Ask HN: Programmers, are we in a race to the bottom? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Programmers, are we in a race to the bottom?

8 pointsdanielovichdk3 comments

I am in the Northern EU.

I have no idea what is going on. But in my 24 years of professional programming, the job market haven't been this "strange".

By strange I mean there seem to very little jobs and the jobs there is, it seems that I can hardly get into the first round of interviews.

I am a normal bread and butter programmer. I know my abstractions; tcp, http, sql, patterns, different popular languages and I know different business domains.

But little does it matter.

The I wonder, who gets the jobs ? Is the lower wage juniors or is it special knowledge seniors ?

I have also thought about if nearshoring is a part of the issue? Cheaper wages ?

Have we entered the time where software development is democratised so much that we are simply fighting over the same jobs ?

Any suggestions or insights here ?

Thx

Most job postings are fake / ghost jobs. Some are used for companies to evaluate the talent pool and find the lowest possible wages. Others are made to collect and even sell your data. You can identify those by their vague generic description of responsibilities/tasks and an absurd amount of requirements.

I'm not kidding - I am a freelancer and got unwanted calls from an accounting service company. Thanks to the german data regulations they had to tell me where they got my contact data from and it was a broker which got the data directly from a freelancer project platform.

There are still plenty of job opportunities out there, but lots of HR teams are overwhelmed by the amount of candidates received from the job platforms and recruiters. Besides the global economy cooling, we also see job platforms becoming more and more useless for candidates and employers at the same time.

My suggestion is to go the conventional way of application: as a freelancer that means acquisition by cold/warm calling and as a job seeker I recommend researching companies and contacting the people there responsible for staff - team managers, internal recruiters, CTOs or even the CEO

Well, when did you last go on the job market?

Big Tech made lots of redundancies after covid, and it’s taking a while for the glut of people on the market to find new jobs.

Also… this is a slow time of year anyway, isn’t it?

It is time to stop complaining about the lack of jobs and start creating the jobs.

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