Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

> Anecdotally, it feels like something materially changed in the US software hiring market at the start of this year to me. It feels like more and more businesses are taking a wait and see approach to avoid over-investing in human capital in the next few years.

My guess is companies overhired in COVID and between that experience and an uncertain market they don't want to make the same mistake twice.

View on HN

where did the excess labor force suddenly materialize in covid.

the "learn to code" campaign began ramping up in 2013. If you started undergrad in 2016 you would've graduated right into the covid market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code#Policy_impact

I think the hype peaked around 2016 where Democrats were portrayed as out of touch for saying laid off coal miners could just "learn to code". By 2019 it was a cliché used to mock laid off journalists on Twitter.

2008 had ~30k CS graduates.

2015 had ~50k CS graduates.

2021 had ~100k CS graduates.

You can extrapolate the rest.

thats only a fraction of all the layoffs

Someone may graduate with that degree only once in their lifetime--or not at all--and be laid off multiple times. :p

We might be able to make a flow-comparison for "entering the field" versus "exiting the field forever", but layoffs don't really measure the latter.

This is a great question that rarely gets answered. It’s partially that a ton of student students went to school for computer science because they saw how much money could be made, another fraction is people that switched into software from related fields, maybe with a boot camp or something.

Anecdotally, our firm's Covid hires were just okay. The recent hires are better. So my hunch is the weaker CS candidates were able to get jobs back during Covid, while today, they are left out.

> So my hunch is the weaker CS candidates were able to get jobs back during Covid, while today, they are left out.

Does this mean that your assertion is that "people currently unable to get a job are weak CS people"?

It didn't. The elites never want to admit that they have failed to efficiently use capital for the last 40 years. It's always the fault of workers that should never be trusted. Just continue trusting the elites as they ruined US manufacturing jobs, surely the same institutions won't fail the workers again!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com