6 ms·
Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare
- okokwhatever 3y agoArticle just created to show Wired Hired career marketplace. Next.
- roschdal 3y agoWhat can people do instead of technology jobs, to make real productive work in the labour market?
- mugivarra69 3y agofarm
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hirako2000 3y agoCarpenter, plumber, electrician.
- yellow_lead 3y agoSometimes I think about this. Things humans need: food, shelter, healthcare, energy, water. Working in one of these industries or improving access/efficiency of these things could be useful. But there are a lot of tech startups, i.e vertical farming that end up wasting capital because the economics don't make sense.
- badpun 3y agoIndividually, most startups fail, so most of them are "wasting capital". As wtih any experimentation, they only make sense in the aggregate, where the total value for society delivered by successful experiments makes up for the cost of the failed ones.
- meiraleal 3y ago> where the total value for society delivered by successful experiments makes up for the cost of the failed ones. I disagree. The successful experiments are negative to society just a few years after some startup wins in a niche. The world would be better off without Google, Facebook, Airbnb or Uber now that they already "changed" the market. Every tech dominance becomes society-negative over time.
- lompad 3y agoAnything related to taking care of old and/or disabled people.
- hcks 3y agoYes yes I’m a plowing ox, put a collar on me and let me pull the heavy heavy weights for my masters.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoNursing seems to have a shortage basically everywhere. Especially when you factor in the difference in physical strength between men and women. I personally wouldn't want any job where I didn't feel like I was personally helping push out the Pareto frontier of civilization, though. Everything else feels somehow short-sighted to me.
- saagarjha 3y agoOn the contrary, not having people working on the structure needed to support this kind of effort seems to be more short-sighted.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoNow that just doesn't ring true. Uncountable millennia passed where virtually everyone had to work on "the structure" and we didn't get anywhere interesting. The nurses of today would have been the shamanic healers of yesteraeon, but the vast difference in their abilities to actually deliver cure come entirely from the work of countless researchers and technologists.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pseudalopex 3y agoThe work of those researchers and technologists would have been impossible without the work of countless others who understood there were many ways to contribute.
- quickthrower2 3y agoNone of which would be possible without mothers giving birth.
- sjamaan 3y agoSkilled manual labor like welding, for example
- hef19898 3y agoNot sure if that would work out.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neilv 3y ago> And in the tight market, supply of workers is high: Some 780,000 registrations were submitted as of July 31 for this year’s H-1B visa applications If the market is as over-supplied as this article claims, is it getting more difficult for companies to plausibly justify hiring H-1B?
- JohnMakin 3y agoTech unemployment is still extremely low, so these articles always feel a bit off by not mentioning that.
- guenthert 3y ago> Tech unemployment is still extremely low How do you know that? Does the government know that or does it only count those applying for unemployment 'benefits', which i) aren't paid for long and ii) don't even suffice to pay the rent if you live in the S.F. Bay Area. I'd rather think that most who lost their job in the tech industry moved on, i.e. work in a different sector or bide their time in an area of lower cost of living.
- JohnMakin 3y agoThere's tons of data published all the time by various sources that are easily searchable. If you don't trust those, that's fine, but I think it's pretty reliable. It sounds like the disconnect here is that low unemployment (around 2-2.5% last I checked) might be disproportionate in the demographics that it consists of - new grads, etc. So to them the market may look really bad but as a whole there are empirically a ton of jobs.
- mg 3y agoI'm surprised there is still so much friction about white collar jobs like programming. One could think that by now, it should be easy for developers to "jump into" a codebase and suggest changes (aka pull requests). Turning the world of developer jobs into a fluid system that adapts instantly to demand and supply. It works pretty well for Wikipedia, where everyone can jump in and edit articles. And then there is some hierarchical power structure, which assures high quality. I wonder what the biggest hindrances are for software development to become this way.
- gjulianm 3y ago> I wonder what the biggest hindrances are for software development to become this way. Context and complexity. Jumping into a codebase and suggesting changes that add value to the company usually require having context of what the company is doing, who are the users, what's the product used for, etc. Not to mention how a lot of codebases are complex and understanding where and how to do changes is not something you can just do straight away.
- KirillPanov 3y agoQuality: the need for more of it than Wikipedia has. Coherence: Wikipedia pages are small and loosely-coupled. Stability: Wikipedia has no external API. Any page can be renamed and restructured at any time.
- sph 3y ago> I wonder what the biggest hindrances are. Three-tiered interview system, flaky interviewers, flaky candidates, insane job requirements for mundane positions, useless recruiters, fake job ads, "hybrid" work? It's a bloody mess and it has always been. My best interview was in 2006, at my first junior position, when the guy just asked my experience in Linux, what does "ifconfig" do, what languages I know, and I got a paid internship. They expected me to learn on the job, and I did. Now even the junior position have ridiculous requirements, and with 17 years of experience, I get ignored by a clueless recruiter because out of the 10 techs they use, I forgot to list the exact Linux distro they use on my CV, so I'm probably not good enough for them. I keep hearing there's more demand (for engineers) than there is supply but I call bullshit. That might be true, but the employers make all the rules so even getting an interview this year felt more like winning the lottery than filling a supply shortage. And the lottery you've just won got you in the Squid Game. Now you gotta fight against 50 other candidates, which might be more desperate than you and gladly work for peanuts, 3 days in the office. Fuck this. Even finding work as a mercenary^Hconsultant is a bloodbath. The only advice is "ask your network." If your network isn't hiring, it's back to the Squid Game for you. I reckon even Fortune 500 CEO interviews are easier than the average software engineer gauntlet.
- RugnirViking 3y agoThis is a surprise to me lol, job searching right now pretty much every company I talk to is desparate
- dxuh 3y agoMy experience is not like that at all and I feel like it's messed up in a weird way. I applied to dozens of companies recently and I never got a positive response, mostly automated rejections (both small-ish and larger companies). The only companies that I ended up in talks with were companies that contacted me and none of those went anywhere (yet) for different reasons. Some of these companies are really cool though. I am thinking a lot about whether I might just be much worse than I thought (feel free to look at my "Who wants to be hired?" posts in my post history).
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agoit's really not, if you're the slightest bit strategic about it, and seek employment outside of san francisco. i suppose that wired's editors know this, but like many publications, they will gleefully sow fear, doubt, and anxiety into people who don't know any better in order to make a small amount of money.
- dxuh 3y agoWhat does being strategic about it mean to you? Just searching outside of San Francisco? Because I have only searched inside the EU and I find it quite difficult.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y agosearching for roles outside of "software developer", e.g. "it analyst", "programmer analyst", etc. or even just keyword searching for basic software like excel and seeing what comes back. there's lots of well paying, boring jobs, provided by organizations that are flush with money need specific tasks done and don't understand how easy it is to do them. or more accurately, an individual or small team within an organization is flush with money, because organizations are not monoliths. they are out there, desperately trying to hire people, only finding duds. i can't really speak to the market in the EU, though, only the united states, where my personal experience lies.
- bkirkby 3y agoIn the article they are talking with students who haven't graduated yet, a couple of PMs, and one software engineer who took a three month break between gigs and has been looking for a month.
- dijit 3y agoI feel like the industry has been actively trying to suppress tech workers wages for at least the last 15 years. I am hoping that this message coming from someone with as much Karma as I have will be a signal that I'm not trying to troll- though what I say next will definitely be controversial. The push for "everyone can code" and the large investment in coding bootcamps (especially focused on diversity to increase the pool as much as possible) and the rise of tools like leetcode (many backed directly and indirectly by big tech companies, especially google) creates a very wide funnel to create as many software engineers as the market will allow. A large demand can still be a comparatively low demand if your supply is larger. It's my firm belief that the needs of software engineers hasn't gone down at all; just that we have enough software engineers now that we're not "special" and thus we can be paid like normal administrative staff like project managers and other white collar work.
- sshine 3y agoI believe it is a valid perspective that the corporate economic benefit behind "everyone can code" is to use the widened supply of developers to push down salaries. But I think the origin of this movement is actually a grassroots movement that seeks better opportunities for the individual. If today comparatively more people can make the thing, maybe making the thing is only as important as planning to make the thing.
- hirako2000 3y agoThe capital's endeavor is to identify relevant ideas, opportunities, phenomenons, and back them proportionally to their potential. The grassroot movement would have been 1% of what it has become in size, yet would have achieved far better results in pumping out great enginners. What have we seen instead? a massive injection of enginners, most of them not belonging to the tech industry altogether. Fooled into it for the compensation bait or to escape a field they probably loved that dried out in demand for labour. For the most part. At least for a significant part. For sure with a very impactful effect. A sad diagnosis we can make is, on one side a large number of poorly and insufficiently trained enginneers with hardly any chance to build the necessary foundations to grow, on another side a shrinking ratio of great enginners who are seriously starting to struggle carrying heavier weights, and on the opposite side high up management not even sure to notice spending marginally fewer dollar per head count but significantly more dollar for subpar outcomes. On a more people wellbeing note, of the many fooled into becoming a fullstack enginner in 12 weeks, not only did they believe it since many indeed got the job, they also got fooled into believing they actually liked that job. High comp doesn't turn people from zero to hero. Only love or at least genuine interest does.