11 ms·

Skilled tech workers snapped up despite downturn

151 points by sizzle 4y ago

chomp 4y ago
This has been my experience too. Companies never stopped looking for senior talent. Junior talent is getting squeezed. Quite a few people in my circle have been getting job offers after interviewing at one or two companies, it's still somewhat of a hot market.
- paxys 4y ago
  Junior talent isn't getting squeezed either; there are just too many unqualified people trying to break into the industry. The time when you could get a high paying tech job with a bootcamp certificate or a couple of trivial projects on your Github is over. People with CS degrees, internships or a year or two of professional experience are fine.
  - dr-detroit 4y ago
  - chomp 4y ago
    I guess that is true. I mentor CS students at my local university and they're having tougher times breaking into the industry than past years. We helped them with resumes and making contacts, and where maybe 3/4 of students previously would have been placed by now, only maybe 1/4 are getting placed. Companies in my area seem interested in talking to students, but not actually hiring them (yet.) A couple students got job offers in place 6 months out (!) I do believe the bootcamp certificate crowd will have a harder time than this though. I'm seeing way more "degree required" postings than I did 5 years ago.
    - paxys 4y ago
      > A couple students got job offers in place 6 months out (!) This is standard in the tech industry. The bulk of college hiring happens August-October for start dates in May-August or even later. And the local market is always going to be difficult in non tech hubs. Relocation is almost always a requirement for the better jobs.
      - bobkazamakis 4y ago
        Maybe in the 90s? You speak pretty confidently about this, but relocation being necessary is not even close to the truth.
        kaesar14 4y ago
        Relocation to the Bay was impossible for me to avoid as someone who graduated with 3 FAANG offers and a multitude of other big tech and startup offers as a 2019 grad. All SF or Bay mandatory. Don't know if that's changed post COVID though.
    - screwturner68 4y ago
      I've mentored a couple of college kids and have pointed out some good jobs at good companies and the response I got was "they're boring". They might be boring but they pay well and have good benefits, I guess it's got to be a generational think because I would have jumped all over a $80K gig at a boring company vs a $32K gig at some BS startup at 23-24.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    I'm still uncertain when that was ever so easy. Leetcode, take home exercises, and all of the hiring processes that are the stuff of a hundred irate blog articles posted to HN have been around since the late 2000s. And it feels like bootcamp grads were feeling the squeeze as early as ~5 years ago.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      A few decades ago maybe. It is easier compared to the other majors, but easy makes it sound like a firm handshake is the only necessity. Hasn't been like that since 2008 minimum.
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        I wonder if any company really only asked fizzbuzz for the technical segment.
        chucky_z 4y ago
        I used to ask it for a pre-pre screen. It had a maybe 20% fail rate.
        HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
        Back in the dotcom boom, most certainly. I had a friend who had taken exactly one programming course in some obscure financial language and she got hired at the, to her, insane amount of $45/hour. At that time, pretty much any warm body that had ever looked at a computer was being hired.
    - Hermitian909 4y ago
      I know someone who founded a bootcamp around 2010. According to him they had a 99% placement rate within 3 months of finishing bootcamp till around 2015, with starting comp in the 80-120k range. The basic setup over 3 months: 1. Crash course in basic dev tooling setup (git etc.) 2. Crash course in data structures and algorithms (e.g. leetcode) 3. Crash course in setting up a production environment 4. Group interview prep sessions post-graduation According to him this worked because: 1. There was very little talent on the market at all 2. Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads 3. There was a backlog of otherwise highly competent people trying to break into tech that just needed guidance on how to get in None of these things are true anymore and he has sinced closed his bootcamp since it began to felt exploitative.
  - seaucre 4y ago
    the main bootcamp in my city is still doing quite well, but it's not startups that are hiring - it's big banks and the companies the contract out to them. many of the bootcamp grads are only getting QA positions, but that's still a step up from their old work, and some are still getting entry level developer positions.
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    The problem is the "funnel" is clogged. You can slip through with a referral, a degree from a tier-1 school, and/or some solid internships but everyone else just has to hope they get lucky. I do agree about the under-qualified part though. We do some basic technical pre-screening that has candidates spend maybe 15 minutes answering 2 fizzbuzz-style questions just to save everyone time and there's a solid minority of candidates that can't do a question they didn't rehearse in leetcode training.
- deleted 4y ago
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- madaxe_again 4y ago
  I’m seeing the opposite at PE-backed firms. Blackstone, for instance, have been firing anyone who costs anything, and moving every technical role to the lowest bidder. I’ve watched the entire technical and leadership teams for businesses get fired this year, and replaced with $10/hr coders. It’s going to make them look rosy for the next few Qs while everyone else haemorrhages cash. Long term, not so much, but the long term isn’t important to the market.
  - starwind 4y ago
    Seems like business as usual for private equity
  - WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
    There's no future beyond the current quarter.
ptero 4y ago
Downturn is still very young. Many unprofitable companies can continue to execute on their previous funding rounds which, raised in the macro environment of zero-cost money, can provide for a year or more of runway. Should this downturn become a fairly severe recession, many more jobs may be hit affecting hiring in skilled tech as well. Not claiming that this will happen, but many economists agree that it is fairly likely. So even if you are in a very enviable position in a skilled tech role and are inundated with recruiter calls I would prep: take stock of your finances, determine your personal runway (how long can you maintain current quality of life should your paychecks stop tomorrow) and plan accordingly. My 2c.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  I still hear a lot of conversations that assume current trends are temporary, that we'll return to an era of free money soon, and we can finally stop worrying about this silly "profit" nonsense to focus again on growth which is much more fun. I won't believe this is near over until I see worldviews fundamentally change.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    There is a lot of room between “era of free money” and 5% rates.
    - barrenko 4y ago
      Yes, but every 1% (maybe even 0.5%) of interest rate is it's own metaverse.
- VirusNewbie 4y ago
  What “unprofitable” companies are you talking about? Most of the layoffs have come from very profitable companies that trimmed a lot of fat they acquired. Meta, Amazon, Stripe, Twilio, Salesforce etc are all profitable companies. That’s where the majority of non crypto layoffs came from.
  - 4y ago
dzonga 4y ago
companies printing money i.e profitable not funded by cheap vc money are not affected by the current downturn. unless it is industry wide e.g covid which affected the cash flow of travel tech companies. likewise for financial companies e.g HFT. of course certain skills get saturated and get replaced. normal course of market adjustment.
- negamax 4y ago
  100x this. Most companies with large layoffs had pie in the sky valuations due to pandemic money printing. They were never profitable. VCs with wads were searching for next 20x in three months
- friedman23 4y ago
  Of course they will be affected if their customers are unprofitable and are forced to cut costs or go out of business.
- treis 4y ago
  >companies printing money i.e profitable not funded by cheap vc money are not affected by the current downturn. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all laid people off and they basically own dollar printing presses.
  - izzydata 4y ago
    I imagine that all those companies are big enough to have segmented departments that can be determined to be unprofitable by themselves. Amazon made plenty of profit, but they doesn't mean they should keep employing everyone from the Alexa department that only lost money.
    - deleted 4y ago
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devmunchies 4y ago
An employer’s market changes the dynamic, which can be to your benefit if you’re a top engineer. I expect that companies can lay off the bottom 10% and then turn around and hire the top 5% in the market who will replace the laid off 10%. Kind of risky to join a new company though because if they do layoffs, recent hires or more likely to get the axe.
- FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
  This sounds like anti-worker sentiment trying to sneak in on people's egos. It doesn't pass the common sense test, for me. It sounds like you're saying that companies are going to lay off (say) half their workforce, and replace them by a handful of "10x engineers" who they pay twice as much. Is there any evidence that this happens? It sounds to me like saying that luxury mansions go up in a housing market crash, or blue chips went up in 1929. I don't think it describes reality.
  - devmunchies 4y ago
    I wouldn't say it's "anti-worker", just armchair discussion of supply-demand economics. You can't improve worker conditions without an honest characterization of market dynamics. It pretty straightforward that a decrease of "open positions" (the supply of jobs) and the increase in "candidates looking for work" (the demand for jobs) would afford employers the leverage to change their hiring strategies. Combine that with post-covid environment where employers want to boost productivity to prior levels, and as they see other companies successfully perform layoffs without huge hits to productivity or stock price, and you get a perfect storm. And yes, most companies that have had had layoffs are still hiring, but obviously more selectively. Follow up: > It sounds like you're saying that companies are going to lay off (say) half their workforce, and replace them by a handful of "10x engineers" who they pay twice as much they don't have to be 10x engineers, just perceived as better than their current "hand". Put some card back in the pile, draw some new ones from the deck. And they don't have to pay them twice as much either (unless a really desirable skillset), it's an employers market.
cheriot 4y ago
Great to hear that those laid off have jobs to find. This round of layoffs has only been the end of easy money. If we have an actual recession it will get worse. Now's the time to think through emergency funds and contingency plans.
- culi 4y ago
  Inverted yield curve and other economic indicators all point to an incoming recession. Then again, it's a pretty unique time when the natural interest rate is negative. Maybe boosting government spending will actually work, it's hard to say. It's all kind of a big experiment at this point
yevpats 4y ago
Downturn didnt even really start. Wait like 8 more months and put your seatbelts now.
- yardie 4y ago
  It feels like we've been waiting 6 months for the last 12 months for the downturn to start any day now. We're in uncharted territory. The economy sucks yet people are employed, wages are down, and cost of living is way up.
  - benjaminwootton 4y ago
    People were talking about a recession in mid 2021 as I remember it. Still waiting….
    - heurist 4y ago
      It's been coming since 2018, 2015, 2013, and 2010. The fed rate hikes are a new thing but could also be reversed quickly if any s does htf.
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    The economy doesn't suck. Most of the 2022 numbers that look bad are really artifacts of year-over-year reporting, being compared to numbers from 2021 that were artificially high because of time-shifted demand from the pandemic in 2020. Compare 2022 to 2019 and most things look fairly normal for a three-year period. Remember the "great resignation"? That was never a thing - people aren't leaving the workforce - it was just time-shifted demand for job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic, so that some transient numbers looked high.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >Remember the "great resignation"? That was never a thing - people aren't leaving the workforce - it was just time-shifted demand for job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic, so that some transient numbers looked high. What is this based on? Labor force participation rate[1] is still visibly lower than pre-pandemic levels. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Haga 4y ago
lovich 4y ago
Is anyone aware of how hard covid hit the software engineering community via early deaths/retirements? This downturn is going to be weird all over the economy because unlike normal recessions its coming right after a structural change to the labor market which is why were still seeing historically low unemployment rates despite these rate hikes and layoffs. Every company who was profitable to begin with has been hungry to snap up employees still. Not saying this is necessarily true with software since were a niche of the economy and may have a different outlook, but the affect of covid on our number would help figure that out
- madengr 4y ago
- trustfundbaby 4y ago
  > Is anyone aware of how hard covid hit the software engineering community via early deaths/retirements? Can you provide some data around that?
  - lovich 4y ago
    I phrased that awkwardly. I meant, does anyone know where/if that data exists. I didn't mean to ask it rhetorically.
  - rurp 4y ago
    This article[0] doesn't discuss the tech industry specifically, but Jerome Powell recently stated that deaths from covid is a notable factor in the labor shortfall. Those deaths, along with early retirements and decreased immigration, have left the labor market about 3.5 million people lighter than it would have been without covid. [0]https://www.axios.com/2022/12/16/the-missing-workers-who-are-never-coming-back https://www.axios.com/2022/12/16/the-missing-workers-who-are...
cgb223 4y ago
Personal anecdote: Am a Senior PM laid off from a Big-N tech company who has launched multiple 9 figure revenue generating products. The market, despite the economy and the time of year isn’t great, but it’s not terrible. I’ve had lots of first and second interviews and a surprising amount of final rounds given all of the above. That said most all of those came from recruiters reaching out as opposed to applying directly. Unlike a month ago, my LinkedIn is EMPTY in terms of recruiter messages. It’s been over a week since anyone’s reached out but I figure that’s a function of the time of year. To compare to Spring of this year when I was interviewing (while still employed) I had many, many, more recruiters reaching out than anything I’ve seen in the last 3 months, and the caliber of jobs was higher quality. It sucks being unemployed during the holidays and not getting the reach I had before. It’s a little scary, but I keep reminding myself that it’s that time of year with holidays, no budget, etc and it’ll get better in January (hopefully). I’m no 100x rockstar coder, but I’ve added real, quantifiable value at companies where it’s a real challenge to launch anything quickly and successfully. It’s not nearly as rosy a picture as the BBC presents. I hope it gets better soon.
- deleted 4y ago
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- bdcravens 4y ago
  Not discounting real issues going on in the economy, but most stuff grinds to a halt in December, even when things are rocking.
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
  It's the week before Christmas, half the people are gone already, and of the half is not at 100% anymore. January will get better :)
- dist1ll 4y ago
  It's the end of the fiscal year. No one wants to drown in paper work during the holidays.
- pnutjam 4y ago
  I'm a linux sysadmin / devops guy who went through this recently. When I started looking, end of September, I had a ton of interest from recruiters who wanted to chat. I also applied to a ton of jobs. Week 2 looked a little sparse. By week 3 I was getting interviews daily. It took 6 weeks, but I ended up with about 6 solid offers and I turned down another 2 or 3 that wanted to make offers, or continue interview rounds. I landed an awesome job at the very end of November. Things will pick up in January, good luck.
dahateb 4y ago
As someone with 13 years of experience in Backend Development and Devops and currently working in a startup that might run out of money next year, would it make sense to start looking for a new job right now or just wait it out? Also considering that I'm working in Europe where job protection laws are quite strict and having worked in a company for 3 years will give you strong job security. So basically I will be one of the last ones to be laid off.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  No job protection laws will protect you from losing job when startup runs out of business. Look for a new job now.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  The longer you wait to jump ship, the less time you'll have to establish and prove your value at a new company, making it more likely that you'll be first in line on the chopping block if the new company also ends up with layoffs in the next few years. It really all depends on how many years you can survive without a job from your savings and how much faith you have in your startup to survive long term. You seem to be in a high risk, high reward situation which necessarily has no one right answer because every person has different risk tolerances. If you can survive 2-3 years without a high paying tech job, and don't have a family to support, the reward of sticking it out might be worth the risk. Only you can answer that.
Beaver117 4y ago
I mean it's still easy to get interviews. They still make you solve Leetcode hards and system designs which needs months of prep
- danesparza 4y ago
  Not all of them.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Chatgpt to the rescue!
  - carabiner 4y ago
    Yes, it was never possible to google leetcode solutions before.
    - Beaver117 4y ago
      I'd still hire someone whos able to google a vague problem (not from leetcode) during an interview, piece together information, code it, and get away with it. That shows at least some knowledge, skill, and potential. But using chatgpt requires no skill. Shame
LatteLazy 4y ago
All the news I read is lay-offs, recessions and downturns. All the emails I get are from recruiters begging for me to apply to their clients' many openings. And I am not Skilled really. I am not one for conspiracy theories (except for some really niche little ones :) ) but it does make me wonder how much the media follows facts and how much it follows the mood. People seem in the mood for a recession more than actually in one...
- yrgulation 4y ago
  The media is corrupt and filled with incompetent writers. According to them we will be replaced by ai monday morning. They did the same wave of stories where they said baristas and chefs will be replaced by ai robots just a few years ago. They even had “proof”: a robot arm here and there doing a crappy job at making a burger and scrambled eggs. Now it’s tech “workers”. Also there are no jobs in tech. These folks writing “news” really are clueless and have no idea what they are writing - dont usually bother talking to people and researching their content, they just spew it out.
- screwturner68 4y ago
  I've heard nothing but the warning of a massive recession since about 2015, half the pundits are telling me the world is going to end in the next six months and the other half say the pump is primed and the good times will be back in the next 6 months. I guess we'll find out who's right in the next 6 months...or not.
- disambiguation 4y ago
  the #1 influence on the american economy is the Fed, and if they raise interest rates - which is likely - then it will cause a recession. (see Volcker) of course there are no guarantees, we can't predict the timing or severity of the markets' reaction, but its not a complete fiction of the media and mood.
- deleted 4y ago
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- culi 4y ago
  I don't think you're that far off. When Elon's antics went public, there was a good article about how most other tech CEOs/managers wanted to replicate it. One CEO felt a bit emboldened to crack down, but acknowledged that if he did what Elon did he'd likely lose everything. However, he said that it didn't really matter because Elon's actions have had an effect already by scaring workers and making them less likely to ask for more I don't think it's crazy to imagine that tech CEOs, investors, management, etc stand to benefit from tech workers being more scared to negotiate for more
ChuckMcM 4y ago
This was true during the dot com bust as well. Basically good technical talent is good technical talent right? If things are similar to the dot com post partum it won't be as great for middle/line managers. Those folks often found themselves with a management practice from a company that failed, and that sort of tainted them as well seeing as "management" was considered the reason things failed at the company. In the early 2000's I saw a lot of resumes of "engineers" where their last job was management. Sometimes that was fine, they had kept themselves fresh while managing, sometimes not so much.
Tade0 4y ago
My co-worker's engagement was recently reduced due to lack of work matching his highly specific skills, so he's on the lookout for another project. He was told by one of the recruiters that while there are offers for contractors such as us, it's the first time since time immemorial when they're actually considerably lower than the previous year. Don't know what to make of this - could be just a negotiation tactic but indeed the budget he was offered there was around 75% of what he had in his previous main thing(our project is technically his side gig). Meanwhile Google was on a hiring spree around here for the past few months, but the compensation offered is reportedly, ahem, uninspiring. Perhaps if enough companies do the same we'll be facing not a job shortage, but a well-paid job shortage. I think it's possible.
908B64B197 4y ago
I feel the recent rounds of layoffs were a bit overblown (perhaps because it affected well-known companies? and Meta isn't very liked by traditional media outlets). A lot of layoffs targeted "tech-adjacent" or "non-technical" positions too (perhaps this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816 can shed a light on how essential these jobs were). Some of it were expected, like at Microsoft where they trim about 1% of the workforce deemed underperforming on an annual basis. The market is still incredibly hot for high performing engineers, especially senior. I think where the squeeze really happened are junior positions, but I still see a strong market for qualified candidates. It's certainly not like back in 2015 where you would see junior hires come in with only a coding bootcamp on their resume. Now something I noticed is a renewed interest for startups, especially from experienced engineers who might have "cashed out" in the last few years and have bit of runway. Crypto and Twitter both created their fair share of well-off engineers that are looking for their next challenge. > Craig Freedberg, from UK-based specialist recruitment firm, Robert Half, says businesses will still have a need for tech resources and software development projects. > However, he thinks companies will be reluctant to expand their workforces and will instead turn to temporary tech workers. Maybe in the UK, but it's not what I've seen this side of the pond. Brexit made the UK a risky destination to start or operate a business, and out of control inflation didn't help. Salaries adjusted to cost of living have decreased, inducing an even larger brain drain. Temporary resources are good for the immediate bottom-line but when has this ever worked out? Long term, it generally means a loss of technical expertise for a company. The reason a lot of UK businesses are doing it might also be that Brexit made it much harder to secure finding, as investors aren't too confident in the UK's future. > Could this erode Silicon Valley's attraction for ambitious software engineers and developers? After all, other cities like Lisbon and Toronto are offering attractive tax breaks in the hope of attracting tech entrepreneurs. Startups aren't worried about taxes. They are worried about funding. The real question here is are Toronto and Lisbon attractive places to secure funding? That's what matters to founders. > Author Margaret O'Mara does not see a big exodus. "Companies come here for the talent, to recruit the best people, and that's still happening in Silicon Valley," she notes. > But venture capitalist Lu Zhang views it another way. "The new normal will be to rely on the core values within Silicon Valley to help founders get started and create their initial products and learn about market fit, but then to expand outside those borders to leverage talent outside Silicon Valley and remotely hire from other tech hubs." From my experience that's already the case. However, long term, I've seen a lot more employees move from other tech hubs to the Valley than the opposite. Every time I've been pitched the "next Silicon Valley" or that innovation just wasn't going to happen in the Valley anymore, the correct bet was to ignore it. I don't see how this time is different.
mkl95 4y ago
Tech salaries are keeping up with inflation in my area. Employers expectations are proportional though.
- culi 4y ago
  Expectations shouldn't be inflating so salaries might not actually be keeping up in that sense
jeffwask 4y ago
There was an entire layer of software companies that were struggling to hire and fill roles because the big players were hoarding talent. All those companies are still hiring, the roles may not be as flashy, and the challenges may be different but they all need good engineers.
tluyben2 4y ago
Because I am working on some new products and finally without a NDA (since a decade), I can make some noise about myself again, so I am polishing my LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon and website; I am getting rather a lot of recruiter noise even some direct companies. I am skilled but not looking. It seems a way better market than when I switched off my LinkedIn. But that can hardly be…
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  Recruiters have gotten a lot more aggressive on LinkedIn in the last year.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    Ah yes, well that would explain it then.
Melatonic 4y ago
Anybody want to start a company specializing in de-clouding companies that went all in and now want to switch to a hybrid approach?
- danrocks 4y ago
  Go on.
- heurist 4y ago
  It's a tough battle after a decade of cloud propaganda...
jti107 4y ago
if you're willing to relocate and not picky there are tons of state/federal programming jobs. couple co-workers got picked up by NASA for Javascript/C++ programming
- AB1908 4y ago
  How does one look for these? Looking for junior roles.
  - jti107 4y ago
    try usajobs for federal. for CA there is calcareers, should be something similar for the state you’re interested in
    - AB1908 4y ago
      Thanks for the heads up
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kartoolOz 4y ago
ML engineer with 10+ years experience, took voluntary break in Sep, started interviewing in Nov, interviewed at 6 companies to land 2 offers. Most companies have been having hacker-rank pre-screen coding, Hiring Manager Technical screen, System Design, Product round, Behavioral round, ML specific round. While it's not been hard to land interviews, the process is taking a long time and it looks like people are looking for previous experience in the specific stack they work on. Offers are also lower from a year ago.

151 points by sizzle 4y ago

This has been my experience too. Companies never stopped looking for senior talent. Junior talent is getting squeezed. Quite a few people in my circle have been getting job offers after interviewing at one or two companies, it's still somewhat of a hot market.

paxys 4y ago
Junior talent isn't getting squeezed either; there are just too many unqualified people trying to break into the industry. The time when you could get a high paying tech job with a bootcamp certificate or a couple of trivial projects on your Github is over. People with CS degrees, internships or a year or two of professional experience are fine.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- chomp 4y ago
  I guess that is true. I mentor CS students at my local university and they're having tougher times breaking into the industry than past years. We helped them with resumes and making contacts, and where maybe 3/4 of students previously would have been placed by now, only maybe 1/4 are getting placed. Companies in my area seem interested in talking to students, but not actually hiring them (yet.) A couple students got job offers in place 6 months out (!) I do believe the bootcamp certificate crowd will have a harder time than this though. I'm seeing way more "degree required" postings than I did 5 years ago.
  - paxys 4y ago
    > A couple students got job offers in place 6 months out (!) This is standard in the tech industry. The bulk of college hiring happens August-October for start dates in May-August or even later. And the local market is always going to be difficult in non tech hubs. Relocation is almost always a requirement for the better jobs.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      Maybe in the 90s? You speak pretty confidently about this, but relocation being necessary is not even close to the truth.
      - kaesar14 4y ago
        Relocation to the Bay was impossible for me to avoid as someone who graduated with 3 FAANG offers and a multitude of other big tech and startup offers as a 2019 grad. All SF or Bay mandatory. Don't know if that's changed post COVID though.
  - screwturner68 4y ago
    I've mentored a couple of college kids and have pointed out some good jobs at good companies and the response I got was "they're boring". They might be boring but they pay well and have good benefits, I guess it's got to be a generational think because I would have jumped all over a $80K gig at a boring company vs a $32K gig at some BS startup at 23-24.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  I'm still uncertain when that was ever so easy. Leetcode, take home exercises, and all of the hiring processes that are the stuff of a hundred irate blog articles posted to HN have been around since the late 2000s. And it feels like bootcamp grads were feeling the squeeze as early as ~5 years ago.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    A few decades ago maybe. It is easier compared to the other majors, but easy makes it sound like a firm handshake is the only necessity. Hasn't been like that since 2008 minimum.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      I wonder if any company really only asked fizzbuzz for the technical segment.
      - chucky_z 4y ago
        I used to ask it for a pre-pre screen. It had a maybe 20% fail rate.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
        Back in the dotcom boom, most certainly. I had a friend who had taken exactly one programming course in some obscure financial language and she got hired at the, to her, insane amount of $45/hour. At that time, pretty much any warm body that had ever looked at a computer was being hired.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    I know someone who founded a bootcamp around 2010. According to him they had a 99% placement rate within 3 months of finishing bootcamp till around 2015, with starting comp in the 80-120k range. The basic setup over 3 months: 1. Crash course in basic dev tooling setup (git etc.) 2. Crash course in data structures and algorithms (e.g. leetcode) 3. Crash course in setting up a production environment 4. Group interview prep sessions post-graduation According to him this worked because: 1. There was very little talent on the market at all 2. Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads 3. There was a backlog of otherwise highly competent people trying to break into tech that just needed guidance on how to get in None of these things are true anymore and he has sinced closed his bootcamp since it began to felt exploitative.
- seaucre 4y ago
  the main bootcamp in my city is still doing quite well, but it's not startups that are hiring - it's big banks and the companies the contract out to them. many of the bootcamp grads are only getting QA positions, but that's still a step up from their old work, and some are still getting entry level developer positions.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  The problem is the "funnel" is clogged. You can slip through with a referral, a degree from a tier-1 school, and/or some solid internships but everyone else just has to hope they get lucky. I do agree about the under-qualified part though. We do some basic technical pre-screening that has candidates spend maybe 15 minutes answering 2 fizzbuzz-style questions just to save everyone time and there's a solid minority of candidates that can't do a question they didn't rehearse in leetcode training.
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madaxe_again 4y ago
I’m seeing the opposite at PE-backed firms. Blackstone, for instance, have been firing anyone who costs anything, and moving every technical role to the lowest bidder. I’ve watched the entire technical and leadership teams for businesses get fired this year, and replaced with $10/hr coders. It’s going to make them look rosy for the next few Qs while everyone else haemorrhages cash. Long term, not so much, but the long term isn’t important to the market.
- starwind 4y ago
  Seems like business as usual for private equity
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
  There's no future beyond the current quarter.

ptero 4y ago

Downturn is still very young. Many unprofitable companies can continue to execute on their previous funding rounds which, raised in the macro environment of zero-cost money, can provide for a year or more of runway. Should this downturn become a fairly severe recession, many more jobs may be hit affecting hiring in skilled tech as well. Not claiming that this will happen, but many economists agree that it is fairly likely. So even if you are in a very enviable position in a skilled tech role and are inundated with recruiter calls I would prep: take stock of your finances, determine your personal runway (how long can you maintain current quality of life should your paychecks stop tomorrow) and plan accordingly. My 2c.

time_to_smile 4y ago
I still hear a lot of conversations that assume current trends are temporary, that we'll return to an era of free money soon, and we can finally stop worrying about this silly "profit" nonsense to focus again on growth which is much more fun. I won't believe this is near over until I see worldviews fundamentally change.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  There is a lot of room between “era of free money” and 5% rates.
  - barrenko 4y ago
    Yes, but every 1% (maybe even 0.5%) of interest rate is it's own metaverse.
VirusNewbie 4y ago
What “unprofitable” companies are you talking about? Most of the layoffs have come from very profitable companies that trimmed a lot of fat they acquired. Meta, Amazon, Stripe, Twilio, Salesforce etc are all profitable companies. That’s where the majority of non crypto layoffs came from.
- 4y ago

dzonga 4y ago

companies printing money i.e profitable not funded by cheap vc money are not affected by the current downturn. unless it is industry wide e.g covid which affected the cash flow of travel tech companies. likewise for financial companies e.g HFT. of course certain skills get saturated and get replaced. normal course of market adjustment.

negamax 4y ago
100x this. Most companies with large layoffs had pie in the sky valuations due to pandemic money printing. They were never profitable. VCs with wads were searching for next 20x in three months
friedman23 4y ago
Of course they will be affected if their customers are unprofitable and are forced to cut costs or go out of business.
treis 4y ago
>companies printing money i.e profitable not funded by cheap vc money are not affected by the current downturn. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all laid people off and they basically own dollar printing presses.
- izzydata 4y ago
  I imagine that all those companies are big enough to have segmented departments that can be determined to be unprofitable by themselves. Amazon made plenty of profit, but they doesn't mean they should keep employing everyone from the Alexa department that only lost money.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

devmunchies 4y ago

An employer’s market changes the dynamic, which can be to your benefit if you’re a top engineer. I expect that companies can lay off the bottom 10% and then turn around and hire the top 5% in the market who will replace the laid off 10%. Kind of risky to join a new company though because if they do layoffs, recent hires or more likely to get the axe.

FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
This sounds like anti-worker sentiment trying to sneak in on people's egos. It doesn't pass the common sense test, for me. It sounds like you're saying that companies are going to lay off (say) half their workforce, and replace them by a handful of "10x engineers" who they pay twice as much. Is there any evidence that this happens? It sounds to me like saying that luxury mansions go up in a housing market crash, or blue chips went up in 1929. I don't think it describes reality.
- devmunchies 4y ago
  I wouldn't say it's "anti-worker", just armchair discussion of supply-demand economics. You can't improve worker conditions without an honest characterization of market dynamics. It pretty straightforward that a decrease of "open positions" (the supply of jobs) and the increase in "candidates looking for work" (the demand for jobs) would afford employers the leverage to change their hiring strategies. Combine that with post-covid environment where employers want to boost productivity to prior levels, and as they see other companies successfully perform layoffs without huge hits to productivity or stock price, and you get a perfect storm. And yes, most companies that have had had layoffs are still hiring, but obviously more selectively. Follow up: > It sounds like you're saying that companies are going to lay off (say) half their workforce, and replace them by a handful of "10x engineers" who they pay twice as much they don't have to be 10x engineers, just perceived as better than their current "hand". Put some card back in the pile, draw some new ones from the deck. And they don't have to pay them twice as much either (unless a really desirable skillset), it's an employers market.

cheriot 4y ago

Great to hear that those laid off have jobs to find. This round of layoffs has only been the end of easy money. If we have an actual recession it will get worse. Now's the time to think through emergency funds and contingency plans.

culi 4y ago
Inverted yield curve and other economic indicators all point to an incoming recession. Then again, it's a pretty unique time when the natural interest rate is negative. Maybe boosting government spending will actually work, it's hard to say. It's all kind of a big experiment at this point

yevpats 4y ago

Downturn didnt even really start. Wait like 8 more months and put your seatbelts now.

yardie 4y ago
It feels like we've been waiting 6 months for the last 12 months for the downturn to start any day now. We're in uncharted territory. The economy sucks yet people are employed, wages are down, and cost of living is way up.
- benjaminwootton 4y ago
  People were talking about a recession in mid 2021 as I remember it. Still waiting….
  - heurist 4y ago
    It's been coming since 2018, 2015, 2013, and 2010. The fed rate hikes are a new thing but could also be reversed quickly if any s does htf.
- vikingerik 4y ago
  The economy doesn't suck. Most of the 2022 numbers that look bad are really artifacts of year-over-year reporting, being compared to numbers from 2021 that were artificially high because of time-shifted demand from the pandemic in 2020. Compare 2022 to 2019 and most things look fairly normal for a three-year period. Remember the "great resignation"? That was never a thing - people aren't leaving the workforce - it was just time-shifted demand for job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic, so that some transient numbers looked high.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >Remember the "great resignation"? That was never a thing - people aren't leaving the workforce - it was just time-shifted demand for job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic, so that some transient numbers looked high. What is this based on? Labor force participation rate[1] is still visibly lower than pre-pandemic levels. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Haga 4y ago

lovich 4y ago

Is anyone aware of how hard covid hit the software engineering community via early deaths/retirements? This downturn is going to be weird all over the economy because unlike normal recessions its coming right after a structural change to the labor market which is why were still seeing historically low unemployment rates despite these rate hikes and layoffs. Every company who was profitable to begin with has been hungry to snap up employees still. Not saying this is necessarily true with software since were a niche of the economy and may have a different outlook, but the affect of covid on our number would help figure that out

madengr 4y ago
trustfundbaby 4y ago
> Is anyone aware of how hard covid hit the software engineering community via early deaths/retirements? Can you provide some data around that?
- lovich 4y ago
  I phrased that awkwardly. I meant, does anyone know where/if that data exists. I didn't mean to ask it rhetorically.
- rurp 4y ago
  This article[0] doesn't discuss the tech industry specifically, but Jerome Powell recently stated that deaths from covid is a notable factor in the labor shortfall. Those deaths, along with early retirements and decreased immigration, have left the labor market about 3.5 million people lighter than it would have been without covid. [0]https://www.axios.com/2022/12/16/the-missing-workers-who-are-never-coming-back https://www.axios.com/2022/12/16/the-missing-workers-who-are...

cgb223 4y ago

Personal anecdote: Am a Senior PM laid off from a Big-N tech company who has launched multiple 9 figure revenue generating products. The market, despite the economy and the time of year isn’t great, but it’s not terrible. I’ve had lots of first and second interviews and a surprising amount of final rounds given all of the above. That said most all of those came from recruiters reaching out as opposed to applying directly. Unlike a month ago, my LinkedIn is EMPTY in terms of recruiter messages. It’s been over a week since anyone’s reached out but I figure that’s a function of the time of year. To compare to Spring of this year when I was interviewing (while still employed) I had many, many, more recruiters reaching out than anything I’ve seen in the last 3 months, and the caliber of jobs was higher quality. It sucks being unemployed during the holidays and not getting the reach I had before. It’s a little scary, but I keep reminding myself that it’s that time of year with holidays, no budget, etc and it’ll get better in January (hopefully). I’m no 100x rockstar coder, but I’ve added real, quantifiable value at companies where it’s a real challenge to launch anything quickly and successfully. It’s not nearly as rosy a picture as the BBC presents. I hope it gets better soon.

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bdcravens 4y ago
Not discounting real issues going on in the economy, but most stuff grinds to a halt in December, even when things are rocking.
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
It's the week before Christmas, half the people are gone already, and of the half is not at 100% anymore. January will get better :)
dist1ll 4y ago
It's the end of the fiscal year. No one wants to drown in paper work during the holidays.
pnutjam 4y ago
I'm a linux sysadmin / devops guy who went through this recently. When I started looking, end of September, I had a ton of interest from recruiters who wanted to chat. I also applied to a ton of jobs. Week 2 looked a little sparse. By week 3 I was getting interviews daily. It took 6 weeks, but I ended up with about 6 solid offers and I turned down another 2 or 3 that wanted to make offers, or continue interview rounds. I landed an awesome job at the very end of November. Things will pick up in January, good luck.

dahateb 4y ago

As someone with 13 years of experience in Backend Development and Devops and currently working in a startup that might run out of money next year, would it make sense to start looking for a new job right now or just wait it out? Also considering that I'm working in Europe where job protection laws are quite strict and having worked in a company for 3 years will give you strong job security. So basically I will be one of the last ones to be laid off.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
No job protection laws will protect you from losing job when startup runs out of business. Look for a new job now.
anonporridge 4y ago
The longer you wait to jump ship, the less time you'll have to establish and prove your value at a new company, making it more likely that you'll be first in line on the chopping block if the new company also ends up with layoffs in the next few years. It really all depends on how many years you can survive without a job from your savings and how much faith you have in your startup to survive long term. You seem to be in a high risk, high reward situation which necessarily has no one right answer because every person has different risk tolerances. If you can survive 2-3 years without a high paying tech job, and don't have a family to support, the reward of sticking it out might be worth the risk. Only you can answer that.

Beaver117 4y ago

I mean it's still easy to get interviews. They still make you solve Leetcode hards and system designs which needs months of prep

danesparza 4y ago
Not all of them.
ornornor 4y ago
Chatgpt to the rescue!
- carabiner 4y ago
  Yes, it was never possible to google leetcode solutions before.
  - Beaver117 4y ago
    I'd still hire someone whos able to google a vague problem (not from leetcode) during an interview, piece together information, code it, and get away with it. That shows at least some knowledge, skill, and potential. But using chatgpt requires no skill. Shame

LatteLazy 4y ago

All the news I read is lay-offs, recessions and downturns. All the emails I get are from recruiters begging for me to apply to their clients' many openings. And I am not Skilled really. I am not one for conspiracy theories (except for some really niche little ones :) ) but it does make me wonder how much the media follows facts and how much it follows the mood. People seem in the mood for a recession more than actually in one...

yrgulation 4y ago
The media is corrupt and filled with incompetent writers. According to them we will be replaced by ai monday morning. They did the same wave of stories where they said baristas and chefs will be replaced by ai robots just a few years ago. They even had “proof”: a robot arm here and there doing a crappy job at making a burger and scrambled eggs. Now it’s tech “workers”. Also there are no jobs in tech. These folks writing “news” really are clueless and have no idea what they are writing - dont usually bother talking to people and researching their content, they just spew it out.
screwturner68 4y ago
I've heard nothing but the warning of a massive recession since about 2015, half the pundits are telling me the world is going to end in the next six months and the other half say the pump is primed and the good times will be back in the next 6 months. I guess we'll find out who's right in the next 6 months...or not.
disambiguation 4y ago
the #1 influence on the american economy is the Fed, and if they raise interest rates - which is likely - then it will cause a recession. (see Volcker) of course there are no guarantees, we can't predict the timing or severity of the markets' reaction, but its not a complete fiction of the media and mood.
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culi 4y ago
I don't think you're that far off. When Elon's antics went public, there was a good article about how most other tech CEOs/managers wanted to replicate it. One CEO felt a bit emboldened to crack down, but acknowledged that if he did what Elon did he'd likely lose everything. However, he said that it didn't really matter because Elon's actions have had an effect already by scaring workers and making them less likely to ask for more I don't think it's crazy to imagine that tech CEOs, investors, management, etc stand to benefit from tech workers being more scared to negotiate for more

ChuckMcM 4y ago

This was true during the dot com bust as well. Basically good technical talent is good technical talent right? If things are similar to the dot com post partum it won't be as great for middle/line managers. Those folks often found themselves with a management practice from a company that failed, and that sort of tainted them as well seeing as "management" was considered the reason things failed at the company. In the early 2000's I saw a lot of resumes of "engineers" where their last job was management. Sometimes that was fine, they had kept themselves fresh while managing, sometimes not so much.

Tade0 4y ago

My co-worker's engagement was recently reduced due to lack of work matching his highly specific skills, so he's on the lookout for another project. He was told by one of the recruiters that while there are offers for contractors such as us, it's the first time since time immemorial when they're actually considerably lower than the previous year. Don't know what to make of this - could be just a negotiation tactic but indeed the budget he was offered there was around 75% of what he had in his previous main thing(our project is technically his side gig). Meanwhile Google was on a hiring spree around here for the past few months, but the compensation offered is reportedly, ahem, uninspiring. Perhaps if enough companies do the same we'll be facing not a job shortage, but a well-paid job shortage. I think it's possible.

908B64B197 4y ago

I feel the recent rounds of layoffs were a bit overblown (perhaps because it affected well-known companies? and Meta isn't very liked by traditional media outlets). A lot of layoffs targeted "tech-adjacent" or "non-technical" positions too (perhaps this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816 can shed a light on how essential these jobs were). Some of it were expected, like at Microsoft where they trim about 1% of the workforce deemed underperforming on an annual basis. The market is still incredibly hot for high performing engineers, especially senior. I think where the squeeze really happened are junior positions, but I still see a strong market for qualified candidates. It's certainly not like back in 2015 where you would see junior hires come in with only a coding bootcamp on their resume. Now something I noticed is a renewed interest for startups, especially from experienced engineers who might have "cashed out" in the last few years and have bit of runway. Crypto and Twitter both created their fair share of well-off engineers that are looking for their next challenge. > Craig Freedberg, from UK-based specialist recruitment firm, Robert Half, says businesses will still have a need for tech resources and software development projects. > However, he thinks companies will be reluctant to expand their workforces and will instead turn to temporary tech workers. Maybe in the UK, but it's not what I've seen this side of the pond. Brexit made the UK a risky destination to start or operate a business, and out of control inflation didn't help. Salaries adjusted to cost of living have decreased, inducing an even larger brain drain. Temporary resources are good for the immediate bottom-line but when has this ever worked out? Long term, it generally means a loss of technical expertise for a company. The reason a lot of UK businesses are doing it might also be that Brexit made it much harder to secure finding, as investors aren't too confident in the UK's future. > Could this erode Silicon Valley's attraction for ambitious software engineers and developers? After all, other cities like Lisbon and Toronto are offering attractive tax breaks in the hope of attracting tech entrepreneurs. Startups aren't worried about taxes. They are worried about funding. The real question here is are Toronto and Lisbon attractive places to secure funding? That's what matters to founders. > Author Margaret O'Mara does not see a big exodus. "Companies come here for the talent, to recruit the best people, and that's still happening in Silicon Valley," she notes. > But venture capitalist Lu Zhang views it another way. "The new normal will be to rely on the core values within Silicon Valley to help founders get started and create their initial products and learn about market fit, but then to expand outside those borders to leverage talent outside Silicon Valley and remotely hire from other tech hubs." From my experience that's already the case. However, long term, I've seen a lot more employees move from other tech hubs to the Valley than the opposite. Every time I've been pitched the "next Silicon Valley" or that innovation just wasn't going to happen in the Valley anymore, the correct bet was to ignore it. I don't see how this time is different.

mkl95 4y ago

Tech salaries are keeping up with inflation in my area. Employers expectations are proportional though.

culi 4y ago
Expectations shouldn't be inflating so salaries might not actually be keeping up in that sense

jeffwask 4y ago

There was an entire layer of software companies that were struggling to hire and fill roles because the big players were hoarding talent. All those companies are still hiring, the roles may not be as flashy, and the challenges may be different but they all need good engineers.

tluyben2 4y ago

Because I am working on some new products and finally without a NDA (since a decade), I can make some noise about myself again, so I am polishing my LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon and website; I am getting rather a lot of recruiter noise even some direct companies. I am skilled but not looking. It seems a way better market than when I switched off my LinkedIn. But that can hardly be…

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
Recruiters have gotten a lot more aggressive on LinkedIn in the last year.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  Ah yes, well that would explain it then.

Melatonic 4y ago

Anybody want to start a company specializing in de-clouding companies that went all in and now want to switch to a hybrid approach?

danrocks 4y ago
Go on.
heurist 4y ago
It's a tough battle after a decade of cloud propaganda...

jti107 4y ago

if you're willing to relocate and not picky there are tons of state/federal programming jobs. couple co-workers got picked up by NASA for Javascript/C++ programming

AB1908 4y ago
How does one look for these? Looking for junior roles.
- jti107 4y ago
  try usajobs for federal. for CA there is calcareers, should be something similar for the state you’re interested in
  - AB1908 4y ago
    Thanks for the heads up

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kartoolOz 4y ago

ML engineer with 10+ years experience, took voluntary break in Sep, started interviewing in Nov, interviewed at 6 companies to land 2 offers. Most companies have been having hacker-rank pre-screen coding, Hiring Manager Technical screen, System Design, Product round, Behavioral round, ML specific round. While it's not been hard to land interviews, the process is taking a long time and it looks like people are looking for previous experience in the specific stack they work on. Offers are also lower from a year ago.