IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023
wsj.comEveryone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditions deteriorating.
I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.
My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs.
An example to illustrate what I was working with:
Problem: input validation is too restrictive
Their solution: remove all input validation
For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.
Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.
This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net
Bottom Line Up Front - opening your message with the core request or message first - is a related practice from the military that works really well for email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
The way I apply this to emails is to ask myself: if someone only reads the first sentence would they know what I need and if they need to act on it immediately, read it at their leisure, or file it away?
I like this one, it's a little more subtle: https://yeshello.org/
I fear that one would be misinterpreted by a significant percentage of American office workers.
And by an even higher percentage of overseas colleagues in some countries.
Look at the timestamps. That exchange extends over three days on that site, showing how useless it is in a subtle way.
Consider all the people who are naturally inclined or conditioned to behave like the example, and then consider that many of them will miss the subtlety.
Especially those who for whom American business culture might be foreign. "Oh, they have politeness and trust-building conventions, much like we do. This is more pleasant than Hollywood led us to believe. It seems the difference is that you also verbalize what you are doing in their conventions. Maybe that's because they are a nation with a diverse immigrant mix, so they evolved that to reduce misunderstandings, and to help integrate people to common conventions. That's nice of them, and I will be sure to emulate."
I think the subtlety on that page is tuned for humor to those who already know, not to educate or persuade those who don't.
Agreed. Just ask the bloody question.
People, particularly family, calling me on the phone and then asking me what I'm doing as if it's any of their business and it's their decision whether what they need is more important than what I'm doing is such a pet peeve of mine.
How do you start the conversation when you call your brother/sister?
*ring*
"Hello?"
"IT IS TIME."
*click*
With whatever the thing is I need to talk to them about.
I admit to being guilty of the "YT?" or "Hi" type messages, but it's for a reason: the person may be presenting to a client and shared their screen instead of their window.
I've been on too many Zooms where the presenter's Slack pops up saying, "John, we have a call with <company name> about <topic> at 3:00. Can you join?"
Multiple times, this information was probably sensitive. I'd rather avoid that by waiting until I get a response.
While you have a point, the golden rule is to shut down everything related to email and IM during meetings.
But you can't control what other people do. You can control what messages you send.
But you can expect people to do their jobs. If a notification embarrassed the company in front of a customer then talk to that person's manager about training them to not be a numpty.
Stop having such low expectations of grown ass adults.
You clearly haven't worked at a job with incompetent adults before. I mostly haven't either thankfully, but my wife just put in her two weeks resignation after two months at her new job because she works proposal management and she couldn't get anyone to do anything properly (proposal management requires getting information from other people in order to put together a proposal with all the information requested), while they just kept piling enough work to keep at least 3 employees busy on her.
Forms filled out wrong after explicit instructions, vital information needed for a proposal due at 10 in the morning not received until 5pm the day before (and even then it's missing half of what they were told was needed), and then after asking for it again, finding out half an hour before it's due "oh I'm out running an errand, I'm not in the office, I can't get that to you", people taking pictures of handwritten notes in sloppy handwriting and sending them to other coworkers instead of typing them up themselves, people refusing to click a link on their iPads to access a document and demanding email attachments instead, people refusing to store important documents in CRM tools and instead saying "well it's in someone's email somewhere".
She's worked with several of these types before, but not this many people at one company, and not with such an intense workload (I think she was expected to submit a proposal every other day this month while wrangling these people, which is very short. At past jobs she usually only had to juggle 1 or 2 proposals in any given week).
She had no choice but to work holidays and nights and weekends and it still looked like she wasn't doing a good job because they weren't doing their jobs (her boss knew she was though, since she had to do the job before she was hired and knew what it was like, and begged her to stay).
I guarantee none of these people would have bothered turning off a notification, and then something confidential (legally not supposed to be seen by certain employees) could have been revealed.
Not that I ever usually bother to think about that myself, personally. It's rare that I start a conversation with someone with 'Hey blah! Here's some information that I can get in trouble if other people besides you see!'
It's called snooze your notifications. Easy enough to do, at least on macOS, and surely all OSs with a unified notification manager.
You can control what messages you receive by closing your client
There may be a middle ground. In this example, you could say, "Are you available to join a call at 3:30?"; that gives a little information about the topic and the time sensitivity, but it may still require a follow-up.
At one point I installed a filter on my IM client to silently discard trivial messages like "thanks" and "OK". There were already delivery indicators so nothing was lost.
Perhaps a hello filter and "yes?" auto responder could help, at least during business hours. Then send an OOO message if after hours.
The next level of this is waiting a couple hours and reacting to their message with a waving emoji- not replying! only putting the reaction in there.
If they don't want to talk business then a friendly greeting is appropriate.
This is the real answer. If they ask you why you didn't respond, you can honestly tell them you were waiting for them to ask their question.
If someone says "how are you?" that doesn't work though.
Imagine being this guy.
My company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code.
It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.
I'm not college educated and I've been coding since I was about nine in different capacities. I was inspired by two engineers my dad worked with that were the same; one of them was a SWE and the other was a Systems Engineer. I ended up dropping out before I hit any of my CS courses, so I basically did a repeat of high school.
The stuff you need to know for most jobs can be learned through books (DS&A); everyone, including grads, learn to actually code on the job. Systemic thinking and breaking problems down into manageable chunks is harder to train for; this is where I think something that's akin to apprenticeship could really help. At least the way I view it, and maybe I'm wrong, is that in the early 2000's, much less the 90's, there weren't many CS or CE schools - much less accredited ones that followed CAC standards. If your company is doing this then they're just getting back to the roots of what a computer programmer used to be.
What's DS&A?
Data structures and algorithms
We've done this, and it's worked out pretty well - all of our apprentices were dedicated to learning to write software, about half were offered jobs at the end of the apprenticeships, and half of those accepted.
Remember that they're not just mashing code straight to the main branch; they're apprentices, so other engineers paired with them, others read their pull requests, etc. It wasn't a free-for-all, nor should it be.
> It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.
German here. The secret sauce behind the Duales System is that it's, as the name suggests, a split system - one part of the training is at government-run schools ("Berufsschule"), and the other part at the company that trains and pays you. And since the curricula are virtually the same across the schools, even if they're a bit outdated, they still produce decent graduates.
Can you list some things graduates of this “secret sauce” have built?
We don't make glamorous "unicorns" in the US style as we lack both the financials (aka enormous amounts of dumb money floating around waiting to be invested - remember, we don't have 401k, we have rolling-contribution pensions so no need for that) and the culture (we're very risk averse)... but our "Mittelstand" has produced hundreds of small and medium size companies that are world leaders in their respective market [1], often dominating their market with 70-90% [2]. And the foundation of that, especially for the older companies, isn't academics, it's trades, training and apprenticeship. Many of the Mittelstand companies, you enter in your youth and remain there for the rest of your life.
Our pride as a nation, our role models, is not a few people who struck it right to become multi-billionaires, our pride is the millions of people working for the Mittelstand and the consistently high quality of the stuff they produce. Boring, but wildly profitable and very, very resilient.
PS: You actually might know some of these things our tradespeople built. BMW/Audi/Mercedes/Volkswagen cars, MAN trucks, Rheinmetall, KMW and ThyssenKrupp military hardware from tanks to the massive Panzerhaubitze 2000, Diehl's IRIS-T anti-air defense, Heckler & Koch/Walther guns, anything with "Siemens" on it built before Siemens fell to MBA shenanigans, all developed and prior to globalization also built in Germany. And a lot of it, especially the military tech, is up to par with what the US military builds - for IRIS-T SLM and PzH 2000, the Ukraine war shows that they are even better to some experts.
One thing we sadly lost was pharmaceuticals - up until the 60s-70s, Germany used to be the "apothecary of the world" [3], but we lost that to India and China.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
[2] https://hbr.org/1992/03/lessons-from-germanys-midsize-giants
[3] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2018/daz-44...
Very likely core-competence in technical work, which is priceless in my opinion.
This only works if you hire enough really good engineers and have them spend most of their time mentoring, and most companies aren't willing to accept the senior engineers individual contributions on paper dropping to zero.
I disagree. Actively mentoring, like what this demands, is more supervisory. I do it with college interns all the time. It's not suddenly different because the pipeline doesn't originate with college. The process generally goes:
1. In weekly one on ones we may discuss a topic. I ask them to apply that topic.
2. They pick up sprint tasks and look to apply the knowledge they've gained.
3. They may ask some questions along the way; it's important that other engineers are also available for question asking - the same way peers may depend on each others knowledge.
4. You peer review the outcome in a PR.
Rinse and repeat.
I'll add I end up having to do this with everyone if they're fresh to industry or came from a place with poor standards for code writing and/or problem solving.
https://www.yearup.org/ A non-profit that I've volunteered with,that explicitly trains folks from alternate pathways to place them at entry-level positions, with support from certain corporate entities, ranging from training support to directly hiring via internships/apprenticeships.
In Germany, and Portugal (where I went through similar system), you still need to finish high school, and there is a programming related curriculum anyway.
The part-time work is like doing the labs part.
Also at the end of it, you can still go to the university if feeling like it. I did so.
Going through technical school was a secure way to have a job, in case the university exams weren't good enough for the engineering degree, which by the way is mostly state sponsored on this side of the Atlantic.
My 23 year old son has ops experience, but not much development, though he's eager to learn.
This sounds like the kind of situation he'd excel with - is your company currently hiring U.S. based folks?
Are you allowed to say what company you work for?
Do you want to avoid it or do you want to join it?
Join.
Amazon has a few different programs to retrain people for tech jobs, such as non-tech Amazonians, people separating from the military, under-represented people, etc.
It's a FANG.
Thanks. If it's Google (and I suspect it is), what are they calling this employee development program and where can people apply?
That sounds like a frustrating experience. I wonder what caused this problem? We’re the people leading your company’s subsidiary’s hiring efforts incompetent? Was it a management issue? It’s not like there’s something about being German or British or Indian or Filipino or Australian, as opposed to American, that makes you think input validation doesn’t matter.
With contracted outsourcing the root of the problem is generally a third party with misaligned incentives. But here this is no third party.
Companies can have internal intermediaries.
Suppose you go to a country and talk to a charlatan who tells you that they have many qualified people and they'll work for 30% of what you're paying in the US. You hire them and tell them to hire more staff there.
Then it turns out there are many qualified people in that country, but they don't work for 30% of what you're paying in the US, because it's a global market and actually they can command the same wages as their skills imply anywhere else. But there are plenty of unqualified people who will sign on for lower wages, and you've been promised workers for lower wages, so that's what you get.
The good news: Each employee only asks for 30% of what your onshore resources want. The bad news: You need four of them.
You kind of can though. In Europe even 30% of a US FAANG wage would be an incredible wage here. 50% certainly would be.
There are other problems like timezones etc. and maybe payroll taxes are higher here too but I think the possibility for labour arbitrage is definitely real.
In my dealings with companies that had European offices, European workers had far higher non-salary costs that brought the total compensation numbers closer together.
Eg Europeans usually had much more time off. The costs of that time off scale with salary.
I do think labor arbitrage could work, I just don't think it would be in Europe. I suspect the total employee cost in Europe approaches that of the US, the money just goes to non-salary places (taxes, time off, labor protection, etc).
The thing about arbitrage is that it generally implies you know something nobody else knows or are otherwise in a different situation than they are. Otherwise everybody would do it, bid up the price, and there would be no more arbitrage opportunity.
Which is basically what happened. When the earliest companies figured out that you could do a lot of computer things remotely, they would hire some quality staff in e.g. India, pay them a little more than they'd usually get in India but a lot less than they would in the US, and that was great. Then everybody wanted to do that... but there isn't an unlimited supply of qualified staff.
So the competent staff started demanding more money, because they could, until they got paid enough that the savings was only just offsetting the inconvenience of different timezones and laws etc. But the current CEO still remembers that case study they read in business school from 1985 about how great outsourcing is at saving money, from before the arbitrage opportunity was eliminated by everybody trying to do it.
Now that's problem solving!
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At the very least it makes pivoting from mediocre engineer to ransomware kingpin much easier.
Pivot! Lean startup! Four hour workweek!
I've had them confidently tell me they verified functionality by decrypting a TLS session even though that was impossible because I hadn't yet implemented a way to expose ephemeral TLS keys and there was no way to do it from the other side of the link.
Maybe you encrypted with 8-bit keys? :)
Good news, I got rid of ALL the tickets!
You probably say that in jest, but I have seen — multiple times — someone just go and delete all the tickets. Boom! 0 tickets. No bugs, totes. /s
Reposting my comment from a couple of months ago:
At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."
that could be a great feature of a new product - "your jira is full? time to move on to...." ))
I've seen it too. Actually, I'm in SE Asia right now and the ISP I'm using routinely deletes tickets that haven't been resolved.
That's called ruthless prioritization.
I worked at a company that was doing this, but the candidates I interviewed were all below [what had been] the bar. Recruiters asked me why no one was passing the interviews; I told them I ran the interview the same way I had been doing for 3 years. I stopped being scheduled for interviews.
As soon as your company hires a Indian CIO, you're done. More and more of the staff will be H1B's and over time they will transition the work to India. I could name a very big corporation doing that right now. The CIO they just hired (last 6 months) is an Indian who just finish doing this to the previous corporation he was a CIO at. Both these companies are the largest in their respective industries in the world.
We don't have an Indian CIO but the trend is generally true. Indian managers hire more Indians.
I will guess that the two industries are agricultural machinery and transportation.
At the same time, US salaries are either $300k+ in the Bay Area or $0 and unemployed, there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area.
There are many large, stable, profitable companies that are hiring software engineers. They are not software houses, but they pay well for a comfortable life (outside of NYC and Bay Area) and offer good work-life balance. For some examples you can look at medical devices, utilities, manufacturing, IBMs and Walmarts and R&D departments of virtually any large non-software company.
But there are frictions, too. Unless you go into management, comp tops out around $200k in most metros. HR -- instead of write-your-own-rules in a startup you have to take corporate training and get approval for things folks at the startups take for granted. Limited tools, externally managed corporate OS and software, Outlook instead of Slack. Office time requirements -- fully remote is very rare. And so on.
Not saying this is the wrong choice, just that there are tradeoffs.
Absolutely. It’s weird though that tech focused companies with Silicon Valley style cultures who are looking to cut costs are completely uninterested in those regions. With more developer-friendly working conditions, they wouldn't have to compete as aggressively on TC. And with more normal cost of living, it could be sustainable for senior people who are not independently wealthy to have long tenures there.
I think you are absolutely right that there appears to be some low hanging fruit for tech companies to pick by looking to "second tier metros". But I inertia and (lack of) critical mass play a big role.
In the past decade (i.e., when the money was plentiful) when a startup is young, the TC of its engineers rarely makes or breaks the startup. Being able to get an MVP out and iterate quickly is more important, so it was a rational choice to stay in the Bay Area even if it means 30% inflated TC. And after that moving is expensive in both time and money and risky (e.g., a key engineer might not want to go).
And having a critical mass of tech companies helps attract talent: if a company goes under or has large layoffs it is perceived to be easier to find a new job in the center of the tech hub.
I think covid helped nudge along the process of moving tech development out of SV, but it is a slow process. My 2c.
Tech is moving rapidly out of Silicon Valley... but strangely, straight to the developing world, skipping second-tier metros.
Some tech is. Meanwhile large tech companies that are actually innovating (FAANG, near-FAANG, and FAANG-adjacent companies) are not. My comp has never been higher, and we're hiring. In the bay area.
I’m honestly unable to name a single innovation from a FAANG that wasn’t just buying another company or cloning a competitor in the last five years.
What has Meta or Google or Microsoft actually innovated on recently?
They havent innovated on anything of significance in decades. They just sit on their cash crops and buy up startups.
The M1 is kinda innovative but Apple did “just buy companies”.
Self-driving cars, from the Google self-driving car project, which was later renamed Waymo, kinda seems like a big deal to me.
Will be interesting to see if they keep it going or shut it gown.
Google has a way of starting something and then shutting it down.
These companies are always innovating. Google doesn't just say "Our ad recommendation system is good enough, lets just go into maintenence mode for a year." No. They constantly are trying to improve their models, switch to a better architecture, and innovate to try and eke out a few more percentage points of conversions.
I just looked at Walmart. Base pay was 240k remote plus a lot of bonuses and benefits. Even Walmart isn’t paying Walmart wages any more.
Frankly I miss these annoying outlook calendar notifications, these days nothing comes close to be that invasive )
Those companies exist but they are being squeezed by borrowing costs so they're either not growing or are cutting staff.
There's definitely $150k jobs in a normal metro area. Chicago, for example, has a lot of posted software engineering jobs in that range (I've even seen more that are lower than that lately after this past year of tech layoffs, like around $120k, unfortunately)
> there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area
There are "normal metro areas" that aren't the Bay Area where a $150k salary leads to a very comfortable life, with loads of $150k jobs for people with decent skills.
I'd happily take 150K/year and go live in nowhere Wyoming or something. As much as I loathe Musk I'm sure I could get by on something like Starlink
Except oops Amazon would absolutely decimate my yearly comp because they base it entirely off where you live, and adjust it if you try to move somewhere cheaper
Though of course that's all moot anyway since we've all gotta go back to the office because the people who own all the realestate are weirdly chummy with all the management of these companies. Weird how that worked
> Except oops Amazon would absolutely decimate my yearly comp
There are other employers hiring tech people other than Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.
In fact, a teammate of mine is a software developer just got his Starlink connection up and running replacing his WISP in a rural area where he's farming as well on the side. Another friend works as an SRE and lives way out in the desert pursuing his amateur astronomy hobby. I know of several other friends and coworkers who live similar lives.
Technically I'm 100% remote, but personally I enjoy the metro life so I'm living in an affordable metro area living a lifestyle I enjoy.
Yep ours are hiring from India directly. Rumor says head of IT has a affiliated company set up...
It's possible, in one of my jobs the senior project manager was found to hold a stake in one of the outsourcing companies working for us and was terminated under conflict of interest.
This was a pretty forseeable event after US based developers repeatedly told their bosses that development could be done just as productively remotely.
just as productively remotely
...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
The problem with this argument is that it implies "you're special".
And you likely have experience, domain knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge and so on, so I'd argue you Are special.
But then you leave, and need to be replaced. Since I'm hiring from a pool where no-one has this special, I may as well hire from overseas. Its cheaper.
Equally, when you work remotely your special is invisible. The way you keep the customer happy is invisible. The way you enable your team (assuming your special is passed on) is invisible.
Of course there are very smart people, with lots of experience, and lots of special of their own. Finding them is hard (of course) but the reward for finding them is significant.
FAANG companies are skipping the labor broker, and building subsidiaries offshore. Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing.
So your point us well made- existing employees have value. But companies deal with churn. And we don't need 300 people onshore with your special skills. We can offshore 200 posts, and wait for them to come up to speed.
Being a remote worker makes this process easier.
> Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing.
Everybody goes into these arrangements believing, against all history and experience, that they aren't going to lower their hiring bar. Good luck with that.
Once those 200 posts offshore come up to speed, soon they'll be acquiring incomes at comparable levels since skilled thought-work and crafts are always going to be sought after until labor is meaningless.
We saw this trend happening with manufacturing overseas. Chasing the cheapest labor is not an effective strategy in the mid to long term because it means that eventually your supply chain is at risk and the savings delta shrinks to the savings being irrelevant.
>Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
Management does.
Same. My "team" is doubling in size, but all the hires are international.
I bailed on a small local company in early 2021. I checked in with how they were doing recently. They laid off all the local developers, minus management (of course). They're hiring exclusively in Africa, the Middle-East, and South America. My current company has done the same thing by emphasizing that we're only hiring in our EU office. I've not seen many US based roles unless they are customer support related.
It is predictable that remote work would lead to another wave of off-shoring. The question now is whether or not these companies can actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. We've all seen the abominations produced by offshore teams. Moving to a fully remote foreign workforce may be short-sighted.
At least so far, we've seen foreign direct hires work out well. Much better than the outsourcing teams by a long shot.
>> actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce.
As distinct from a remote, largely local, expensive workforce?
Innovation is often the mix of vision, direction, and implementation. AWS for example, was implemented by an offshore team. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#:~:text=....
AWS was not implemented by an offshore team. The link you pasted implies that EC2 was implemented by an offshore team - which is not correct either. EC2 had two teams, one of which was in Cape Town. The other team was in Seattle - and larger than the one in Cape Town. The rest of AWS at the time (2007) consisted of S3, SQS, DevPay, CDN, SimpleDB (AWS' own DB implementation at the time) etc... These teams were all in Seattle (in the red brick building by I5).
I've been down this road, and I'm sorry to tell you that your team will be halving again once the international hires are considered onboarded. They might sell it as going to a follow the sun model, but the plan is to move to cheaper labor. I've been through it myself.
Same. I work as an SWE at a non-FAANG, non-tech Fortune 100 company. We already had an IT staff in India and would hire consultants in India, but this has been accelerating over the past year - virtually all hires or new consulting contracts have been in India. Some of the SWEs in the US are even being put under PMs in India.
My company is actually doing mostly Europe and ex-US North America
I've actually considered setting up a Mexican corporation to run C2C contracts through for those who want LATAM hires, but the logistics seemed pretty onerous, especially since I don't live near the border. I'd be willing to do a single trip there to finalize everything, but it seems like as a US resident/citizen you'd need to basically stay there for weeks/months while everything is set up, or make multiple trips for each step of the process.
It's hard not to get angry at the company when you see them hiring at median US wages ($100-120k US equivalent) but specifically refusing to hiring folks in the US, when the company is US-based.
Yeah seeing a lot of Canadian and Mexico hires.
Mexico City, especially -- general consensus is that the level of expertise is good, it's not hard to find a Spanish speaker in the US, better cultural fits, and the timezones overlap better; MXC is on Central Time. Not India-level cheap, but competitive enough.
Canada is even better in that sense, but at a higher price.
NAFTA TN visas are also attractive there, too. No H1B nonsense, and can easily bring personnel over for short (~3 year) tours.
Disclaimer: USA-ian of Hispanic extraction in Canada, so I follow these gigs reasonably closely.
At my company many of the new hires are within Canada. You get similar talent, similar culture, native English, and same time zones for about 2/3 the cost of a USA dev.
You also don’t have to pay for healthcare of your Canadian employees since they pay for it on their income taxes.
Being in the UK I see a lot of that too - we're cheaper than Americans, speak the same language, are pretty close culturally, and while we're a few timezones off, we're far enough east to overlap with both the West Coast and India.
Plus, London alone has 10 million people, and if you lump in the London commuter belt that adds up to aroun 15 million people, more than all of Ontario! That's a hell of a skilled worker base to work with.
It’s time we unionize as software developers. You saw what the UAW achieved, Software Engineering needs the same type of protections
How would unionizing help stop a company from setting up an offshore subsidiary? It may prevent layoffs in the short term - but even with big3 auto manufacturers it hasn’t prevented a move in manufacturing to Mexico and Canada.
I think the solution here has to come from the federal government to explicitly increase sw development employment in the US. Just like we find ourselves in a bad place with scaling chip manufacturing, we will find ourselves hamstrung in sw dev.
I doubt unions can help here - except maybe pressure the government (and that too works mostly on democrats if at all).
Canada (close to Detroit) has always been part of the US auto manufacturing scene. In fact you could take what you write and replace the US with Canada and you have what people (and unions) in Canada are complaining about. Not sure what to replace Canada with in your text though. Maybe Mexico a second time?
Easy: The union can negotiate they don't have to train or work with anyone overseas (or non-union members generally).
The union can force an all-or-nothing decision, but some companies can and will easily choose "nothing" and keep only the overseas developers, not the local unionized ones.
I think there would be too many programmers who would be proud to take the jobs of other programmers trying to unionize.
There are a lot of anti-unionists and Libertarian minded programmers in the US.
Libertarians aren't anti-union, they're anti-government enforced unions.
Unions are meaningless with collective bargaining enforced by the government.
Then they just hire consultants for overseas training.
That would certainly make the union workers more attractive given the average consultant’s experience, teaching ability, and understanding of the business.
It remains to be seen if the UAW's achievements will work out in the EV era. They need to unionize Tesla or they will lose hard. Looking at the teardown of GM & Fords EVs vs Tesla, there is no profit being made whatsoever by the old guys. Everyone either loves to idolize Musk or downright hate him with a passion. At the end of the day, the union companies need to still sell a compelling product at a good price. Couple that with how freakin fast Musk moves and the Union companies will eventually end up in bankruptcy court unless something drastically changes: Either the legacy OEMs turn their act around (unlikely see Boeing) or the Unions successfully unionize Tesla. Will be interesting to see the show nonetheless.
The truck is a disaster, as is Twitter. I’d guess you have 18-24 months before something pops.
People have been saying 18-24 months for the last 15 plus years. Its not going to happen at this point. Lets say the truck is a complete flop, the amount of runway they have allows them to just pivot to something else. Plus these engineering achievements give them massive breathing room to cut costs compared to their competitors. This is what I said by people unable to look past their hatred or love of Musk and look at the actual details on the ground.
As for Twitter well, I can't explain why his other companies get 1 million plus applicants while this company languishes.
I can explain why Twitter languishes. Other than the obvious troll hole he’s turned it into, it also doesn’t fit the brand he worked so hard to build around himself in the 2000s and early 20teens.
What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him. Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark.
People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go help him stan for a guy called "catturd2."
I mean yeah its true. In fact I recall going to DEFCON this past Aug and they had a handful of Starlink engineers there. I tried to get them to discuss that whole Twitter saga, they absolutely were adamant that they did not care one bit. They really emphasized how they are doing cutting edge work at starlink and it definitely showed in the town down equipment that they brought to demonstrate. Tesla/Spacex get so many applicants thats its insane.
This leads me to want the OEMs to succeed, we desperately need a counterbalance to Musk because just shaming his employees won't change a goddamn thing but if there was another place where A players can be embraced well that would put a massive chink in the Musk armor. Hell I remember there were a whole group of furry employees at Tesla as well. Tesla has also participated multiple times in pride parades. I wonder where they are now...
It’s worth asking why there aren’t way more Elon Musks.
He’s not superhuman. I think he was once quite smart but I feel like he’s fried his brain. (I think the fash brain worms are an opportunistic infection.) So what made him able to get these companies going?
A lot of lazy critics think it’s just luck. Founding a rocket company and a car company and having them even work at all is not luck.
Maybe he’s showing us that the bar is actually not as high as we think, and instead that the process whereby we promote people to levels of wealth and influence where they might have the opportunity to do what Elon did is horribly broken. We aren’t promoting competent people to pivotal positions as a society, and in fact are probably filtering them out.
I guess you can see that clearly in politics. Look at all Presidential elections 2016 onward. Look at the whole lineup during the primaries. You’re telling me these are the best candidates we can find for the highest government office? Really?
Protectionism doesn't work beyond selfish short-term interests. American cars are not exactly paragons of technical or mechanical prowess compared to their Japanese or German counterparts.
I've been a software developer for the better part of two decades, I'm not worried about the C-tier code coming out of rural India. You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
I’m okay with my fellow citizens being selfish and protecting their livelihood. No one else will. “Whose interests?” You’re advocating for shareholder returns (labor arb savings->profits). Ain’t nobody coming to save us.
If we can mandate EV batteries be built in the US to get subsidies (Inflation Reduction Act), other protectionism mechanisms should be on the table. Otherwise, businesses will do their best to maximize profits in the market they’re offering in without any labor contribution back, extractionist style.
And at the end of the day, the ones doing the outsourcing will have outsourced themselves out of a job too. China won’t need American MBAs when they can do everything in house.
Jack Welch died before getting outsourced after driving GE into the ground, and there are lots of folks like him still alive, empowered, and with that belief system. These are the folks controls are needed against.
I appreciate you telling me what I'm advocating for. Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
> but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The evidence does not show the American worker being better off after these policies you support were enacted and have had decades to run. Free trade is great for shareholders and some consumer cohorts who get excess utility, but terrible for workers. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/
https://www.epi.org/publication/botched-policy-responses-to-...
https://www.epi.org/press/globalization-lowered-wages-americ...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...
> Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
You're almost certainly correct in the sense that the people of the entire system will be better off, but your own domestic market could suffer at the gain of the other market where the business is now being outsourced to.
A good example of this might be tech in the EU. The EU basically has no major tech companies because we "import" all our tech services the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc). It's great for us in the sense that we didn't have to pay anyone to build amazing online services like Facebook, Google, etc – it's just free stuff we get here from the US. But who benefits the most from this arrangement, is the US or the EU? I'd argue that the EU allowing the US to provide all of our major tech services has been great for US growth, but it's stagnated the EU economy in recent years as we've had no real reason to build 21st century companies here. The free stuff we get from the US actually comes at a cost for us even if overall the economy as a whole (EU + US) is better off for it.
Similarly, imagine an extreme scenario where US companies outsource all work to low-cost labour countries (I know this is impossible, but assume the US is 100% service sector jobs which could be outsourced). Would this hypothetical scenario be good for the US economy? It might be good for companies registered in the US because now they can provide their services to markets they serve for a fraction of the cost, and it would be great for those low-cost labour countries getting all this foreign work, but it would be awful for the actual US economy that's allowing this to happen in the pursuit of efficient markets.
So yeah, you might be growing the whole pie at a faster rate, but it's possible mass outsourcing doesn't help grow your share of the pie. And like with manufacturing, you also need to consider how you'll lose technical competency within your domestic market over time if you outsource too much, and this will likely lead to the country you out sourced to eventually out competing you in your own industries. We see this today in China.
If you want to cripple tech innovation in the US, outsource all your software engineers so there's no one in the US with the skills or resources to start the next Google or Facebook.
> and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The theory only says that all the people globally will be better off. It does not say anything about citizens of a specific country that is applying protectionism. They may be better off for it, they may be worse - it depends on the particulars and, as most economic interventions, can only really be judged post-factum.
Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions? Did we forget that having weekends off and holidays off was not a thing until unions? Did we also forget that children were put to work at a young age until unions?
I think many well-off people just don't care. They might support them in a poll but question their utility in a specific sector like software. Or how another commentor said they weren't concerned about competing with people writting c grade code in India since they have been writing software for 20 years.
I don't think unionizing will help with off-shoring for development. I do think unionizing could bring about more equal treatment though. It seems most companies ignore their own policies when it comes to ratings, work assignment, hours, etc. Devs have very little recourse. Of course the assholes that do well and aren't afraid of c grade coders are the ones who don't want unions since they might loose their edge over others comp-wise.
No, a huge amount of Americans are actively hostile to unions as a concept. The very idea that employees should be able to negotiate as a block instead of individually has been scapegoated as basically all of society's ills.
Consider the common refrain: I'd rather negotiate for myself
It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work, as if you as a solo person in a 1000 person company could somehow EVER be more valuable to the company than the entire labor pool.
Newsflash: If your company doesn't throw a fit any time you try to take time off, like CEO comes and talks to you personally fit, they think they could replace you just fine. 40 years of project management has attempted to build things just for that.
> It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work
The misunderstanding is yours. Workers understand what you say just fine, but don't care about out-negotiating the company. They will never meet the CEO at the bar, so it means nothing to them. They want to be able to out-negotiate their neighbour so they can peacock dominance over someone they actually interact with.
The purpose of a union is to establish a brotherhood between metaphorical neighbours so that they don't try to be assholes towards each other. While that does, indeed, improve the overall worker position against the company, it hinders the power dynamic between them. And that's where you find the pushback.
It's much like you find in 'middle-class' neighbourhoods where you see households trying to outdo each either with nicer yards, or fancier BMWs, or whatever, all while racking up crazy debt to pay for it all. If they invested the money they pour into that stuff instead they would be way better off, but being better off isn't the motivation.
> Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions?
Is it still forgetting if it never happened? Both the idea of the 8-hour work day and weekends predate the first recognized union. The 40-hour workweek became the norm during the Great Depression by way of government initiative in an attempt to spread the work out across more people.
Unions have long supported the 40-hour work week, but are not meaningfully responsible for it. If showing support for something is necessary for something to exist, then you could probably say that just about everything exists because of unions...
Even still, we're talking nearly 100 (when it became common) to well over 200 years ago (when it was conceived). Even if unions actually were responsible, people are going to naturally ask "What have you done for me lately?". Where is the 10-hour workweek?
The weekend was due to organized religions. The Atlantic has a great article on the history of it. Henry Ford pioneered the 40 day workweek without union prodding, only through his own experimentation.
Besides, let's say youre right and unions have given us all those things. Those standards are over 100 years old. If it were true, it would mean nationwide unions did some things 5 generations ago and have collected literal trillions in inflation adjusted dues* since and have provided nothing in return.
* 11% of the US is unionized, representing about 1.1 trillion in annual payroll. Average union due is 1.5%, that's $16.5B per year in union dues collected, over 100 years = $1.6 trillion. But union membership used to be much much higher than 11% so its actually a much bigger number than $1.6T. But you get the math.
Only Sunday was off thanks to Christianity. Free Saturday only came in early XX century. Before that it was work 6 days a week.
In the long term we're all dead.
Short and mid term matters a lot to people.
"and the people are better off with free, open markets long term."
Eh, maybe not. It depends on the demand and availability of skill/labor. If you have a high percentage of low skill labor and you can outsource low skill labor to cheaper markets, then what are the current low skill citizens going to do? Surely the rust belt is not better off now than when coal and steel (and other manufacturing) were still a domestic thing. Maybe other areas of the county faired better, but with median wages dropping over the past 50 years, it doesn't seem like a strong case.
> You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
I dislike the tone as there are plenty of good devs who've been cut and replaced (sort of) by offshore. Don't equate laid off/replaced with "really bad dev".
The downside is for people disabled. Maybe they aren't a terrible dev but they aren't a great dev either. If they're on par with outsourced labor, they aren't so safe. But what else can they do?
If I lost my job right now, I'd be totally fucked. I'd end up working at Walmart. Masters degrees might as well be toilet paper.
I remember driving through West Virginia with my parents to visit family as a kid, and my dad was lamenting the fact that its full of the haves and the have nots, with the distinct implication that the haves did something wrong to end up there, and the have nots would be just fine if it wasn't for those pesky rich people. I was just left thinking that if life was haves and have nots, shouldn't you spend your time trying to be one of the haves rather than lamenting the way reality was? But in reality, both those views are overly simplistic.
It's a pretty big leap to go from a software engineer to Walmart. The median software developer (~$110k/yr last I checked but could be outdated) is somewhere in the upper teens as far as income percentile (20% being around $100k and 10% being around $150k[0]). Pretty much any non-management role at Walmart is going to land you in the bottom half.
I'd be curious (but it's none of my business) what about your situation makes that the most likely outcome. I'd bet there are ways to head that off.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States
Just in general, what do you think an alternate job would be for an ex-dev (without spending 10s of thousands on reschooling)?
Seems like retail, warehouses, and other unskilled labor are the main options. Even something like teaching would require a certification.
Basically anything tech-adjacent - product, "business analysts," management. Maybe something like tech writing but there are going to a lot of decent devs who make terrible tech writers so that's much more on an individual basis. And then there's the devs who still code but that's not their focus - SDET, devrel, that sort of thing.
Devrel would actually probably be the easiest thing to get into with a few years' foresight. Building a following on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter/X, etc. will make it infinitely easier to land that first devrel role.
You bringing up teaching is a good point - I'm not sure about where I currently live but where I used to live you could get a substitute teaching cert basically by just passing the background check and having a college degree. It was pretty easy to get an add-on certification as well to teach your subject or closely related ones. I can't say what it's like everywhere though, and to be honest most of the people I know who have teaching degrees have left or wished they could. But if you can get a job and can deal with the bullshit you're basically set from a put-food-on-the-table standpoint.
Most of those roles you list require strong interpersonal skills. That's usually not something an autistic person is strong at. Not a big market for many of those either (dev rel, tech writer).
I'm looking to switch into IT from teaching. The job security in teaching is the best but half of my colleagues are in psychotherapy. Last year we had 30% of our teachers on leave. It's not a happy life unless you're a social butterfly and unless you enjoy yelling at kids.
Can't wait till I'm out.
Options:
Tech Writers - nope. Nothing dealing with boilerplate text is safe, in any field.
Twitch/YouTube - nope. That is just celebrity economics again. For every half dozen people that make it (and make it is just back to median dev salary) there are thousands that only get a few viewers.
Teaching - this is option. But as noted by others. Can have own problems and a lot of people leave.
I'm an old Dev looking for second career, and it is tough. The option is to just re-skill and be dev again in another industry. Dev's be Dev's. It doesn't seem like there are many upward paths, and limited sideways paths.
What, product manager, analyst, marketing? Tried them, they all have downsides.
Even with all the crap, I only find comfort in creating things. Coding.
If talking percentiles, you probably mean 80th percentile instead of 20%, and similarly for the other number - 90, not 10.
the new CEO of Google is from India, no?
I see a lot of very qualified people coming from India, around a big University here.. They have had twenty years to build to this.
There are extremely talented Indian engineers, but I don’t think this discussion is about the elite “cream of the crop” but more so the rank and file.
I have been assigned to lead offshore teams with engineers that need direct guidance on very basic coding tasks, produce low quality code and become combative when receiving feedback.
So many times I’ve reviewed and requested the same changes to code, classic example: a try/catch then completely ignore a caught exception, just to get some code “working” for the example inputs. When I call this out as a problem, it’s met with “well you did not say that in the specification, I have completed what was asked”. Another commenter had a similar anecdote where all input validation was removed to get test cases passing… are we expected to write things like that into a work spec? Seems like this would take longer than for me to write the damn code myself
There's gotta be something between Satya and "C-tier code out of rural India".
There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.
As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way, that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.
Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.
Those talented indian engineers are paid on the global market rate though. The logic also goes the other way, those don't want to be underpaid.
That's why these outsourcing threats from companies make me laugh, they don't understand that software is a global market and they also are competing in it.
The world class FAANG-level Indian engineers which are underpaid just do not exist.
the only thing i want from UAW is a refund for all the dues they made me pay in grad school
I now understand why American unions have such a bad name.
I've seen a bunch of US companies setting up offices here in New Zealand and hiring SRE/DevOps types. Our wages are garbage so it's much cheaper for them! Plus our timezone means having staff here leads to much less on-call requirement for US/UK staff.
The overseas subsidiary business model was happening well before 2007. I left a company doing it, in 2004, for example. And they had been doing it for some years before I joined. And they were not the only one.
Yeup, we're expanding and only hiring off-shore.
My company is doing this, with the end goal of reducing engineering headcount in the US..
The only way for me to protest is to leave, but the job market is terrible.
My exposure to bigco is they aren’t hiring anywhere.
When you can hire engineers in South America or Easter Europe for a tiny fraction of US salaries, you bet they're going to do it.
What industry?
To me it looks like tech is just falling more in line with other industries pay/workload. I think there are many who joined the tech workforce during the pandemic thinking the norm was to make $135k while doing 10 hours of real work a week from home, twiddling a few lines of bootcamp level javascript to appease your largely absent boss.
Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. The pay was just decent too. Not jaw dropping like today.
I am dumbfounded this idea gets trotted around HN so freely. I’ve met nobody like this in the industry. Most people I know are burnt out from many years of having to work over 40 hours.
> I’ve met nobody like this in the industry.
nobody is going to admit to other people they know that this (slacking off) is what they do. You only get this on an anonymous forum like HN or reddit. Of course, some of them might be lying, but where there's smoke, there's fire imho.
I work at FAANG. People here coast while making mountains of money.
Google is the big tech company with that reputation though. MS has pockets but pays considerably worse
Which one?
A large part of the IT community does indeed very little work.
As for having to work over 40 hours and being stressed, I guess there's a price to having to work in US under such lax worker's rights and benefits, in Europe you just say no thanks boss see you on Monday.
I hate to break it to you but in the US, employees at many companies do not work more than 40 hours a week. There are two reasons for this:
1) People who can leave will leave if the work load is too high. Those who can leave are usually the best team members.
2) It does not work. Research has shown most people are incapable of producing more than 40 hours of work a week over the long term. They can do it for a week, maybe a month but after that their productivity is either the same as a 40 hour/week work or maybe even less. People are not machines and just because they are asked to do something (or ordered to) does not mean they will or even can.
One last thing, what keeps employers inline in the US is people can leave. If you are in a bad job, you can switch to a good one.
Another thing about Europe v. USA conditions: it is considerably harder to fire a bad hire or team member in Europe.
It is a testament to the great work they do that many people believe that IT does not do much. The work required to keep things working without noticible downtime is hardly trivial.
Thanks I work in IT, I'm a dev, and based my comment on both my own and experience and the dozens of peers I know very well in many companies of the world.
And I reiterate, a large parte of our sector does very little practical work.
Jaw dropping pay is inextricable from the jaw dropping Bay Area housing market. Standard white-collar pay for Bay Area-only roles is a pretty bad deal, and most tech workers would be better off learning something else. But standard white-collar pay with the geographic distribution of other white-collar work (i.e. any mid-sized and up metro is fine) would be a perfectly good equilibrium.
It's arguably more expensive in West Los Angeles (where tech is in LA). Most articles compare LA to SF but LA is giant. If you lived in La Verne (cheap), the east most side of LA, your commute to tech companies on the West Side would be 2 to 3hrs.
Looking at Rent Cafe:
SF: $3267
Santa Monica: $3956
Venice: $3844
Playa Vista: $3726
Marina Del Rey $3896
These are all places near Meta, Google, etc....
I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet but in LA on the west side it's all over the place. "Coliviing" where they rent out individual bedrooms for $2500-$3500 a month and you share the living room and dining room. It's like having a roommate except you have have lock on your bedroom door and no choice who your roommates are (and no responcibility if they don't pay their rent).
> I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet
There was a startup for just this a few years ago. Home share is what it was called.
Makes you wonder if these mega corporations wouldn't be better off lobbying to resolve the housing crisis instead of paying more in salaries.
>Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.
Exactly. Look at industries that also recruit smart college grads and pay well: consulting, finance, law. These jobs have very demanding schedules.
Not saying that's good, just that it is.
Software industries outside of VC are still pretty normal, decent pay but in line with other local industries, nothing jawdropping. Working pretty hard still, but balanced enough compared to the overtime all the time days. That's going to depend on your company.
I’ve had this conversation with my boss, we’ve settled on about 3-4 modes of compensation.
Lowball, either because on ignorance (bro I have an app idea!), intention (fast buck artists preying on folks that don’t know better, maybe it’s a BS startup with 80k S.E. base and worthless ISO), or something like government.
Middle-Road, all the normal companies in all those “flyover” states or something to that affect. You’ll get paid a reasonable market rate for a reasonable expectation of work, e.g. an American 40 hours work week. If you’re lucky these might be a small tech-shop, but no flashy VC driven mania. I’ve worked at several, currently work at one. From the inside looking out the ZIRP issues are nonexistent, Cost-of-Living raises might not be as high as I’d like but I have 0 worries about the trends of tech layoffs I read of here.
Upper-Middle, places that are similar to Middle Road in that they are not flashy VC driven firms but “real” companies delivering profitable software or tech-enabled products and services but they also highly value their IT as a force multiplier. As a result the compensation might be a fair bit higher than Middle Road but nothing insane. You’re not walking about with 300-500k Total Comp. Nice 200k TC for a quality Senior here for a normal place of living. I’ve worked at one such firm but something of a unicorn.
Finally, VC world where the rules don’t matter and the points are made up… or something like it. Compensation is ludicrous and often detached from real-world value provided.
I know this is neither exhaustive scientific, but rather to play with the idea that there are different patterns of compensation than the 5 hours of work and 500k of compensation I see some thinking is both reasonable and deserved (trolling?)
> Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.
And I can't understand sorry, why should we go back to this scenario, exactly?
The implication isn't that we should, rather that IT sector is reverting to some saner curve of compensation vs skills and effort.
It will still be insanely cushier and well paid than other jobs.
The comment didn't say that
Takes a low IQ person to accept ridiculous workload for kinda ok money
Only when there are better options available in the same industry. Nobody is getting a CS degree from a good school then switching to nursing because they can make the same money with better hours (or better money with the same hours).
The gravy train might be ending, I just wish it would end with the jobs that actually do nothing (product) rather than engineering first, but oh well.
Ouch :) I felt that
No offense, I'm curious: do you happen to be younger than 30?
No lol, why would anyone work crazy hours for not an impressive salary?
Off the top of my head:
- They're a founder
- They're a spouse of a founder
- They're a friend of the founder
- The worker is unskilled and needs to work crazy hours to break even
- They believe in the company and have equity
- The vertical is more politically compatible than alternatives
- The vertical punishes newbies before the career starts paying off (lawyers, doctors, academia)
- The work is interesting/fun on its own (in these cases, the type of work would never be paid well -- teaching, charity work, homemaking, niche tech, etc.)
- The worker is being compensated in other, non-monetary ways (aside from equity)
- The job is poorly paid locally but well-compensated elsewhere, and moving/remote work is not possible
Are such people idiots? Maybe.
That said, people who place money above all other factors trend closer to the "idiot" line, in my book. YMMV.
If you require the literal best pay possible, you'll be job-searching forever. Some people do not have that luxury.
You take what you can find and negotiate.
I was on a 24 hour on call for months, a two man team, managing Chick-fil-A's Doordash, UberEats and GH Go integrations for thousands of stores. It was literally insane. I survived this recession - but I was way way way overworked. The balance has definitely tipped towards the employer.
Sorry to hear that!
I had some clowns reach out to me for the same job it sounds like, promising that I could absolutely move up to employment with Chic-fil-a after my contract was up…
As if I haven’t heard that story before.
Who was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.
Who was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.
This was a good position to get me through the tech recession. I was able to continue working on Go, and the system was interesting. But it wasn't an easy job by any means. I ended up going back to startups where I have more ownership.
Is this based on Elon’s idea of trimming the fat?
Id like to believe it isnt but its a copycat industry.
It's not as if Elon invented the idea. Every successfully entrepreneur who went on to found a large company has done it in one form or another. Maybe it didn't take the form of layoffs, but cost-cutting is a natural behaviour when the soft money disappears. Happened in 2008 as well.
Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs and refusing to hire more who is going to take on the work burden? Obviously existing employees.
> Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs . . .
Sometimes, yes, but not always - if the load is high enough, employees are overworked even if headcount increases.
I also am getting multiple reports of fake job ads posted to show health in the market but internally those jobs are understood to never be filled.
And - somehow when things slip, the customer is pissed, it's your fault.
You just have to be more hardcore
joking
> Based on analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Janco, news that the IT industry added just 700 jobs following an estimated 262,242 jobs lost amid mass layoffs is shocking, but not surprising.
So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
> Currently, there are almost 100K unfilled jobs with over 101K unemployed IT Pros – a skills mismatch.
Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job. Additionally, I suspect that a lot of these unfilled positions are either paying too low, or aren't real jobs.
Yeah but over 100,000 people graduate in CS/IT per year. 700 net jobs is rough. (I should know - several of those graduates are old friends of mine who struggled massively to find jobs.)
How many retire/quit/die each year
Relatively young industry, the population pyramid of workers would have more people at the bottom. So gaining only 700 jobs isn’t that fun. That being said, I feel bad for newgrads, since it feels like nobody wants to train them anymore. Any job posting I’ve seen is mostly 2-3 year minimum experience at a professional level.
I have genuinely never seen an in-house training program in the software industry. Maybe some bullshit industry certs that amount to a single exam. But nothing like an apprenticeship style program where over a year you are taught and mentored.
Even university doesn't teach you how to work in the industry. It's a very DIY career, we should probably change that.
At my previous company there was an in-house training, where the first three months were dedicated to the training of a new employee. The training consisted of both the tech stack and the development and business processes used by the company.
As a result everyone knew how things worked and everyone by far exceeded the minimum level of knowledge needed to meaningfully contribute. It was a great department to work in and I miss it still.
Sadly, the company had that insane policy of only 3-4% annual raise irregardless of performance, so most people, including me, would leave after a few years.
Training in CS is giving some new-grad a job, instead of not. Plenty of companies hire senior-only.
I agree we should be doing at least that. But we could do better too. Apprenticeships are a much better transfer of practical knowledge than university, and has been a concept in use for centuries.
Think of internship programs, streamlined hiring of new grads and etc. My previous companies had both, now I don’t see that on their website. Obviously not a real statistic, but a bit disheartening.
There was a tech company in the UK who was doing it (irritatingly, I can't remember their name atm) with Oxford and Cambridge humanities grads. Just googled it and couldn't find it. If anybody remembers what I'm talking about, please reply below because now it's bugging me.
Lots of UK companies do it - google Software Engineer Apprenticeships. Vodafone, BAE, Softwire, BT, Rolls-Royce, the BBC, HMRC, tonnes do.
No one wanted to hire new grads when I first started working in 2000... Except startups. And it was very slim pickings until you had 3 years under your belt. This isn't a new phenomenon.
Well, that would mean we’re just rolling back to 2000s era? I did finish a pretty decent university to be fair, but had options right after grad even in mid-sized companies. So did my peers.
I’m not sure that’s changed at all. I graduated in 93 and I remember having conversations with friends where we complained that all the jobs seemed to expect 2-3 years experience.
Probably more relevant is how many over 40 give up coding because they're bored and/or employers dont want them any more. (I'm over 50 and finding it much harder to get piad compared to when I was younger despite kids moved out and I have lots of time to dedicate to working)
Ageism is one of the bad things about our industry. It's the last accepted form of discrimination. The irony is that when you're young and starting a family, you feel guilty about working crazy hours because you're not spending time with your wife and kids. Then when the nest is empty you've got plenty of free time to work hard and even learn some new things, languages, frameworks, &c. but at that point a lot of closed-minded companies think you're too old for software development.
not to nit pick but there are still many accepted forms of discrimination after ageism.
My sample set is definitely biased. I see plenty of very conservative (doesn't want to learn, will only work in one technology) junior engineers, folks who are going to stall out. For senior folks I don't see many. This could be because older folks have jobs or are self filtering to the tech they like or maybe their resumes don't make it to my desktop. Of the folks I can recall that were going for a jr position with many years of experience had some pretty obvious personality issues. Everyone else I interview that's been in industry over 12 years is trying for Lead/Staff/PE. I'd definitely want to know why someone with 20+ years of experience in development is applying for a SDE2 job.
"Just needs a job" and "moved into software" are good reasons. But I'd be really worried about "just needs a job" person getting mad/frustrated if they were that experienced and banging heads with manages that didn't know how to leverage their skills.
When I was younger (~2005) I worked as a peer with one of the dads of a kid who was one year older than me in highschool. He actually became a good friend and mentor. I also worked with a guy who had been a CTO of a 500 person dev shop for years and went back to being a dev. He relished not making decisions or dealing with politics. They were both great mentors. It was a 2 way mentorship as I had a bit more core CS than they did and was more willing to experiment on new tech. They were great with doing whatever they needed to to get the job done. And they'd been in many techs stacks, that helped me break my single language bias and my "not my job" quickly.
I think these days my bias would come from everyone I work with that's older is also quite senior, level wise. On the engineering side they're people who are also constantly trying new things and really leveraging their experience. They're all very introspective. You can call into question pretty much anything with them and you'll get a good discussion.
Companies I've worked with definitely expect engineers to at least reach the lead position for the most part. Up or out in some ways. But the megaco I worked at definitely has really solid non-lead, non-entry-level engineers who have been there forever, esp in critical systems, ignoring their up-or-out guidelines. The main risk there was a new manager being biased and just assuming a 15 year tenure L5 engineer should be managed out. As a contradicting factor there was general consensus anyone over 10 years "really knows some shit" as the default assumption.
Thanks, this is a really valuable answer and makes sense to me. The only follow-up I would have would be if that dev with 10-20 years of experience applying for SDE2 did tell you in an interview that they didn't want to move "up or out" and their goal was to be a productive dev for as long as possible instead of applying internally for management roles, would you accept that answer?
So lead (3) isn't manager...
I'm in one of those systems where after lead you have staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier. You never have to be a manager in those. In that style system you can stop at lead (L1/L2/L3 lead/PE/sr PE/de). At those you can stop at L3. It would be very hard to explicitly stop at L2 there. You would have to opt out of hiring, peer reviews, and doing architecture and just do assigned tasks on jira.
We had one engineer who wanted this, they had a ton of stock and we're kinda set, had been there forever. Their super power was ops. You just let em go at a system and it just becomes more and more stable and better documented quietly over time. They had a manager explicitly protecting them that they didn't really grok was happening. They actually left after moving to a new product team and the new manager kept trying to uplevel them. But again they basically just retired at that point.
For me I always worry about people who just do what others tell them. I need feedback and have had projects go sideways when I didn't get it. "Wait you realized 3 months ago this wasn't going to work and you didn't mention it?" "Your the boss/lead I do what you say".
Another way to say it is I think small team lead is the minimum viable dev in places I've worked. That doesn't mean you cant step into a support role and rotate who's lead or work as a team but you need to be capable of doing it.
"staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier"
wow people do love their titles )))
There are definitely many more forms of discrimination. Think about neurodiverse people, e.g. with autism. Reardless of skill, knowledge, degree, age etc. it may be much harder to acquire a job for social reasons.
Or become unhireable because of age discrimination
Not enough, obviously
not enough for what? you'd have to show numbers of either unemployed new grads or retiring tech folks over the last few years to be able to say anything at all.
This feels like the dot-com bust. The job market sucked around 2000/2001.
All Principal/Staff positions or laptop repair.
Canada's latest economic report had a net positive of only 100 jobs in the entirety of the labor market.
With a massive growth of people.
There's only so much Maple syrup to harvest!
Isn't Canada still hiring loads of Filipino nurses, physical therapists, and caregivers?
I don't know why Filipino would be a necessary qualifier, even if that's been a pretty common demographic, but yes there's a lot of health care stuff still.
It's 700 net, but that's generally how numbers are reported. When we get the national BLS numbers of "178,000 jobs created in October" that number is always net. In reality, most months you'll see a few million jobs created and a few million terminated.
> So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
Were it not for December hiring (which is usually pretty low in most years, but was the highest for any month last year according to the data) it would've been negative. That could mean that things are improving in the tech job market - have to see if the trend continues into January, February this year.
I wonder how many “unfilled” roles are ghost jobs. I keep seeing the same roles re-posted or just never filled.
I'm an unemployed staff/sr level software engineer who's been unemployed for 4 months. The only interview I got in the past 3 months was due to an internal referral. I'm seeing a lot of similar re-posts.
Basically my story, but with a longer timescale.
I was getting rejected from jobs that seemed a perfect fit for my resume. End up getting a job I wasn’t qualified for on paper via referral.
And some of those jobs that rejected me are still reposting the same damn job monthly.
How many of those 100K unfilled jobs are real?
Way closer to 0 than to 100k
"Skill mismatch" could also mean experience mismatch. I would imagine a mismatch is more often about a company wanting someone with 10 years experience in a particular domaine than about a Java developer needing to learn python.
You can't take an online course or build a couple side projects and be qualified to run a 1M+ qps distributed system.
it can also be a sign of company looking for graduates to hire for cheap, so they're looking for inexperienced only.
Yes, this "statistic" makes no sense. No fucking way was there a net addition of jobs.
One of the stranger victory laps I've ever seen
> Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job.
Gotta love capitalism. CEO sees some shiny new thing and all the sudden some poor shlub's entire livelihood is fucked.
I am realising that this is what taxes pays for in Denmark. I have a masters in computer science (5 year, postgraduate + thesis, Aarhus University which is top 100 and even higher for PL + semantics, which is my thesis subject) that I received tuition free and I am continuing with a professional degree in business at a reasonable tuition at 10k USD for the entire degree.
It appears like continual learning should be a tax as it is non-negotiable for people living in a modern world. Just like roads, hospitals, military, etc.
(Maybe it is just my European midnset that speaks here)
I don't necessarily think it needs to be government run. The best schools in America are private. Ironically government support (the federal student loan system) is imo largely responsible for crazy high tuition in the U.S.
Maybe there is just less demand in Denmark? But I feel like demand surged here, and with easy access to capital it drove prices to absurd levels.
This is and interesting, and very American, point of view.
In Europe all countries have tuition free universities, in Denmark people even get a government stipend of ~1000 USD/month by the government. And yet, there is availability on most programmes (like computer science)
It seems like the market powers do not apply for American universities? When tuition (demand) surges, it should be profitable to expand supply (new unis, added seats on programmes, hire more staff).
Regardless, the supply seems quite inflexible?
Though it is convenient to blame the government for supporting the ones most in need (young people starting their careers) it seems to be more appropriate to blame structural issues that inhibit the creation of supply – which is also very anti-American.
Classic American mentality. "If we don't have it here, it can't work anywhere else."
>In Europe all countries have tuition free universities
The UK doesn't (and didn't before Brexit either).
Sorry my statement should have been moderated: "In EU most countries have institutions with insignificant tuition costs"
The last part is the biggest factor. When all the easy, soft VC capital dried up, so did the jaw-dropping salaries.
Direct education funding has been going down though.
it depends what skills you're talking about. when i see people complaining about always having to learn new things, it's related to new libraries, frameworks, technologies (e.g. now i have to learn graphql, now i have to learn to make things cloud-native, now i have to learn go because it's cooler than java).
this stuff in my experience is either taught badly or not at all in universities, and i don't even mind that. the institution can stick to fundamentals applicable across the given hot tech on any day
personally i don't agree with the sentiment. constant learning is something i love about the industry. for one it's interesting, but it also means there are always opportunities to prove yourself by being interested in learning
That would be OK if they actually let you learn while doing, which is my preferred way of learning. But they ask you to give ironclad estimates for how long it's going to take to implement <insert completely unclear requirement in one sentence> in <technology nobody has heard of so far>.
They can go do whatever they want to themselves. Either tell me what cool new tech you want me to try out and what problems we might want to solve soonish and I'll see which of those and how it might be applicable to or you tell me you want to build <whatever it is> in whatever tech I think will get me there best and fastest. If you know so much, do it yourself. Oh you can't? Well then STFU (not you you but that proverbial manager type above you that seems to know so much)
None of its "new", its simply repackaged and slightly different, not really any better. Its just constant churn of frameworks, languages, and libraries.
Pour one out for the buggy whip manufacturers . . .
slap ~~crypto~~ generative AI on it
> So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
^ This guy reads.
Oof, tough crowd.
While a vast majority of comments here seem to indicate a lot of jobs being moved offshore, there are massive layoffs (even entities shutting shop in India. Github closed its office here, Twitter reduced its presence dramatically etc. Where I work, there are no back-fills for voluntary attrition or restructuring). Layoffs are a taboo of some kind here too, affected are treated as "non-performers" and recruiters will look down upon you.
A lot of hiring here is for low end work or at very junior levels (If you are a 10+ years experienced guy, good luck getting a job. I know a close friend of mine struggling to get one - ready for even a 40pc pay cut)
If you apply for a Principal or Staff position (few), be ready to grind out 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard Leetcode problem and doing a System design interview where you do FB with Instagram design reels all at once in 1 hour). Surprisingly when you attend meetups and talk with "Senior" managers who used to hire dozens with shambolic interviews, seem to be opting for getting "good" "resources" with DSA skills from this market (Imagine working in core engineering and then going on to do body shop consulting at an IT provider migrating from Java 4 to Java 17)
While the general sense on lot of jobs are going offshore is true, it is possibly very low paying entry level jobs.
You can now possibly correlate these to a lot of comments you see, junior folks who (no offense intended) :
* Given a spec hack something up and never think of how a customer will use this * Exceptions (sorry, we code Hail Mary scenarios) * Monitoring (sorry, that is ProdOps issue not mine) * Alert Management (this is non critical anyway & maintenance is someone else's job) * Testing (shambles)
Add to this targets such as "automate" with "Gen AI", We paid your co-pilot license where is the productivity increase number (you are an under performer and did not "customer delight" experience)
Sure is frustrating (onshore or offshore) & sad to see this where this is. One just thinks we'd have to live with this at-least for now. Hoping that things get better (overall in the world), sanity prevails and we can all have better lives ahead of us
I would say the article is about Pax Americana. Anywhere else — like Russia, Asia, Africa — IT is booming with stronger demand than ever.
Probably, one of the main reasons for layoffs in “US and what have you” is new wave of deglobalization and having your own google, visa, etc. “just in case”. This way possible markets shrink and big “IT troops” become less economically feasible.
We may even see in the not so distant future some IT migration from US to the countries outside of Pax Americana.
could it also be part of "section 174 US tax code"
Russia?
This would make sense - most of top talent left when they realized what can happen to them and those who decided to stay did it mostly for family reasons. So someone needs to fill in this hole.
The notion of most top talent leaving is very much opposite of true.
Some reasons for better than ever demand in IT are the creation of alternatives to some gone paid western products like SAP or migration of the existing solutions to open-source stack: e.g. from Sql server/Oracle to PostgreSQL and/or adding Linux support instead of just Windows.
I thought offshoring happened 20 years ago. I think today, it is more about aishoring, or the dream that it will be possible to do a lot with very few people.
Oh absolutely. The term is new (aishoring). There is chaos though (initial days of aishoring ?) The challenge I see is the following (or the management thought I see is the following)
a) Hire some Junior devs, track them through spyware on the laptops b) Enterprise ChatGPT, Bard, <Insert my own> c) CoPilot d) Spin features out
Some senior folk reviews the code (we pay him top dollar, so 18 hours is reality he/she has to wake up to) As someone to whom this happened (I did not sign up, it was normal till management changed), I can tell you it made me go crazy. 85 hour work weeks (weekends included) took a toll and I quit and took a lower paying position (1 year ago).
Sadly its not getting better, Was conversing with a colleague recently and he told me his new task was to use GenAI to migrate IMS to Java microservices. Kind of chuckled to myself (console by saying: it gets worse, before it gets better)
I'm not sure the new model will be senior dev + junior devs + LLMs. Rather it is more likely that it will just be senior dev / person with ideas + LLM. At least that is how it seems that it should work. However, my own empirical evidence runs somewhat counter to that: ChatGPT has a tough time getting the details right. Perhaps in time we will get true amplification.
> As someone to whom this happened
Happened to me too - I just said this shit is generated by ChatGPT and I won't be reviewing it. They didn't insist.
The trend I’ve seen, and one that actually seems to have decent results, is “near-shoring” to Romania, Ukraine, Brazil or similar.
India has had an “if you’ve got no better options” for most of my career to be honest.
Point taken, but there are no black and white options as you'd have seen. I have worked with folks from East European Geo's who are very good and you will find that everywhere.
The volumes (fresh and junior hiring) in India are staggering numbers
I was part of a somewhat well known US based product company that set up shop here in 2022 and laid off their entire India team in 2023 too. I am still looking for a job and I am terrible at Leetcode interviews in general. Things are looking grim.
That confirms my anecdotal experience. At times I felt I was losing my mind with all the "record low unemployment" and "soft landing" stories in the press. 2021 and 2022 felt like great years in terms of the job market. 2023 felt horrible.
If the opinion from old guy matters - 2021 and 2022 weren't great, these were insane and it wasn't sustainable. And it's completely normal that hangover after such years feels horrible.
Exactly. To me this felt extremely similar to the post-dot-com bust. Back then, the joke was that anyone who could "fog a mirror" could get hired in tech. While the mechanics this time around are a bit different (we didn't have TikTok back then to chronicle "A day in the life at a FAANG food court..."), the outcome is very much the same: lots of easy money led to over-hiring, and when that spigot turns off, there are lots of layoffs, which (if you got laid off) feels like an outright depression because you have a huge number of laid off people now going after a much smaller pool of job openings.
Also, just like in the dot com bust, companies really start laser focusing on roles that are directly tied to revenue, but anything that is even slightly tangential/"a luxury" gets cut. In a non-scientific perusal of my LinkedIn connections, most of the software devs and sales people I know who were laid off found work relatively quickly, but I've seen people in roles like recruiting, content marketing, UX research, and product managers that have in some cases been unemployed for over a year. Middle management also definitely had a major thinning out.
It’s still horrible and lots of people at large companies are worried of getting laid off any second.
Is it horrible or is it reversion to the mean? Post-COVID hiring and pay was completely unsustainable, and I'm shocked it lasted as many years as it did.
You can't look at years of largesse and then when we get back to reality lament about how it's so horrible.
> years of largesse
The American worker has never had largesse, even the tech workers like ourselves, the largesse is and was and will still be going to the capitalist class. You're basically saying that we must accept that we're meant to live shitty lives where we grind and grind for very little gain while the capitalists and founders thrive on our labor. Reality is reality, but the whole "we can't complain about this" message you're sending is part of what's keeping us here. We should be fighting for the fruits of our labor.
It’s horrible for people terrified that their job might disappear and they won’t be able to find another one.
Lots of risk taking behavior is gone and focus has shifted to saving the company money.
I am, and several friends in F500s and/or Big4 consulting are too. Esp. the consultants, where they're waiting for the other shoe to drop every quarter.
I am a Senior/Staff level software engineer who has been unemployed for 4 months. Best advice is to live way below your means and have great savings. I get a little freaked out at the job market and not having all but 1 interview in the past few months, but I don't feel that stressed because I'm ok financially for now.
I'm waiting for it too and I know more cuts are coming that could impact me. The stress is really bad for me right now and I was already stressed before.
I am absolutely not convinced that if I lose my job I can easily get another one that pays as well, which is saying something because my wage is pathetic compared to most people on HN.
>2021 and 2022 felt like great years in terms of the job market. 2023 felt horrible.
Well, we had people bragging about working 2, 3 or more remote jobs in 2021/2022, so I'm not sure that should be the expectations anchor. 2023 reversed some of that.
We're in a lull, no doubt. But there's still a lot happening.
> Well, we had people bragging about working 2, 3 or more remote jobs in 2021/2022
Do we know how prevalent that really was though?
I just assumed those were extreme outliers, famous because they were so outrageous.
Also, I never understood why people had a beef with it.
Companies bend and cut the throat of loyal hard working employees the moment they are not relevant yet people raged some ethics there which was very misplaced.
I now question how many of these cases were legitimate and/or sustainable.
Coincidental to the overemployment stories, there was a trend of entry-level workers taking jobs and abandoning them at the end of the training period. They'd work a series of short-term "jobs" concurrently in which they collected pay for the time period in which nobody had any real expectations from them, and left when that changed.
Overemployment candidates don't hide it well, or the media was making news up based on viral bullshit someone exaggerated on Reddit based on the above trend. I figured someone would try this shit so I kept an eye out; we only ever caught two OE cases arising from unresponsive remote employees with low output. (One confessed.)
There's not exactly any mystery to catching this, and there's a ton of ways to get caught (as repeatedly reported by Redditors). I have a hard time believing this narrative was ever real for more than a handful of people. The story mainly seemed to serve as astroturf citable in support of eventual RTO mandates.
IT jobs are only a part of the total jobs picture.
Yes, but I would be interested in the gross income of IT vs other occupations and how that is impacting overall economy.
For example, if you drop 2 IT jobs, but each one is 150k, but you create 4x 60k jobs, it looks like you added 2 jobs, but in reality, you removed 60k worth of payroll income.
>For example, if you drop 2 IT jobs, but each one is 150k, but you create 4x 60k jobs, it looks like you added 2 jobs, but in reality, you removed 60k worth of payroll income.
But the company saves 60k, so the net (to the economy) is the same.
That is not entirely true. Whereas a company will likely bank that profit, employees are more likely to put that income back into the economy which provides a multiplier effect of the income in overall economic growth.
>That is not entirely true.
No, it's entirely true. The economy is a closed system. Employees can't "put that income back into the economy", because it has never left.
How it gets redistributed will vary, and you can make normative arguments about spending the money at the local coffee shop. But the net effect on the economy is the same.
>The economy is a closed system
This is sort of not true. The biggest example of why is the concept of the velocity of money. If you’re unfamiliar with this concept, it’s the idea of of how many times a single dollar is used in a given time period. It’s a very important measure, and it’s historic low at the start of the lock downs was why the fed dumping so much money into the economy was not a mistake (at the time). It’s an effective multiplier, and has very real impact as to the total utils that everyone in the spending chain collect.
What this means, is that when money is spent outside a country, there is a very real risk that that the local velocity of money goes down, even though the gdp of the global economy is going up.
> The economy is a closed system.
No, its not; value (and, separately, money) can both be created and destroyed. And, when examining any scale smaller than the global economy, value and money can each enter or exit the universe of analysis from or to the outside, as well.
If that were true, then recessions and depressions would be impossible. The velocity of money moving through the economy would be a constant, like the speed of light. But recessions and depressions happen, so we know that the disappearance of certain transactions from the economy can have a negative macroeconomic effect.
Even if it's a closed system (I'm not sure it is), it's definitely not a zero-sum system.
According to the latest jobs report, average wages are up 4.1% in 2023.
where would they be if wages kept up with inflation, or value generated?
4.1% sounds nice, but inflation has been at, what, 7% over the last couple of years?
Inflation is currently 3.1%
I'd love to get put of IT, but there's nothing else that I can really switch to. Other good paying jobs have a high barrier to entry, terrible hours, etc.
> 2023 felt horrible.
It really did. I choose that year to become an independent contractor, and thanks God the only client I found loves me and pays on time because otherwise literally nobody has ever contacted me on LinkedIn or anything with a single decent proposal.
I have a huge fear of losing that client and going back to European corporate job and salary again.
> otherwise literally nobody has ever contacted me on LinkedIn
If you're a contractor you should be the one contacting. Sales is part of the job.
Thank you, I will take note of this for the future.
Both can be true. Tech sector, especially start ups, is especially sensitive to interest rates. It's been a booming year for travel, retail, hospitality and more.
Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.
This is the part that's left out of every statement that starts with "There's a shortage of workers in industry X" ... "willing to accept the current wages / working conditions".
Similar for "jobs Americans won't do"... "at the wages being offered".
It drives me insane that people freely accept the concept of supply and demand, except when it comes to labor.
There's a second part to this argument.
There would be riots, for example, if agricultural workers were paid rates that would make Americans willing to do this. If you think food inflation is bad now, that would be off the charts.
Like it or not, we benefit from cheap labor, across many, many different industries.
Cheap labor needs cheap food and cheap housing.
Some of the "housing" for migrant workers would be considered quite appalling by most Americans.
Something I advocate for in the UK is that we should actively suppress wages of industries like healthcare and agricultural with cheap foreign labour, while providing access to good and affordable education so that native workers maximally benefit from the migrant labour underclass. Specifically I think we should bring foreign workers here on mass to work in specific industries then deport them if they're unable to find work. We should ensure they're not allowed to work in other industries to reduce labour competition with natives working in sectors for which we don't want to suppress wages.
That said, some people disagree with the ethics of importing a migrant underclass which we're knowingly underpaying, but I'd agree with you that the current system benefits us, although it could be better with more immigration and labour controls.
What is your plan for when that cheap labour runs out or starts to become more expensive?
How are you going to compete with other countries doing the same thing but offering a better deal?
> some people disagree with the ethics of importing a migrant underclass
and those very same people would also "disagree" with higher prices for essential goods/services.
Yeah exactly.
When people cite the benefits of mass immigration, eg, "where are all the nurses going to come from it we don't import workers?". I'd argue what they're actually saying here is, "if we don't create a migrant underclass who is going to work for the crappy pay we give nurses?". The only reason we need migrant workers to fill these roles is that they don't pay attractively enough for natives to apply to them.
The main benefits of immigration on a native population is that you create a migrant underclass. So if that's what we seem to want then our current immigration system could be improved. That's really all I argue.
> If you think food inflation is bad now, that would be off the charts.
I don't have a stat but looking in past the manual labor costs of food is very small percentage.
True for staple crops, not fruits and vegetables. Many of those need to be hand picked still. Until theyre automated those farms would not be able to make any sales if they paid American level wages because everyone switch to cheaper imported produce. All the farms in the central valley and imperial valley could not exist without farm migrants.
How people still believe that importing masses of immigrants from poorer nations who are used to a fraction of the standard of living and will be contempt with much less money has no effect on employment / wages is beyond me.
We even have an example of what a train wreck it is in Canada, with stagnant productivity, a housing bubble and overcrowded public services. But we're determined to make the exact same mistakes.
The UK has been doing the same thing and has exactly the same problems.
this is really annoying to read.
go open the careers page for most mid-tier tech co’s (Coinbase, Rippling, Affirm) and count the number of SWE jobs in India/Latam/Eastern Europe vs the U.S.
Say you get your wish of no immigration. How are you going to force these companies to not hire abroad instead?
At least if the worker who competes with you is in the U.S., they have the same cost structure as you and won’t undercut you as much or at all on wage.
They do it for VOTES in the short term, not realizing or not caring in the long term it's actually destabilizing the country.
and it's not one party or another either. it's both parties.
Immigration in the US boosts birth rates to an essentially ideal level. Without immigration we would be dealing with significant population bust issues.
https://theconversation.com/the-dip-in-the-us-birthrate-isnt...
It’s also my understanding that the people asking for more lenient immigration policies are essentially asking for more humane treatment of migrants (refrain from breaking up families, for example) and more effective processing, not typically advocating for an open border or an increase in overall immigration.
Remember that the meaning of “sanctuary city” is the refusal to cooperate with federal enforcement agencies like ICE that have a documented history of abusive practices. “Sanctuary city” was never intended to be an open invitation for immigration. Instead it’s intended to encourage the immigrants who are already here to do beneficial things like report crimes and enroll kids in school rather than existing off the books in an underground seedy under the table situation.
>Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.
This isn't an argument against immigration as I'm incredibly pro. That said, trying to sell people on immigration based off the premise that it'd provide them with more minority groups we could exploit into accepting lower wages feels morally bankrupt.
I’d much rather compete with an immigrant who is in the U.S. and has the same cost structure as me than we someone based in India/LATAM and will undercut me on wage 3x.
You do realize most large companies have offices in India, Canada, Ireland etc.? They don't have to hire specifically in US.
What happened to IT is the same thing that happened to blue-collar workers. They’ll use you until they actively create a lower cost labor market.
“there’s a power in the union..”
Yes, there is a power in a union and it’s about time we unionize and unite SWE before AI takes our rights and jobs.
Which right is AI going to take from us?
IT is one of the easiest to off-shore; how would a union help?
Unions can make deals as part of the labor contract that they will not offshore their jobs.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2017/03/03/wi...
Ok, so forcing a company to lock in high costs while non-union competitors can use offshore.
Can you explain how this would even work? Why would any company agree to this?
Offshoring projects very commonly fail because companies dramatically overestimate the savings and underestimate the cost of communications, company culture, and experience. If you have a workforce which is delivering good results, there’s often a solid benefit to continuing that rather than chasing a mirage.
Not my experience at all.
I've been part of successful offshoring at a few different companies. It wasn't "one and done", that is, we had to try different countries, different subcontractors, etc but it is totally possible to maintain quality AND lower engineering costs by 50-75% by offshoring.
For those interested, my best experience has been with workers in LATAM countries. Pry 75% were Brazilians. Great timezone and culture match also most of them have good written/spoken english.
I’m not saying it’s impossible but that it commonly fails due to those reasons. Timezones are a common source of problems but I’ve also seen a fair number of problems which basically boiled down to outsourcing putting more stress on existing management problems such as inability to produce specs or delegate, and micromanagement were amplified by distance and cultural barriers. Basically the organizational equivalent of saying “our monolith sucks, let’s use microservices” without first contemplating how the existing system got that way.
How does an offshore employee set up a new workstation for a tech illiterate employee?
Those guys and gals get paid $25, 30/hr.
This is like asking how are they going to offshore McDonalds workers when discussing moving steel production overseas.
IT is also one of the easiest to disrupt by industrial action. Immagine a Go-Slow in Amazon for example. Lol
How would unions increase employment unless unions make employees less productive. You could claim that they increase employee's wellbeing, salary and make the job better, but it would likely have inverse effect for ease of getting the job. e.g. Film and fashion industries are unionized, but getting to them is significantly harder than software engineering.
Only if the union shop can ship faster than the non-union shop.
But they can't do that to us, we went to uni and refused to unionise!
The cognitive dissonance I'm getting from reading the comments here is pretty staggering. Where I live (The Netherlands) me and every IT person I know is getting absolutely hounded by recruiters. As an additional anecdote I'll add that I've just switched jobs to a start-up on very favorable terms and the recruitment process basically amounted to being cold called and asked "hey you wanna work here?".
Can anyone here comment on whether this horrible job market is a US specific situation or whether I'm living in some kind of weird bubble?
It's many things. For example in Europe the bubble hasn't been so massive and not solely based on VC money. It's still also true for US that full-stack developers with 20 years experience in every technology are in high demand. For two years it was the same for almost every beginner as well, but not any more.
I'm in Australia and I get recruiter calls all the time. I've said I'm interested to all of them, and then they just stop talking to me. No idea what's going on. Seems like recruiters are just spamming out first contact messages and then selectively picking the replies they want to respond to.
They’re gathering data points for their “Robert Half IT Job Market Q4 2023” report and also keeping their call quotas up.
In my experience as an American working with people in the EU (particularly the UK/Western Europe), the developers there are every bit as capable as Americans and get paid less than half of what an American would - seems like quite a deal to me.
You’re not including all the taxes that need to be paid and that employment bonds are far more difficult to break.
But yeah, EU engineers are very good in my experience.
In the US there are also taxes and a huge expense in the form of private health insurance - my employer says costs increased 9% this year. I don’t know that it balances, but there are additional costs to employers in the US as well.
Indeed - they’re much higher in EU though. Also until recently you could deduct 100% of a USA employees salary for tax reasons and that has recently been changed.
As an European consultant it feels like Netherlands isn't also super remote prone. Most dutch companies I've seen recruiting want you hybrid and possibly dutch speaking.
With such restrictions you're obviously gonna encounter issues hiring and will hammer the restricted pool.
Think of it as a wave. Right now, the EU is getting a slightly smaller version of the hiring peak of 2 years ago in the US. EU wages are considerably less but the quality is nearly the same. Productivity is a bit lower, but the cost is still advantageous. The goal is to find the cream of the crop before the competition, so a ton of hiring, then assessment and in a year or so reducing the workforce and the wave moves on the next frontier to find the most valuable employees.
> but the quality is nearly the same. Productivity is a bit lower
Slightly insulting to European developers?
Though I suspect a lot of European developers would say the same about their US colleagues…
Don’t Europeans typically work less hours than Americans and do so as a point of pride? I’ve spent over a decade lurking HN, Stack Exchange, later Reddit - and I always seem to see Europeans coming in with the “We work 32 hours at most in my country” or “We have a 35 hour standard here.”
Wouldn’t that necessarily imply a reduction in productivity?
I've worked in the UK, Europe and the US. From my personal experience I haven't seen any difference in the amount of effort, productivity or skill level.
Maybe I've just been lucky with the people I've worked with. In one company we had a representative of pretty much every major European country working there along with quite a few guys from the US. Everyone worked hard to get stuff delivered.
Nope, because productivity is output divided by hours worked, so working longer can decrease productivity.
I think youre just using a different definition of productivity. Hourly is valid, but yearly is too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity is my definition, as it's the one that actually gets talked about in the press (as opposed to the nebulous "productivity" beloved of tech people (including me)).
No that’s a false equivalence. More hours ≠ more done.
Maybe, but not really, obviously any one individual can have high variance. On a macro level though it's pretty easy to identify trends. The most ambitious European devs will come to America to get the much high salaries. The hiring standards for EU devs are considerably relaxed because of the reduced salary requirements. As a result many of the actively employed EU devs would be in a lesser role than their equally skilled American counterparts which results in the reduced metrics.
It's certainly not something any one individual should take personally.
A bartender makes same as a software engineer in NL
To be fair, I probably make the same as a bartender here in the US. Blows my mind that people are easily making $120,000+.
The amount of money people give in tips is insane.
if I could make IT-level money bartending in the US I'd jump back to that tomorrow.
Yes, that's what economic equality means.
"But but but but my CV enlarging JS framework wankery for the spotify of deli meats is obviously so much more valuable to people than a bartender!"
A good day's work in software development delights the end-user to at least the extent of a well made craft cocktail. That seems like a good standard to hold for yourself. There just tend to be just a few more users for a software product than the capacity of a neighborhood bar on a given evening.
I mean bartenders are unironically useless. If there was a machine that dispensed highballs I would much rather prefer that than leaning over the counter for 20 minutes waiting for my drink while the bartender flirts with some girl.
Well, you're going to the wrong bars!
Last weekend I got free beers for knowing the band on a bartender's shirt. We shot the shit about music while I waited for my friends. Made my day.
Pubs started as "public houses". What's the point if you don't know the regulars? Why go out?
Imagine Cheers with robo Ted Dansen. (Actually, that might be awesome, for very different reasons...)
Absolutely. I get comped drinks a lot at the places I go. In the past seven days, I have gotten five free drinks (three of them were mocktails) across four places.
I sit at my usual wine bar and chuckle watching across the street, people standing in line for 30 minutes to get into a loud club with mediocre drinks. Then again, that club is hugely profitable.
Being a regular (at any local business but especially bars) is an extremely fulfilling feeling. Also very good for ones social health to be active in their community.
I am senior developer/data engineer based in Poland. 2021-2022 I was getting remote work offers from all over Europe, some from quite interesting places. Today I am still getting offers but mostly from Poland, lower rates or not disclosed, more boring 'build an ETL' type. There is a definite change but looks like it would still be possible to get a new job quickly, possibly at lower rate.
A lot of US companies prioritising hiring in EU don't need to pay for medical insurance or it's way cheeper plus wages are way lower.
Here in Canada it's pretty hopeless. Basically no prospects on the horizon at all even willing to work on-site.
The job market isn't uniformed across all experience level and roles.
You didn't specify, but I'm going to assume you're not new in your career. It's just fine in the US for staff engineer+ experience level also. New engineers? Mid levels? Probably less so, and probably similar in The Netherlands.
I had maybe 3 emails from recruiters in the last year. Used to be a couple every other day. I'm between West coast and Midwest of the US and it seems like hiring is picking up quite a bit in Midwest. Or maybe it's just less competitive and jobs aren't flying off the market like they do on the coasts. With that said I still know a good number of people who have been looking for months and are getting desperate.
I would assume many of the comments are anecdotes based on their situation.
Elon showed with Twitter how you don't need hordes of engineers to run a company. He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise). More engineers lead to more useless bullshit being created(like at Google). A lean mean team seems the way to go.
Twitter is facing mounting debt, large quarterly loses, and lost tens of billions of dollars in valuation. I wouldn't use that as a success story.
From the WSJ, so no complaining about liberal bias.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...
All of that is true, but it was true before Elon took over, now they just have fewer employees to pay, so if they can turn the advertising back around, they'll be in a better cashflow situation.
> ... now they just have fewer employees to pay, so if they can turn the advertising back around, they'll be in a better cashflow situation
They cut ~$1B in operating expenses, to go from $4.73B to $3.31B in advertising revenue, and forecasts don't look much better [0]
What has Twitter left to offer? They don't have the manpower to add new functionality, and they are bleeding advertising money.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis...
Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.
I've never personally believed in Twitter as a business model, so you're preaching to the choir there. As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.
Unrelated in the short term. In the long term, I disagree.
Twitter is not that interesting of an app that users are flocking to it, nor it is so fundamentally different from any of its competitors and essential as a social network, that it would have a captive audience.
Twitter user base peaked in 2022. There haven't been any new major features, no concrete plans, but regardless, they have not enough manpower to implement them even if they wanted to.
> As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
Good luck with that. People in the US, and especially the EU, don't like to have their payment apps linked to their social media. It's not like big tech hasn't tried already, e.g. Google Wallet, Facebook Pay, SnapCash, etc.
East Asia runs on a different gear. They have their own "everything apps", e.g. Kakao, Line, WeChat. Musk is not going to convince them to switch, that's for sure, and I highly doubt he would succeed where so many others have failed, definitely not with a withering platform like Twitter.
Yeah the whole everything app/banking app concept is pushing is bizarre to me.
Why wouldn’t everyone use Apple Pay? And as successful as Elon has been in his other companies, is it wise to go up head on against Apple, literally one of the most valuable companies in the world? Making Twitter into a payment app sounds like one of the worst ideas I could possibly think of.
I'm not trying to argue that Twitter will be successful. Only that none of their current problems (eg, profits) were caused by the layoffs.
> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.
They're not unrelated. Advertisers like to know that their ads work; you need staff to do that.
Look at how much tailored the FaceBook ads were vs Twitter [1]. Advertisers would be sticking with Twitter if they thought the ads were worth it.
> Facebook targeting allows advertisers to drill down, ensuring your ad is targeted at those most interested in your ads’ content.
> The Facebook ad targeting based on interests looked like this:
> Science > Mari Smith > Joel Comm > Social science > HootSuite > Post Planner > Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn > Kim Garst > Sprout Social > Social Media Examiner > Buffer
> Twitter’s targeting is not quite as refined, but we targeted these keywords:
> instagrammarketing > socialmediamarketing > socialmediaexaminer
[1]: https://www.agorapulse.com/social-media-lab/twitter-ads-cpc-...
Facebook's features really don't have much to do with advertisers leaving due to twitter firing a bunch of employees.
FaceBook's features are just an example of how bad Twitter's targeting is; but also it is a zero-sum market. Nike has an advertising budget; if those dollars go to FaceBook they don't go to Twitter. Having worse engineering than your competition is a real problem.
However, my point is that the top parent's claim of Twitter's problems aren't engineering is wrong. Their targeting is god awful to the point that Advertisers don't want to bother with it anymore. If they had better ad targeting (aka Engineering) then Advertisers would sweep the problems under the rug.
There are also many non-engineering examples of this.
- "If Jeffrey Dahmer ran a 4.3, we'd call it an 'eating disorder.'"
- Russian Oil / Gas is still buyable by western countries.
- Lack of repercussions for Jamal Khasoggi assassination [1]
- Massive amounts of advertising on FaceBook post-Cambridge Analytica
- USA Companies selling your active location (to journalists pretending to be not-journalists).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
Twitter targeting has always been ass though. All the employees they had pre elon were unable to improve it over a decade plus.
> They don't have the manpower to add new functionality
or may be they dont need new functionality. It works fine as it is today.
What twitter needs is revenue sources, and i don't see how they are going to get it.
You’re leaving out the massive amount of debt he added to the company as part of the buyout. That means they need to do something like triple their most profitable quarter just to be where they were before the buyout.
But that has nothing to do with the layoffs.
Nobody said it did? I was responding to a claim that they could end up in a better financial situation because they have fewer staff, which would be an easier argument if there weren’t so many extra billions in debt on the balance sheet now.
It was not. They are losing far more money because they removed the content moderation team and advertisers don't like their brands showing up next to questionable content. The buyout added a ton of debt to Twitter. It's far worse now.
These issues are caused by (1) the buy-out by Elon Musk involving a large amount of debt, and (2) Elon Musk annoying "woke" advertisers who have subsequently deserted the platform.
The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.
I wouldn't expect too much change right away after a lay off that size. Any decent engineering team will have processes, workflows, CI/CD, etc... in place and if all the engineers went away today, most places would still run just fine for a while, maybe even a long time if the systems are set up correctly. The question becomes what happens next? How quickly will they be able to leverage new advantageous technologies? What happens when that rare thing breaks and you have no institutional knowledge? How do you solve difficult problems like content moderation? I'm curious to see where Twitter will be a couple years from now in terms of how it's engineered. I would expect a slow decline in expectations and results.
You are right in theory. But instead of trying to predict the future I'm trying to be descriptive about what has changed so far (very little) and why (mostly advertisers + debt driven by buy-out).
> The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.
Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product.
Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the workforce? That's much more impressive.
Features are both being added and removed. Actually, the main difference is that more feature are being added than were before, but this is being done in a more haphazard way. Sometimes things appear to break but are then fixed. It's not awful though, is what I'm saying.
I think the point is that twitter doesnt need new features. Twitter can just be twitter.
You're getting downvoted for this, but factually what you're saying is correct. He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't.
Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work done is incorrect. Most engineers can build stuff, but they also add complexity and require hand holding. Both suck time from the most productive engineers.
A team of 10 excellent engineers is easily better than a team of 100 good engineers, in my opinion.
>He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't.
It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering.
I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.
increasing growth most places in world
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026
heres a total feature map of what was released in 2023:
https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387
I think thats definitely a signal that the B and C teams werent needed, considering they cut 90% of staff LOL.
As for the bots, AI is making it easier than ever to bypass those systems. CogVLM is just sitting there menacingly on github https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM
> He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise).
This is debatable.
Twitter hasn't added any meaningful functionality in recent years, which is fine if you think your product can survive stagnation for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't think so, but who knows.
Also, random Twitter functionality seems to be broken once a month, more or less. Last time I checked, new signups were having trouble following accounts and posting, which is as essential as it could be for Twitter to work.
I think to most people, twitter is fine and was fine with only its core product.
The core products of social media platforms are the advertising systems!
After telling the advertisers to go 'F themselves', those paying customers are leaving in droves plus the ad ecosystem is one of the worst in the industry.
The only alternative is to get enough paying users. Good luck.
"Most people" are the users. Users (mostly) aren't paying for the platform, advertisers are.
> still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise)
It's not though. I assume you're trying to claim Twitters only problem is the Advertisers leaving and that the platform is fine but that's not the case.
Lets ignore all visible technical problems such as outages or broken features that have happened since the purchase.
You have to compare Twitter to FaceBook. Both of them have had similar outrage by Advertisers for the respective companies actions. However, Advertisers keep coming back to FaceBook because of the engineering. FaceBook has much better targeting and also staff that interacts with the Advertisers. Twitter has absolutely horrendous targeting; Jews don't want their 'buy a Torah' ad next to a pro-gaza post not just because they disagree with the post but also because that somebody isn't their target audience. This is an engineering problem; if Twitter had better engineering the Advertisers wouldn't be leaving.
Twitter targeting wasnt any better with 10x as many employees. Its ad system has always largely sucked, Elon was just the push advertisers needed to get out.
The smaller staff may be ok for maintaining an existing Twitter, with feature tweaks, but could you build a Twitter up from scratch with the amount of people they have now?
I work for Google Cloud on the sales and consulting end.
We’re hiring exclusively in Canada and India. We have a handful of US positions open, but leadership wants us to prioritize Toronto. Now we’ve been asked what teams could operate 100% in Toronto without customer being the wiser. I don’t expect we’ll have a functional team that isn’t primarily leadership in the United States by the end of 2025.
How does that make sense? Canadians are cheaper to hire than Americans but not by that much, right?
Immigration is way easier you can hire people from anywhere in the world. Similar thing is happening in Ireland.
This is the answer. It's just way easier to hire here than in the Bay Area.
Now, unlike a lot of other shops, actually the people Google hired were mostly top notch, regardless of where they came from.
In the Google pay scale, not a huge difference really. At least for engineering. Or at least some years ago when there was an internal spreadsheet circulating. Big part of compensation is in RSUs, in USD.
Now... cost of living in Toronto is as high as the Bay Area. I wonder if the above commenter meant Waterloo (hour from Toronto), because that is where the bulk of the SWE staff is.
Canadian compensation for Google engineers AFAIK is about 60%-70% what it is in the Bay Area.
Base compensation, or GSUs? My base compensation was only maybe 1/3rd of my total comp.
Total, and for L3/L4. But this was my impression a few years ago; Google has changed comp a fair bit since then (e.g. vesting schedule).
It was worsening before I left (end of 2021). But relative to anybody else in Canada it was very high, and competitive with plenty of US companies, though yes, not quite as high as Google in MTV.
Around 2014 I recall a spreadsheet making the rounds that people voluntarily and anonymously submitted to, and it showed, yes, about 3/4 the total comp. But if you live in Kitchener-Waterloo like most SWEs do, that was an incredible package as housing costs there were about half of Toronto's.
In general since then all salaries in Canada have not come close to keeping pace with the broken cost of living / housing price bubble here.
Quite a few of the Google Cloud sales/consulting/TAM roles are based out of Google's the New York Office(s).
Using L3-L5 SWEs as a reference point, the typical difference between Toronto (Canada) and New York (US) for the same level and role was around 30%+ less if a person was based out of the Canada office.
There are/were a non-trivial number of Canadian Googlers that made New York their official office but were unofficially trying to live/work out of Toronto to take advantage of the compensation difference as well as trying to dodge the difference in income tax rates.
"This month, job seekers outnumber job openings on HN"
FWIW, I think that title wasn't quite right.
The post compares the number of "who's hiring" comments to "who wants to be hired" comments. (Or maybe top-level comments, I'm not sure.)
Some of the "who's hiring" posts indicate multiple openings, and I'm guessing there have always been more job seekers than there are "who wants to be hired" comments.
I'm just saying that the underlying reality may be messier than the title indicates.
> I'm guessing there have always been more job seekers than there are "who wants to be hired" comments
i don't think so. from my first search from 2021, there were 202 seekers, and 857 hiring comments. not sure how to get the top-level comments number only, but that ratio is already way different from 2023 (1:4 vs 1:1)
For most of my career, I was being hounded by various recruiters virtually every day.
For the past few years... crickets.
This told me everything I needed to know, regardless of the many whom have been in denial.
Perhaps the first people to be laid off are recruiters?
Juniors are more commoditized though. Number of job opportunities decrease with seniority in most industries (but conversely potentially also become better quality)
Yeah I've noticed a distinct reduction in linkedin spam too.
Maybe you're the wrong person to ask this to but.. how does one get noticed at all without participating on something like LinkedIn. I think the privacy implications of a platform like that or any public resume are pretty worrying (essentially a timeline of ones whole life) but I don't understand how to even get any job prospects without this kind of self marketing. Not having a clue about marketing but having technical domain specific skills I just find it completely impossible to find any position where one is valued/compensated fairly.
I guess I don't have the same reservations on using linkedin. You can of course omit information as you like on linkedin, same as you would on your resume. I do not make posts on Linkedin, but try to keep the resume type info more or less up to date.
The info I put on Linkedin, I'm comfortable being publicly available. Linkedin does block anonymous viewers, but you can't see everyone who views your profile without some premium subscription. But it IS possible. So slightly better than just hosting a resume on a public site.
If you're not willing to post the information publicly, then I think you just have to put in more work, find places you want to apply to, and directly send them your resume. But it just won't really be possible for people to discover you on their own.
Considering 262k were laid off in 2023. Compared with 165k in 2022. The beginning of 2022 also included the over-hiring phase of the COVID Era[0].
You can see a clear sign of the worst being over and I would expect 2024 to start a return to normalcy again, maybe people will even start hiring again
2022 was not a good time to be entering the industry, but I think for people with 5+ years experience it was not so bad.
I have 20 years experience and I have not had a job in 6 months.
Honest question: What changed? A few months ago you commented on HN and said you made $190K on a 4-day work week? Did your company do a lay-off? Freelance dry up?
Same, 15 years experience and the only major programming languages I don't have experience in are Java and Go.
The job postings are there, but they sure don't seem real. I've had 1 interview in past 3 months and that's only due to being internally referred at NVIDIA for about 20+ matching jobs.
People are pushing hard for in office. Are you only applying to remote positions?
where are you based? What's your specialization?
I’d been dodging layoffs for 20 years until I got laid off for the first time, late last year. My personal situation isn’t bad at all. Meaning my wife has insurance through her job and we have plenty of cushion. I’m spending time on a hardware startup and practicing leetcode. The job market will come back, it always does. Maybe not as hot but we’ll see.
Edit; According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemployment could be a signal of the singularity approaching; so we’ll have that going for us (if the job market doesn’t come back) at least.
> could be a signal of the singularity approaching
That would imply a fairly widespread ability to predict the singularity which doesn’t seem plausible to me
Leetcode is good practice but go into full exploring mode and learn new tech. I got back into full stack development (mainly backend guy) and I now have endless ideas. I learned sveltekit and tailwind css to build my portfolio website. I love rucking and did some research and found out there's no real good rucking tracker. Consider social media such as Twitter and Reddit groups like saas, entrepreneur, and indiehackers.
This article blew my mind because we as software engineers have immense power, we just need to use our skills to build stuff and take advantage of social media to harness/sell it. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query
> According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemployment could be a signal of the singularity approaching; so we’ll have that going for us (if the job market doesn’t come back).
That would mean the messy parts are starting. Not great!
Will be funny if AI hype slashes more IT jobs.
funny?
ask chatGPT
In the doom an gloom of the article, there was a glimmer of hope however.
>But tech hiring over the fourth quarter led to a small net growth in IT jobs for 2023. There were 21,300 IT jobs added in the quarter, a positive signal for increased tech hiring going into 2024, Janco said.
Hopefully, the uptick in hiring trend continues and things improve in 2024. The tech jobs market is indeed, pretty bad right now.
So if it wasn't for jobs added in December it would've been negative. On the bright side, given the large number of tech jobs added in December, maybe things are starting to picking up again?
(seems a bit odd as usually there's not much hiring going on around the holidays, yet in 2023 December had the highest hiring numbers according to that data)
I've been out of work for about 9 months.
Anecdotally, my job search started feeling more promising around mid-December.
> my job search started feeling more promising around mid-December.
Probably because of new budgets in the new financial year right?
My company tends to hire and promote a load of people in Jan
I'm not sure overall. In my particular case
One company is planning to make me an offer, but they have to wait for the new FY to start in February before they can seek approval for another remote employee.
The other company is hiring to replace someone who recently left. The team is pretty lean, so IIUC they can't easily cover the departing employee's skillset.
With the current state of reporting, I would expect those numbers to be revised down like they did for the last year or so.
It seems for the last year or two the numbers are revised down once or twice after they are released.
For the last year, yes, in all but one month the numbers ended up being revised down.
In 2022, there were slightly more months (7) with upward revisions than downward (5)
Every F500 company is Almost There on automating absolutely everything through ServiceNow and that's without AI being in the mix yet.
There's always going to be a place for coders who can massage the API links between packages or run an ERP, but you don't need IT when your firm is disposable line staff, institutional knowledge lives in the codebase, and HR has mostly been replaced by Workday.
UBI when?
Serious question: Why is the answer to firms automating everything "give me money for doing nothing" and not "get a different job?"
Don't get me wrong I would love shorter work weeks, fewer hours a day, etc. for the same pay. That was the promise of all this additional productivity, after all. But even that is still getting paid for work.
I just can't rationalize the idea of paying an entire population for nothing.
>I just can't rationalize the idea of paying an entire population for nothing.
And the crazy thing is, that we actually have SO much that needs to be done. There's massive shortages of all type of roles that can be filled by pretty much anyone.
Ever read Vonnegut's _Player Piano_? Eventually there's just no real work to be done, unless you want to invent even more bullshit jobs for the FIRE sector.
Very similar story in Zajdel's Limes Inferior
The US already plays a great many people for nothing. David Graber's book Bullshit Jobs goes into this in detail. When it comes to UBI, the question is, will people do nothing but sit on the couch and play videogames, or will they do something productive and beneficial to their fellow human beings, that they could not afford to do without UBI?
> Serious question: Why is the answer to firms automating everything "give me money for doing nothing" and not "get a different job?"
Because eventually, there will not be many jobs left that cannot be automated. Cleaning and some of the trades will remain as long as we get iRobot-style droids with dexterity and intelligence to match a human, as will politics and management, but everything else will get automated.
The question is, will we manage to shift our society away from the millennia-old model of "one's employment defines one's worth in society" to "everyone is worth the same in society" in time, or will there be bloody fights in the transition?
People fought and died in the streets to get OT pay and 5 day workweeks in the US. The CIA has assassinated union leaders in the Global South for decades. You tell me.
What other job would you recommend? It seems like the ones considered low hanging fruit for automation, the drudge-work, are actually resistant, but I don't really feel like asking people if they want fries with their burger.
Nobody at the beginning of the industrial revolution could have imagined the types of post-revolution jobs we have now. So "tell me what job to get then" is the wrong mindset.
Will I need to go to college for a few years to get this theoretical new job? Will my health insurance be covered if I do? As ever, I'm glad I never wanted children because just keeping my own ass sheltered, fed, and well(ish) is hard enough.
Maybe? Probably?
It sounds like your problem is less with your specific job being obsoleted (or made less lucrative to you) by AI and more with just having to work in the first place. I can't really help with that.
Well, I do have a crippling illness that results in some disability, so being able to work (and especially to keep my health insurance) is indeed a significant concern of mine.
>I don't really feel like asking people if they want fries with their burger.
McDonalds and others have kiosks already. One place I frequent only has touch screens for ordering.
The answer should be: "Give me money so I can do things I want to do." Most people want to feel useful and valued, so people will still volunteer and do useful work even if they don't have to do it to survive.
So if talent is cheap and we have many smart people unemployed why don’t we get organized and experiment on startup ideas we always wanted to build?
>So if talent is cheap and we have many smart people unemployed why don’t we get organized and experiment on startup ideas we always wanted to build?
Because capital.
Software, as a whole, is the most capital intensive industry in the world after energy/transportation: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
Because it coincides with there being no VC money and it’s hard to build something without funding.
Opinion and not a fact, have you heard of bootstrapping and using old computer as server
We used to be dreamers now is like cant do
18 years ago I was 15 and I worked on my first startup with a friend before I was even able to code.
We hosted the website on the spare computer in my bedroom and within a few months had our first pay customer and we continued to grow it from there.
However despite working on countless startups since then none of them replicated that success, despite me since becoming an accomplished software engineer and knowing far more about business.
The truth is any idiot could launch a successful startup from their bedroom with a bit of effort in the early 2000s. When me and my friend worked on our startup we were like 1 of maybe 2-3 companies doing what we were doing. Today I suspect that number would be closer to 1,000, if not more.
Those old bootstrapping stories don't exist anymore. The low hang fruit is gone. There's a huge amount of competition even in the most niche markets. And if you have competition they'll probably have an ad budget many times your total bootstrapping budget.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to bootstrap a startup, but statistically it's insanely difficult these days. There was an article on Indie Hackers a while back where someone looked at the stats for successful Indie Hacker projects it the guy found that only something like 1 in 200 projects posted on Indie Hackers even go on to make profit if I recall correctly.
You're an idiot if you're a dreamer today. You're almost certainly better off just getting a second job.
You make it sound like a game of chance, but bootstrapping a startup is mostly about coming up with the right ideas, is it not?
> We used to be dreamers now is like cant do
A lot of people on here are workers that can do one type of task and not much else. Of course they cant understand that people can bootstrap by writing code and managing servers and designing databases and building uis themselves. For many, adding a button to a page is a career defining win. Leetcode doesnt translate to experience. A lot of NPCs will soon realise they not better than the factory workers they are looking down upon. And a lot worse than the outsourced people that deliver value they so dread. Perhaps they can look into bartending jobs.
Anyone who has been employed in Big Tech should have no problem self-funding a few hundred dollars a month for small-scale server infrastructure. The problem is you gotta keep paying your $3500 rent or $9000 mortgage in San Francisco. Most of us need to work at a profitable company or funded startup to manage that.
We could all organize and move to a much cheaper off-shore location for say, a year, to build something great.
95% sure that this is my last job in IT. after 17 years or so.
not enough jobs. too many applicants. interviews too damaging.
If I may ask, what's next for you?
hopefully as a disability support worker.
I'd like to spend the next 17 years doing something more personally meaningful as i'm quite jaded on tech now.
I believe it. I work in the UX space, and I'd be shocked if total employment grew in 2023. I know lots of skilled designers who've been out of work for multiple months, and people in the UX research space are faring even worse.
I used to believe UX was immune to off-shoring, but that's not the case anymore, either.
1.5 years ago, we posted a UX job and got maybe a couple resumes. Three months ago, we posted a UX job and got 900 resumes in just a couple days....
This has been the case for practically all of 2023. We posted an entry level UX position and got over 1000 applicants in a week. Even senior positions (what I was looking for) are flooded with applicants that total in the mid-hundreds. I was laid off at the end of the holidays in 2023 and only found my current position through sheer luck of networking.
Honestly, I could feel it. In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been. It was very difficult to get interviews, and even though I managed to get multiple offers, many of these were at companies I'd not normally have accepted offers from. It took a long time to find a job offer I wanted to accept.
I do feel that there are signs of recovery now, so good luck to those that are still looking. I know it's very hard -- particularly if you're also supporting a family.
I have never had problems finding work, until now. It used to be easy. Recruiters used to call me at night. Now they ghost me.
Yeah in past 20 years I would receive a job offer from nearly every company I interviewed with. Past few months have been really disappointing with rejections after interviews that I'd normally have said went great.
It's also true that you have now 20+ years of experience. The higher you go, the harder it gets - you might want a different role, etc etc.
If on the other hand you're competing with senior sw devs with 5+ years of experience, there could also be other factors to keep in mind (age, ability in very specific tech stacks, etc).
I think companies are still hiring, but more focused, unlike in 2021-2022 when they over-hired "just in case".
> 20+ years of experience
Welcome to my world.
In-company recruiters are often quite helpful and accommodating, but, as soon as one single tech person gets involved, the temperature drops 30 degrees.
Standalone recruiters send me these breathless emails, extolling my qualifications, but, as soon as they find out my age, they ghost me. I have actually had recruiters hang up on me, as soon as I told them my age. I learned to just mention that up front, to get the ghosting out of the way.
Apparently, they aren't very good at math. I list 30 years+ experience, yet they seem to think that I'm under 35.
After a while, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired.
It's not the money; it's the "culture." Many folks, much younger, and much more inexperienced, are paid more than I ever made, in my entire career. I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.
>I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.
We need an acceptable way to express this, without desperately extolling you'll take less money. I think a lot of us "old guys" are in the same boat; I don't need 150k, I'll take 100k if the work is interesting, and I'm more likely to be loyal to boot.
> I'm more likely to be loyal
The funny thing, is that I've been told that "Old people are just cruising to retirement," but it's OK to establish your entire business infrastructure on the idea that your young, energetic, engineers will not remain at the company for more than 18 months.
> Old people are just cruising to retirement,
That is just BS. In my company we have quite a few 50+ and it's nice to work with them. They add exactly what younger people can't.
Reality is: They need to squeeze every dollar as much as they can. If they could, they would never hire:
1. People with kids
2. Older than 33-35 (more often than not also 1)
3. Disabled
4. Often sick People (give me your history of sick leave, that kind of stuff)
5. Anything else I am missing?
Just freaking replaceable robots.
I really knocked a smile off a CTO once when I said I wanted to have another kid.
>but it's OK to establish your entire business infrastructure on the idea that your young, energetic, engineers will not remain at the company for more than 18 months.
Yeah, it's a tough nut.
It's understandable that SV companies want ambitious strivers that move on every 2 years, for the same reason many of these CEOs consider the "job done" as soon as they get "an exit". The life of the company is measured in months.
But if you're building a company for the long term, you need smart, loyal people who build institutional knowlededge within the company. This isn't something you can fast track, I don't care if you're the brightest MIT AI grad.
You need both.
I was just struggling, this morning, with the Apple App Store Connect Web interface.
We're in the final stages of releasing an app, so we're spending a lot of time on that Web app.
It's...challenging. I know that they have big issues with security, privacy, and sheer scope (I'll bet they get millions of submissions, every day), but the site is dog-slow, the CDN breaks constantly, I need to refresh the page quite often, and they seem to forget where I was, the last time; necessitating that I follow the breadcrumbs back to where I was (I have admin accounts on several orgs).
I've released over 20 apps on the store, and have dealt with this, for a while. It's actually getting worse.
But Apple is a multi-trillion-dollar company. I think they could afford for this to work a bit more smoothly, and, quite frankly, I'm surprised, as they have some of the best, and most experienced engineers on the planet, working for them. These are the types of things that lots of sites seem to be doing quite well.
</rant>
> get "an exit"
It seems that many startups don’t actually have a product, other than the startup, itself.
A “successful exit” means that the company is sold. The company is the product.
I have spent my entire career at companies that made actual products, for use by actual end-users. These corporations never had any “exit strategy,” because they were meant to be ongoing, perpetual, concerns. They had “future planning,” and “growth strategies,” that often looked a decade into the future.
Things have changed.
Isn't age discrimination literally illegal pretty much everywhere? Proving it is always hard, but "they hang up on me as soon as I tell them my age" seems pretty clear-cut.
It's probably not even legal to ask in some jurisdictions.
I suspect that it's not so easy to prove with external recruiters, and that may explain the difference in demeanor between the two types of recruiter. The standalone ones aren't on the hook for $MEGACORP's brand and legal.
They just start saying "Hello?, Hello?, Are you there?," etc. It's a convenient way to hang up on people.
That's why I like the "make it illegal to even ask"-type of policy. At some of these American firms they asked me things like my sexual orientation and religion, aspects you often can't infer from appearance, and that always seemed rather odd to me – I'll just have to trust it won't be used to discriminate. If I don't tell this information I know they can't.
Things like age, gender, and ethnic group are harder because you can't always conceal that. Still, "don't ask, don't tell" during the hiring process seems like the best option here.
Maybe try changing over to management? You might have a shot at a non-tech centric company.
Also, don't be above lying about your age.
I was a manager. That's actually a problem.
I don't lie; especially in my profession. It's a thing. I know that personal Integrity is considered a "quaint anachronism," in today's world, but I won't compromise on that.
You’re right not to compromise and even if you were less ethical, that’s something which is easily detected and could lead to being fired with no recourse. It’s very reasonable for a company to say someone who lies about simple facts can’t be trusted with anything else.
You certainly don't have to lie, but there's no reason you can't simply calculate your age differently. The common 365 days to a year for age isn't a universal given.
You'll be a little less than half as old if you pretend to be a Martian with their 687 Earth days per Martian year.
Just don't go with Neptune, it takes almost 165 years before you turn 1 there.
My grandfather used to say that he was "35 and a few months."
I'm actually aiming lower in role and salary due to more senior roles being very sparse in my network.
I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but the tech economy seems much worse recently and I don't think I'm suddenly worse, stale, or less productive.
The higher you go, the more expensive you get. And the fewer places see the value you bring compared to a cheaper "senior sw dev" with 5 years of experience.
If you want to be paid more than someone with 5 years, you have to generate more value than they do, and you have to persuade the hiring manager that you can generate more value. The fraction of places that can see that is smaller than the fraction that can see the value of a senior over a junior. (On the other hand, for those places, the competition for the jobs is also less severe - there aren't tons of people with 20 years of experience on the street at any given time.)
So it takes longer than it did when you had 5 years of experience. But keep looking. There are places that will see the value in what you provide.
The job category you're looking for is "principal software engineer" or "staff software engineer".
The mere statement that a 5 year ‘Senior’ software engineer has more perceived value than a ‘Senior’ software engineer with 20 years of experience is just crazy. Let’s replace ‘software engineer’ with ‘electrician’ and then tell me this is sane.
That wasn't my statement. Let me try again.
A 5 year software engineer may have more perceived value per cost than a 20 year software engineer. Sure, if they have the same salary, you hire the 20 year engineer, but they don't. The 20 year engineer expects more pay, and (rightly) won't work for 5-years-of-experience wages. So you have to find an employer that perceives the additional value of the additional 15 years of experience.
Have you seen the salary requirements for these jobs? People are being paid way more than they were being paid 10 years ago. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is turning down jobs because of insufficient wages. The perceived ‘value’ that an employer sees is the ability of being able to exploit a younger engineer with ridiculous timelines and all night ‘coding sessions’ because they don’t have a family waiting for them when they get home.
Then I guess I'm nobody. I was turning down jobs that wanted to pay me like I had 5 years of experience, just a year ago.
It could be that required skillsets have shifted in the past year.
> In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been.
You did two superficial things and are surprised you didn't feel more qualified? Practicing / memorizing leetcode and having a rudimentary understanding of LLMs (if I were hiring, we're targeting advanced degrees with a focus in the space) -- yeah, probably not sufficient. This is a feature and not a bug as the employment market moves back to sanity.
I think this is very unfair. In the few months that I was looking, I put in more than 300 hours of study. It wasn't superficial and I didn't attempt to memorize anything — I wanted to understand fundamental techniques, and put a considerable amount of effort in to doing this, treating it as if it were my job.
Nobody owes me anything but that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it. It's very tough for those that have been laid off. Particuarly those have to support families as I did -- I am a sole earner and have two children.
You could benefit from practicing a bit of empathy and not lying to yourself that the market has merely moved back to "sanity" without gaining a bit of recent experience in it.
> I put in more than 300 hours of study. It wasn't superficial and I didn't attempt to memorize anything — I wanted to understand fundamental techniques, and put a considerable amount of effort in to doing this, treating it as if it were my job.
If you landed a job, do you think this new ability to implement a CS 101 data structure would let you keep it? Help in your performance in a measurable way? This is what I mean by superficial. The same applies to the LLM work. You studied enough to where you could buzzword it in a 45 minute interview.
My response, which I'll be more clear with: Maybe it's not that bad that we're more careful and these superficial techniques are no longer adequate to get someone a job in this industry.
> I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it.
Don't think anyone is preventing you from doing anything.
I did land a job making applications for an HFT firm and while I don't think that being able to implement data structures or write my own algorithms is necessarily what will allow me to keep this job, recently I somewhat regularly use the skills I pick up doing competitive programming exercises in my workplaces. Therefore, my answer to your question about whether it will help my performance in a measurable way is: yes.
Leetcode is not superficial when nearly all companies are using leetcode as a barrier to entry these days. Many of us with 10+ years of experience did not need to practice leetcode to get hired originally, but many would fail miserably today due to the time constraint and necessity to socialize/speak the problem while solving it in 45 min. Some practice problems took me all day at first, but after a while it became a skill of quickly identifying the type of data structure to use and solving it. It's great practice.
As for LLMs, it's probably the best thing to learn right now, especially by building something. I personally believe it will lead to an explosion in potential jobs. It's hard to describe but imagine a software engineer learning how to create a rest api for the first time after doing soap. And then integrating various apis to harness saas products, cloud deployments, etc back in the 2000s.
Then again I also talk to an ex-googler I met on Hacker News who built an LLM app and is now spending most of his time selling his saas product because he can't find a job either. That's a very positive go-getter attitude.
Are you seriously saying practicing data structures and algorithms to improve your skills is 'superficial'?
OP also had multiple offers they would "not normally accept".
We are spoiled in this industry.
There's no enough information to extrapolate that fact. Were these offers median salaries? Bottom 25th percentile?
Lots of companies low-ball candidates because they are happy with Harbor Freight quality candidates, so long as they will work for Harbor Freight prices.
I'm the OP (of this thread). The main issue caused by the industry-wide hiring freezes wasn't necessarily income but work/team quality. I've been in the top-10% of incomes in my country for more than 5 years and the top-1% of incomes for a lesser period of time.
I was able to get offers in this percentile but the companies making these offers didn't usually hire at this level. If anything, I want to be around people that are more competitive than me, that put a lot of effort into what they do and that can easily walk into high paying roles. I definitely don't want to be the highest paid engineer in the room at a company that frankly doesn't need this.
I know this can be seen as entitled but I'm the sole provider of a 4-person family and willing to work hard and prove myself. I'm happy to say that I now have a higher income than I did before being laid off and at a company with more successful people than me and a higher ceiling, however, that doesn't mean I didn't find it significantly more difficult to get a job this time around than I have in the last decade.
There are people that are going to have a much harder time than I have.
I had one company ask me to volunteer and another offer $40,000 for a senior dev position.
The need for competent IT will only increase, especially in the US. There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary. Some may say that AI will do this, but by the time AI is capable of doing this then all labor of any kind is deprecated as a concept and we'll have transitioned to a different type of economic system anyway. So don't be afraid, there's a lot of work coming.
There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on. Even though there may be economic downturns when it's harder to find work, and I was affected by this in the last two years so I understand what it's like, the long term trend until labor is irrelevant is that we'll always need IT and software engineers and software developers. The good ones will continue to earn a really great wage because it's difficult to become a really good one and a lot of other shops will want your great devs. It does not matter where you're located on earth - if you're great, a better shop will take you.
> There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary
> There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on
Will putting additional effort and in turn paid man hours increase the profit margin?
Absolutely. Maintaining and modernizing code means making use of the newest capabilities so your systems are more efficient, thereby reducing their costs. Newer tech also has many more capabilities which means older products can become new again, which would lead to more sales. It also reduces the bus factor since you will be able to find many more experienced people to intervene in your system if it experiences significant issues.
I recently worked on a platform that still used Silverlight well after its deprecation. They needed to deprecate and then extricate that dependency. For a very long time, people would pursue features over this maintenance task since the maintenance wouldn't have increased revenue. However, eventually the very old dependency slowed down their ability to produce features that customers want and presented a security risk as well. These certainly will reduce profit margin...so a lot of the time, tech investment will be about not losing the profit margin that already exists, and biding time until new capabilities become available to add new features and decrease system costs.
Is there any clarity around what constitutes IT? Does it range from installing printer drivers to writing software for self-driving cars? I look at IT as a cost-center focused on keeping the company business running - internally focused (email, finance, ops, sales, etc) - but NOT product development. However I am not sure how the government defines it for these stats.
Edit: to simplify my personal definition - if your report to the CIO - IT, if you report to a product group - not IT.
Since a lot of quite large corporations had big layoffs, does this mean the jobs shifted from the big corporations to the smaller ones, or is that too simple?
Those same large corps shifted to hiring again.
One of the factors that they looked at were remote workers when they wanted local, office based workers.
We are also seeing a glut of over hiring to deal with changes in pandemic demands and productivity.
Finally, many companies run on borrowed cash. This means they need to make repayments and with the high interest rates they need to adjust to that.
Once they are meeting their payments comfortably we will see a surge in hiring.
Usually that’s the case but a lot of the smaller startups no longer have VC money coming in so they aren’t hiring much either.
No
"IT Employment Grew by Just 700 Jobs in 2023, Down From 267,000 in 2022
Despite business and investor hype around generative AI last year, information-technology hiring slumped as companies laid off workers and sought to cut costs
The information-technology sector grew by only 700 jobs over 2023, a drastic slowdown from the 267,000 jobs added in 2022, even as artificial intelligence and ChatGPT spawned huge interest from businesses.
Job losses in the first half of 2023, including layoffs at technology-driven companies that dominated the period, hurt overall hiring for tech jobs in all industries, said Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of consulting company Janco Associates. The firm bases its findings on data from the U.S. Department of Labor."
Once companies see how much they can save by spending less on IT, they might not go back to overspending.
I may be dumb but is the second derivative of a job sector declining that disastrous? Is that not just normal ebb and flow?
Also I think the HN title is wrong; IT employment's yearly growth increase by just 700 jobs/year in 2023.
No, the article says that total IT employment increased by 700 jobs last year. The first derivative declined but was still positive (barely), so the second derivative was negative.
I am utterly shocked it grew at all. I am only seeing layoffs and I haven't been able to secure employment in a year. Product Management seems particularly dead in terms of hiring, especially here across APAC.
Can anyone explain how the 700 number makes any sense?
The analysis referenced by the article: https://e-janco.com/career/employmentdata.html#p7TP3c2_3
The table "Change In IT Job Market Size - December 2023" seems to indicate that 5.5k jobs were added to the 'job market' in 2023, contradicting what's being said. (Which isn't even representative of total employment in the sector, only the open job postings for the sector).
Maybe it is net new jobs, once you account for the massive layoffs in 2023.
Let's import more H-1B's.
Well their jobs are counted too in the figures. No one is getting jobs.
Yet the industry moans about a supposed shortage of tech workers.
i knew it. its worse than 2000 crash
In absolute and relative terms?
Pretty sure this was sarcasm.
i think I applied for all of them
In other parts of the world IT employment is still at good levels.
It’s probably a sign that IT skills are no longer only relevant in the most powerful economies.
Also, the powerful economies are outsourcing to the cheaper ones. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if IT is booming in India still.
Excellent time for brick--and-mortars to hire skilled people.
If only brick and mortar stores were thriving in this economy.
Perhaps they just mean "non-internet businesses"
Yes, of course, the intent was businesses that do not sell software , or perhaps non SV. Thanks.
Cheaper for me to stay home, not to mention that one of the reasons I work a remote desk job is that I am a fall risk.
How much of this do you think involves senior programmers using LLM and AI-generated code to do a lot of the grunt work, thereby not needing to either employ, outsource or train? I am amazed how much more productive I have become with the leading LLMs, especially with specialized full-stack tasks that I do not do every day. Many things that I regularly outsourced once a year I now just get an LLM to assist. Could it be that this is more of a factor already than the economic factors indicate?
True to a large degree. The key is "grunt" work. The definition of that varies though. New services are "grunt" for some, Knowledge base based production support is "grunt". The challenge is this , but from what we can see, it is a huge factor
Senior developers detect junior developers by how blown away by llms are. For instance, I can tell you a junior dev, or not a dev, by reading your comment.
Interesting. While I wear your grading me as a junior dev with pride, I think the opposite is true. Junior devs simply don't know enough and have not had enough experience to appreciate just how disruptive LLMs already have become. Most of the senior devs I know see this breakthrough in our industry as genuinely disruptive and without precedent. When I say "I am amazed how much more productive I have become", I have used a plethora of software (and other) tools to increase productivity over the past decades, and LLMs are the first tool I have encountered that are more profitable to use than simply outsourcing or employing additional expertise.
Just a random estimation but I'd say LLMs make me at least 5x more productive.
As still a young dev, I haven't even finished my college, this seems nice to see even though I probably wont be able to find a job. I feel like it's nice to see a great filter since there are a lot of so called programmers that do web dev these days. I find it laughable to think that these are the programmers and all they know how to do is js and html/css. This will better the world and make people learn more, as they should. I am learning absolutely everything there is and right now I could write in any language (except ASM, not quite there yet) even if I have never worked in it. With a few google searches I will learn the basic syntax. With AI, people are losing jobs on a huge rate, which might be sad but this is new tech and every tech changes the world. People probably complained about losing their jobs when computers were made, or diggers when heavy machines were made. It's normal and sooner people understand that the better. I just hope governments are going to recognize these problems. If I can't go to the wild and survive on my own, then provide me with basics for human survival in modern society like it is done in Germany for example.
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I was laid off at the end of last year and at the time I felt pretty bad about it. To land that job I spent the longest period in my entire career applying to jobs and I was extremely worried I'd have to repeat that process. But you know what: there is something fundamentally different about the job market at this point of time, during this time of year. This is only anecdotal but I'm seeing some of the best companies hiring for new positions. I'm seeing new, very promising startups spring up that are managing to raise money in a crushing bear market (I work in FinTech which due to regulation and a serious number of horrible events have sent the industry to its lowest point yet.)
If you're currently jobless you have one amazing advantage for you: January is the best possible time of year to find roles. Don't be discouraged when you see jobs with hundreds of applications. Most people just mass spam and aren't even remotely qualified. If you have the experience the best way to get hired is to engage with the job post. Show that you've read it, that you understand the companies mission, that you understand how the company is uniquely positioned and what value they're trying to create compared to everyone else. Then talk about how you can help solve their main challenges to make them successful. I guarantee you will stand out above everyone else who is just spamming generic cover letters. But this means only applying to jobs that also stand out to you.
tl; dr: im getting interviews just like every other time when the market was actually healthy. At the very least this is the best time of year to apply. So take advantage of it while you can.
Man I sure hope so. I spent the last month or two working on my portfolio website to help stand out. I built an interactive resume ai, mostly as novelty, but to help get back into frontend dev. I'm building projects, writing tech articles and engaging on twitter with fellow solopreneurs/entrepreneurs. My worst case scenario plan is to build something that makes me money eventually.
* in the USA
Don't worry, the U.S. government will respond by increasing the H1B visa cap as they always do.
> as they always do
The H1B visa cap has been 65000 since the day it was introduced in 1990.
They added 20K in 2004 [1], for those with high-level degrees, possibly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_Visa_Reform_Act_of_2004
Yep, although this act drastically reduced the total number of work visas issued. There was a 20K addition for people with advanced degrees/PhDs, but only because nonprofit & research work was no longer exempt from the visa cap.
There’s a direct correlation between H1b’s and Airline activity.
TBH the only thing left from american dream is Taylor Swift concert EUR 500 per ticket in my nearby city in Europe.
I'm rolling down the blinds, brewing coffee, putting everyone on blocklist, and tweaking my website. See you all in 2030!