Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad? I haven’t been job hunting in a while, but I’ve noticed many of my friends and family struggling just to land interviews. Most are well-qualified and can easily pass initial phone screenings, yet they face challenges in progressing further or even securing a first meeting. Previously, my LinkedIn profile used to be flooded with job offers, but now it’s nearly silent. It seems this trend isn’t limited to software jobs alone. What are your thoughts on this? |
One thing that does not help was a string of startups I worked for which all eventually ran out of funding, so I have like four companies in four years. Also, no thanks to Patreon, who hired me to do one thing, went through a bunch of managers and could never get the ball rolling, then laid off a bunch of people nine months later. really hard to explain to a hiring manager without sounding like I'm mad and resentful. Because I'm mad and resentful.
Picking up odd jobs here and there. Small part time gigs, some substitute teaching, bar-backing and construction work.
Was in the same boat.Did the audio-to-text transcribing gig on amazon mturk. It was a tossup between that & odd jobs at Walmart at that time. Recessions in usa is pretty brutal.
If you are so inclined, I suggest getting a cert & then hitting the shady indian outfits. They always have jobs so long as you have a recent cert. Can be anything - cert in GCP, or AWS or some cloud infra work will do. You have to study...but you have the time.
Large companies outsourced to Indian companies like TCS, WIPRO, Infosys, CTS, etc. The latter wants to fill some positions onsite; here, TCS, et al source resumes from these 'shady Indian outfits'.
Also another phenomenon I observed: companies want presence during the US day time, so they outsourced to companies in Brazil and other South American countries. A friend's been out of job for a year, and reached out to an ex-manager at a tech company owned by a PE firm. The manager is willing hire him through the outsourcing company but for South American wages: this company pays $60 per hour to the outsourcing partner, who takes 30% cut. So, that is about $42 per hour on 1099, without any benefits. And this contract gig may last for four months.
Welcome to the new world, where we see three classes of techies: (a) those who work for FAANG and other elite companies/firms (b) those who work for non-elite companies (c) contract work force, whose contracts last for three to six months.
Just a suggestion. It may instead be preferable to put a `Other Work Experience` section with a bullet point highlighting either tech skills or domain or a mix with the duration.
``` Java, J2EE, .NET
Various Companies
mm/dd/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy
Enterprise app development
- Design and implement various travel, finance applications/modules ```
edit: formatting
Also, work on your narrative for those startups / patreon... "I learnt a lot in a short time" or "they were having financial troubles so they had to lay off some of their best people", or something not mad and resentful.
1. There's no available headcount. No one is leaving since there are no opportunities elsewhere. Especially those on visas.
2. When we do have headcount, we get 1000 resumes within an hour or two. We also have a stack of referrals to get through first. A lot of these resumes are experienced folks with backgrounds in FAANG.
3. Supply remains high (100k CS undergrads every year including global supply) whereas innovation is low.
places like the GOOG are so far out there in terms of tooling and approaches (and size, and bureaucracy, etc.) that you end up with a hire who is damn good at whatever unique internal tooling and job sets are, but can't handle anything else.
they'll expect 250k at minimum, get surly when they don't get it, constantly look to jump or climb, and won't jive with the culture, esp. once that's still using a lot of the more basic approaches that are more common in larger, non-STEM enterprise orgs.
inevitably these guys jump in 1.5 years or less, and achieve nothing of note in that time, except harping on how great tool X is at Meta, or how we did Y at the GOOG and everyone else should. or some sort of PTSD from working at Amazon.
after a couple rounds of getting burned by people with amazing resumes we are now weary of the FAANG pedigree.
Anecdotally I've gotten a fair few more job interviews in the last month or so than I did when still at my previous company, and seems recruiters are reaching out a bit more than they did back then as well.
But it's still really bad for anyone that's not a senior, especially anyone who hasn't been a senior at a large tech company. I often look on LinkedIn and Glassdoor and other such sites for jobs, and whenever I end up on the home page feed, there's always at least a few very popular posts from people lamenting how bad the market/search is. Those posts are filled with comments from people saying it's been weeks/months of effort to get anything, including from those in the tech industry.
And heck, I've even seen depressing stories pop up all the time outside of job boards and related sites too. Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon... they've all got a lot of people who seem to be in serious trouble right now, and in pretty much every industry under the sun.
It definitely feels bad, especially when people I know with a lot of experience are struggling to even get interviews. We're talking senior devs, team leads, managers, etc. All people that I feel should be getting offers left, right and centre, yet are struggling to get anywhere.
Makes me rather worried as someone who is by default unlikely to have much of a personal network, and who has basically negative charisma.
Key driving factors are people who have been laid off working to find positions against the backdrop of many tech companies not adding headcount right now. Additionally the decade+ long messaging campaigns of "CS is going to be the most in-demand major forever etc etc" have now materialized into a steady supply of CS grads every year.
I'm fortunate to be interviewing for a role at a big tech company right now (arguably the most desirable tech employer rn outside of MANGA) and the recruiters have told me that they get almost 1000 applications for every role posted and are basically exclusively hiring from referrals. I imagine this is exacerbated by people using llm scraping bots to automatically submit applications.
With all that said, anecdotally I'm seeing cold approaches from recruiters tick up. 6 months ago my linkedin/email were radio silent, but I've had ~10 people reach out in the last 2 months or so.
maybe they were talking about the dot-com crash several years earlier?
The worst of 2008 started in October of that year though … tick tock ?
Can confirm. I nowadays receive mostly messages from people who are looking for a job and curious if our team is hiring. Though it is mostly entry-level candidates (fresh grads, people who have completed bootcamps, etc.), which probably tells something about the job market.
HRs occasionally reach out to me but only to try to sell devs. So it looks like nobody's hiring and everyone is desperately looking for a job. Or maybe it's just LinkedIn is dead and people use other channels to find opportunities.
only reason i still have it is essentially as a social proof to any HR person looking me up.
No one’s interested in taking on anyone at recent grad / entry-level. Not sure what to do.
This means they now need to crank out a working product as quickly as possible, and that means hiring only seasoned seniors with an impressive track record.
Previously, they could have gotten away with having no product at all (all while hiring as no tomorrow, just to pump up their valuation). But those days are gone with the low interest rates.
I’m sorry founders, but equity isn’t going to pay off my student loans!
Granted, I work for a small company doing things that may be considered boring and maybe people are looking elsewhere.
I would be curious to know if that feels like the case for other companies too.
There are many people "on the market" who are either A) employed but looking for something better or B) not interested in taking a lower salary than their previous job.
Salaries skyrocketed in 2021 (along with prices for houses, groceries, etc), and there are going to be a lot of potential candidates who are anchoring on those wages as their expectation for next role.
It's definitely still a tough market, but I don't know anyone good who was laid off and then stayed unemployed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493049
https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1fbhap7/sec...
Have been doing contract work - currently doing AI engineering
You're good, then. FTE is way worse than that.
So many places looking for kitchen staff, waiters, carers etc. Might just be that I've been in smaller towns with leaner recruitment pools, but it's been striking.
But tbh yes, it seems job postings for software jobs are the lowest in 4 years, almost as low as the dip that occurred just after the pandemic. The COVID job boom was clearly temporary and is now being massively offset by AI
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&he...
It's over. Best alpha for people who aren't being flooded rn is to just start their own company while applying in the background via AI so it doesn't waste their time. All their applications are being culled via AI anyway so it's fair.
Plus, interviews have become really intense. I recently had an interview (the first one, "HR") that consisted of me talking about myself and my experience for 10 minutes, without any questions from the interviewer, and then it went straight into a coding challenge (a change-making problem, which I couldn’t finish in time).
Note: I really like Clojure and looking to invest time in it but I am scared it will not make me attractive to employers.
The only two software people I know who lost jobs this year are now employed again.
I was on the market a few months ago. It was fine. Worse than 2021 but better than 2020 and 2019 (I had the same level on my resume in 2020 and 2021).
- Companies over-hired during the COVID boom and don't need to hire as much because they still have those people. It's like they did all of their hiring for a few years ahead of time.
- Interest rates are still the highest in a long time. Tech hiring is disproportionately affected by this.
You can throw in offshoring of jobs if you'd like (I would still put that ahead of any impact AI has had).
1) Tech hasn't really innovated since the smart phone era. VR and web3 didn't work out. All the covid B2C subscription stuff didn't work out. Big data and SaaS only partially worked out. AI is pretty transparently a pump and not many people are investing in headcount for it.
2) Interest rates raise the risk-free rate of return so there's less impetus to dump money into speculative investments in chase of yield. This affects startups but less so established companies who don't need to raise.
3) There's a massive offshoring push right now. Bigger than I've seen since the early 2000s. Lots of organizations are making it basically impossible to open a req in a western office while also actively moving roles offshore.
4) There's a big push from the ownership/investor class for labor discipline. There's a feeling that industry workers got too comfortable during the Covid boom and started making demands.
5) People actually getting displaced by AI is marginal to non-existent as far as I've seen, but I've seen plenty of managers using it as an excuse for workforce reduction "we're going to fire 10 percent of you because you should all be using AI to be more productive."
Is there a good phrase for people that make sweeping definitive statements like this with fairly tepid evidence?
> Almost everything that needs to be built digitally, has been built
If 0.01% of the tech jobs use clojure and 0.005% of developers are looking for a clojure job that would still be a great position for the few thousands of clojure programmers.
In my experience, seasoned seniors are expensive to get and bring unnecessary conflicts and issues to startups lifecycle.
Until startup has started to actually scale they definitely shouldn't hire seniors with a lot of experience.
Multiply this happening all over the entirety of industry right now.
Tech stopped innovating because they stopped training developers. They attempted to turn developers into plug and play commodities via open source and large frameworks. It spectacularly backfired over the course of about 15 years.
So you have a fleet of developers utterly reliant on colossal tech stacks that cannot pivot and otherwise cannot program. Not only do the people cost more over time but the products became insanely large slow never ending debt machines.
Now the game is to off set those super expensive shitty developers with AI. It’s probably going to work because the code is was so bad and AI is already doing a better job with the framework nonsense. The problem there is that it will be bots writing bad software, possibly better than the people but still bad, talk to other bots.
Most of the previous innovators and wannabes of 15 years ago (HN users) are still alive and should be eager to innovate now that the market and audience is so much bigger. But we all got too domesticated by big tech. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta revenue is money lost by millions of developers.
As far as "too comfortable," absolutely. Those "follow me for my day at X" videos drive everyone insane. Workers insisting on remote. Multiple remote jobs. The fact that people who had it pretty good weren't satisfied and insisted on posting all of this publicly, embarrassing their employers, making work look more like a spa or daycare -- all you can say to them is, you did this to yourself.
This is it, basically. COVID showed the world that a whole lotta things could be remote. Industries that might have balked at the idea 5 years ago are now onboard.
Automation and AI aren't helping, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to 120k new CS grads a year -- on top of outsourcing.
- Easier to get a job as a contractor (college degrees and certification standards are relaxed) - Pays a lot more - Skips all the happy horseshit - Treated like an adult
Sometimes FTE can be good but by default it is a bad deal for most.
As far as pay goes, I don’t find many are making much more than faang pay. Most are making okay money but spending a lot of unpaid time on networking. I feel like the people I know who speak the most about contract work are those who are actually running contracting firms (not doing any work themselves), were underpaid and are now getting at market rate comparable to other FTE, and people not in the US where contract work is more typical.
One guy I know runs two contracts at once. One of them ends...no big deal.
I believe you that the contractor rate can pay substantially more than salaries but does it make up for the 100k, 200k, or more in stock each year a FTE might get at a really good tech company?
