatically downsize their teams without losing effectiveness. Obviously sooner or later they'll learn or they'll fail but in the meantime it's another barrier to good people finding good problems to solve and getting real work done.
If you're good and you're looking for interesting work then I suggest considering smaller employers. The era of the Big Tech free lunch is over and it's probably not coming back any time soon. Meanwhile there are people all over the place still trying to solve important problems who will value experienced colleagues who can get things done.
Management typically doesn't have the engineering chops or in-the-trenches experience to properly discern "low value" engineers from "high value" engineers.
They were more willing and able to deliver shit fast (which management obviously loved) at the expense of making terrible architecture choices that really crippled productivity in the medium/long run.
So, from management's perspective, you have like... a bunch of younger cheaper people getting more done. What's not to love?