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Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?
I am seeing many anecdotal experiences shared online on various platforms stating that it is difficult to find employment in tech. I myself have had a difficult time landing an interview over the last year despite having two decades of experience.
I am attempting to gain some insight into the issue. My situation is somewhat unique in that I am self-taught without a CS degree. I'm a very experienced, diligent worker, etc, but an algorithm doesn't care about this and so getting through the filters is difficult.
However I see many discussions being posted (primarily on X) stating that it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males) to get an interview let alone a job. There have been mass layoffs, less money being invested etc.
Many people have claimed AI is taking jobs, or that there aren't as many jobs available, yet at the same time, Elon Musk and others claim there is an engineer shortage and we must increase the number of H-1B visas in order to fill this gap. When I apply to a position on linkedin I can see that even the most Jr positions have over 100 applicants.
I know that X can be slanted, and really anything posted online must be taken with a grain of salt - but I'm seeing many people claiming to be in the same situation as myself, and most of them claim to be white males.
Furthermore, in the last two years I experienced two layoffs. In both situations it was white males let go in favor of Indian and KZ foreigners. Again - this is anecdotal and could be a coincidence, but its awfully telling that Vivek and Elon are calling American tech workers uncultured, lazy and stupid in the wake of these experiences and those that I've read about online.
I don't want to start a war here on hackernews, but I'm looking for people's personal experiences. Do they match up? Are you having a hard time finding employment? Have you been fired in favor of foreign workers? Is this racism / ageism / sexism at play or is that being overblown by political actors?
- theandrewbailey 2y agoI've been out of a job for most of the past year. While sending Merry Christmas texts to my friends, I had a conversation with one (another programmer, different technologies and industry) where he revealed he was laid off last month. I keep applying for jobs, and recently accepted the possibility to relocate for an on site position (because staying where I am and hoping to get a remote position hasn't worked out). I just had a promising lead in Texas 'move forward with another candidate'... argh! Companies aren't willing to train people, not even their current employees. They want their candidates to come prepackaged with at least X years experience in Y technologies for several technologies. Their unwillingness to budge created the H1B catastrophe we see now. I'm more than willing to replatform my skillset (B2C Commerce Cloud to Shopify, or Java to .NET, for example), but no one's offering. Looking around at the big picture, it seems that most money is leaving tech to chase higher returns elsewhere. If you aren't doing AI or crypto, it feels that you're fighting over bones. The scraps were gone a long time ago.
- w4ffl35 2y agoThat has been my experience as well.
- mxuribe 2y agoYou are not alone!
- underseacables 2y agoI think companies do this deliberately to avoid hiring Americans. The entire H1-B scheme is a disaster.
- Yoric 2y agoI'm probably going to be unpopular, but as a non-American, I actually find that hiring non-American is a good trend, especially if you want to sell all around the world. I don't have an opinion on H1-B specifically.
- binary132 2y agodo you feel that employers in your home country should also follow this rubric?
- maeil 2y agoSoftware ones? Absolutely. Companies selling physical goods lead to a decent amount of jobs in every country they operate in by definition. Not so for software. It is US big tech who has for a decade or 2 reaped enormous benefits from extracting large sums of money from non-US economies while contributing near-zero back to those economies (often not just near-zero but straight up deeply negative amounts due to externalities).
- EliBullockPapa 2y agoWhat do you mean? Only way I can think of is social media advertising revenue going to big tech instead of local media. But a net negative effect on non-US economies seems hard to believe.
- nicbou 2y agoI’m self-employed so I don’t have personal experience, but all around me (in Berlin) people are struggling to find work. I have more unemployed friends than ever and they stay unemployed for longer than ever. Others are afraid to risk their job in any way. Employers got bolder in their demands and English-speaking workers are fighting for scraps. The UX industry is absolutely cutthroat right now. I work in immigration and my colleagues in the industry noticed the difference in skilled immigration. It even affected the overpriced temporary housing market that mostly targeted skilled immigrant workers. Freelance relocation consultants report having their worst year on record. I also noticed a dip in traffic but it might be caused by Google’s plundering of the web with its AI summaries. I can’t tell if the actual demand changed. I run a website that helps immigrants settle. It’s generally accepted in Germany that things are not great right now. I could likely find matching evidence in yearly reports, but the vibe alone is telling.
- vbi8iBEX 2y agoSounds like its a problem everywhere, not just the states.
- RGamma 2y agoAnd it's not just in programming-related jobs either. Parts of industry and the blue collar market are shitting themselves in Germany right now. Two people I know have been let go (pumps and wood sectors resp.). Another (metal construction) is getting barely more than minimum wage. There's only one dude (chemical engineer) who is doing well (nearing 100k at 5 years work experience). The others are getting by. Politicians are still complaining about Fachkräftemangel, skilled labor shortage, but it's really a wage slave shortage.
- brtkdotse 2y ago> Fachkräftemangel Why is this German word thrown in without any explanation? I’ve noticed this is a common trend whenever a Germany-adjacent topic is discussed.
- franktankbank 2y agoLongterm unemployed people turn to the armed forces for employment. Intentional?
- RGamma 2y agoWith tech oligopolists in government it's a match made in heaven.
- w4ffl35 2y agoThat has been one of my fears. I've even considered it for myself, but I'm 43 - too late for me.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoConsider the other side of that equation. Idle hands are the devil's playground. Too many men with no future and nothing to do are known to start revolutions.
- franktankbank 2y agoUnscheduled stress-test on the surveillance state?
- Dilettante_ 2y agoHave you tried turning your government off and back on again?
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoMost of the developers I know would be an impediment to any modern (or indeed pre-modern) military organization.
- JohnBooty 2y agoThere's no doubt that the "economically disadvantaged to military pipeline" is as old as history itself, but... No. No for a lot of reasons. There's no shortage of poor people in this country even when employment is high. I mean, the max enlistment age in the US Army is theoretically 35 years old, but realistically they are not looking for anybody much past 25 from anything I have ever seen. Even from a machiavellian standpoint leaving a whole bunch of unemployed people from 18 to 75 just so you can scoop up the youngest 10% of them or whatever just makes no sense. Lastly, the next war between major powers is probably not going to involve massive numbers of infantry troops from America. We fight proxy wars (Ukraine, etc) generally and if we fight another peer/near-peer country directly it's going to be missiles and drones and what-have-you, not 10 million American infantrymen marching through China.
- RGamma 2y agoAnd if you look at e.g. Bachelor's enrollment in CS it's somehow still rising in Fall of 2024: https://nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/ https://nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/ That's gonna be one rude awakening.
- SoftTalker 2y agoClassic "buying on the high" behavior, we saw this in 1998/99 also.
- warner25 2y agoI've been fascinated by the boom in university CS departments since I was a CS major myself during the low point between 1999-2001 and the start of the current boom. At my alma mater with a total undergrad enrollment between 10-20k, my graduating class of CS majors had just 23 people. The department didn't even have its own building. For a number of years now, CS has been the most popular major there (graduating hundreds per year) and the CS department's newly constructed building is perhaps the most iconic building in the whole city (it's an urban campus). I keep asking myself how long this can really go on. I have little doubt, by the way, that the booming compensation for software folks in recent years is partially a function of how few people in their mid-30s to early-40s today did CS degrees during undergrad. For undergrads today, though, I suppose the good question is "what else is there?" (i.e. providing a path to an upper-middle class American lifestyle). Pre-med programs have long been over-enrolled with med school admissions being super competitive. Business and law degrees only matter if they come from the top schools where admissions have long been super competitive. My own kids will start having to figure this out soon, and I don't know what I'll suggest.
- SoftTalker 2y agoBusiness, law, and medicine are still pretty "high touch" and I think will be for a long time. Nobody is really going to trust an AI for legal or medical advice -- even if the use of AI becomes more common in those professions (which I expect) people want a human connection or a human handshake (or a human to blame). AI for software though? It will decimate employment in that field as soon as it's good enough. Nobody cares who or what wrote their software. It's been amusing to me to watch the software profession build the tools of its own destruction. As far as the future, I would advise looking at professions where a high degree of human-to-human interaction is important. But certainly I have no crystal ball, maybe people of the future will be fine with getting care from a Star Trek "Medical Hologram" doctor.
- dafuqdat 2y ago[dead]
- asdfologist 2y ago>I myself have had a difficult time landing an interview over the last year despite having two decades of experience. Unfortunately many employers see that as a minus, not a plus.
- w4ffl35 2y agoIndeed - I've legitimately considered creating a fake profile at this point to make myself look more Jr with about 10 years of experience. I don't really have much to lose in trying it.
- mxuribe 2y agoI've been at the receiving end of ageism, and what i now do is drop off some of the older experience(s) from my resume, etc. Also, i try to avoid listing my graduation year from university. Some people suggest even if not fighting off ageism, its only relevant to list the last decade of experience on a resume anyway...so if i ever get questioned, i'd use that as an excuse...but, my strategy is simply to get my foot in the door to an interview without getting caught by the "age police" in HR. (If someone thinks that there's no such thing as a sort of filter - what i called "age police" - within HR, then you have wool over your eyes.) So, my suggestion is maybe there's not a need to create a fake profile, but maybe trim yours a bit. Good luck!
- w4ffl35 2y agoThanks - good advice I'll give this a try.
- FireBeyond 2y agoI'm in my early 40s and struggle at times because although my hair is black, my beard is entirely silver, which (I think) adds 10+ years to me. And while I'm at the IC5/6 level in Product, I still worry about it, and think if I had to find a new job, sorry, fiancée who loves my beard, it has to go, or I think I'm going to have a hard time.
- 2y ago
- Apreche 2y agoYou have to apply to jobs at places that are smaller, growing, and aren’t using an automated resume filter.
- hipadev23 2y agowtf is a KZ foreigner
- w4ffl35 2y agoKazakhstan
- hipadev23 2y agodid you get it conflated with pakistan maybe.
- w4ffl35 2y agoNo, I hired them myself at the behest of the company, trained them, and then was fired because they were cheaper.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tempodox 2y agoWhat's the special significance of being from Kazakhstan? How do they differ from other foreigners?
- jarsin 2y agoIt's not anecdotal. There's no doubt there is a massive downturn in tech and in general right now. There has never before been such large revisions to job numbers. The latest is that massive print of 653k jobs in Q2 was all a lie. > The massive downward revisions to jobs data are set to continue: latest from PHL Fed has early benchmark indicating jobs DECLINED in Q2 of this year while the initial monthly job reports estimated gains of 653k - the labor market's strength is a fiction.. https://x.com/RealEJAntoni/status/1867368092902601195 https://x.com/RealEJAntoni/status/1867368092902601195
- w4ffl35 2y agoTerrible. I've turned to making video games while my wife works. Rough times.
- marmaduke 2y agohow far from your previous experience is the game work?
- w4ffl35 2y agoVery far. I'm a fullstack web developer. Independent game dev has been my hobby for 10 years, and game dev is what got me interested in tech when I was a kid. I started teaching myself at a young age with qbasic. Building interfaces and menu systems etc feels very similar to frontend web development. Much of the domain knowledge transfers when it comes to programming. Mainly my skills transfer to gameplay development and debugging. I make small games and only just recently released my first commercial game, which has only sold two copies.
- marmaduke 2y agodo you have a link for your game? how was the release process?
- Insanity 2y agoAnecdotally.. but not really. I was worried about the job market but this was unfounded, for me... I started applying in October and had four offers from large tech companies by end of November. A lot of this was through networking to be fair, not “cold applying” (1 was through cold applying, the other 3 through networking). reach out to former coworkers or friends and ask for referrals. YMMV, but I do not think it is at all that bleak.
- w4ffl35 2y agoHow old are you? I'm curious about demographics
- Insanity 2y ago32 - interviewed only for senior IC positions in hybrid and remote roles. Also do want to nuance, I applied to many more positions than I ended up getting interviews for. The only guaranteed way for the interview stage was through referrals.
- einsteinx2 2y agoI found this was the same for me in the middle of the pandemic hiring boom too. I sent off a dozen resumes and didn’t hear back from any of them, one post for me on the YC alumni forum and I had a whole week of interviews lined up immediately and one referral to another company which landed me an interview as well and ultimately an offer I ended up accepting. I never found cold applying to be particularly useful, even during the best hiring times, so I always read these accounts of how bad the market is because someone sent their resume to X number of companies to be a bit useless in judging the market as in my experience that never really worked.
- emseetech 2y ago| A lot of this was through networking to be fair On that note, being in a larger city and doing in-person networking is a much different game than trying to apply online from afar. Plus, I've heard a lot about how useless online applications have become due to AI, ghost jobs, bad HR practices, etc. It makes me wonder if returning to the "come in to the office and drop off an application" days would be better for everyone.
- pmarreck 2y agoWherever there is difficulty, there is also opportunity. I think the major thing stopping people from just going their own way is healthcare coverage. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) I wonder if I can hack a business model that somehow provides healthcare but also gathers together sourced projects, and freelancers to bid on building them, while also getting healthcare. (And if you opt out of healthcare, you can take the difference. Maybe.) It may not result in 100% employment, but it could potentially provide a source of income while looking for something more fulltime. And I would help coordinate, while also vetting people. Also, not sure if related to the difficulty in tech, but it might depend on your ethnicity, and not in the way you might think: https://fox11online.com/news/nation-world/major-us-companies-gave-94-of-new-jobs-to-people-of-color-in-2021-report-says-diversity-hiring-employees-apple-nike-microsoft-wells-fargo https://fox11online.com/news/nation-world/major-us-companies...
- doctorpangloss 2y agoThere is some truth to healthcare coverage, but 26 and under are covered by their parents. They’re the hard to fill junior roles anyway. IMO, people want way too much fucking money.
- collingreen 2y agoWant and need way too much money. Cost of living is wild everywhere and cost of a lifestyle we used to consider "standard" (family, home ownership, kids can go to college, annual vacation, usually on one salary) is out of reach for most now. Looking at the numbers for the decline in spending power over time is sobering.
- StanislavPetrov 2y agoWhy does everyone assume young people's parents have healthcare coverage?
- snowwrestler 2y agoI’m somewhat dubious that healthcare is the biggest impediment to doing a startup today, because of the Affordable Care Act. It certainly seems to have helped supercharge the “FIRE” (financial independence, retire early) movement—another set of working-age people who need healthcare without employment. I think a lot of engineers just want to engineer. Leading a startup quickly becomes mostly business stuff like finance, marketing, sales, hiring, etc. You need a business model, not just tech know-how. Starting your own business is definitely not the same job as staff engineer at an established business. It’s not for everyone.
- Glyptodon 2y agoThe "white males" bit is not useful/helpful. But US resident vs non is probably a bit. There are several layers to this. Layer one is that SW Eng work has always been both multi modal and that it's never been easy to get out of the trash distributions (e.g. $40-$60k "analyst" or "programmer" gigs, etc.) if you end up there. And it's also never been easy for someone to get a degree and find a job w/o having internships, years of part time work or other experience, or connections. Anecdata, but a solid number of my CS graduating class more than a decade ago who were more than good enough to work in CS struggled to figure out how to find a first position if they didn't happen to have gotten internships, worked in the field before graduation, etc. While the best off got Google or MS internships that the majority of my class didn't even apply for. And even then, the majority of the jobs were for 4+ years of experience. Add to this over the past decade many outfits have started to hire substantial numbers of overseas remote workers. For the most part, I think many companies fill their junior and slightly up roles with outside of the US remote workers. This has mixed results, but it's usually cheaper to hire several foreign remote workers over one domestic worker, and particularly in cases where time consuming grunt work is needed it can work reasonably. In some ways the H1-B doesn't matter because you can always hire remote foreign workers. The main issues I've seen relate to there being a substantial management load to deal with the amount of stuff lost in translation. I've personally had a better experience w/ South American contractors than Russian/Ukrainian/Slavic or Indian, I think because the timezones match better, English/Spanish/Portuguese seems to be easier to navigate linguistically, and the workers have seemed to better understand what we've needed and been better at showing initiative for some reason. Then layer AI on top of this and relatively reduced hiring. I do not think it's a good time to be looking for work, and with every year that's gone by over the least decade it's been worse for junior/early career roles especially. I haven't seen white males being let go in favor of foreigners, but I have seen a lot of limiting hiring to a few seniors and filling the rest with overseas to save money. AI is only exacerbating. As is the fact that nobody really seems to have money for hiring. So is the desire to hire people who are magically already perfect and spun up for a role, no matter how niche. In general, I think "white male" is a red herring.
- speakfreely 2y agoAgree with everything you wrote, with one small caveat: the "white male" thing is really only a notable disadvantage with large companies. Every startup I've interacted with has always prioritized hiring the person who is most capable of doing the job... the extra race/gender variable really only comes into play when there's a substantial HR layer involved. But to your other point, I think any perceived layoffs of white males at tech companies is just correlation with their overrepresentation in the software engineer population.
- gavinhoward 2y agoI haven't been able to get a job since the pandemic. The problem is that I work best as a lone wolf, and that's not how software is done nowadays. For good reason, I might add, so I am not complaining. Don't make my mistake and learn your soft skills. https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/ https://gavinhoward.com/2024/06/my-programming-journey/
- turtleyacht 2y agoThank-you. Also found your article on C and discipline helpful: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-in-memory-safety/ https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/why-i-use-c-when-i-believe-i... If I could go back, I would have started working in C and building (reinventing) all the other ideas. Building your own language and compiler surely is the just fruits of an earnest programming life. It's not unlike plain Javascript where code patterns become the unit of work [1][2], where keywords in other languages would otherwise suffice. The shelves have books on C and Deitel, hacking, drawing, and architecture too. I hope some of them sort of combine. I don't know the recipe to bring about a kernel hacker, but hope it can all be absorbed in a decade or two. [1] Reliable Javascript (2015) [2] Javascript Patterns (2010)
- gavinhoward 2y agoThank you for your kind words!
- gaws 2y agoFrom Let Me Cure Your Imposter Syndrome[1]: > Got engaged. Made a stupid mistake on my wedding day and was left at the altar. I deserved it. What happened? [1]: https://gavinhoward.org/2023/06/let-me-cure-your-impostor-syndrome/ https://gavinhoward.org/2023/06/let-me-cure-your-impostor-sy...
- zusammen 2y agoI’m 65 and I have tenure. If I didn’t, I would leave the country. If I couldn’t, I don’t know what I would do. You do not want to be on the open market in the 2020s, that’s for sure. it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males) to get an interview let alone a job. My friend, if you think it’s bad for white men, just wait till you hear what it’s like for black women. 2+ year job searches, for black tech workers, were the norm even in the pre-COVID economy. It’s terrible for everyone who isn’t in a position to take advantage of geographic arbitrage. And even that, for a worker, is unstable… look at how fast the bastards RTO’d people as soon as their real estate holdings took a hit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- w4ffl35 2y agoThanks - I agree that I think the "white male" thing might primarily be getting pushed by white nationals on X (and since I'm a white male, my experiences will of course relate to white males). That's why I'm curious about demographics. Vivek didn't call out white males either, he called out Americans and bashed our culture while stating we need more foreign workers. I understand the point he and Elon are attempting to make, but I believe they simply want cheap labor. If the market is so bad for Americans, why do we need more immigrants in tech?
- like_any_other 2y ago> if you think it’s bad for white men, just wait till you hear what it’s like for black women "Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color. It Actually Did. The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color." - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e... A BestBuy & McKinsey leadership program open only to non-whites - https://web.archive.org/web/20220927170605/https://corporate.bestbuy.com/best-buy-mckinsey-partner-to-develop-diverse-leaders/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220927170605/https://corporate... London Mayor’s Transport Team Bans Whites from Internships - https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/05/21/london-mayors-transport-team-bans-whites-from-internships/ https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/05/21/london-mayors-transp... Mind you these are official, openly stated policies. If this is what they admit to, imagine what they do more discreetly. And it's not just hiring - it's a "pipeline problem" - whites, especially non-Jewish whites, are the most underrepresented group in the Ivy League, by a significant margin - https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png https://archive.org/download/ivy_league/ivy_league.png (2023 data)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- huuhee3 2y agoThe market definitely sucks in EU too. A couple of years ago I could choose where to work as a junior dev. These days as a senior I'm happy to cling into my current job, and probably couldn't find anything if I got laid off. Fresh grads in most other fields aren't doing either, but at least they aren't oversaturated as badly as CS is. Only ones doing fine are medical and social work professionals.
- BadCookie 2y agoThere is plenty of discussion about how hard it is to get or change jobs in tech (even with several years of experience) in the r/womenintech subreddit, along with some discussion about what other industries to potentially pursue instead.
- morkalork 2y agoExploit foreign labour to pick crops, exploit foreign labour to do manufacturing, exploit foreign labour to do tech. At the end of the day, what is left? I keep thinking of that Henry Ford anecdote about factory workers and buying cars.
- hereonout2 2y agoI've recruited for many roles in the UK for a very large tech employer (1000s of developers but not a FAANG). With 20 years experience you'd get through our semi-automated processes and get an interview if the skill sets and employment history matched - regardless of a university level experience. Are you sure it's the degree that's holding you back? I'm not advising you lie, as it's fraud, but just adding that over here it would be incredibly rare to ask for proof of academic qualifications from 20 years ago when recruiting such an experienced hire. I myself have around 20 years experience, I have a degree but god knows where the certificate is and additionally the university who issued it no longer exists. Although my degree is adjacent somewhat it is not in CS. I've never been asked to show it to anyone, never asked a hire for theirs either.
- w4ffl35 2y agoThanks for asking - I tried to start my own small business and it was just before the economic downturn so i now have an employment gap - this has been the main point of contention with hiring managers. I also let SEO on my site slip and my resume needs to be cleaned up. However, I think the market is oversaturated and this is the main problem. I'm also not great at leet code challenges, but landing interviews in the first place is currently the challenge.
- gosub100 2y ago> Have you been fired in favor of foreign workers? 1) I work at a large company everyone in the US has heard of. When I walk in the public areas of the company or at lunch, it looks like we are based in Mumbai. There is no "diversity", it's one country in particular, which is India. (Funnily enough, this demographic isn't reflected in management) 2) I overheard the 4th level (above me) manager complaining to another manager that his department (he oversees the whole floor, let's say a bit under 100 employees) has 30+ open reqs, and HR has only given him a few resumes (unknown what time period this refers to). The last interview I gave was to an H1B who had an audio link in his earbuds to someone who feed him answers to my technical questions. 3) I have 20 years experience, yet this job pays the same amount I was making 10 years ago. There is effectively zero negotiation for salaries. They will happily let you go vs bargain. 4) A previous mega-corp I worked for, GE Healthcare in Wisconsin, looked like India on campus. Utter lack of diversity. I recently got a job solicitation from an Indian recruiter for $40/hr for C++ development at this location. I think it's very clear that the cat's out of the bag about how to evade high-paying tech salaries. Set the parameters to discourage Americans from hiring, create a bottleneck so that your open reqs last longer, then use their extra-legal powers (unfettered access to congresspeople) to claim they are falling behind profitability, but if they just had those wonderful H1Bs everything will be ok.
- scottiescottie 2y agoDo any of your real life friends accuse you of racism? Do you find that Indian managers hire their own? I'm assuming you're not Indian. I applied to FedEx affiliated company for SWE, and everyone except upper management was Indian. I was shocked.
- gosub100 2y agoI haven't been accused of being racist by anyone I know (especially not for pointing out a lack of diversity). I haven't experienced any Indian managers hiring their own, but I've only had one Indian manager. That isn't really a concern for me; small amounts of prejudice are to be expected, and if they grow to large-enough proportions they can be proven in court and adjudicated. What concerns me is a systemic trend to cut off US citizens' ability to move up economically. Incidentally, there is a completely orthogonal concern that almost nobody is aware of: that Indian children are essentially being forced to study tech or medicine in order to get high-paying jobs in the west. This essentially erases their culture and robs the children of any freedom of identity. From single-digit ages they are being forced (under threat of discipline) to provide economic security for their parents. That is sickening.
- josephsantana 2y ago[flagged]
- notfried 2y agoI see this as a combination of three forces at play: AI, WFH, and Skillset--all adding downward pressure to hiring talent in the U.S.: 1) While A.I. may now be only adding 10-20% of productivity gains, the rapid pace of improvement leaves open the possibility that tha gains can be soon much more than that. So, instead of scaling your company now, if you can afford to, wait out a bit and see where this goes. 2) Even though much of BigTech is clawing back WFH, startups aren't as much. And once you introduce WFH to your culture and processes, it is hard to reason with the idea that you should pay $200K/year for an engineer when it can cost you a fraction (possibly 20-50% of that) to hire them remotely from another country, when also nowadays most of these remote employees are more than willing to work in EST/PST timezones. This used to be the case before COVID, but now many more startups have accepted and adapted to the idea of WFH. 3) While advanced skillsets and deep experience is necessary in many (but not most) startups, and while these skills are more difficult to find in India or Pakistan, the reality is, for many, many tech companies, most of the work doesn't require top-notch skills. You don't need a top 99% percentile in frontend engineering skills for a 1-year-old "name whatever category" app. And with the recent rise of focus on profitability, frugality, and the difficulty in fund-raising, being cognizant of cost per talent is now a thing. I think Elon and Vivek's comments are more nuanced than they are taken. Elon, given he's at the cutting edge of engineering, must be having difficulty hiring top-99.9%-percentile talent against BigTech, and wants to open the pool of these types of talent from elsewhere. I don't think he wants H1Bs for React Native engineers. I am interpreting his comments as "I want to suck-in all A.I. researchers into America".
- blandcoffee 2y ago| I think Elon and Vivek's comments are more nuanced than they are taken. If they are, they have the platform to provide that nuance. Take a look at the public H1B data for Tesla (disclaimer it doesn't tell the full story), it does not seem like they are vying for the top-99.9%. It seems odd we're giving billionaires the benefit of the doubt. They are positioning themselves to win, and that's totally fine in the system we're in, but let's not assume they are friends of the working class.
- vbi8iBEX 2y agoElon told people to "go fk yourself in the face" over H-1B. Doesn't seem very nuanced to me.
- josephsantana 2y ago[flagged]
- throwaway847492 2y agoCreating a throwaway account for simplicity. I was/am a hiring manager, mostly for startups. Market is rough right now for sure but I also want to share some flags I’d personally note when looking at your website / LinkedIn. 1. You have experience in a lot of technologies, which sometimes is good, but can also be the case where you don’t have expertise in any of them. 2. According to LinkedIn since 2016 most of your gigs were about a year long. You also had a lead engineer gig that lasted eight months. I’m sure you put more info about it in your resume but it’s a pretty big flag considering that it spans not only the downturn but boom periods as well. 3. No well known companies in your list. I know it sucks that pedigree matters so much in our industry but it does. 4. Political posts / complaining on LinkedIn. Having dealt with political stuff at work (from both sides of the isle) it’s such a pain in the ass that my risk management alert kicks in. 5. I see you’re in Denver. Are you applying only for remote gigs? Sadly, a lot of companies are doing RTO and probably not in your area. Hope this helps a bit. Hope things improve for you soon.
- sixstringtheory 2y agoThis should be the top comment. OP is looking for confirmation bias and got plenty here, but they really need to introspect on how to be a more appealing coworker. Linking to Jack Posobiec’s tweets and complaining about being called a racist on hacker news, on your linkedin account, just makes you look radioactive. And dumb: linkedin is for hustle porn; 4chan, twitter and their derivatives are for online political warfare. Your inability to distinguish between these shows that you will likely act inappropriately in a professional environment. It shows you don’t know your audience at all, which are the people whose money you want. And then there’s the age-old question of whether you want to be right, or be liked. It’s not really your responsibility to educate your coworkers on socio-economic-political realities, and they likely don’t come to work to hear others’ opinions about it. But you are shaping an online persona that advertises such a service. I’ve gone through long stretches of looking for work and fear another in this market environment, so I do sympathize. But you gotta button up. And don’t just shape a better image of a pleasant coworker–actually be one. I’ve worked with too many this-is-your-brain-on-social-media types, of all political persuasions, and it’s miserable.
- robomartin 2y agoWhile I have been self-employed for a few decades, I do see and hear about what's happening out there. I have many friends who have had challenges and others who are afraid to leave their jobs, even when paid well under what they are worth. One of them finally gave up and took a job in the oil fields in New Mexico. This, after sending hundreds of applications and enduring a few 5 to 7 stage interviews, only to be told they chose someone else. Age discrimination has been a real problem in tech for a very long time, this isn't new at all. Yet, somehow, it feels like it has gotten progressively worse over time. There are companies where you have the young (25-ish, just out of school) comprise the majority and the managers are just a few years older than that. They simply do not want to see "Mom" or "Dad" join the team. You are going to find very few 40, 50 or 60+ year old engineer in those environments. Their experience and capabilities do not matter at all except for a few domains where they almost have no options (RF electronics, signal/power integrity, embedded systems, gov/mil, etc.). I am not saying that age discrimination is the only filter being applied, of course not. That is, however, likely one of the main filters for a large group in the application pool. The other problem seems to be that a massive portion of the job posting on sites like LinkedIn seem to be fake. I have seen reports claiming that the number might be as high as 80%. These postings are fake for a lot of reasons. One of them, at least in the US, are rules/laws that require posting a job opening even when you have already identified someone you will hire (or retain) for that role. Companies have to be able to show they evaluated N applications before declaring they will hire someone from the inside or retain/bring-in an H1B. This is terrible and --while there is no indication that this will be an objective-- I hope the new administration gives this issue some thought and modifies the rules of the game to create a real market for jobs, one where opportunities are fair for everyone (whatever that metric might be). For example, people have been told to go study coding all the way back to the Obama administration (maybe earlier, I don't remember). So, lots of people did. And then they were dropped on their collective heads. No offense to anyone, but, if the US is telling its young to study CS, H1B visas should have become rare and exceptional. Nothing else is fair. There are other problems, of course, many problems. One of the is that university CS programs in the US and elsewhere, well, suck. People come out of programs with their degrees and are incapable of writing code. In the US, they can argue with you about Socialism and Karl Marx, and they can't code shit. They are taught what I call "coding by library". I am going to stretch and suggest that the vast majority of them would drown if you gave them C and a raw embedded system and asked them to implement a neural network or a genetic algorithm (and many other things). Give them Python and Pybullet and they are all geniuses. Brilliant. So, yeah, education has to change. A CS/Engineering degree should consist of three years of core, from the ground-up, subjects and one more year specializing at a higher level. Yes, that means that the $50K students are forced to pay for bullshit non-degree topics must go. They are a waste of time. General education should happen in high school, not university at $30K to $50K per year. You should be able to graduate with a solid CS foundation in three years, a generalist, if you will. Anyone wishing to specialize should be able to add one year to their BS degree for this purpose and a Masters after that. About two years ago I helped a recent CS graduate prepare for an interview. What I learned from this single data point was astounding. It is embarrassing that our universities are doing such a horrible job in preparing people for their future. The issues had to do both with breath and depth of knowledge. To be sure, encyclopedic knowledge isn't necessary, but you have to be able to code using something other than JS, P5.js or Python and a pile of fat libraries you do not understand. Questions like "What's a pointer?" and "Can the data in a non-mutable Python object ever change?" should have intelligent answers that reveal understanding. BTW, the answer to the second question is: Yes, absolutely. Getting back to the issue of finding employment, frankly, I am not sure what people can do about it. If I were looking for a job I would likely take one of two approaches. The first would be to join everyone else carpet-bombing job postings with applications. Well, that does not work. The other might be to be extremely selective and, perhaps, look for niche positions with few applicants and attempt to tailor the application to make a case for hiring you. One thing is sure: Trying to second-guess a software-based application filter (AI or otherwise) is a waste of time. You are throwing your application into a black box and have not idea what happens inside it. Whatever guess you might make is far more likely to be random, rather than stochastic. In other words, in the first case your guesses will have almost completely unpredictable results while, in the second case, with some knowledge, the guesses are made in the context of something that resembles a probability distribution. And yet, in the end, either case might be equally pointless. This is particularly true when the posting's intent was to support internal hire or H1B. The other angle on this is entrepreneurship. This isn't for everyone. Most will fail and do so multiple times, dozens of times in some cases. I nearly lost everything I owned before I experienced success. Like I said, not for most. In the end, I don't really know how this can be fixed. I don't believe in big government, so I am not comfortable with the suggestion that legislation is a solution. Then again, I also have to admit that there might be a need for this on a temporary basis to bring balance into the relevant markets.
- sunshine-o 2y agoI am wondering if this is not just "normal". If we look back tech jobs have been growing fast since at least the 90s. We have basically put everything on computer and the internet in the last decades with some obvious efficiency gains. But how far should we continue to invest in this and expecting a return on investment? At the same time, in the west, agriculture or manufacturing jobs have been annihilated. Could they see that coming? Probably no as it was not that obvious from their point of view. At least in the west, first world or whatever you want to call it, most people need cheaper housing, cheaper energy, less taxes and bureaucracy. This is just what most young people complain about. People do not complain they need more computers, smart thing or self driving cars. They might actually need less of this but still consume it because it is in fact the things they can afford. Also in the EU there is a growing and undeniable regulatory framework which is destroying the local tech industry. What I mean is we could see the type of shift that you only see once in a lifetime. Where computer tech see the same fate as agriculture and manufacturing had. Hard to tell if this is just a hiccup or the start of the destruction of the tech jobs market.
- zeroc8 2y agoThat's the way I see it too. All that AI crap isn't going to make our lives any better. It even might have the opposite effect. Few people are getting super rich while everyone else just suffers. Previous tech revolutions like PC, internet or Iphone let anyone participate and the benefits were pretty obvious. Now, less so.
- blandcoffee 2y agoThis topic reminds me of the old interview Bernie Sanders gave nearly a decade ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0 I hope citizens wake up, business interests are not always aligned with your (citizen) economic interest. It doesn't matter if it's legal or illegal immigration, there are economic realities that we should talk about - stop focusing on the color of someones skin.
- throwawayhn2024 2y agoI was let go from my last job. Also no CS degree. Had no LinkedIn either (deleted years ago). Had to create a resume from scratch. The only thing I had was about a decade of experience. I started by creating a resume and LinkedIn and aggressively optimized both as much as possible. Using a ATS checker I found online, I got a score of 96 for my resume after numerous changes (29 changes after a few weeks). I started applying aggressively (and tracking) immediately after being let go. I’m pretty sure early rejections were because my resume was awful. After nearly 2 months, 588 applications, with an average 10% response rate within an average of 10 days per response, I had 16 move to interview stages and 2 final offers. I accepted one of them (it checked all my boxes for what I wanted so didn’t have to compromise). I had 3 referrals but none of those materialized to interviews or offers. I did not work with any recruiters. Market is bad, no doubt about that. I can’t speak to the experience of others but I’m convinced my response rate is good enough and it’s a numbers game. This happened earlier this year. Some stats for those who think it may influence my results: 40s Asian male. US Citizen. So no VISA needed and not white and don’t check any DEI boxes. This is for Senior SWE IC role.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pickpuck 2y agoCan you link to the ATS checker please?
- RGamma 2y agoBeware that it may be just another data kraken.
- skillissuz 2y ago+1 love to see a comment written by an actual human programmer It's always been a numbers game. The people writing this posts you don't want to work with. Think about it, would you write this post (you the reader, not you throwaway guy I'm replying to)? Top commenter entitled guy with "Ivy League" degree who probably did everything right in school but cannot code.
- jt2190 2y agoRemember that two things have changed the employment landscape: - the end of zero interest rate policies mean that investments in projects can’t show a return “someday” but actually have to show some benefit on a reasonable timeline, say 2-3 years. Gone are the days when hiring armies of warm bloodies and having them work on “moon shots”. - the expiration of the tax write off for programmer salaries when developing a new product. The bottom line is that most of the market is now very price sensitive (hence trying to find the cheapest labor i.e. less experienced or overseas devs) and that devs in high-cost geographic areas now need to be extra productive to complete.
- SoftTalker 2y agoAlso there's going to be very little sympathy if people who have been earning 6-7 figure salaries working in their pajamas for the past decade are now going through a rough patch.
- verzali 2y agoReminds me a bit of 2008, when I'd regularly encounter recently laid off bankers getting drunk and bemoaning their situation with some passion. It was hard to have much sympathy for people who'd earned enormous salaries and somehow failed to put any aside for an emergency...
- i_have_an_idea 2y agoThen, just like now, a lot of the hardest hit people were junior employees that hardly had many years of enormous salaries but mostly had student loans, junior pay and large one-off expenses like moving into a major population center and trying to rent an apartment.
- AgentOrange1234 2y agoShrug. I’ve done a lot of intensely creative work in my pajamas. I’ve burned a lot of unproductive hours on commuting and pointless in-person meetings.
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- jamal-kumar 2y agoNot really a problem for me but that's because I had the foresight to realize this is the way things are going and that it's time to get into my own thing and start my own companies if I am going to survive. The thing that was the writing on the wall for me ages ago was seeing older programmers with plenty of talent finding it hard to get work in their field, like the ageism thing, if you're past 35 or so and still just doing the labour thing and not in a management position people tend to give you the side eye in this industry... So yeah if nobody is going to promote you to that you gotta promote yourself and start a company, that has been clear to me for at least 5 years since I did that. It's kind of weird seeing people complain as if this is a race subject though. I think the discrimination may be there for that but it's beyond it too and has been for a LONG time now.
- vbi8iBEX 2y agoI'm seeing stats that show very few jobs have gone to white people as of late, and many people online are stating its an issue, but I personally have not felt as though being white is the issue for me. I am trying to get a read on other people's experiences with ageism, racism and sexism. I have experienced being replaced by foreigners who were cheaper, but I doubt being white was the issue. How did you get your company off the ground?
- jamal-kumar 2y agoFocusing on small-medium businesses and individuals who normally don't have alot of knowledge or access to people who do information technology as our leads has been our bread and butter - you want to be looking at local companies like art galleries, schools, non-profits, places that are running legacy systems that need to be upgraded, stuff like that are just everywhere and the thing is they know they need work done and they just haven't gotten around to hiring someone to do it. The big thing is lead generation and you can just do that on google maps, and showing up friendly asking if they need help. We don't really try to be big or anything, but we're happy with solid income in something we simply enjoy doing. We just landed a client that's been linking us up with doing red team work for larger international companies, which has been a fun change from the development work I've been mostly doing - all it took was all of us here just running through a bunch of tryhackme and hackthebox to make sure we are on the same page, and then just getting linked up through people we know from going to defcon, so this has been a really exciting and fun pivot which definitely pays more than the other stuff! https://31337itsolutions.com https://31337itsolutions.com if you're curious. Everything else we do is related to ecommerce and that's always good $$$ as well. Feel free to steal my idea for your own locale if you're looking for work, it didn't really cost much to start this.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago"I am seeing many anecdotal experiences shared online on various platforms stating that it is difficult to find employment in tech." What is "tech" 100% serious question Is it short for "technology" For example, "Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way." Skolnikoff, Eugene B. (1993). "The Setting". The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology, and the Evolution of International Politics. Princeton University Press. p. 13. ISBN 0-691-08631-1. JSTOR j.ctt7rpm1. Citing Harvey Brooks' definition of technology as "knowledge of how to fulfill certain human purposes in a specifiable and reproducible way." The term "technology", historically, is not synonymous with computers despite whatever popular usage has arisen in the past ~20 years. Technology predates the existence and use of computers and computer networks and the use of these resources for commercial surveillance Knowledge of computers and computer newtorks is a type of conceptual knowledge Electronic surveillance, data collection from internet usage and delivery of advertising via internet is a practical goal The application of conceptual knowledge of computers and computer networks to the practical goal of surveillance, data collection and advertising is reproducible However it should be self-evident that "technology" is much broader than this type of application Most technology has nothing to do with internet surveillance or advertising
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago> Most technology has nothing to do with internet surveillance or advertising Yes, but what people want is to make money applying technology, and most of that does in fact have something to do with surveillance and advertising. This is because control-over-other-people stands out as something which there will always be demand for. Everything else gets easier to supply as technology improves.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- RGamma 2y ago"Tech", as in use here, is the VC-tortured shorthand for "anything to do with computers or the internet" and maybe other fruits of hard science like energy or biotech. The term's similar to content, influencer or creator, in that it sucks the nuance out to commodify it better.
- Cypher 2y ago2 years been looking, didn't help that I only found out I have ASD which was probably costing me many jobs without realization. But yea, market sucks and we hired someone to come in and cut costs.
- m_ke 2y agoIt's not just you. I have an Ivy league degree, worked in deep learning since alexnet at a leading startup in the space, was a CTO of a startup that got acquired and have referrals from very senior people at the top FANG companies and still struggled to get interviews. I also have research scientist friends with Neurips papers, ones that solved long standing open math problems and even they are struggling to get hired. What me and my friends heard from a lot of people at the large companies was that many of them are no longer hiring in the US, but in India, Poland and Brazil instead, and that the roles they have listed in the US are for internal transfers. I've had a referral for Google for months and did not get an interview for NYC based roles, but when I went to an ML conference in Warsaw a few months ago I learned that Google is looking to hire 2000 people there, but with people in that office making ~1/4th of my friends in the US. On top of that you have a huge pool of bootcamp grads and foreign applicants so any role posted gets 1000s of applications in the first few hours, making it impossible for recruiters to look over all of them. And if that wasn't enough we're going through a huge hiring downturn post the COVID bump, see: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
- tiffanyh 2y ago> was a CTO of a startup Could it just be, the more senior/executive level you are - the harder it’ll always be to find another comparable job. The funnel gets smaller the higher up you are.
- misiti3780 2y agoMy company is hiring in ML, the position is remote, can you send me your resume?
- m_ke 2y agoThanks, I’m actually pretty far in the interview process with a bunch of companies now but would be open to learning more. My contact info is in my bio.
- cmalluise1 2y agoMy good friend is a sr ml research eng looking for remote work also
- ckirch 2y ago35, male, American citizen. applied to 800 jobs, few technical interviews, no offers. i believe with the advent of AI, the landscape has changed faster than the job market has corrected for it. It will never go back to the glory days of tech people getting hired, its over.
- e40 2y agoI don't believe for a second that AI is the reason. In anything, AI has contributed to added jobs, or at the minimum a shift in resources toward AI.
- atrettel 2y agoI do know that ML and AI are at least changing hiring in my own field (scientific research). Where I work, there is little hiring of subject-matter experts and a lot of hiring of data scientists and ML experts. I have talked to many managers over the last few years, and in many of these conversations, the managers imply that there is a lot less of a need for subject-matter expertise because the AI can fill in the blanks for us --- no need to hire expensive subject-matter experts anymore. In their minds, AI can do it cheaper and better. That's my own summary of these conversations, but it does show a shift in hiring patterns in scientific research at least.
- w4ffl35 2y agoAgreed that AI hasn't replaced jobs but i think that AI driven hiring tools have shifted the landscape.
- ckirch 2y agoI went to a bootcamp, (regret it), but the change from the learning process when i was in it (2021), to now, is steep. The use of AI in writing code has had to have an affect on the jr dev levels of hiring. How could it not? what seasoned SWE isnt more efficient now with the use of AI?
- gaws 2y ago> 35, male, American citizen. applied to 800 jobs, few technical interviews, no offers. Is your network nonexistent?
- betaby 2y agoLow pay offers. In Montreal there are plenty of offers paying ~90k CAD/year ( 62k USD/year ) for 15+ years of experience. There are lot of job listings in Montreal, and those positions are real. Problem is that the pay makes those positions undesirable. The second problem is that no one hires junior developers. My friend's kid finishing CS studies in May 2025 and prospect for jobs are not good.
- quaffapint 2y agoIn the last couple of weeks we posted a job for a junior .NET dev and got over 800 resumes within days. The automation is killing both the employer having to sift through it all and the employee possibly getting lost in the mix.
- microtonal 2y agoI think this is an important factor. Developer salaries have been bimodal or trimodal [1]. I have really good former colleagues who have difficulty finding jobs, but they are looking for 120k+ USD/Euro jobs (remote, outside SV). I also have friends owning companies, having difficulty filling positions, but they are in the 50k-70k USD/Euro range. It seems like the difficulty of finding a job is in the second mode. But the people who had jobs in that mode are hesitant to apply in jobs corresponding to the first mode, not only because the pay gap is substantial, but it can also be bad for one's resume and perhaps less satisfying intellectually. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-salaries-in-the-netherlands-and-europe/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
- betaby 2y agoThat kind of makes sense, but doesn't. I'm aware of the fact of the bi-modal / tri-modal distribution of the software dev. salaries. However, in the case of my friend, software is not the only option for him. My friend refuses to get lower paying software eng. position ... because he can make the same lower money by doing the thing he likes, in his case - working as a luthier. Another friend also were refusing to get lower paying software jobs and instead were working 1+ year as secretary for a wealthy person. My point is that some lower paying jobs won't be filed ever, even if there are plenty software developers without jobs. It's more wise for some people to leave field temporarily or permanently.
- motohagiography 2y agowhen you look at who is absent at the professional level there's a theme. where are all the high agency operators? I've spent most of my career contracting and consulting for institutions and the reason I was able to do it was because those institutions had social/diversity hiring mandates that created a huge market for people like me to actually deliver the work while not being a part of the permanent organization. they could all sit in meetings being weird and passive aggressive with each other while I just solved and built stuff. it's been a good run, but the broader economic effects of that trend are becoming unavoidable. What's changed since the 90's is there is no longer a path from tech practitioner to executive class in any org larger than a startup. the real value of H1-B's is they make up for the conflict-avoidant agreeableness of managers as companies grow larger and become more like institutions, where the effective indenture arrangement means H-1B's have to be supple enough for uncharismatic people to manage them. it's abuse, but it's an ancient dynamic. it would be great if markets de-globalized to where my cultural capital was currency again, but what to hope for and what to do are different things. Don't look for employment, look for work. the culture and economy don't confer meaningful status from jobs anymore. it's gone, just get work for its own sake. Getting hung up on the racial issue or anything that makes you think in an inferior way or excuses a lack of agency is going to guarantee failure. Who cares what may be true, the only thing that matters is what you can effect.
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- w4ffl35 2y ago[flagged]
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoWhy should it be illegal for American companies to operate abroad when they have international revenue streams?
- w4ffl35 2y ago[flagged]
- nickff 2y agoThere are a lot of companies; Americans have a spectrum of views, as do corporations. In addition, both individuals and corporations are capable of talking out of both sides of their mouth (or just plain lying).
- w4ffl35 2y agoYes there are a lot of companies, and yes people and companies can lie. I'm not really sure how this negates what I said or my view on the matter. Globalization is the antithesis of the America First movement.
- nickff 2y agoSome industries do face shortages in short term skilled labor supply; they might be able to get more people trained up in 5-10 years, with enough investment, but you can’t get a journeyman ready in three months. Others just want more supply, to reduce labor costs and make domestic production cost-competitive with foreign equivalents. Neither of those groups is lying.
- w4ffl35 2y agoThen let them go through the immigration system, get a green card and start working in the US. The original thread here is me saying that it should be illegal / there should be penalties for hiring abroad when there are plenty of skilled American workers who are being turned down for the jobs which are going to cheap foreign labor.
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- kindeyoowee 2y ago[flagged]
- egypturnash 2y ago> Elon Musk and others claim there is an engineer shortage and we must increase the number of H-1B visas in order to fill this gap There is a shortage of engineers who are willing to work cheap, and to be much more tolerant of shitty working conditions because getting fired = getting deported.
- hightrix 2y agoNot just cheap, but excessive hours. People like musk don’t want someone that works 8 hours a day and goes home. He wants someone that works and lives to work.
- unquietwiki 2y ago[flagged]
- neom 2y agoI know you specifically said you don't have a degree, but never the less the comment section gives me mega flashbacks to what happened with MBAs around 2010/2013. Same pattern.... everyone had been pushing MBAs as the "good" career path, schools were pumping out grads, and then the music stopped. I watched friends who dropped $150k+ on top MBA programs struggle to land jobs that would let them pay off their loans. The career offices kept pushing the "average starting salary" stats but those numbers were getting propped up by a small number of graduates landing PE/consulting gigs while a much larger group was fighting for corporate roles paying half that. The MBA eventually found a new equilibrium but the "MBA golden age" was over. Starting to feel like we're watching the same movie with tech, the industry isn't dying but the days of "learn to code" being a pretty safe path to upper middle class might very well be ending. As with any concentration, the smartest MBA grads I knew were the ones who treated it as a tool to build actual skills rather than just a credential.
- dhcpserver 2y agoThe same thing happened with law careers earlier. Everyone believed that becoming a lawyer was the golden ticket. Back in the early 2000s, law schools were packed with people pursuing that path. Everyone highlighted the starting salaries of lawyers, but those figures applied mainly to outliers in BigLaw. Many graduates found themselves with $150k in debt, working $60k associate jobs in major cities. It can take a decade or more before you start earning the kind of money you were promised at graduation.
- thw09j9m 2y agoMy thoughts from ~ 6 weeks ago: >> This is the toughest market I've ever seen. I easily made it to on-sites at FAANG a few years ago and now I'm getting resume rejected by no-name startups (and FAANG). The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected. I've since landed one decent offer, but mostly got lucky (the sys design interview was about an obscure optimization problem that I specialized in for years - though I didn't let on that fact) Between that time, I failed multiple interviews (always solving the question, but never quickly or cleanly enough). Companies are incredibly slow to respond back (up to 4 weeks from time of application to first interaction with a recruiter). Some companies are incredibly demanding (recruiter screen -> tech screen -> tech screen -> take-home test -> group discussion about take-home test -> behavioral / culture interview). Don't think it's about race. It's just an employers' market. And if you refuse to jump through the hoops, somebody else will. For reference, the last company on my resume is a top tier company that every recruiter has heard of.
- m_ke 2y agoYeah the process these days is insane. I went through 4 rounds of interviews with one company, did really well and was expecting an offer but they want me to come in for a full day of onsite work mixed in with more technical rounds. I’m interviewing with like 10 companies right now and it feels like a full time job, I have full days of interviews lined up for almost every day in the first 3 weeks on January.
- cloverich 2y agoThis is actually identical to my experience in 2021/2022 when the market was red hot. I literally did treat it as my full time job, failed a lot, but rarely had less than 4 interviews which it seems most of the good companies do.
- 0xfaded 2y ago> the sys design interview was about an obscure optimization problem that I specialized in for years - though I didn't let on that fact Honestly I feel this situation is an invitation/opportunity to show your depth. I had a similar experience where I was asked to implement a box filter, which I did naively, and then asked to do it the clever way. I remembered about Haar classifiers https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/db/d28/tutorial_cascade_classifier.html https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/db/d28/tutorial_cascade_classifi... which solve the same problem, and I was familiar with the OpenCV implementation. I mentioned this and started to write code, but at that point the interviewer was much more interested about why I knew about some obscure old-school opencv method than finishing the coding exercise.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoYes, we reached peak tech employment. The market was flooded with job openings from a decade-plus of endlessly increasing VC funding. So a lot of not-technically-inclined people took bootcamps and entered the job market, and for a while there was enough jobs. But with VC funding slowly drying up, and a shaky economy, all those excess jobs are gone. But there's still a ton of people trying to get the jobs. I have two decades of experience and even I have a really hard time getting an interview. I feel like there's just too many people with my skillset and not that much demand for it [anymore]. Salaries for new jobs have gone down and there's fewer remote positions [thanks, braindead CEOs].
- ethanwillis 2y agoWell the CEOs are telling us there are more jobs than ever and they need the ability to hire more people from abroad to even have a chance at filling them. So are there jobs or not?
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoNo, there are not that many jobs. There is a normal amount of jobs, and there are lot of unskilled workers trying to get those jobs. A large amount of the jobs are being listed for senior level skillset and experience, and there's just not that many of those candidates. It's even harder to find them when hiring managers are awash in unskilled candidates who look similar, with no discernible way to sort them out. So the CEOs are claiming there aren't enough skilled workers, because it's technically true. The main problem is they've raised their standards [for the same wages], there was never that many experts just hanging around looking for jobs, and they shoot themselves in the foot. They could fill positions pretty quickly. But our whole industry is a bad joke. "Highly Skilled" positions, where we don't have any quantifiable standards or qualifications, and we divine candidates from a stack of hundreds of applicants by software scanning pieces of paper for buzzwords. The final irony being these jobs can all be done remote, yet these CEOs claiming there's no candidates are requiring people live close to an office. If you've ever wanted proof that human beings are generally irrational and stupid, look no further.
- rossdavidh 2y agoSo, I must ask for definitions. I found late 2023 and early 2024 very difficult for finding employment (I work as a freelance/consultant/temp programmer), whereas both early 2023 and late 2024 I did get some significant amount. I know others who are white males like me, and they also found late 2023 and early 2024 to be more challenging than lately. I should also mention that as a young man I would apply for any job in my chosen field, whereas now I look for jobs that are not just programming, but the kind of programming I wish to do (for example, in my particular case I don't like front-end and I like machine learning but am turned off by what looks like AI-hype in company descriptions). So, am I finding it harder because I am pickier? Or is it actually harder because my standards are higher, because I am fortunate enough that I can (for now, anyway) afford to be picky? In any case, I found late 2024 to be better than the 12 months before that.
- Havoc 2y agoThink it's a confluence of a couple separate things: * End of ZIRP * Musk's twitter firing spree being watched & emulated by others. i.e. there was rest & vest happening & execs realised some fat can be cut * Bootcamp generation has moved beyond entry level and is now competing with more established players * Entire thing just naturally goes in waves * More fractured/specialised field. Language/Framework/Job description feels like things are more granularly sliced these days * AI whether real or illusionary has some execs focused on things other than "lets hire humans"
- pfdietz 2y ago* End of Moore's Law
- arendtio 2y agoI think your categories ('white male', 'Indian', ...) are a form of racism already. I mean, there are other categories you can use. Outsourcing, offshoring, and nearshoring all describe something similar (cutting costs by replacing the workforce) but do not categorize humans based on racial factors. I understand this is not the core of your question, but I did not want to leave it uncommented because I think it is inappropriate.
- nickpsecurity 2y agoMany companies officially endorse systematic racism under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). They isn’t just trying to exclude white males to hire more of the opposite traits. Many will have support groups for non-whites and non-males for their specific issues, special training that can lead to promotions which whites can’t have, and put out posters or videos displaying non-whites to show how much they care [if you’re not white]. I ran into this quite a few times when looking for AI companies. They often put it prominently in the About Us pages or their annual report. Some organizations were also giving grants or mentoring only to minority members. That DEI makes hiring decisions partly based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. means it shouldn’t surprise you at all that someone mentions it as a hiring factor. If they hired X non-whites, then up to X whites may have been rejected depending on the makeup of the candidate pool. That’s just how systematic racism works. It should be abolished.
- nosefurhairdo 2y agoI'm close with a principal engineering manager at a large tech company. At his level, bonuses are in part determined by hiring minorities (discriminating against whites, East Asians, men), and resumés are sorted by the same category to ensure some minimum of minorities are given an opportunity before a less racially desirable candidate even has a chance of being looked at. IBM Red Hat is being sued for this, having stated workforce diversity goals of 30% female and 30% people of color. Executives have openly stated that bonuses are on the line if you hire too many white men. For the last decade or so we haven't been able to state these things without being accused of racism or sexism. Ironically, my primary concern is that these sorts of policies make the problems of racism and sexism worse. Equality requires that we judge people on their merits.
- Dig1t 2y agoI work at Apple and we have a policy (new in 2024) where we are not allowed to make an offer for a manager position to a candidate unless we have interviewed a PoC or a woman for the roll. The stated goal for this policy is “diverse managers hire diverse teams”. So right off the bat we are discriminating based on race and gender. Look at the published diversity data on the Apple website, the company is now 50% Asian in North America (they stopped publishing the data after 2022 but internally that’s the number now), because it’s cheaper to hire H1B’s and they can’t leave the company. It’s not surprising that Americans are having trouble finding jobs right now, they are being squeezed by both DEI and cheap labor from abroad.
- ajmurmann 2y agoIMO the difference between "interviewed" and "hired" here is crucial. I had a similar rule at my previous job. If anything I felt the risk was that this would be abused to the detriment of the URM candidate. If you have a strong candidate coming through but haven't met the URM interview retirement yet, it's tempting to not look for a "real" candidate but just go through the motions with the next candidate who matches the DEI requs. Fortunately, I can say I'd never have to give in to that temptation but the real loser would be the person who got to waste a ton of time and nervous on an interview for which they were set up to haul from the get go.
- Dig1t 2y agoidk it seems illegal to me.. the civil rights act says in very plain language that it's illegal to discriminate based on immutable characteristics during hiring. Break down a hypothetical scenario: 1. Post a job, anyone can apply. 2. Candidate applies, goes through the hiring process, the team likes them and wants to make an offer. 3. Not a woman or PoC so not allowed to make an offer yet. So at this point lets say you go out and interview a woman or PoC. a. If you like the woman or PoC and want to give them the job, then the first person was discriminated against because if they had been a different race or gender they would have got the job. b. If you don't give them the job then you can check the box saying you interviewed the diverse candidate, but this is at best purely performative because the other outcome was discriminating against the first person. Logically, it is impossible to have this policy and not be breaking both the spirit and letter law in my opinion. Also the implication of "diverse managers hire diverse teams" is that the diverse managers will discriminate based on race and gender.
- BinaryMachine 2y agoYou're definitely not alone. (I am glad you're writing this because I thought I was alone here as well) I am currently applying to ~15 jobs a day starting late Sep till now mostly on Linkedin. I know it might not be the best time to look due to holidays. When wake up the next day finding 3-5 "decided not to move forward" So then I think theres something wrong with my resume? So I update it a little each day, its an unless cycle I have probability done this 50+ times now? Also seeing 100+ job applicants even after the job posting has been up for only a few hours. Also approaching 2 decades of experience, also white American (they always ask on applying). I have a bachelors degree but its in Interactive Media taught myself everything else. I am one month away to moving back home with my brother because I can only afford another one month rent on Credit Card until its maxed out. Free time I just spend it learning learning learning, and an hour gym routine helps with stress. I try not to think about the situation that I am in or the job market. All we can do is try our best everyday, theres only so much we can do and stressing out is the worst thing for the mind/body.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway-100 2y agoSmall startup tech-cofounder here so definitely won’t apply to large companies. Only interviewed candidates sourced through referrals because the risk of a wrong hire is way too high for us. I also noticed a pattern where more senior devs tend to not be as hungry as a a younger dev, and I don’t mean accepting a lower pay, in fact we pay higher salaries for a mid level position. We require (relatively) a lot of customer facing time and product management/discovery activities and may not be everyone cup of tea.
- coding123 2y agoI mentioned a couple years back it looked like this was happening. HN shrugged.
- dddrh 2y agoAdding a topline response echoing the same thing. Been on the job hunt since October 1, and have done hundreds of applications, yet only spoken to 3 companies, and made it past the hiring manager once. I’m a technical product manager with 10+ years and most recently was head of product at a healthtech company. It seems like none of my experience or background matters for the initial screen. The most frustrating part has been spending time to update a resume and a cover letter to get a rapid rejection obviously done via AI. The fastest rejection I’ve received was 2 minutes. It is at the point where the information-asymmetry between company and applicant is so high that I don’t think it is worth the time or effort to craft a customized resume and cover letter to match the job description. Not even with the “help” of LLMs. The promise of Remote hiring now is proving to be a double-edged sword. It can be easier to get hired, but it means competing in an almost global applicant pool. As a way to keep me occupied I’m building a personal tool to journal my work history and use the journal as a source to leverage an LLM to customize my resume and cover letter to a job description that sounds like me. Just need to keep the momentum up for both the continued job hunt and personal projects. Though its starting to wear on me.
- istorical 2y agoHave you tried just saying you're a product manager instead of technical product manager? In my experience small changes in storytelling and self-marketing can create giant shifts in how you are perceived.
- dddrh 2y agoActually yes! In this case it was lazy shorthand. Same result for the job hunt progress but persisting still. I appreciate the feedback greatly. I’m sure there is a way to tell the story better.
- dhcpserver 2y agoDuring Covid, I had many lively debates with my peers about remote jobs. They kept insisting that the "world has changed" and that remote jobs are the future. My anxious self struggled to understand that. I'm good at my job, but I'm not naive. I know I live in a high cost of living market that not everyone wants to be in, so the competition isn't too threatening. But take that away, and as I mentioned, you’re now competing against the entire world. I've worked with talented people in Eastern Europe and Asia who could easily do my job for a quarter of the pay. I really don’t want to compete against that. All the friends who moved their families to farms in Iowa to be near family and enjoy the low cost of living? I’d be terrified that if I ever lost my job, I’d have to search far and wide for one of those scarce remote positions, and there’s no way I’d get my Bay Area salary now. Plus, now that my kids are in local schools in Iowa and my wife is deeply connected with the local extended family, there's no way I could move back to the Bay unscathed.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoAs a white male (I only mention this since you did), I didn't have any trouble finding employment this year. I wrote about my experience here: https://sjer.red/blog/2024/job-hunt/ https://sjer.red/blog/2024/job-hunt/ I do believe the market is pretty bad though, especially for new grads. I don't think it'll ever recover because of AI, and that realistically you'll have to be talented, passionate, or hard-working to work as a software engineer.
- w4ffl35 2y agoGood feedback thanks.
- jokethrowaway 2y agoI know of many hiring manager who hire with recruiters that specialise in "diverse" candidates, where diverse means women and people of color only, so they can have better looking "diversity" stats. They certainly have a preference but this has been going since (at least) 2018 - it was true before the massive layoffs of 2023-24 and the end of ZIRP. What changed recently is that the market is really crap. Incidentally all the people I know looking for a job are white males, but it may just be because they're the majority of people in tech I know anyway. On legality of the above (given I was pretty sure it was illegal): It's legal, because "positive discrimination" is legal in the relevant EU countries (and in the UK).
- graemep 2y agoits not legal n the uk. Quotas in particular are illegal, as is direct discrimination. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/positive-action-in-the-workplace-guidance-for-employers/positive-action-in-the-workplace#what-is-the-difference-between-positive-action-and-positive-discrimination https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/positive-action-i...
- 93po 2y agoYes. I have 15 years experience of mediocre web development, project management, and product management experience. Most of my development work was building the same CRUD apps over and over in greenfield projects and at small scale, so I never really had professional experience to "level up" and be a better candidate as a developer. Obviously in this job market with lots of other unemployed people with a more clearly good track record, it's very difficult for me to get an interview at all. I saw an interesting post on X the other day: someone was saying that when people get a degree in something like... music, and they're bad at playing whatever their chosen instrument is, it's not surprising when they don't find employment. For some reason we do have an expectation that even bad or mediocre programmers will get jobs, which was maybe historically true simply due to the high demand for those skills at all, but maybe we're seeing the shift where it no longer is. I think there's more at play too: many people are more productive in their roles thanks to AI, people are maybe clinging to their jobs more knowing what the job market is like, and companies are probably not spending money like they have been for the past decade due to interesting rates/uncertainty/whatever else. One anecdote I'll add about foreign workers: my last employer was a software agency/consultancy, and they had probably twice as many developers in a country in southeast asia as they did in the US. I am not clear what the root of the issue was, I think it was probably several things, but that employer did struggle a lot with the results and output of the teams in that country, to the point that their entire office in that country closed down and I think the entire team was laid off. I think the problem was a mixture of poor management on the American side, poor hiring practices on the foreign (I don't like that word) side, cultural differences between expectations in work, communication barriers in terms of them understanding the details of the work that needed to be done, and mismanagement on both sides of the ocean causing poor morale. I will add, that agency framed the use of foreign workers as a necessity for cost reasons, which I believe to be true. There was work they did with extremely small margins and even with foreign workers, was often times unprofitable. Small businesses just really do not have the budget for teams of software developers to make custom software, and especially not when the development process is an inefficient as it sometimes was at that agency. disclaimer: really lovely, amazing people all around. great humans. had some understandable flaws. i don't like the use of the word foreign because i don't want to otherize anyone but not sure what other word to use
- diamondfist25 2y agoHate to be political here, but anyone that is on this boat and is left-leaning got a taste of their own medicine
- ipython 2y agoCare to explain? A lot of the reasons posited here involve, for example, Elon firing 70+% of Twitter staff and still having a “functional” site. Elon doesn’t seem to have a particular leftward lean. Covid related stimulus (advocated by those in the left) in fact fueled a lot of the rapid growth in engineering roles in the past four years. We are also locked in with at least the next four years of very right leaning US government, so if you’re a business basing your hiring on the expected “lean” of the government, how exactly is that the lefts fault? Heck the next two years the republicans have the trifecta plus a majority on the Supreme Court.
- Attach6156 2y agoThe explanation is simple: most people on the left love immigration. Well guess what, people on H1Bs are competing for the same tech jobs everyone else is. There is this fallacy (promoted by the tech billionaires) that the import of tech workers is due to a lack of skill in local workers, and this is simply not true (very much the opposite actually), I saw it first hand at every single company I worked at; the real reason is to be able to excerpt as much control over the life of the worker as possible (they cannot switch jobs as easily as a citizen), that's it. You are actually supporting this stance with your argument. When Elon fired a bunch of people at Twitter who prevailed? H1Bs of course... Independently of who is controlling the government something has to be done about it, ideally reforming the H1B program to be for very highly skilled workers (my threshold would be something akin of the knowledge an engineer at ASML/TMSC has) and not random CRUD developers.
- bdangubic 2y agoeven though nothing in america any longer can be apolitical it is unfair to say that people on the left love immigration. more accurate politically would be that people on the right (smartly) realized that it is election-advantageous to make immigration a political issue. hence on the button - several months before every election cycle there goes a caravan of immigrants that all MSM starts following from El Salvador and what not. america needs immigrants, both ones coming through the soutern border as well as those flying in to JFK with the view of Statue of Liberty. both political parties are money-lobby driven and immigrants, both blue and white collar, are good for business.
- irvingprime 2y agoThe longest period of unemployment I've ever experienced ended about 6 months ago. I was unemployed for 11 months. The company that finally hired me was intentionally targeting people with lots of experience. I have that. They also pay less than I used to make but I took it because I needed a job. Previous to that period of unemployment, my resume tended to get noticed. I got interviews from 3 applications out of 5. But this time, it was 3 out of 150. Read that last paragraph again. My resume has not gotten worse. I still have decades of experience, a master's degree and a bunch of patents. That used to count for something. My conclusion is that the market has gotten much worse for people with experience who don't hide being white and male.
- skillissuz 2y ago[flagged]
- melbourne_mat 2y agoMaybe it's a cultural thing but to me this comes across as racist
- wsintra2022 2y agoI think it may be, depends on how much of a sense of humour you have. The offensive part suggesting smoking weed in large amounts can make your eyes look half closed. The punchline being Asians are not white males and Asians also (some of them) have eye shapes that do not look like white males.
- intelVISA 2y agoTaking your conclusion in good faith, would you really want to work in a shop that weighs immutable characteristics over actionable metrics like solving LC hards?
- vbi8iBEX 2y agoyes, because I like food better than principles.
- feznyng 2y agoQuestion for those who lived through it: is this sense that not only is the market over but that it’s permanently over a point of discussion during the dot com crash or 2008? I’ve experienced the former personally but the idea that it’s never going to get better is a little harder to swallow, although that may be pure cope.
- silisili 2y agoI wasn't in programming in the dot com crash, but everything from news media to friends said it was a bubble and fad. It recovered. By 2008ish, maybe before, they were telling us all the jobs would go to India, and aren't coming back. The 2010s proved that wrong. Too much doom and gloom here. I understand why, it sucks losing your job and searching. It'll come roaring back like it always does, especially as rates fall. We haven't even scratched the surface of smart AI application. I can't wait to see what we come up with. I just hope these folks can survive or get by until then.
- ipaddr 2y ago2000 or 2008 didn't feel like it was over. 2000 felt like too far too soon undelivered promises dried up the market. 2008 felt like wall street fraud killed the economy for all. Today we are living in a reality created by FAANGs (and those who copied) who over recruited everyone so that other FAANGs could not get them. Employee count became connected to valuations. Which created insane fake demand which increased graduate numbers and let companies import people. Companies like facebook doubled their staff count in a year and a half during covid lockdowns. Then interest rates went up and companies realized they don't need most people and then AI hit and shifted more budgets. Recover to when? Part of the recovery is happening. Students are choosing other majors. Importing people will probably slow. The ratio of people to jobs is getting slightly better with people leaving the field. As wages and interest rates keep getting lower we'll hit a point where developers will be in demand again but AI might have taken your role by that point. Not to worry new jobs will be created somewhere doing something AI can't.
- skillissuz 2y agoSo much this. I have been watching the bootcamp mouthbreathers give up in droves and the recovery will be apparent when they've capitulated and latch onto their next host (don't forget, in 2006 they were all learning to flip homes or get a realtor license). I despise these imbecils for visiting their chaos and confusion on our industry. The entire time (past 10 years minimum) the relative volume of skilled engineers and the demand for them (do not confuse that with open job postings) has been constant. In my opinion of course.
- phendrenad2 2y agoIf you're good, and you can demonstrate that you're good, you should have no problem finding a job. There are still many more job openings than there are skilled candidates. And I don't think there's any discrimination against white males, that's certainly a popular talking point from the far-right, but it's simply not true.
- dh2022 2y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Care to show some evidence?
- phendrenad2 2y agohttps://www.hrdive.com/news/skills-based-hiring-helping-tech-talent-shortage/734141/ https://www.hrdive.com/news/skills-based-hiring-helping-tech...
- heavymetalpoizn 2y ago[dead]
- LouisSayers 2y agoI live in New Zealand, applied for 5 jobs in March 2024, got 2 offers (Atlassian, small startup - both Aus based remote jobs), the other 3 companies didn't move me past resume. I have a CS degree and over a decade of experience as a full stack dev. Maybe I just got lucky, but there have always been people out there that seem to apply for hundreds of companies and land nothing. I've also helped some of those people land a job. IMO it mostly comes down to understanding and preparing for the interview process, and tailoring yourself for the position you're applying for. Sometimes people also need help with blind spots - little things like correctly referring to technologies in their CV, small talk and being personable etc.
- xandrius 2y agoI do think it heavily depends on what kind of salary you are looking for. Not sure how it is jn NZ but perhaps they pay less than in the US, and hence it's less competitive to remote outsiders?
- LouisSayers 2y agoQuiet possibly, I'm on the equivalent of $90k USD which would be considered as the bottom of the higher (or top mid) salary over here if that makes sense!
- nsfmc 2y agoi suspect that a lot of people applying to a lot of jobs and not hearing back are applying via an inbound webform or even, unknowingly, through an agency or intermediary like Indeed. my experience (on both sides of the hiring process) is that inbound applications are generally considered fairly low-signal unless they are paired with a highly-specific job req or come with a referral attached. i'd be curious to know how you applied to those companies to get such good response rates. as an anecdote, for some jobs i've applied to, i received an internal referral to a specific recruiter and it just never went anywhere (although i could often observe the recruiter looking at my linkedin profile from linkedin's own upgrade promo emails). in many cases, i would have preferred a 5 minute call to see if i was even a good fit so as to cross a job off a list. i'm not anybody special, also degree and over a decade in, but it seems like a market where i could be connected 1-1 to an internal recruiter that is actively filling a role but where on several occasions i was ghosted is just a different sort of environment than what you're describing.
- variadix 2y agoI can’t comment on the current job market, but I was looking for work as a fresh grad in 2021. After applying to 200+ positions I received 5 callbacks, 3 of which were defense contractors. 3.9 GPA in EE at a top 10 state school, 2 internships, several big projects in and outside of school. Mostly applied to RTL and embedded positions, ended up in infosec for various reasons.
- kragen 2y agoRTL: register-transfer level? I didn't realize that was itself a job category!
- ironman1478 2y agoI haven't had a hard time finding employment. I am going to start at a FAANG next week, coming from another FAANG. I work in embedded / hardware. I think what is being asked for is changing and people are being caught flat footed. We don't need more web or backend devs, we have so many of those. The world of embedded can't hire enough because the scope of embedded has increased. It's no longer just writing bare metal C on a tiny microcontroller, it has expanded to writing applications for embedded Linux for custom devices that are more tricked out than desktops 20 years ago. It's easier than ever to build an SoC and a device and so many companies need people to write software for them. I think it's hard to outsource because frequently it requires lab space (unless you're working on pure compute devices) and companies don't want to ship prototypes and devkits overseas. So there are industries that are hiring lots of Americans. Also this might be a hot take, I don't agree with Elon or Vivek's plan to outsource, but I do think tech has done this to itself. Why are so many startups and tech companies so bloated with engineers? I worked at a company that sold VERY complex factory and plant monitoring software to companies around the world. It's engineering team was about 500 people supporting a wide range of products and different levels of the stack. Companies with way less complex software and less software volume have way more bloated engineering orgs and are way less efficient. Because, fundamentally most people are bad at software engineering (which is different from just programming and pure CS), including grads from MIT. A lot of companies are outsourcing because if everybody isn't that great, they might as well pay less for something that isn't good. The companies that have simple products and have crap engineers are the ones outsourcing.
- feznyng 2y agoHow would a junior engineer get into embedded software? Personal hardware projects with esp32s, etc? Seems far more interesting than cobbling together CRUD apps but it seems tough to get into given the experience roles require.
- ironman1478 2y agoHaving a computer engineering degree helps. Outside of the embedded equivalent of CRUD, you'll have to know the details of how a computer works. How memory visibility and synchronization works, what mmio is, basic assembly, interrupt concepts, etc. I'd actually recommend reading a book on operating systems. A lot of embedded devices that are pure compute require knowledge of operating systems because you're basically building software to enable a user to interact with the accelerator or sensor on the device. I'd also learn a tool like yocto or buildroot, both tools for creating Linux images. They're not great tools, but they are widely used in creating embedded Linux images. If you want to solve domain specific issues (like getting into DSP) or doing high speed networking, you have to find an entry level job in that field and have the requisite background. It's hard to do DSP without an EE background for example.
- stouset 2y ago> most of them claim to be white males There’s really no need to call this out repeatedly as if something sinister is happening. Despite ongoing efforts, the overwhelming majority of tech workers are… white males. So yes, the largest number of voices complaining about joblessness are unsurprisingly going to be white males.
- wakawaka28 2y agoTwo things can be true at once. We have a workforce that is mostly white males in a majority-white country and we also have credible reports of anti-white bias in hiring, which is illegal and racist. If people feel that employers who explicitly say they want to hire non-whites ONLY in violation of the law are in fact doing that, why do you feel the need to chime in with attacks on the victims?
- afpx 2y agoNah, there’s definitely racism from asian hiring managers. It’s not totally unexpected, though. Unlike us white males, most of them haven’t been trained from birth to not prefer candidates that look like them. If you disagree though, I challenge you to go on linkedin and randomly choose 10 asian hiring managers from tech companies and then the demographics of the people who work for them.
- vbi8iBEX 2y agoAsking about "white males" because I'm seeing claims that white males are being disproportionately affected. I haven't made the claim myself. I'm a white male so my experiences are based on that demographic.are the majority of tech workers white males? Can you show me stats on this? Is there a site I can view thst shows demographic data?
- ungreased0675 2y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e... Maybe not as comprehensive a stat as we’d like, but here’s one data point. > In 2021, Hispanic, Asian and Black people made up a vast majority of the added workers
- mrayycombi 2y agoMusk wants "hard core" talent, remember Twitter? He wants people hungry, super motivated and, oh yeah, not too expensive. Remember stories of him eating peanut butter sandwiches and sleeping on floors? He's a frugal/cheap guy. There's a shortage of Americans willing to meet Musks "brilliant and cheap" spec. H1bs are cheap(er), hungrier, and sometimes brilliant. And if not brilliant at least "hard core" if required. Since we can't replace Musk with AI yet, we have a "labor shortage" of cheap, hardcore, brilliant talent. Yup.
- katamari-damacy 2y agoone way out is to get good enough with AI as a tech to automate various yet-to-be-automated industries, find customers, get investors, etc... if you try to get a job for 12 months and fail, isn't it better to try another rout? the AI angle is just one of many
- jcalvinowens 2y agoYes, this is what everybody I know is experiencing right now. Caveat lector: This is simply a retelling of my personal experience, YMMV. This is not advice. What has consistently worked for me: I stopped applying for jobs, and redirected all that effort into creating and publishing open source projects that demonstrate competence in the areas of work I want. And, just as importantly, I contribute to big established open source projects in those areas too. I did not apply for my current job (started 6 months ago): they solicited me, based on my open source work. All the best jobs I've had have been like that, this is the 3rd time it worked. When I'm unemployed, I only apply for jobs I actually want, typically spending an hour each on 0-2 extremely targeted applications per week. But I treat churning out new open source stuff as my full time job until somebody notices. In addition to successfully landing me three great jobs over the past decade, this approach has made me a much much better programmer. Also, I strongly believe spending hours a day writing new code will enhance your ability to pass technical interviews much more than gamified garbage like leetcode. A huge part of making this work is not living a typical valley lifestyle: I plan my life around the median national salary for a software engineer, and when I'm making more than that it all goes straight into my savings. In the bay, that requires living frugally (by bay standards...), but I can't even begin to put into words how grateful I am to past-decade-me for living like that and giving today-me the freedom to turn down the bad jobs and wait for the good ones. Obviously, I don't have children. I do a lot more open source than a typical programmer in the valley, but I don't think I'm "exceptional" in any sense: you just have to put in the work. I do feel like I was very lucky to start my career in an extremely open-source-centric role, and in fairness that gives me a leg up here which I am probably inclined to underestimate.
- miohtama 2y agoI have been hiring some 30 Devs over the years and the most important positive factor is open source contributions. It's a public trac record that you cannot fake. It also shows you can communicate and work with others. You can also get good hires and open positions thru community friends. Invest in community and community invests in you.
- pelagic_sky 2y agoI’m in UX with 20+ years of experience, including FAANG. I’ve been looking for new opportunities for a majority of the year and I have found that publishing blogs and case studies gets me emails from recruiters. If I try to reach out, 9 times out of 10 I get no response.
- _l7dh 2y agoGreat comments and insights. Thanks to everybody for being constructive. I am also going through the same situation, but in Europe. Despite having a PhD in Machine Learning, somehow I cannot even get to the interviews. I am suspecting it might stupidly have to do with my LaTeX-generated CV which gets desk-rejected by badly design CV screening systems… anyone else sharing my suspicion?
- w4ffl35 2y agoThis has been my problem as well. I didn't want to say too much in the original post as I wanted to see if others would say the same. I've seen a few comments mentioning this. I noticed the inability to get interviews right around when chatgpt dropped, so I think it might be AI screening related.
- jamal-kumar 2y agoOh yeah actually because they can't parse it automatically as easily as a word document or whatever, the form of a pdf is too ambiguous to easily parse from what I understand, so you don't even pass the robot. Hiring management is like a secretarial job mostly. Especially in the americas I find this is the case, that you might not even have someone with your skillset looking at your resume before it gets passed on to someone who does. I've seen the worst people hired through procedures like that hahaha It's awful that this is the case but you really just want to make it a word document because of administration staff and software who are tasked with filtering things based on really the most arbitrary of reasons, but that's how much of the business world works because Microsoft went and built everything so hard around office collaboration at the expense of stuff like security or open standards There may also for security reasons be policies against opening or even receiving PDF attachments in email.
- quanto 2y agoPlease allow me to offer some color from the other side of the table. My colleagues and I are/were/have been hiring managers for the past decade or so. Our recent observations regarding the job market: 1. Incumbent programmers became more productive thanks to GPTs. A shop stopped hiring for junior, mid-career positions. 2. Other shops (small and medium) take it further and layoff 10% of the labor, mostly junior guys, to be replaced with GPTs. 3. Another shop (recognizable name in HN) made some offers to strong candidates, and they took the offers without negotiation. Quite unusual in the light of the past decade. 4. The ones that I wanted to hire or got hired at other shops: the going total comp was 500k - 1.5m USD/annum at senior or staff level. And this range applied to outside the bay area as well. Talking to some headhunters -- we do see a strong hiring market at the senior level or niche markets (e.g. low latency numerical systems), but the junior levels are definitely seeing a transition. My (very obvious now) running hypothesis is that GPT is influencing the market. I personally haven't observed any systematic or overt racism implied by OP; I do not recall race explicitly coming up in any of the discussions, but yes there is a large pool of foreign-born engineers who are willing to take a lower pay (who are just as productive, especially with GPT), so perhaps this is what the OP's circle is observing. On a related note, I read an early research showing the impact of GPT on customer service staff productivity. GPT greatly improved the new/bottom performers but did not impact senior/top performers; a result that fits my intuition of how GPT works. I believe that a similar thing is happening at an industrial scale in tech. I make no moral judgement here. At least on my end, the market is simply acting in line with supply and demand. Nevertheless, my sympathies for those in an unsuccessful quest.
- thrwythrwythrwy 2y agoAnother piece of anecdata: a major bank and credit card issuer on the East Coast has started staffing in Mexico. You’ve definitely heard of them or even actually use their services if you’re American. They led a multi-year long tech “transformation” for which they hired heavily, especially new CS graduates. That’s now been scaled back considerably, and it’s H1B contractors as far as the eye can see. The irony is that the Indian H1Bs that undercut the local workforce are now being undercut themselves by Mexican contractors.
- blased 2y agoYup at the epicenter of this one, it’s a shitshow honestly.
- dhcpserver 2y agoA race to the bottom for sure.
- mmmmmbop 2y agoTo answer your question: No, I did not struggle to find employment. I'm at a FAANG right now, but was shopping around last year for offers, and got decent offers from the likes of Snowflake and Uber. Ended up not taking them because I'm happy where I'm at. I took a look at your LinkedIn. If I were a hiring manager, I'd be concerned that in the last 8 years you mostly stayed at each company for a year or less and that your longest tenure was 2 years. That would most likely make me pass on your resume.
- cloverich 2y agoWhat would good tenure ranges look like to you? I feel 3 is the magic number, and 7 is too long (dep. on many factors of course) but feel this is under discussed. Personally id have questions about anything sub 2, but seeing 2 or more 3s would be enough for me to ignore a short stint or two.
- xenity7 2y agoWhy would a long tenure be a problem?
- janstice 2y agoIt’s harder to demonstrate growth & development in the same job for 7 years - if you have a couple of job changes it makes a more natural narrative of how you are professionally developing - not impossible at a single org, but needs a bit more of a story of projects you delivered and how you are not the same person as 7 years ago.
- InvOfSmallC 2y agoI don't think it's a problem per say but if same company and no role change means I'm hiring someone who doesn't like changes which in certain cases it's ok in certain cases not what someone is looking for. I don't think it's right or wrong without the context of the hiring manager.
- vbi8iBEX 2y agoSo far it seems that hiring managers are the problem.
- aip4aileiPhi 2y agoI'll add my sob story to the pile for the sake of a data point. Warning this story contains racial identity. White male, 10 yoe, worked at FAANG and many more. I was laid off and remained unemployed for over a year. I only have my new job thanks to nepotism - or referral, if you prefer to be politically correct. 2021 - I land a new job as a senior dev at a startup with a huge salary (200k) thanks to the hiring surge. Things are good, we're all getting along, but my Indian male tech lead confides in me that he's upset that I'm paid as much as he is - he's been with the company longer, and he implies that he works harder. I encourage him to pursue a raise with management, but we maintain a good relationship, I would say friends even. Fast forward 2 years - My skills are generally recognized by everyone, from peers, to the engineering director, even the VP - everyone has seen what I can do, and they trust and respect me to do good work. Then one day, things aren't so good - I have some home life drama and I drop the ball at work. Meanwhile, my tech lead is stressed out for his own reasons, but its a perfect storm and things boil over. He writes a lengthy (angry) email complaining to management about me, tearing me to shreds. I'm stunned and try to defend myself, some people go to bat for me, but its Dec 2022 and that email puts me on the short list when the layoff wave strikes - I'm out of work. Its months of grinding and interviewing - I finally get an offer but my mental health is in a bad place so I turn it down. I'm still feeling raw and betrayed and I'm just wondering what the fuck is the point of it all. I take some more time, then start interviewing again, but things go from bad to worse in the job market. I succeed in a couple of on-sites but still lose out to other candidates. By a stroke of luck, I connect with an old acquaintance who was willing to advocate for me and get my resume to the top of the pile. I do the whole song and dance and land the job - that brings me to today. The whole experience has left me with a bitter and jaded opinion of this industry, and work in general. I now consider this industry a joke. I don't enjoy programming anymore, I don't think there are any tech products that make the world a better place - any that were decent continue to enshitify - and to be honest I'm wary of non-americans going out of there way to undermine me - likely fueled by their own fears and anxiety of winding up in the same position, but with more to lose. Nonetheless, I wasn't aware that they harbored such resentment against americans, and I won't be forgetting it anytime soon. And congrats to CEOs who once again have us fighting amongst ourselves - you've made the world a worse place and got rich doing it. Great job.
- sotix 2y agoI’m approaching a year of unemployment, although I took a deliberate four month break. Don’t have a CS degree but am a CPA. Have been primarily targeting accounting and fintech companies, but I’m getting passed up for software engineers with zero accounting knowledge but much more dev experience. It’s been tough, but I’m hoping it will get better in January. I have to at least hope because I really need to get a job ASAP.
- geor9e 2y agoI remember in the early 2000s, computer science was not a very attractive field. The headlines were saying the jobs would go to India. People weren't predicting that in the 2010s, demand would get so high that people would switch careers to do a 3 month boot camp (or equivalent self-study) and then making six figures remotely. To the people who got non-software stem degrees, and went into a stem career, the world of software looked like an alternative reality. Imagine a 3 month bootcamp to become a structural engineer or chemical engineer. To stem folks outside of the software world, the bar being raised feels like a return to normalcy. A lot of the mundane work you used to need an army of coders for is now doable with an LLM in cursor/vs code. Most stem majors take at least one coding class in college, but didn't have the patience to really get into it, but AI has opened that door. I don't want to sound callous or unempathetic, but a chunk of software workers no longer being unemployable makes total sense to those outside the software world. But, give it a few years, surprises often occur, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's another massive software hiring wave.
- didgetmaster 2y agoPerhaps a better question is: For those who have recently found new employment; how much trouble did you have to go through in order to land the job?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jelly-filled 2y agoI got laid off from Amazon and it took me around 4 months to finally land a job last summer. I did a shotgun approach to applications and make track. I completed 400 applications but only interviewed for 12 companies before getting an offer. I'm in a similar situation, I do not have a degree but have around a decade of professional experience. I did recently talk to our tech recruiter and he said we average about 1k applicants a day in each job post and about 95% of them are AI generated slop resumes and his leadership wants him to review every application.
- md_ayaz 2y agoI got laid in June and was unemployed for 2 months. I'm from Bengaluru, India. Job market here is really bad. There are companies from USA that are opening offices India but the no openings are less than the job seekers. I have friends who are unemployed for 6 months or more. Companies don't want to match previous compensation. They want candidates at the lowest price and best skills. There is a leetcode inflation and getting interviews is the most challenging part.
- gloosx 2y agoThe remote work culture won, as well as capitalism. Who wanna pay a local worker 100k/year if a remote worker from small country can do the same job for half of that? I'm almost decade in the field and I'm that worker who is ready to take the half because this is enough in my country. Of course I would be considered poor in US, but here I am rich, and the hiring dynamic is pretty clear, if you want to compete on this market you need to lower your expectations.
- finding_nemo55 2y agoAgree the rate of top US companies hiring foreign tech workers has massively increased in the past decade. But no, its not at the expense of US citizen employees. I work at a FAANG (5+ years at one, 10_+ years in other big companies). We are actively hiring great talent. The majority is white males, because...statistics. HR recruiters try to serve us a diverse pool of resumes/candidates to screen but its actually hard to find enough to fill all the roles we're hiring for (in cloud computing). Results in teams of mainly white males. Hopefully your 'anecdotal experiences shared online' are just a subset of the few that don't make it past an initial screen vs. the majority that do.
- w4ffl35 2y agoI believe much of what i see online is politically motivated. I'm looking for insider info and personal experiences so this is good feedback, thanks.
- devops99 2y ago[flagged]
- namaria 2y agoEmployment is over. It will only erode further from this point on. It will become a club for well connected people and prime corporate candidates. We need to take employment back on our hands and build small community business.
- TypingOutBugs 2y agoI haven’t found it harder than any other time since 2014 to be honest. In Sweden now, previously Palo Alto, previously Oxford/London, but remote since 2018. The only thing that might be niche in my position is I focus on SDET contract roles while having a general dev background? I moved into SDET work originally to join a company that used Haskell because I couldn’t get a dev role there, and enjoyed it so stayed in the domain. Ends up it’s been fairly easy to find work ever since!
- InvOfSmallC 2y agoNo it's not just you. There is a focus in recovering from post pandemic therefore the marching order is to hire only in India in the case of company as a low cost solution. But I just did an interview in another company and in their case is also low cost but EU. So yeah. That's the song playing right now.
- JustExAWS 2y agoYou had me until you said “white males”. No evil corporations are not inspiring to oppress the White male. What skills do you have to make you competitive in a saturated market? Do you really think greedy corporations who are only out to make a profit are going to go out of their way to hire someone less qualified to oppress White men?
- w4ffl35 2y ago[flagged]
- compiler-devel 2y agoMany recruiters continue to reach out to me on LinkedIn mostly, including FAANG companies. All of the positions are either a 3-2 hybrid or completely on-site. In such cases, these companies want to phone screen and have the first round technical interview via Zoom or something. I've been telling the recruiter that, unless the company allows fully-remote work, I will not allow for a remote interview; however I am happy to interview so long as the entire process is on-site. That includes everything that would normally be done remote, such as the initial phone screen. I'm tired of companies (think of some well-known ones) having it both ways: remote interviews are OK for them but not remote work. If enough smart, technical people told these companies "no, I won't allow you to conduct a remote interview for a non-remote position" then things may change.
- JustExAWS 2y agoWell recruiters are idiots for the most part: 1. I had a recruiter from Amazon reach out to me about “exciting opportunities” as an SDE on LinkedIn. The issue was that my profile showed that I was already working at AWS. 2. A recruiter from Google reached out to me about an Engineering Manager position. Not only did I not have any management experience on my profile, my current position then was in the consulting department (full time) at AWS - it wasn’t even officially software development 3. A recruiter from Meta reached out to me about a senior software engineer position in AI. Again, my profile clearly showed a bunch of no name CRUD developer jobs and then working in consulting Recruiter outreach is no indication of careful targeted outreach
- compiler-devel 2y agoRecruiters, in my case, have either been contractors or employees of the companies for which they're hiring. In the latter case, they're better prepared than those of the former.
- cereal_cable 2y agoI would only assume the other side of this entire conversation, from the recruiters view is that it is also a numbers game. Recruiters are effectively sales jobs just a different contract to close on. Get enough leads and eventually they close. I'd expect that don't care if the resumes are perfect. There's very little lost for being wrong.
- JustExAWS 2y agoYou had me until you said “white males”. No evil corporations are not inspiring to oppress the White male. What skills do you have to make you competitive in a saturated market? Do you really think corporations are going to hire less qualified minorities if it impacts their bottom line?
- gremlinsinc 2y agoSame situation. So I'm going back to marketing (what I did in 2010 before dev). I'm deciding to start a digital agency with my target niche being drone operators. I'm working on the best model like a productized service or revenue share agreement etc... my primary service is cold-emailing mixed with online presence and branding. Cold-emailing doesn't really fly if your business doesn't at least seem legit and have a website etc .. I thought about starting a drone company myself doing aerial surveys but figure I can get a lot of experience around the industry by servicing existing drone operators and maybe someday I'll start my own drone business as well. email in profile if anyone has referrals I could really use them. Also I can help with cold-emailing campaigns for other industries and niches, that's just my primary target.
- kypro 2y agoI'm from the UK and almost everyone I know is finding it hard to get work in tech right now. There's also a lot of strange stuff going on in hiring here (especially for remote roles). There's a huge number of what appear to be fake applicants who when interviewed appear to be based on India for remote roles (bad internet connection, very poor English, unusual decoration for a British home or use of background, strange background noises). While these people can generally provide an ID of someone based in the UK and who has a legal right to work, my assumption is that they are not actually that individual. In non-remote hiring there's been an explosion in the numbers of boot-camp devs applying for positions which is making it difficult to find good developers between weeds of applicants. The average developer role might get 300+ applications when 5-10 years ago that might have been 10-20. I've also noticed a huge increase in companies filling underpaid positions by importing talent from abroad (generally from India). I used to work in the public sector and this seems to have been an increasingly common practice over the last few years. This may be because the public sector has found it hard to compete with private sector tech salaries and with the boom in migration in recent years they have started to turn to foreign talent as a way to fill roles where they're offering below-market-rate salaries (although I'm sure they'll claim there's a shortage of British people applying for these positions but we know that's salary related). I think all of this combined along with the tech slowdown and economic stagnation in the UK has basically created a toxic combination in which it's very hard for UK tech workers to find work. And because I know people will accuse me of xenophobia for what I'm saying here to be clear, I'm not suggesting any of this is bad or the fault of foreign workers. My family are working class and have had to compete with foreign labourers for many many years now. Many middle-class people like myself were quick to agree this was good for the economy and suggesting that it was simply that British workers were too lazy and didn't want to do jobs like clean toilets (well, except my mum I guess). So honestly if anything I think it's good that this trend is now hitting middle-class knowledge workers because perhaps now there will be a discussion about whether countries like the UK should be thought of primarily as economic zones in which its population are simply economic units which can be exchanged with economic units from other nations when it makes sense for businesses do so. Or whether alternatively the UK is nation which owes its best opportunities to its own citizens first, rather than offering them to a global labour pool (even if this is better for business and corporate profits).
- rustcleaner 2y agoI've been pretty much locked out for years. Been a graveyard mall cop because if I am going to be paid shit, I ain't even barely pretending to work lol.
- chadQuinlan 2y agoI'm a techie with a Fortune 10, and have helped on the recruiting side of the house. I've been told very clearly, with slideshows confirming, that non-DEI applicants need not apply. There's <10% hiring quota that they could fit. All our new hires without an incredibly strong in-team reference are H1B people who are incredibly incompetent.
- mindaika 2y agoThat’s consistent with my experience: 4 years at a company doing a nonprofit tech job I cared about. Got replaced with 2 Indian hires, neither of whom had any real skill or industry knowledge. I have two CS degrees from accredited US colleges.
- patterner 2y agowithout job for many many months. most companies don't even answer. 20 years of experience => too old
- tmaly 2y agoI am surprised I am not seeing the obvious in the comments. When ever the market is this bad, it usually indicates we are in a recession. The government numbers are just a lagging indicator.
- designer212 2y ago[dead]
- fluxthedev 2y agoI was laid off in May from my consulting firm of 3.5 years and I still don't have a job. Probably applied to over 200+ jobs and haven't even got an interview. I have 10 years of experience in front-end development with a hint of full stack. Before this year, the longest time it took me to snag a job was 2-3 months. Curious, what is everyone doing for income if they cant get a CS job? I need something :(
- enrio2000 2y agoa new normal is upon us, unfortunatelly
- dragonshed 2y agoYou are not alone. I'm also just shy of 2 decades of experience, and have had extreme difficulty. My last salary was as a contractor for a 10 month project, which ended Dec 2019. Then came a divorce, the covid lockdown, and a horrendously difficult bout with depression. I've moved back home, and have been looking for work in earnest for the last two years. I've finally had some nibbles with freelance, but interviews for salary positions are still few and far between, and even then solid, successful interviews have not gone in my favor. For comparison, in 2013 I was poached after a recruiter saw my linkedin profile, and given an offer I couldn't pass up.
- dangerPikaPika 2y agoOver the past 2 years, my company has laid off over 70% of the US based engineers. Only, 20-30 are left. Many of those positions were "re-structured", and re-hired in Eastern Europe. As an engineering manager, my job was not cut, but if I leave they will re-hire my position in Europe. Everyone in the US who managed to get another job, the replacement req was not filled in the US. The engineering office in the US was shutdown, and the remaining folks mostly work from home.
- filipponeri 2y agoThanks a lot for the useful comments and for starting this thread. It would be helpful when one is talking about a job to add the salary range. It makes a huge difference speculating about the success or un-success of getting a job in the 30K Euro range or in the 150K USD. So what kind (salary range) of jobs have you successfully applied recently?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]