6 ms·

Whether or not you should be concerned is really dependent on where you sit in the industry. Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job?

Whether or not you should be concerned is really dependent on where you sit in the industry. Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck. Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig. The vast majority of over-hiring was with engineering-adjacent roles, think project managers, recruiters, hr, etc.

0xB31B1B 4y ago
2nding this. I am hiring for engineers and it is still difficult to find quality candidates. I think for most engineers, the issue will not be "finding my next job" it will be that we all have raised expectations on output and quality. The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die.
- projectazorian 4y ago
  > The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation. If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options: - Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars. - Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager. - Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it. And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain. There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.
- ljm 4y ago
  I don't want to put too much of a point on it but if engineers are 'loafing and surfing' for most of the working week and you're not embellishing the story, then I don't think it's an engineering problem you got but a management or prioritisation one. Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    engineering manager here ... I think it's stated in a bit of an extreme way but I definitely encounter this as a challenge. Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge. It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.
    - oofta-boofta 4y ago
      You could just not have the expectation that people are robots who are the corporate definition of productive, 24/7.
  - chrisfrantz 4y ago
    Yeah, ironically the problem here isn't a lazy engineer, it's the management or poor systems.
  - joshlemer 4y ago
    I think online software development discussions tend to lean slightly towards blaming management rather than engineers, probably because we're most of us engineers and can empathize with them better, but in this case I think it's reasonable to blame the engineer. A manager's job isn't to micro-manage every single task and to make sure that an engineer is highly engaged at every hour of the day. If the engineer is blocked on everything, above a certain level of seniority which is not so high, it's incumbent on them to find ways to contribute or find things to do, and if need be convey their situation to their manager.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. I have literally never seen this happen at any place I've worked. I think I must be doing it wrong!
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  > The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. that hasn't changed, and has nothing to do with layoffs. projects move at whatever speed they move at, and fires will pop up to steal the attention of others.
- tayo42 4y ago
  > I am hiring for engineers and it is still difficult to find quality candidates. Do you have more info about the job. I keep seeing this, i did some interesting and hard work and it doesn't match what im coming across. like remote ok? how much are you paying? whats the tech and problems being worked on?
techperson20007 4y ago
Where is the data on "majority of over-hiring was engineering-adjacent roles"? I keep seeing folks say this but I don't know if it is true. I just looked at some layoff lists from Twitter on layoffs.fyi and the vast majority looked to be Software Engineers of some shape or form.
- ljm 4y ago
  I think Twitter in that case is a massive outlier because of who acquired it and how. Layoffs in the companies I personally know about have affected software engineers but have massively affected back-office staff and other business functions.
commandlinefan 4y ago
I also wonder how this will shake out for people on H1B visas. When there are 10 qualified US citizens for every (US-based) job available, it's going to be a hard sell that they're hiring somebody with a special skillset that can't be found locally.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > I also wonder how this will shake out for people on H1B visas. When there are 10 qualified US citizens for every (US-based) job available, it's going to be a hard sell that they're hiring somebody with a special skillset that can't be found locally. Keep in mind that If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0] my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone? Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE). [0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-shop-secret/78781/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    The solution is simple. Make the application a silent auction. Unfortunately, any mention of reforming this nonsense is met with 'xenophobic' and 'racist' accusations.
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
      I completely agree. The legitimate users of the H1B program are really looking for specialized skills and hard-to-find talent. Especially for software, it's not even cheaper to hire qualified candidates from abroad...
- 4y ago
ChickenNugger 4y ago
>Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig. This is me. But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one. Maybe I'm bad at interviewing. A couple of places put me through ~8 hours of interviews all for nothing. I will also add that 3-4 of the places I interviewed with have since had a chunk of layoffs right up to discussions here about them. Maybe I actually got lucky? It sure didn't feel like it after that many failures in a row. Luckily I landed a new role that I'm finding I like.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Maybe the companies were the mismatch, not you. Sometimes they're less sure of their plans than an interviewee might think.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  >But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one. There were anecdotes like this (and worse) even during the supposed hiring boom of 2021-2022. It was never a walk in the park as the prevailing narrative seems to portray.
- b112 4y ago
  But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one Just wait till you get grey hair!
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    Too late!
- nkjnlknlk 4y ago
  You're probably not good at interviewing. That's pretty normal especially if you don't job hop frequently. The good part is you're not being resume screened. I wouldn't worry too much if I were you. Worst case scenario you can spend time intensively prepping for interviews. :shrug:
bitL 4y ago
You might be super overqualified and your skillset be perceived as threatening to your bosses (imagine top schools/companies in the past and applying to some regular dev role). Or the hiring focuses on finding a unicorn 100% fitting current requirements without any room to learn what is needed.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nerdix 4y ago
> Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck. I had multiple job openings for my team throughout the pandemic and I dont think that people who are not constantly exposed to the hiring side really understand how wonky things were. You had this confluence of both whole sectors of the economy completely shutting down and tech experiencing a big boom. This caused A LOT of people to try to make a transition to tech. I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc. Most of these people are not going to make it in the industry long term (assuming they ever even got the first job). I wasn't around during the dotcom boom but I read stories about people landing six figure jobs because they learned HTML. Landing a 6 figure job by going to a 6 month React bootcamp is the modern day equivalent of that. Most of the 1999 HTML guys are no longer around. The bubble popped, the tech jobs were less plentiful and they moved on. I suspect the same will be true for most of the JS bootcampers.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  >> Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck. It's almost as if you couldn't seriously be hired at a law firm after a 90 day Law bootcamp. Shocking. I'm just angry at the people who run these bootcamps and lure "students" into cutting them big checks, promising them 70-80K jobs that never materialize. > I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc. That was for dev jobs. Imagine all the "tech adjacent" jobs out there (PM, tech recruiters, something something diversity). The signal to noise ratio during the pandemic was catastrophically bad. No wonder there are so many layoffs happening right now.
- linuxftw 4y ago
  You got these applications because almost nobody hires junior developers. I'm sure they would rather apply to 'entry level developer' job listings, but there are none, so they apply to whatever they can find. Why aren't there any entry level positions? We don't need any, we have 100M people with degrees everyone else in the world banging down the door to work here, so there's no incentive for corporations to train junior developers.
jamesliudotcc 4y ago
Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp here. I never got any FAANG interviews until I'd had a developer job for a couple years. I got to a final round at Facebook, but didn't get hired there. Still doing ok at that first job, though. And yes, I agree, I am happy that I am not hitting the job market out of a bootcamp today.

0xB31B1B 4y ago

2nding this. I am hiring for engineers and it is still difficult to find quality candidates. I think for most engineers, the issue will not be "finding my next job" it will be that we all have raised expectations on output and quality. The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die.

projectazorian 4y ago
> The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation. If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options: - Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars. - Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager. - Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it. And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain. There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.
ljm 4y ago
I don't want to put too much of a point on it but if engineers are 'loafing and surfing' for most of the working week and you're not embellishing the story, then I don't think it's an engineering problem you got but a management or prioritisation one. Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  engineering manager here ... I think it's stated in a bit of an extreme way but I definitely encounter this as a challenge. Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge. It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.
  - oofta-boofta 4y ago
    You could just not have the expectation that people are robots who are the corporate definition of productive, 24/7.
- chrisfrantz 4y ago
  Yeah, ironically the problem here isn't a lazy engineer, it's the management or poor systems.
- joshlemer 4y ago
  I think online software development discussions tend to lean slightly towards blaming management rather than engineers, probably because we're most of us engineers and can empathize with them better, but in this case I think it's reasonable to blame the engineer. A manager's job isn't to micro-manage every single task and to make sure that an engineer is highly engaged at every hour of the day. If the engineer is blocked on everything, above a certain level of seniority which is not so high, it's incumbent on them to find ways to contribute or find things to do, and if need be convey their situation to their manager.
JohnFen 4y ago
> The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. I have literally never seen this happen at any place I've worked. I think I must be doing it wrong!
red-iron-pine 4y ago
> The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. that hasn't changed, and has nothing to do with layoffs. projects move at whatever speed they move at, and fires will pop up to steal the attention of others.
tayo42 4y ago
> I am hiring for engineers and it is still difficult to find quality candidates. Do you have more info about the job. I keep seeing this, i did some interesting and hard work and it doesn't match what im coming across. like remote ok? how much are you paying? whats the tech and problems being worked on?

techperson20007 4y ago

Where is the data on "majority of over-hiring was engineering-adjacent roles"? I keep seeing folks say this but I don't know if it is true. I just looked at some layoff lists from Twitter on layoffs.fyi and the vast majority looked to be Software Engineers of some shape or form.

ljm 4y ago
I think Twitter in that case is a massive outlier because of who acquired it and how. Layoffs in the companies I personally know about have affected software engineers but have massively affected back-office staff and other business functions.

commandlinefan 4y ago

I also wonder how this will shake out for people on H1B visas. When there are 10 qualified US citizens for every (US-based) job available, it's going to be a hard sell that they're hiring somebody with a special skillset that can't be found locally.

908B64B197 4y ago
> I also wonder how this will shake out for people on H1B visas. When there are 10 qualified US citizens for every (US-based) job available, it's going to be a hard sell that they're hiring somebody with a special skillset that can't be found locally. Keep in mind that If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0] my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone? Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE). [0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-shop-secret/78781/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
- linuxftw 4y ago
  The solution is simple. Make the application a silent auction. Unfortunately, any mention of reforming this nonsense is met with 'xenophobic' and 'racist' accusations.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    I completely agree. The legitimate users of the H1B program are really looking for specialized skills and hard-to-find talent. Especially for software, it's not even cheaper to hire qualified candidates from abroad...
4y ago

ChickenNugger 4y ago

>Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig. This is me. But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one. Maybe I'm bad at interviewing. A couple of places put me through ~8 hours of interviews all for nothing. I will also add that 3-4 of the places I interviewed with have since had a chunk of layoffs right up to discussions here about them. Maybe I actually got lucky? It sure didn't feel like it after that many failures in a row. Luckily I landed a new role that I'm finding I like.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
Maybe the companies were the mismatch, not you. Sometimes they're less sure of their plans than an interviewee might think.
roncesvalles 4y ago
>But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one. There were anecdotes like this (and worse) even during the supposed hiring boom of 2021-2022. It was never a walk in the park as the prevailing narrative seems to portray.
b112 4y ago
But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one Just wait till you get grey hair!
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  Too late!
nkjnlknlk 4y ago
You're probably not good at interviewing. That's pretty normal especially if you don't job hop frequently. The good part is you're not being resume screened. I wouldn't worry too much if I were you. Worst case scenario you can spend time intensively prepping for interviews. :shrug:

bitL 4y ago

You might be super overqualified and your skillset be perceived as threatening to your bosses (imagine top schools/companies in the past and applying to some regular dev role). Or the hiring focuses on finding a unicorn 100% fitting current requirements without any room to learn what is needed.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nerdix 4y ago

> Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck. I had multiple job openings for my team throughout the pandemic and I dont think that people who are not constantly exposed to the hiring side really understand how wonky things were. You had this confluence of both whole sectors of the economy completely shutting down and tech experiencing a big boom. This caused A LOT of people to try to make a transition to tech. I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc. Most of these people are not going to make it in the industry long term (assuming they ever even got the first job). I wasn't around during the dotcom boom but I read stories about people landing six figure jobs because they learned HTML. Landing a 6 figure job by going to a 6 month React bootcamp is the modern day equivalent of that. Most of the 1999 HTML guys are no longer around. The bubble popped, the tech jobs were less plentiful and they moved on. I suspect the same will be true for most of the JS bootcampers.

908B64B197 4y ago
>> Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck. It's almost as if you couldn't seriously be hired at a law firm after a 90 day Law bootcamp. Shocking. I'm just angry at the people who run these bootcamps and lure "students" into cutting them big checks, promising them 70-80K jobs that never materialize. > I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc. That was for dev jobs. Imagine all the "tech adjacent" jobs out there (PM, tech recruiters, something something diversity). The signal to noise ratio during the pandemic was catastrophically bad. No wonder there are so many layoffs happening right now.
linuxftw 4y ago
You got these applications because almost nobody hires junior developers. I'm sure they would rather apply to 'entry level developer' job listings, but there are none, so they apply to whatever they can find. Why aren't there any entry level positions? We don't need any, we have 100M people with degrees everyone else in the world banging down the door to work here, so there's no incentive for corporations to train junior developers.

jamesliudotcc 4y ago

Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp here. I never got any FAANG interviews until I'd had a developer job for a couple years. I got to a final round at Facebook, but didn't get hired there. Still doing ok at that first job, though. And yes, I agree, I am happy that I am not hitting the job market out of a bootcamp today.