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Comment by game_the0ry | Hacker News Reader

> More than 150,000 layoffs were reported in 2024 and a whopping 264,000 in 2023.

I switched careers in my 30s to get into tech. It was big, difficult pivot. At the moment, I do not regret it and really like what I do.

But the job market is shockingly bad. I do not have an optimistic outlook, so I am looking to pivot again, likely a small business. All the extra cash I have after expenses, I put towards various side hustles. One big upside to being a SWE is that I can make whatever app I want and put it on the internet publicly.

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The job market is bad because a lot of people joined tech when there was a lot of open roles (and a lot of SV money). The money has returned to its pre-bubble level, so there's fewer jobs. But the same number of people looking for work as during the bubble when they switched careers. Most of those new workers lack deep skills, so the existing jobs are going unfilled. Most of the listings I see now are for senior and above.

Ahh I wonder how bootcamps are doing these days..

Well, PG's beloved Austen Allred (of Lambda School, now BloomTech), has started a different company... So, bootcamps are probably doing pretty bad

I agree with you, mostly.

Another problem is management attitudes towards hiring. They are switching their capricious attention and investment towards AI [1] and off shore to save costs [2, 3].

The combination of all this is making for an ugly combo of negativity. Tech used to be a lot more fun, even before the SV ZIRP hysteria.

[1] https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...

[2] https://www.turing.com/blog/top-us-companies-choosing-offsho...

[3] I work at a large bank. Almost all our new roles are exclusively in India and the Philippines.

Been programming since I was 14, pursued a career in another field so that I could program for fun. I have considered pivoting my career to software development many times. Seeing people far more qualified than me have nightmarish job hunting experiences always makes me think twice. When people with 10+ years of experience can't find a job, there's no reason to believe self-taught programmers without degrees ever will.

Starting a business seems like the only real answer. Struggling only makes sense when it's for your own company.

You and the other million of devs think the same, that's why the indie dev market is exploding and twitter is full of influencers posting their app revenue..

This is so true, and I'm in fact going through this right now. One of my semi-technical friends followed an online tutorial and created a stock tracker web app, almost entirely using ChatGPT. It is a pretty good achievement (in the context of someone who isn't a programmer and started from scratch), and I'm encouraging him to keep going down this path and developing his skills. He is however convinced that he can launch this app and make millions, and is even considering quitting his job to do it full time. There is zero chance it is going to get any kind of traction, and I keep telling him that, but he is too enamored by all the "influencers" on LinkedIn/X telling him that he is basically a 10x engineer now.

man, launching and leaving your job is definitely not the way to sustainably, or successfully work for yourself.

I encourage others who want to work for themselves to reduce their core work hours if possible, and spend the new free time working on their projects.

Otherwise you will burn out

At one point, one has to be either 'life smart' and look around at all the life lessons from other people, or end up repeating many of those.

I think we will see a small business "renaissance" of sorts:

- many local small business owners are aging baby boomers, they will be exiting + retiring; that's opportunity to back-fill

- the culture among younger people (millennial and younger) seems to be more focused on employment over entrepreneurship; they seem to prefer the safety of stable employment over taking risk on their own (I have no data backing this, just anecdotal experience...but I think its bc of student loans)

- stable employment with a big company is not so stable anymore, most of human history leans entrepreneurial, big corps are recent phenomenon

I could keep going but I will stop there.

Yup, I've been calling this out as the other side of the coin of LLMs for a while now. If dev skill is no longer a barrier to entry and you can spin up an application using chatGPT over the weekend, then so can literally EVERYBODY else on the face of the planet.

You think it was hard competing against 10 other similar apps? Try 1000 or 10,000 competitors.

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