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Here in the US I find this largely untrue. My job prospects have plummeted, almost everyone else in my network is also feeling the burn. I have had one intervie
by autotune 3y ago
Here in the US I find this largely untrue. My job prospects have plummeted, almost everyone else in my network is also feeling the burn. I have had one interview in 3 months where I used to have multiple in a given week. Life ain't breezy any more from what I can tell, and I'm in DevOps for 10 years as mid-level/senior, which used to be highly in demand. Having to slash like $80k on my previous salary prospects just to get in the interview pipeline again.
- explaininjs 3y agoSame, there have been a few positions I've applied to with a 100% match for the needed qualifications and even "nice to have"s, with basically a 0% response rate. At a point where I'm happy if they even bother to shoot a "we've had some many great candidates, no thanks!" email. Compare to a ~year ago when I was easily making in the low single digit (1/N) millions. Damn interest rates, I tell myself. Luckily I saved enough in bigtech to give me a few solid years of runway for working on things myself. Wouldn't want to have a family right now, that's for sure. Lately it's been seeming my best career option is to enlist in the armed forces. They seem to be the only ones with an actual "skills shortage" around.
- rqtwteye 3y ago"Same, there have been a few positions I've applied to with a 100% match for the needed qualifications and even "nice to have"s, with basically a 0% response rate. At a point where I'm happy if they even bother to shoot a "we've had some many great candidates, no thanks!" email. " Feels like 2003. Back then I went from getting an interview whenever I wanted to not getting any response for almost a year.
- sarchertech 3y agoYou were making the in the low single digit millions and are now considering the military? You could have saved in one year what you’d make in 10 years in the military.
- iab 3y agoHe meant making in the medium hundreds of thousands : 1/N millions, where N is low. I have never heard anyone describe income this perversely
- sarchertech 3y agoI thought maybe that’s what that meant but then dismissed it because I thought that’s just too odd to consider.
- stavros 3y agoWe're all making high quadruple digit (1/N) billions here.
- sharemywin 3y agostill doesn't discount the 1/N drop in pay to go into the military.
- explaininjs 3y agoI don't really care about pay as I've said I saved a lot already. Just looking to do something Good (USCG, for instance).
- anon84873628 3y agoI assumed this to mean "around 1". But really, why be coy in a scenario like this? Just say the damn number... it's not going to change anything.
- explaininjs 3y agoThere's no single number. Ranges from 1/4MM to 1/2MM depending on when/how you account stock grants, 401k matching, ESPP, etc. If it doesn't change anything why make a big deal about it?
- osigurdson 3y ago>> wouldn’t want to have a family right now… People had families during economic downturns, wars and famines. It is also a long term commitment so there are going to be bad times no matter when you decide to take the plunge.
- explaininjs 3y agoDon't see the implied disconnect between people being in bad situations in the past and me not wanting to be in one now. That said, I would like a family. Preferable I'd have some way to provide first though.
- dcolkitt 3y agoGood thing housing prices have at least come down with these high interest rates!
- nemo44x 3y agoYeah the growth story hasn’t come back so most places aren’t aggressively hiring to meet future demand right now. We’re sort of in a consolidation phase right now. Use this time to improve your skills so when we begin to shift back into growth you’ll be ahead of the curve.
- autotune 3y agoLearning TypeScript, Pulumi, and Argo Rollouts and such and reading every scifi book I can get my hands on while waiting. Moved back in with the parents so going homeless isn't an issue it's just extremely embarrassing given I had 10 years of career and financial independence before this. Ugh.
- nemo44x 3y agoYeah good call catching up on things you enjoy line reading. You’ve got skills and a desire to keep them up. You’ll be fine.
- ryandrake 3y ago> Yeah the growth story hasn’t come back so most places aren’t aggressively hiring... Dumb money (and unimaginative executives) waits for someone else to tell a "story" in order to act. Smart companies should be hiring like crazy, sucking up all the great talent these dummy companies are shedding. Tech companies, more than at any time I can remember, seem to have no ideas--they're just watching their competitors and aping whatever they are doing. Competitors are laying off? We're laying off! Competitors are returning to the office? We are returning to the office! Competitors are getting into AI? We are getting into AI. Everyone is chasing each other's tail and sniffing each other's farts and there isn't even a spark of creativity left.
- sarchertech 3y agoYou regularly do multiple interviews a week?
- autotune 3y agoDid. Did multiple interviews per weeek. Not these days.
- Gigachad 3y agoWhile actively looking to move? Or just a background level of interviews per week all year?
- sarchertech 3y agoBut regularly? How often were you hopping jobs?
- stavros 3y agoPresumably this was while job hunting.
- autotune 3y agoIt got pretty bad at the height of the pandemic in 2021-2022 or so with job switches every something like 6 months due to mental health issues and the pandemic causing the instability that it has. My employment history was stable before the pandemic happened, HM's and recruiters should be able to understand the context of the pandemic at a minimum (most don't).
- jh00ker 3y agoI have at least one LinkedIn connection at nearly every company for which I'd like to work / for which I've been tracking open roles. In the past, getting a referral would almost guarantee a recruiter screen (vs just applying online). Now, I get cold-rejected via automated email, even with a personal referral from someone I worked with directly, about 85% of the time. I'm seeing 600+ applicants for a Bay Area FAANG+ EM role listed on LinkedIn, 2 weeks after posting the JD. That doesn't include those that applied directly on the company's career page... Job market rn is wack, yo. edit: specifically front-line EM roles managing ICs
- whimsicalism 3y agoDon’t conflate EM and IC prospects, EM are going to be considerably worse for the immediate future as companies try to slim up on middle management The job market many of you all are describing seems to have been standard for new grads for the last few years
- jh00ker 3y agoCorrect, specifically front-line EM roles. I added clarification.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoNot quite sure what you mean here. "Front-line EM" is still in much worse shape than ICs. While you may argue that front-line EM is not technically "middle" management, I think a lot of companies realize they can be much leaner at pretty much all levels of engineering management - e.g. have a "tech lead" or similar role do much of the work that was previously under an engineering manager. If you're not willing/can't write and ship code, companies are taking a much harder look at those roles.
- jh00ker 3y agoI think of front-line managers (of ICs) as part of "middle management" (anything "in the middle" between ICs and executives) but I can see how some might think of middle management as managers of managers. Anyway, that's why I added the clarification. To your point, yeah, I'm also seeing a lot more "hands on" call outs in JDs for EMs, if not writing code, at least doing code reviews.
- vunderba 3y agoSorry to hear you're struggling. Anecdotally, this hasn't been my or my friends experiences, but none of us are dev ops, we're all senior backend devs (mix of C# and Node) - all located in the U.S. I wish we could get a more granular breakdown on demand in the tech world. There's a vast difference in skills, requirements and pay scale for strict DevOps positions versus more traditional software developer roles.
- samstave 3y agoI. The tech world we need: Less AI hype Less HR personnel Less restrictions on where tech work may be performed Better hours for on call staff Less spending on fancy HQ offices (from an aesthetic) Hot-desks Lower executive pay Better transparency in business costs which companies hide in their compensation considerations based on their money Etc etc etc
- el_benhameen 3y agoI also do mostly backend, mostly C#. I’m curious what kind of companies and projects you and your friends work on if you’re willing to share. Don’t need to name names or anything, I’m not fishing for a referral. I’ve just been in the same niche market for a long time and I’m curious what else is out there.
- autotune 3y agohttps://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi about as granular as it's going to get unfortunately and that is overly broad, but we can at least see it's been happening for mid 2022-2023 so far and it's not just me.
- victor22 3y agoDude, I don't even live in the US but I've worked with PR before (huge firm) and as soon as I started reading this my bullshit radar went off, this is clearly reads like a PR fake story, and when that happens it's always 1) to sell you a product or 2) to plant a fake idea on your head. Since there's no clearly a product, yeah, this article is clearly a psy0ps. Side note: when they report "...72% expects easier jobs..." they are talking about their expectations, while hiding employment data (which probably says otherwise). That's another cheap old "dark pattern" in lying PR article. They call it "soft data" (instead of real data, so you can lie easily. It's like Marlboro would tell you "...72% of smokers expects health improvements due to smoking...
- whimsicalism 3y ago[flagged]
- crummy 3y agoWhat is the goal of this PR piece then?
- mrcode007 3y agoA few years ago a similar move was making rounds in the US to promote increasing of the visa quotas or reforming the system due to the “shortage” Edit: 2013 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/h-1b-visas-and-the-stem-shortage/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/h-1b-visas-and-the-stem-s... 2021 https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/h-1b-visa-reform-is-critical-to-addressing-us-talent-shortage-analysis-finds/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/h-1b-visa-reform-is-... First you plant studies in the news, then you can quote those studies when lobbying lawmakers Edit2: The issue dates back to 1959. There’s always been a “shortage” Kenneth Arrow: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1883726 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1883726
- coliveira 3y agoAnd strangely enough, the goal of these articles is never to increase the number of Americans trained for these plentiful jobs. The idea is always to bring more workers from other countries, so the industry will have an easier time to pay lower salaries.
- QuantumG 3y agoHow's the contract scene? There's a difference between hiring staff and getting a job done. Most companies choose one or the other, but they're peanut butter and chocolate!
- twodave 3y agoIME consulting is where you can really win in a market like this. Especially moonlighting. If you can find an extra 10 hours per week reliably to work on something you can easily supplement your income by $60k or more. It’s not guaranteed to be interesting work, but there’s no shortage of people just trying to get a new thing over the finish line or an keep an old thing afloat for a bit longer. It’s a good value for the company because they don’t have to hire a “whole” developer, and it’s easier for especially smaller organizations to bucket all your hours into either CapEx or OpEx based on the project.
- quickthrower2 3y agoI suspect in the US there has been a shock effect of interest rates causing the big source of money for high tech salaries to fall off a cliff. Everywhere else VC is not as much of a big thing. You typically work for a bootstrapped company (all of mine have been, or taken their first investments at the $1bn valuation level) or a large bank or public sector job. These sorts of jobs are not impacted. You need a global crisis type recession like 2001 or 2008 to cause this. You are slashing $80k. Over here (rest of the world, $80k is the TC typically, and often much less!) This is going to be bad for SF real estate I suspect. People will leave to adjust to their new salaries.
- autotune 3y ago$180k -> $100k -> ??. Not FAANG level salary from the outset, not going to be able to reach a comfortable retirement at this rate while retaining my financial independence.
- quickthrower2 3y agoOk ouch that is a drastic cut, and must be hard to deal with if you have set up your life based on $180k income. Just for comparison, $180k would be out of range for anyone outside the US, unless in High Frequency Trading, managing a team of > 200 people, or working for a hot AI startup, Crypto or similar. It is quiet exceptional. I say this as someone who is, compared to East Europe, Indonesia, Cuba, India, etc, earning a high salary. Same thing could happen to me quite easily if I am out of a job and looking again. It is scary.
- irrational 3y ago$180k? I never worked FAANG, but my understanding is the jobs were in the $250k+ range. I have a sister in law that works for oracle cloud computing and pulls in $350k.
- standardUser 3y agoMost tech jobs are not FAANG or similarly massive, super profitable goliaths. It's something we should all remember all the time. Most tech workers are second rate staff working for [name any big company that is not primarily a tech company]. Examples on the far end of the extremes only serve to skew our perspectives, unless we remind ourselves these are the extremes, not the norm.
- paulddraper 3y ago> Having to slash like $80k on my previous salary prospects Reading in between the lines, these were mostly just prospects and they were also 2021 numbers which were aberrations.
- hiddencost 3y agoMy compensation has been the same for the last 3 years... But the stock price and inflation mean that I'm making 25% less in real terms.
- Manuel_D 3y agoSlashing 80K from what baseline? 160k dropping to 80k is very different from 500k dropping to 420k.
- storyinmemo 3y agoGood heavens I'm feeling this. With my last few employers being acquired by private equity or having layoffs my resume doesn't scream, "Will grow in the role," anymore... and it didn't have the chance to do so. Things are rough out there for sure.
- idunno246 3y agoI've talked with a few people actively interviewing the past couple months, including myself, and fairly consistently people are passing hiring bar, having done the entire battery of interviewing and the company wanting to hire, but there not being any job which to hire them into. 'wait til next quarter maybe more headcount will free up'
- mrala 3y agoWhat companies are spending time doing full rounds of interviews without a open role available these days?
- jeron 3y agoYou might be suffering from too much experience for DevOps? I am in the market for devops roles in SF and I’ve had about 2 interviews a week for roles from devops, SRE, and product engineering. I’m at 3 yoe
- irrational 3y agoThis has been my experience too. My son is starting college and was planning on studying software development. I’ve started encouraging him to look at other majors or consider the trades instead. It doesn’t feel like tech is going to be a good career path going forward.
- zigbap22pity 3y agoI think that's probably because "tech" was never a career path. Just think about the word itself, what does it even really mean? I suppose most people would answer with something about making new technology, but then you've really got your work cut out for you, because damn near any company can make that sort of claim. In my view, tech just means IT but you've got a ping pong table at work and can wear jeans. IT isn't going anywhere and can be a good career path still, but the wild salary increases were clearly driven by speculation, and there was absolutely a lot of hiring of less than qualified people going on, which will probably take another year or two to wash out. If it were my son, I would tell him to do what he likes, and if that's computer stuff then that is still a better than average career path. That being said, I'd make sure they really understand that what they are really probably getting into is IT, i.e. its highly unlikely he will end up working at a startup that is going to make it big and change the world with some hot new invention. The reality is, you are probably going to be working at a bank or something at some point, and that's okay if you didn't get your expectations way out of wack.
- 10g1k 3y agoPeople are doing short certifications for security and immediately earning more than people who racked up $100K debts over 4 year computer science degrees. Everything you need to work in IT (except actual science and engineering roles) can be learned through the Internet and experience, for free. There's no value in a university debt for such.
- irrational 3y agoExcept, of course, the companies like my own still require a 4 year degree to get hired. It doesn't matter what the degree is in, you just need to have one. I've asked HR if we can get rid of the requirement and have been told no. Sigh.
- berkle4455 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34163233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34163233 7 months ago you got a new gig in two weeks and making bank. Now you're unemployed and can't find a single job?
- mrala 3y agoBased on their post history[1], I would wager the poster’s job prospects have dried up due to their own circumstances rather than the state of the devops hiring market. They also claimed to be job hopping every six months during the pandemic. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116238
- autotune 3y agoEntirely possible, I have been trying to find what the middle ground is. I have trouble believing my whole career is suddenly over because of a few short term stints during this pandemic. Edit: https://layoffs.fyi https://layoffs.fyi shows 2023 has been fairly rough as well as late 2022 for confirmation. My troubles started around early 2020 so something to consider. 5 years or so of steady employment and gainful experience before that.
- autotune 3y agoMy employment history has been a mess of 6 month gigs since the start of the pandemic. I'd say it was just me due to additional circumstances but I did a poll of my LI network to see if anyone else was feeling it, most everyone said they were. Surprised some on HN aren't but these are additional data points to consider.
- eru 3y agoKeep in mind that what you are experiencing is related to the compensation change you get when changing jobs. The article isn't completely clear on this, but I sounds like they are talking about the salary for all jobs, including people staying in existing jobs. That one changes much more slowly, especially when people don't change jobs. Also I expect to see minor cuts to compensation for existing jobs to first come in the form of slashing of bonuses, yearly raises and promotions. For various, mostly social, reasons employers are reluctant to cut the nominal salary of existing employees, even more so than they seem reluctant to fire people. Since the article brought up NZ, and so we are already talking about 'weird' job markets: here in Singapore the market is also supposed to be down, but I'm still getting pitched good jobs left and right by recruiters for my particular speciality.
- standardUser 3y agoThe idea that programmers should make $200k or $300k or $400k is irrational and unsustainable, only sustained for the time being by a tiny number of massive, hyper-profitable companies and an endless stream of easy venture capital cash that allows some startups to spend their money like complete idiots. We all know that most tech workers make less than $200k as base salary, just as we know that all skilled professionals typically make less than $200k. If you took an $80k paycut and are still living a comfortable life, consider yourself lucky to have collected as much cash as you did in the previous job and maybe accept that rational, sustainable salaries are the future for most tech workers.
- gaganyaan 3y agoProgrammers should make what the market will offer, I'm not sure why you think otherwise. If there's easy money floating around on dumb projects, good on labor for capturing as much of that as possible, instead of it going towards another yacht.
- standardUser 3y agoI was explicitly describing distortions in the market that we should not assume are perpetual.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoCitizenship used to mean that you had privileged access to your birth country's job market.
- plandis 3y agoHonestly I’m not seeing much point in even living nowadays with prospects so bad. I’ll give it like maybe another month or two but after that I’m out. The amount of suffering being laid off has caused me in my life is just not worth it.
- keenmaster 3y agoHey man, that’s never worth it. Please don’t. There are so many levers you can pull to get to a better place and you might just not be seeing that clearly now.
- mushbino 3y agoYeah, the article is ridiculous. In the past 15 years I've never seen it this bad for me or anyone else I know.