People bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need?
I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign
I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign
1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.
2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.
Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.
There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.
Or we could acknowledge that everyone is pathfinding.
I’d be surprised if the multiple rounds of layoffs has left them with fewer total employees than January 2020.
I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.
And while FB marketplace search kinda sucks the algorithm is supremely effective at surfacing listings based on your searches and activity.
I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...
In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.
A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.
If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.
I'm not saying people with odd backgrounds can't ever make it. But let's be clear, these are not usually hot shots who can simply get any vaguely technical job they want. They get into software because it is traditionally very accepting of uncredentialled or non-mainstream individuals. The framing you put forward makes it sound like the people committed to software are chumps who have to take what they're given, and these interlopers are the real geniuses who leave for greener pastures with ease. That simply isn't true.
This wasn’t the framing I was going for. My point was that industry boundaries are fluid and expand/contract as demand dictates. You’re correct that incentives are not all positive (pay, work life balance, perks), other industries contracting might force people to find work elsewhere.
All that said, I don’t think these people have “odd backgrounds”. I work in a math-heavy domain, so these backgrounds make as much sense as a traditional CS background, and I think these folks are just as likely to be retained in a crunch.
Software engineering is unique among engineering fields in that it accepts people without the right credentials, and sometimes without any credentials. Other engineering fields not only require matching credentials but also have professional certifications. I don't think I would enjoy taking those very much, but after seeing some of the crap that people get away with I have fantasized about having such a process to filter people out.
Not everyone, but it go through the roof, or at least it did in my country. I know a lot of people who doubled or even tripled their salary during that time as these companies went absolutely ape shit. They were getting 50k increases with each position change. I've not seen anything like it before, and I honestly wonder if i'll ever see anything like it again. Kinda wish i'd been in the job market at the time, but I was off with health issues sadly so missed that boom.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
They did? Again, at least in my country. Smaller shops felt the pain, as tons of people left for the pastures of big tech.
> Small businesses have been identified as the biggest losers of the 2020–2022 explosion in big tech hiring. While demand for digital transformation grew to previously unseen levels, smaller firms and businesses were severely disadvantaged by intense competition from large companies for talent, resulting in a multi-year skills shortage where less than 50% of small business vacancies were filled, compared to 65% for large firms
SWEs (and most any role for that matter) definitely can be minted in ways besides graduating with a relevant major. On top of that there's also H1Bs and contractors. Plus "overhiring" doesn't necessarily just mean absolute headcount, it could be compensation, scope, middle managers, etc. The definition of "qualified" is also malleable depending on the incentives.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
Beyond the previous points, this also assumes the supply of labor is independent of the demand, and it's clearly not. As the demand increases, so does compensation, outreach, advertising/propaganda, etc. Everybody can overhire simultaneously as a result of pushing for growth of the supply of labor.
“Qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just like the first dotcom boom and crash, there were people in other fields who got into software during the boom time and went back to whatever other field after the crash.
At least 3 tiers: the FAANG level, the mid-size tech companies, then all the developers working for non-tech companies/administration or in IT service companies.
Even in those categories, workers aren't swappables.
I happen to think workers with minimum qualifications like a CS degree can be fairly swappable, at least more than FAANG types would have us believe. But they're very elitist when it comes to hiring. I have practically given up on being hired at FAANG companies, and these days I think their jobs are overrated too. Sign up to bust your ass 50 hours per week with backstabbing snobs, till you get laid off unceremoniously. I'd rather not.