4 ms·

I don't live in the Valley but I have been wondering how engineers are going to cope when the supply-demand ratio changes in favour of employers. With the spat

by jarym 6y ago

I don't live in the Valley but I have been wondering how engineers are going to cope when the supply-demand ratio changes in favour of employers. With the spate of SV layoffs I think we are about to head into challenging times. Now is the time to:- - Get your resume up-to-date - Keep on top of friends/ex-colleagues who are at other companies still hiring - Be ready (to move out of state, start your own gig, etc.)

gfodor 6y ago
Why do you think the demand for programmers is going to decrease?
- 5986043handy 6y ago
  It may not, but the effective supply will increase due to remote work's acceptance
- casefields 6y ago
  It's the supply you need to worry. When Gates and his ilk talk about an engineer shortage, it's baloney. Same thing going on in the trucking industry. There's a shortage of cheap engineers, which getting everyone and your mom into coding, will help alleviate.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > which getting everyone and your mom into coding Are any of them any good?
  - theredbox 6y ago
    The problem is the delusion in the valley. Not everything is a tech problem and not everyone is a tech company. I am sorry but Uber is just a glorified taxi middleman and I have seen a good enough alternatives in some local markets that blew Uber out of the water. What does Uber bring to the table if they cant even win in some super small countries?
- higeorge13 6y ago
  I work in a HR software company offering its services worldwide and i can definitely say that we have witnessed a posting/hiring freeze during March and April. Software/IT was among the sectors taking a hit, and IT jobs related to ML, data analysts, support, etc. Also Europe is a different story than US. May shows a steady increase in postings and hires, still not close to the pre-covid levels, but it will probably get better as soon as countries start operating "normally" again.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I am not in the valley, but I have seen postings dramatically increase for software engineers where I am (Canada). Businesses are desperate to move as much as possible to technology so they can continue operations. The high salary bonanza may be over, but work still seems plentiful. This kind of recession plays to our skills.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
This is good advice regardless of the time. But this post made me realize that for the past 10+11 years we've had nothing but boom times in the software dev world and a lot of developers have never experienced anything but good times. Even the Great Recession didn't hurt programmers that bad IMO. The .com bust was really the last time there was a huge wave of layoffs in the software industry. I'm glad I was able to go through that early in my career to get perspective. And honestly, at the end of the day I think it was a good thing. It flushed out most the people who didn't give 2 shits about software but saw it as the place to get money. Perhaps another downturn like that is needed.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I’ll never forget going on a test drive at a buy-here/pay-here used car lot in 2002 or 2003 and casually asking the salesperson how long they’d been doing it. “I did it for about 10 years, then I took a couple years off to work as a programmer, then got back into selling cars about 2 years ago...” The industry was snapping up anyone who could spell computer back in the late 90s. It seems less excessive than that in the current/just ended boom.
schoolornot 6y ago
Keeping a diversified skillset so that you can reinvent yourself was the best advice I got 10 years ago.
alfalfasprout 6y ago
The reality is there are a large number of engineers that have enjoyed sky-high comp without having particularly good or difficult to acquire skills. The number of engineers that know how to write a basic java or ruby/node/go web service, some frontend, and basics of using a RDBMS getting half a mil TC is quite high in the bay. However, they lack the background to really advance a company's technical direction, reduce major inefficiencies, or handle problems of scale in a rigorous manner. It's a trend I see having interacted with engineers of all levels at a large number of silicon valley companies. With the era of kubernetes and virtually unlimited cloud hardware on-demand, any college grad can stand up dozens of microservices quickly and satisfy almost any consumer or enterprise product's requirements by throwing money at the problem. To some degree, it's worse at FANGs given how the tooling has essentially narrowed most engineer's focuses to just writing application logic and abstracting everything else away. For these companies, it's effectively cheaper to run thousands of extremely inefficient microservices than try to consolidate the architecture into something leaner and more efficient. Sadly, smaller companies try to emulate this pattern and end up burning piles of VC cash to build something that really requires a fraction of the compute or engineering resources. What this ultimately means is most "engineers" truly are replaceable, lack depth in understanding, and are nothing more than code monkeys. It's about time we see a market correction.

by jarym 6y ago

gfodor 6y ago

Why do you think the demand for programmers is going to decrease?

5986043handy 6y ago
It may not, but the effective supply will increase due to remote work's acceptance
casefields 6y ago
It's the supply you need to worry. When Gates and his ilk talk about an engineer shortage, it's baloney. Same thing going on in the trucking industry. There's a shortage of cheap engineers, which getting everyone and your mom into coding, will help alleviate.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > which getting everyone and your mom into coding Are any of them any good?
- theredbox 6y ago
  The problem is the delusion in the valley. Not everything is a tech problem and not everyone is a tech company. I am sorry but Uber is just a glorified taxi middleman and I have seen a good enough alternatives in some local markets that blew Uber out of the water. What does Uber bring to the table if they cant even win in some super small countries?
higeorge13 6y ago
I work in a HR software company offering its services worldwide and i can definitely say that we have witnessed a posting/hiring freeze during March and April. Software/IT was among the sectors taking a hit, and IT jobs related to ML, data analysts, support, etc. Also Europe is a different story than US. May shows a steady increase in postings and hires, still not close to the pre-covid levels, but it will probably get better as soon as countries start operating "normally" again.

MattGaiser 6y ago

I am not in the valley, but I have seen postings dramatically increase for software engineers where I am (Canada). Businesses are desperate to move as much as possible to technology so they can continue operations. The high salary bonanza may be over, but work still seems plentiful. This kind of recession plays to our skills.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

This is good advice regardless of the time. But this post made me realize that for the past 10+11 years we've had nothing but boom times in the software dev world and a lot of developers have never experienced anything but good times. Even the Great Recession didn't hurt programmers that bad IMO. The .com bust was really the last time there was a huge wave of layoffs in the software industry. I'm glad I was able to go through that early in my career to get perspective. And honestly, at the end of the day I think it was a good thing. It flushed out most the people who didn't give 2 shits about software but saw it as the place to get money. Perhaps another downturn like that is needed.

sokoloff 6y ago
I’ll never forget going on a test drive at a buy-here/pay-here used car lot in 2002 or 2003 and casually asking the salesperson how long they’d been doing it. “I did it for about 10 years, then I took a couple years off to work as a programmer, then got back into selling cars about 2 years ago...” The industry was snapping up anyone who could spell computer back in the late 90s. It seems less excessive than that in the current/just ended boom.

schoolornot 6y ago

Keeping a diversified skillset so that you can reinvent yourself was the best advice I got 10 years ago.

alfalfasprout 6y ago

The reality is there are a large number of engineers that have enjoyed sky-high comp without having particularly good or difficult to acquire skills. The number of engineers that know how to write a basic java or ruby/node/go web service, some frontend, and basics of using a RDBMS getting half a mil TC is quite high in the bay. However, they lack the background to really advance a company's technical direction, reduce major inefficiencies, or handle problems of scale in a rigorous manner. It's a trend I see having interacted with engineers of all levels at a large number of silicon valley companies. With the era of kubernetes and virtually unlimited cloud hardware on-demand, any college grad can stand up dozens of microservices quickly and satisfy almost any consumer or enterprise product's requirements by throwing money at the problem. To some degree, it's worse at FANGs given how the tooling has essentially narrowed most engineer's focuses to just writing application logic and abstracting everything else away. For these companies, it's effectively cheaper to run thousands of extremely inefficient microservices than try to consolidate the architecture into something leaner and more efficient. Sadly, smaller companies try to emulate this pattern and end up burning piles of VC cash to build something that really requires a fraction of the compute or engineering resources. What this ultimately means is most "engineers" truly are replaceable, lack depth in understanding, and are nothing more than code monkeys. It's about time we see a market correction.