Ask HN: Is the job market is bad as everyone claims it is?
I'm looking for a change from my current position and I was just wondering if now is a good time or if it might benefit me to stay for a while. I only have 2 YOE, but the way people are talking about it makes it sound pretty brutal. Dot com bubble burst - In 2002 I had a job interview and the lunch portion was at an outdoor BBQ place. A construction worker was listening to our interview. When we got up to leave, he asked my interviewer for a job interview. He said he was an out of work Solaris sys-admin. Things seem pretty bad right now. It seems like 2023 created fewer new tech jobs. But mostly it is a gut feeling based on anecdotes and news stories w/o hard numbers. It's a bad market, probably the worst since 2000.
Some of this is overhiring and zero interest rate behavior coming to an end.
Companies are shifting from prioritizing growth to profitability.
There is also a lot of asshole behavior. They are laying people off to please Wall Street, not because they need to for financial reasons. And they are doing layoffs in extremely callous ways, e.g., right before Christmas. My daughter's data engineering team in finance was reduced from five to two, and they are not giving raises that match inflation. She is almost singlehandedly responsible for servicing million-dollar accounts. It's not like there isn't money. There is also a lot of hiring of remote people outside the US. The companies figured out how to do remote work during Covid, and they are using it to reduce costs. Things will probably improve in the next year, but it will be rough for a while. Anecdotally, I received 2-3 messages from recruiters almost daily during 2020-2021 (ended up taking a job from one in 2021). I didn't hear anything from recruiters from 2022 until about 2 weeks ago -- now they're starting to trickle back in. I don't know if that indicates that hiring is picking pack up; just wanted to share my perspective. Are you senior or higher role? And is it "general" software development (BE/FE/Full stack and even Mobile Apps included), sys/db admin or somewhat more buzzword things like ML/AI? I am in a senior role, previously full-stack developer, tech director, and now embedded software. There is an old saying that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. Nearly everyone could have an anecdote that might point to a strong job market or one that points to a weak one. There are definitely many tech workers out there struggling to find gainful employment based on their current skill set and/or local conditions. There seems to be enough of them that things are not looking particularly rosy at the moment. It's the worst I've ever seen it. It's a generational downturn, a major bubble burst. Feel free to look but don't quit until you find something else. I doubt we've seen the end, either. It's probably going to get worse before it gets better. Companies have gone super saiyan on outsourcing. Its a nightmare for generalists, newbies, web devs, front end, run of the mill cloud and sysadmin. Literally worst in history possibly. Anything that can be easily outsourced to an Indian or Latam candidate If you have a security clearance that cant be outsourced or use pytorch everyday youre prob fine. If youre a specialist on some field its never been better. I think ML people are getting 1M comp at OpenAI. What kind of tech person are you? 100% this - we're handing out H1B's like hotcakes, sending every entry level job to India or LatAM. Tech is broken right now You think worse than dot-com? 2008? I've been in the industry a decade and I've never seen this many job postings in Bangalore.
just go look at any tech companies career page. In the past few years, the software job market went from hot, to red-hot, to even hotter than that, back down to hot. I think people are comparing the current market to previous boomtimes which we all knew couldn't last. That's a US centric view, right? To be fair it probably depends on definition of how many years are "past few" years. I think from a games industry POV it's worse than 2008 right now. Beyond the raw numbers of layoffs, there's clearly a great number of other companies currently have hiring freezes on. There's simply little to no job postings on right now. Of course it's the worst time of year for listings, and things usually improve in Spring, but it's hard to be optimistic. How come January is the worst? I thought it was among the best. Big companies mostly work on quarterly (so earnings call) cycle. Hence depending on general economic situation (and of course specific industry/company). And just like you might be getting sweet offers to change your insurance/ISP/etc, recruiters/head-hunters might be encouraged to hit their KPIs a bit higher the closer to end of quarter/half-year/new years it is. Also bigger companies might reorg (both teams/people and change plans/KPIs which is usually known as pivot) around new years - for those same reasons. With all of that - January/February is usually "Let's see how the latest course of course adjustment is going to play out". I guess December would be even worse. But similar reasons. Half of January is Xmas/NY hangover. Things just slow to startup again. It's bad. Between H1B workers taking all the jobs, AI, seasonal slows, and the economy collapsing, it's rough out there. I have friends that are 100's of applications deep without a peep. Easier if you're not white, but hard regardless I'm not white and don't think it would be easier for me to get a job in this market (I still have a good one tho) Ummm... Contrary to what most people on this site would say, for many, many years society has overproduced and overcompensated software developers for what they actually do. No other profession, besides maybe Law or Accounting gets higher compensation for making their work less efficient. We have frame works stacked on top of frame works when in many cases we could accomplish the same function, maybe faster 10-20 years ago, with fewer compute resources. As the field matures and becomes more efficient, which is bound to happen some day, I expect relatively static industry standards to overtake the continuous churn of abstractions with dubious value added. Additionally I would say you can't build an economy on advertising alone. I over the past 20 years too much time and money has been invested in advertising which doesn't really make anything. I suspect many businesses purchasing online advertising are basically getting ripped off. A decade ago when search worked effectively you could find the product or service you wanted with a simple Google search. Now you get served a bunch of semi relevant or irrelevant ads cloaked as search results. So there is a big disruption opportunity for someone who can re-invent search to connect people to what they actually want. I can imagine a search or directory device that connects people and businesses to manufacturers, marketers and service providers...both sides could pay for use directly connecting the revenues of the directory operator to its performance. Even today I know in the manufacturing and engineering space I would rather look at McMaster-Carr or Grainger catalogue than Google Spam or look at the website of a still going business I know from 15-20 years ago that doesn't even show up in search results today. Sounds like USA centric POV? It was not until several years ago that software developers in Europe finally reached the mythical 100K per year compensation range, that's been common in USA for more than a decade before that. And that's in rather expensive Western Europe (e.g. €1500+ per month for one kid/toddler daycare), and not "cheaper" Southern/Eastern Europe. Every POV is USA centric. This is a USA web zone. Nowhere else matters. > Nowhere else matters.
Until the California people want to move somewhere liveable with good public transport, low crime, low poverty/homelessness and sensible social safety for their children. Then - and only then - does Europe miraculously become interesting. Who knew? Yes. It is brutal. Any position posted is swarmed with applicants. You’ll need some serious networking to get in the door. And even then, there’s already a line of equally capable people vying for the same roll. Companies seem to be hiring and focusing on the short term, that is focused expertise that can hit the ground running, on a hard problem, right away. Certain fields seem to be more in demand than others (ML, infra, etc) - but to me the main pattern is companies caring more about short term gains than long term growth potential. So I think it sucks to be relatively junior right now. To me its sad as I think how well you onboard other team members is one huge differentiator in your dev culture, and points at a healthy team that can readily share knowledge. How its setup now may work for short term problems, but also creates a lot of "bus factors" where crucial functionality depends on 1-2 skilled people. I also see a bit of getting rid of middle management / product management type layers lately. A sense of wanting to streamline / eliminate alleged "bureaucracy" Obviously for me too N = "too small of a sample size" to extrapolate on whole industry. What I've seen/heard - is that companies are not hiring (have fewer if any open positions for) seniors. And in my experience companies focusing on short term (so basically next quarterly earnings call), was always a thing - just that sometimes it was more and sometimes less extreme. The US market in particular seems to be the worst in decades, but I'm not seeing the same in other markets. Friends in Australia hopped around in the last couple of years and are very happy with their conditions and total comp. It doesn't help that Google fires several companies worth of people sometimes, and they flood the market, and most of them are good at being hired. As always, the best thing you can do is be the best engineer you can be. Companies are still hiring, and while supply outstrips demand more than usual, you should always try to be the best unit of supply you can be. I'm not sure about other niches, but it seems to be fine in HPC. I'm getting more recruiters messaging me on LinkedIn than ever. Now that's interesting - I haven't paid much attention to the HPC job market in years. Are you a HPC system administrator, HPC dev, or both? I'm a HPC system administrator at a DoE lab. Does that require a security clearance? Because that would keep you safe from outsourcing. It doesn't, but outsourcing isn't a thing that happens in this area of focus, especially at a national laboratory. Not only is it a very tough time to be looking for a job, junior positions are particularly difficult (this is generally the case when hiring slows down and companies can buy more experience for less). Doesn't mean you shouldn't look, but definitely set your expectations appropriately. Might be a while before things get better. What I would tell my younger self: above all, make good decisions: based on facts and solid reasoning grounded in a range of models of how the world is, paying particular attention to the magnitude of forces: respecting and using forces beyond your control, but always aiming to change the world around you to make you --us-- better. Not deciding based on feelings or opinions or votes, or on chasing opportunities or shirking danger, etc. Practice daily in small decisions, and the big ones will come more easily. You really think that younger you would really understand that? Or say your child? Yes months and months to get an interview. Food for thought: * Big investors almost never invest the year leading into a general election. They already spent all that money on bribes and lobbying. * So much of the US had already outsourced a great part of their manufacturing. * Much of that manufacturing went to china. (be sure the check the news that china is making in the US today) * We are more politically divided than ever before (I don't think this is mutually exclusive to the US) * We are experiencing (in the US) the largest cost burdens ever seen for renters source: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/reports/fil... * There have been many reports of large lay offs in not just the tech sectors. * Most of our current employment numbers are politically motivated lies or exaggerations * AI has pushed a 6% increase requirement on development productivity * There are vastly more boot camps and junior and mid level developers available in the market. * Remote work make the market global when it was still very local for many. I feel like there are many more bullet points to add. its the worst i've seen since 2000 Personally, I think it's worse than 2000. There are so many more actually talented engineers now competing for each job. The dot com boom and bust cycle was famous for people being hired (and then laid off) who had little to no background in software. I don't see that being the case now. It's possible my interview and other skills have declined, but after being rejected only once in the first 25 years of my career (when I was fresh out of school and terrible at interviewing), I've now been rejected from a half dozen jobs where I got to the panel interview. This included one where they said they planned to make an offer but ended up going with a different candidate. Another where it felt like a perfect match but then they never even got back to me. Another where I bombed a dynamic programming problem that leetcode puts at its most difficult rating. YMMV but I think it's tough out there. This is my experience too. I hadn't been rejected from a job since starting work in the late 90s. Significant experience from coding (which I still do) to startup exec level. Multiple "it came down to you and one other" situations. Jobs are in short supply, applicants are numerous. Most interviews are also with managers 10 years younger than I am which may be a compounding factor. That's not an issue for me, but I think it's easier for them to hire someone of a similar age. I think its the AI screening...I don't have a ton of keywords in my resume, and for the last 1.5 years I haven't been getting shit for interviews, which is about when AI started getting rolled out. I guess its back to good ol' keyword stuff the resume again. jfc Agree that this is worse. 2000 was just layoffs, now it's that + offshoring which IMHO is ruining the tech industry i'll vote for trump if he stops h1b Do you think 2000 was worse? (I wasn’t in the field then) It feels that way, but I don't think the build-out in the late 90s can be compared to what we've seen in recent years. Many companies were coming online for the first time, and it was a mad rush. They were looking for any warm body that could spell HTML. Many weren't even trained in technology. There were plenty who went back to what they were doing before when they realized the party was over. Well, you don't have to quit to apply, right? But, it's a bad market, especially for junior. There are 2-3x more applicants per job posting now than last year. I'd say yes. no it’s not. commenters are wrong and I know no one who were not able to find a job. Current rates - is another question. They are not that high. long story short: if you’re a good specialist, you will be good. It is all relative. Different skills are in demand at different times. What is the unemployment level in your particular skill set or desired profession? Smart and ambitious people, always have their resume up to date, and are looking. Although this is good advise I do not follow it as I am always delusional and think my current job is the best and no need to look. My biggest regret looking back, was not changing jobs early when I first started. With 2 years in, I would recommend you look, but be selective. Remember, you are, from an employer perspective, significantly better if you currently have a job, as opposed to unemployed. So be wary of possible layoffs. Follow up note: It also depends on what country you are in. For IT people in the USA you can look at this site: https://www.statista.com/statistics/199995/rates-of-jobless-... I assume most people who believe it is brutal out there are looking for a job and were laid off. Being laid off is EXTREMELY PAINFUL. We were never taught how to handle it. For most people, myself twice, it was a horrible surprise. In a boom time there are almost no regret hires, every organization basically needs estimated future capacity that is supposed to work out sometime and to maintain a delusional prognosis.. In some of the downturns that unlikely capacity keeps getting new jobs simply by having been the excess capacity at the right places. I think we are we are deeper into a downturn where almost everyone is seriously trying to filter to capable in the near term and that is extremely hard given that you almost always need actual time at an organization so a measure of useful on day one filters everyone but returning employees. I wouldn't move. But then again I'm a low performing piece of shit with a disability.