28 ms·

IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

• cranberryturkey 3y ago
  i knew it. its worse than 2000 crash
  • dpflan 3y ago
    In absolute and relative terms?
    • nkohari 3y ago
      Pretty sure this was sarcasm.
• lifestyleguru 3y ago
  I'm rolling down the blinds, brewing coffee, putting everyone on blocklist, and tweaking my website. See you all in 2030!
• lhnz 3y ago
  Honestly, I could feel it. In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been. It was very difficult to get interviews, and even though I managed to get multiple offers, many of these were at companies I'd not normally have accepted offers from. It took a long time to find a job offer I wanted to accept. I do feel that there are signs of recovery now, so good luck to those that are still looking. I know it's very hard -- particularly if you're also supporting a family.
  • quechimba 3y ago
    I have never had problems finding work, until now. It used to be easy. Recruiters used to call me at night. Now they ghost me.
    • 1-6 3y ago
      It could be that required skillsets have shifted in the past year.
    • gedy 3y ago
      Yeah in past 20 years I would receive a job offer from nearly every company I interviewed with. Past few months have been really disappointing with rejections after interviews that I'd normally have said went great.
      • mk89 3y ago
        It's also true that you have now 20+ years of experience. The higher you go, the harder it gets - you might want a different role, etc etc. If on the other hand you're competing with senior sw devs with 5+ years of experience, there could also be other factors to keep in mind (age, ability in very specific tech stacks, etc). I think companies are still hiring, but more focused, unlike in 2021-2022 when they over-hired "just in case".
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
          > 20+ years of experience Welcome to my world. In-company recruiters are often quite helpful and accommodating, but, as soon as one single tech person gets involved, the temperature drops 30 degrees. Standalone recruiters send me these breathless emails, extolling my qualifications, but, as soon as they find out my age, they ghost me. I have actually had recruiters hang up on me, as soon as I told them my age. I learned to just mention that up front, to get the ghosting out of the way. Apparently, they aren't very good at math. I list 30 years+ experience, yet they seem to think that I'm under 35. After a while, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired. It's not the money; it's the "culture." Many folks, much younger, and much more inexperienced, are paid more than I ever made, in my entire career. I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.
  • ctvo 3y ago
    > In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been. You did two superficial things and are surprised you didn't feel more qualified? Practicing / memorizing leetcode and having a rudimentary understanding of LLMs (if I were hiring, we're targeting advanced degrees with a focus in the space) -- yeah, probably not sufficient. This is a feature and not a bug as the employment market moves back to sanity.
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      OP also had multiple offers they would "not normally accept". We are spoiled in this industry.
      • mywittyname 3y ago
        There's no enough information to extrapolate that fact. Were these offers median salaries? Bottom 25th percentile? Lots of companies low-ball candidates because they are happy with Harbor Freight quality candidates, so long as they will work for Harbor Freight prices.
        • eek2121 3y ago
          I had one company ask me to volunteer and another offer $40,000 for a senior dev position.
        • lhnz 3y ago
          I'm the OP (of this thread). The main issue caused by the industry-wide hiring freezes wasn't necessarily income but work/team quality. I've been in the top-10% of incomes in my country for more than 5 years and the top-1% of incomes for a lesser period of time. I was able to get offers in this percentile but the companies making these offers didn't usually hire at this level. If anything, I want to be around people that are more competitive than me, that put a lot of effort into what they do and that can easily walk into high paying roles. I definitely don't want to be the highest paid engineer in the room at a company that frankly doesn't need this. I know this can be seen as entitled but I'm the sole provider of a 4-person family and willing to work hard and prove myself. I'm happy to say that I now have a higher income than I did before being laid off and at a company with more successful people than me and a higher ceiling, however, that doesn't mean I didn't find it significantly more difficult to get a job this time around than I have in the last decade. There are people that are going to have a much harder time than I have.
• commandlinefan 3y ago
  Don't worry, the U.S. government will respond by increasing the H1B visa cap as they always do.
  • lifestyleguru 3y ago
    TBH the only thing left from american dream is Taylor Swift concert EUR 500 per ticket in my nearby city in Europe.
  • 1-6 3y ago
    There’s a direct correlation between H1b’s and Airline activity.
  • paxys 3y ago
    > as they always do The H1B visa cap has been 65000 since the day it was introduced in 1990.
    • taude 3y ago
      They added 20K in 2004 [1], for those with high-level degrees, possibly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_Visa_Reform_Act_of_2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_Visa_Reform_Act_of_2004
      • paxys 3y ago
        Yep, although this act drastically reduced the total number of work visas issued. There was a 20K addition for people with advanced degrees/PhDs, but only because nonprofit & research work was no longer exempt from the visa cap.
• dsq 3y ago
  Excellent time for brick--and-mortars to hire skilled people.
  • 1-6 3y ago
    If only brick and mortar stores were thriving in this economy.
    • antonvs 3y ago
      Perhaps they just mean "non-internet businesses"
      • dsq 3y ago
        Yes, of course, the intent was businesses that do not sell software , or perhaps non SV. Thanks.
  • eek2121 3y ago
    Cheaper for me to stay home, not to mention that one of the reasons I work a remote desk job is that I am a fall risk.
• DebtDeflation 3y ago
  That confirms my anecdotal experience. At times I felt I was losing my mind with all the "record low unemployment" and "soft landing" stories in the press. 2021 and 2022 felt like great years in terms of the job market. 2023 felt horrible.
  • dsm4ck 3y ago
    IT jobs are only a part of the total jobs picture.
    • genmud 3y ago
      Yes, but I would be interested in the gross income of IT vs other occupations and how that is impacting overall economy. For example, if you drop 2 IT jobs, but each one is 150k, but you create 4x 60k jobs, it looks like you added 2 jobs, but in reality, you removed 60k worth of payroll income.
      • itsoktocry 3y ago
        >For example, if you drop 2 IT jobs, but each one is 150k, but you create 4x 60k jobs, it looks like you added 2 jobs, but in reality, you removed 60k worth of payroll income. But the company saves 60k, so the net (to the economy) is the same.
        • wbshaw 3y ago
          That is not entirely true. Whereas a company will likely bank that profit, employees are more likely to put that income back into the economy which provides a multiplier effect of the income in overall economic growth.
          • itsoktocry 3y ago
            >That is not entirely true. No, it's entirely true. The economy is a closed system. Employees can't "put that income back into the economy", because it has never left. How it gets redistributed will vary, and you can make normative arguments about spending the money at the local coffee shop. But the net effect on the economy is the same.
• contravariant 3y ago
  Since a lot of quite large corporations had big layoffs, does this mean the jobs shifted from the big corporations to the smaller ones, or is that too simple?
  • 1-6 3y ago
    No
  • ActionHank 3y ago
    Those same large corps shifted to hiring again. One of the factors that they looked at were remote workers when they wanted local, office based workers. We are also seeing a glut of over hiring to deal with changes in pandemic demands and productivity. Finally, many companies run on borrowed cash. This means they need to make repayments and with the high interest rates they need to adjust to that. Once they are meeting their payments comfortably we will see a surge in hiring.
  • huytersd 3y ago
    Usually that’s the case but a lot of the smaller startups no longer have VC money coming in so they aren’t hiring much either.
• h2odragon 3y ago
  "This month, job seekers outnumber job openings on HN" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38884903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38884903
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    FWIW, I think that title wasn't quite right. The post compares the number of "who's hiring" comments to "who wants to be hired" comments. (Or maybe top-level comments, I'm not sure.) Some of the "who's hiring" posts indicate multiple openings, and I'm guessing there have always been more job seekers than there are "who wants to be hired" comments. I'm just saying that the underlying reality may be messier than the title indicates.
    • willsmith72 3y ago
      > I'm guessing there have always been more job seekers than there are "who wants to be hired" comments i don't think so. from my first search from 2021, there were 202 seekers, and 857 hiring comments. not sure how to get the top-level comments number only, but that ratio is already way different from 2023 (1:4 vs 1:1)
• DeathArrow 3y ago
  In other parts of the world IT employment is still at good levels.
  • 1-6 3y ago
    It’s probably a sign that IT skills are no longer only relevant in the most powerful economies.
    • taude 3y ago
      Also, the powerful economies are outsourcing to the cheaper ones. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if IT is booming in India still.
• Podgajski 3y ago
  What happened to IT is the same thing that happened to blue-collar workers. They’ll use you until they actively create a lower cost labor market.
  • medo-bear 3y ago
    But they can't do that to us, we went to uni and refused to unionise!
  • hprotagonist 3y ago
    “there’s a power in the union..”
    • mc32 3y ago
      IT is one of the easiest to off-shore; how would a union help?
      • Podgajski 3y ago
        Unions can make deals as part of the labor contract that they will not offshore their jobs. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2017/03/03/with-new-union-deal-att-reverses-offshoring-of-thousands-of-jobs/?outputType=amp https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2017/03/03/wi...
        • bequanna 3y ago
          Ok, so forcing a company to lock in high costs while non-union competitors can use offshore. Can you explain how this would even work? Why would any company agree to this?
          • acdha 3y ago
            Offshoring projects very commonly fail because companies dramatically overestimate the savings and underestimate the cost of communications, company culture, and experience. If you have a workforce which is delivering good results, there’s often a solid benefit to continuing that rather than chasing a mirage.
• deathpanels 3y ago
  Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditions deteriorating.
  • paxys 3y ago
    Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs and refusing to hire more who is going to take on the work burden? Obviously existing employees.
    • benterix 3y ago
      > Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs . . . Sometimes, yes, but not always - if the load is high enough, employees are overworked even if headcount increases.
  • cdeutsch 3y ago
    You just have to be more hardcore joking
  • orochimaaru 3y ago
    I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.
    • giantg2 3y ago
      Same. My "team" is doubling in size, but all the hires are international.
      • 3y ago
• frontman1988 3y ago
  Elon showed with Twitter how you don't need hordes of engineers to run a company. He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise). More engineers lead to more useless bullshit being created(like at Google). A lean mean team seems the way to go.
  • kypro 3y ago
    You're getting downvoted for this, but factually what you're saying is correct. He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't. Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work done is incorrect. Most engineers can build stuff, but they also add complexity and require hand holding. Both suck time from the most productive engineers. A team of 10 excellent engineers is easily better than a team of 100 good engineers, in my opinion.
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      >He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't. It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering. I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.
      • abledon 3y ago
        increasing growth most places in world https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026 heres a total feature map of what was released in 2023: https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387 https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387 I think thats definitely a signal that the B and C teams werent needed, considering they cut 90% of staff LOL. As for the bots, AI is making it easier than ever to bypass those systems. CogVLM is just sitting there menacingly on github https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM
• le-mark 3y ago
  I’d been dodging layoffs for 20 years until I got laid off for the first time, late last year. My personal situation isn’t bad at all. Meaning my wife has insurance through her job and we have plenty of cushion. I’m spending time on a hardware startup and practicing leetcode. The job market will come back, it always does. Maybe not as hot but we’ll see. Edit; According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemployment could be a signal of the singularity approaching; so we’ll have that going for us (if the job market doesn’t come back) at least.
  • glintik 3y ago
    Will be funny if AI hype slashes more IT jobs.
    • random42 3y ago
      funny?
      • lifestyleguru 3y ago
        ask chatGPT
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    > According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemployment could be a signal of the singularity approaching; so we’ll have that going for us (if the job market doesn’t come back). That would mean the messy parts are starting. Not great!
  • Havoc 3y ago
    > could be a signal of the singularity approaching That would imply a fairly widespread ability to predict the singularity which doesn’t seem plausible to me
  • jonnycoder 3y ago
    Leetcode is good practice but go into full exploring mode and learn new tech. I got back into full stack development (mainly backend guy) and I now have endless ideas. I learned sveltekit and tailwind css to build my portfolio website. I love rucking and did some research and found out there's no real good rucking tracker. Consider social media such as Twitter and Reddit groups like saas, entrepreneur, and indiehackers. This article blew my mind because we as software engineers have immense power, we just need to use our skills to build stuff and take advantage of social media to harness/sell it. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query
• GenerWork 3y ago
  I believe it. I work in the UX space, and I'd be shocked if total employment grew in 2023. I know lots of skilled designers who've been out of work for multiple months, and people in the UX research space are faring even worse.
  • taude 3y ago
    I used to believe UX was immune to off-shoring, but that's not the case anymore, either. 1.5 years ago, we posted a UX job and got maybe a couple resumes. Three months ago, we posted a UX job and got 900 resumes in just a couple days....
    • GenerWork 3y ago
      This has been the case for practically all of 2023. We posted an entry level UX position and got over 1000 applicants in a week. Even senior positions (what I was looking for) are flooded with applicants that total in the mid-hundreds. I was laid off at the end of the holidays in 2023 and only found my current position through sheer luck of networking.
• Pepe1vo 3y ago
  The cognitive dissonance I'm getting from reading the comments here is pretty staggering. Where I live (The Netherlands) me and every IT person I know is getting absolutely hounded by recruiters. As an additional anecdote I'll add that I've just switched jobs to a start-up on very favorable terms and the recruitment process basically amounted to being cold called and asked "hey you wanna work here?". Can anyone here comment on whether this horrible job market is a US specific situation or whether I'm living in some kind of weird bubble?
  • jorts 3y ago
    I would assume many of the comments are anecdotes based on their situation.
  • ctvo 3y ago
    The job market isn't uniformed across all experience level and roles. You didn't specify, but I'm going to assume you're not new in your career. It's just fine in the US for staff engineer+ experience level also. New engineers? Mid levels? Probably less so, and probably similar in The Netherlands.
  • hotpotamus 3y ago
    In my experience as an American working with people in the EU (particularly the UK/Western Europe), the developers there are every bit as capable as Americans and get paid less than half of what an American would - seems like quite a deal to me.
    • nemo44x 3y ago
      You’re not including all the taxes that need to be paid and that employment bonds are far more difficult to break. But yeah, EU engineers are very good in my experience.
      • hotpotamus 3y ago
        In the US there are also taxes and a huge expense in the form of private health insurance - my employer says costs increased 9% this year. I don’t know that it balances, but there are additional costs to employers in the US as well.
• ar0b 3y ago
  Can anyone explain how the 700 number makes any sense? The analysis referenced by the article: https://e-janco.com/career/employmentdata.html#p7TP3c2_3 https://e-janco.com/career/employmentdata.html#p7TP3c2_3 The table "Change In IT Job Market Size - December 2023" seems to indicate that 5.5k jobs were added to the 'job market' in 2023, contradicting what's being said. (Which isn't even representative of total employment in the sector, only the open job postings for the sector).
  • ozten 3y ago
    Maybe it is net new jobs, once you account for the massive layoffs in 2023.
• frankbreetz 3y ago
  Considering 262k were laid off in 2023. Compared with 165k in 2022. The beginning of 2022 also included the over-hiring phase of the COVID Era[0]. You can see a clear sign of the worst being over and I would expect 2024 to start a return to normalcy again, maybe people will even start hiring again 2022 was not a good time to be entering the industry, but I think for people with 5+ years experience it was not so bad. [0]https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
  • eek2121 3y ago
    I have 20 years experience and I have not had a job in 6 months.
    • niyikiza 3y ago
      where are you based? What's your specialization?
    • clusterhacks 3y ago
      Honest question: What changed? A few months ago you commented on HN and said you made $190K on a 4-day work week? Did your company do a lay-off? Freelance dry up?
    • frankbreetz 3y ago
      People are pushing hard for in office. Are you only applying to remote positions?
    • jonnycoder 3y ago
      Same, 15 years experience and the only major programming languages I don't have experience in are Java and Go. The job postings are there, but they sure don't seem real. I've had 1 interview in past 3 months and that's only due to being internally referred at NVIDIA for about 20+ matching jobs.
• ravenstine 3y ago
  For most of my career, I was being hounded by various recruiters virtually every day. For the past few years... crickets. This told me everything I needed to know, regardless of the many whom have been in denial.
  • increscent 3y ago
    Perhaps the first people to be laid off are recruiters?
  • Havoc 3y ago
    Juniors are more commoditized though. Number of job opportunities decrease with seniority in most industries (but conversely potentially also become better quality)
  • wombat-man 3y ago
    Yeah I've noticed a distinct reduction in linkedin spam too.
    • sureglymop 3y ago
      Maybe you're the wrong person to ask this to but.. how does one get noticed at all without participating on something like LinkedIn. I think the privacy implications of a platform like that or any public resume are pretty worrying (essentially a timeline of ones whole life) but I don't understand how to even get any job prospects without this kind of self marketing. Not having a clue about marketing but having technical domain specific skills I just find it completely impossible to find any position where one is valued/compensated fairly.
      • wombat-man 3y ago
        I guess I don't have the same reservations on using linkedin. You can of course omit information as you like on linkedin, same as you would on your resume. I do not make posts on Linkedin, but try to keep the resume type info more or less up to date. The info I put on Linkedin, I'm comfortable being publicly available. Linkedin does block anonymous viewers, but you can't see everyone who views your profile without some premium subscription. But it IS possible. So slightly better than just hosting a resume on a public site. If you're not willing to post the information publicly, then I think you just have to put in more work, find places you want to apply to, and directly send them your resume. But it just won't really be possible for people to discover you on their own.
• dayofthedaleks 3y ago
  Every F500 company is Almost There on automating absolutely everything through ServiceNow and that's without AI being in the mix yet. There's always going to be a place for coders who can massage the API links between packages or run an ERP, but you don't need IT when your firm is disposable line staff, institutional knowledge lives in the codebase, and HR has mostly been replaced by Workday. UBI when?
  • pc86 3y ago
    Serious question: Why is the answer to firms automating everything "give me money for doing nothing" and not "get a different job?" Don't get me wrong I would love shorter work weeks, fewer hours a day, etc. for the same pay. That was the promise of all this additional productivity, after all. But even that is still getting paid for work. I just can't rationalize the idea of paying an entire population for nothing.
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      What other job would you recommend? It seems like the ones considered low hanging fruit for automation, the drudge-work, are actually resistant, but I don't really feel like asking people if they want fries with their burger.
      • pc86 3y ago
        Nobody at the beginning of the industrial revolution could have imagined the types of post-revolution jobs we have now. So "tell me what job to get then" is the wrong mindset.
        • hotpotamus 3y ago
          Will I need to go to college for a few years to get this theoretical new job? Will my health insurance be covered if I do? As ever, I'm glad I never wanted children because just keeping my own ass sheltered, fed, and well(ish) is hard enough.
• fred_is_fred 3y ago
  Is there any clarity around what constitutes IT? Does it range from installing printer drivers to writing software for self-driving cars? I look at IT as a cost-center focused on keeping the company business running - internally focused (email, finance, ops, sales, etc) - but NOT product development. However I am not sure how the government defines it for these stats. Edit: to simplify my personal definition - if your report to the CIO - IT, if you report to a product group - not IT.
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  95% sure that this is my last job in IT. after 17 years or so. not enough jobs. too many applicants. interviews too damaging.
  • mywittyname 3y ago
    If I may ask, what's next for you?
    • 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
      hopefully as a disability support worker. I'd like to spend the next 17 years doing something more personally meaningful as i'm quite jaded on tech now.
• coolThingsFirst 3y ago
  So if talent is cheap and we have many smart people unemployed why don’t we get organized and experiment on startup ideas we always wanted to build?
  • huytersd 3y ago
    Because it coincides with there being no VC money and it’s hard to build something without funding.
    • coolThingsFirst 3y ago
      Opinion and not a fact, have you heard of bootstrapping and using old computer as server We used to be dreamers now is like cant do
      • closeparen 3y ago
        Anyone who has been employed in Big Tech should have no problem self-funding a few hundred dollars a month for small-scale server infrastructure. The problem is you gotta keep paying your $3500 rent or $9000 mortgage in San Francisco. Most of us need to work at a profitable company or funded startup to manage that.
        • charlie0 3y ago
          We could all organize and move to a much cheaper off-shore location for say, a year, to build something great.
      • kypro 3y ago
        18 years ago I was 15 and I worked on my first startup with a friend before I was even able to code. We hosted the website on the spare computer in my bedroom and within a few months had our first pay customer and we continued to grow it from there. However despite working on countless startups since then none of them replicated that success, despite me since becoming an accomplished software engineer and knowing far more about business. The truth is any idiot could launch a successful startup from their bedroom with a bit of effort in the early 2000s. When me and my friend worked on our startup we were like 1 of maybe 2-3 companies doing what we were doing. Today I suspect that number would be closer to 1,000, if not more. Those old bootstrapping stories don't exist anymore. The low hang fruit is gone. There's a huge amount of competition even in the most niche markets. And if you have competition they'll probably have an ad budget many times your total bootstrapping budget. I'm not saying that it's impossible to bootstrap a startup, but statistically it's insanely difficult these days. There was an article on Indie Hackers a while back where someone looked at the stats for successful Indie Hacker projects it the guy found that only something like 1 in 200 projects posted on Indie Hackers even go on to make profit if I recall correctly. You're an idiot if you're a dreamer today. You're almost certainly better off just getting a second job.
• lgleason 3y ago
  Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.
  • selfmodruntime 3y ago
    How people still believe that importing masses of immigrants from poorer nations who are used to a fraction of the standard of living and will be contempt with much less money has no effect on employment / wages is beyond me.
    • achates 3y ago
      We even have an example of what a train wreck it is in Canada, with stagnant productivity, a housing bubble and overcrowded public services. But we're determined to make the exact same mistakes.
      • kypro 3y ago
        The UK has been doing the same thing and has exactly the same problems.
      • vinniepukh 3y ago
        this is really annoying to read. go open the careers page for most mid-tier tech co’s (Coinbase, Rippling, Affirm) and count the number of SWE jobs in India/Latam/Eastern Europe vs the U.S. Say you get your wish of no immigration. How are you going to force these companies to not hire abroad instead? At least if the worker who competes with you is in the U.S., they have the same cost structure as you and won’t undercut you as much or at all on wage.
        • Boatfaceing 3y ago
          [dead]
    • hasty_pudding 3y ago
• arunabha 3y ago
  In the doom an gloom of the article, there was a glimmer of hope however. >But tech hiring over the fourth quarter led to a small net growth in IT jobs for 2023. There were 21,300 IT jobs added in the quarter, a positive signal for increased tech hiring going into 2024, Janco said. Hopefully, the uptick in hiring trend continues and things improve in 2024. The tech jobs market is indeed, pretty bad right now.
• bufio 3y ago
  Yet the industry moans about a supposed shortage of tech workers.
• thomascgalvin 3y ago
  > Based on analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Janco, news that the IT industry added just 700 jobs following an estimated 262,242 jobs lost amid mass layoffs is shocking, but not surprising. So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth. > Currently, there are almost 100K unfilled jobs with over 101K unemployed IT Pros – a skills mismatch. Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job. Additionally, I suspect that a lot of these unfilled positions are either paying too low, or aren't real jobs.
  • brailsafe 3y ago
    All Principal/Staff positions or laptop repair. Canada's latest economic report had a net positive of only 100 jobs in the entirety of the labor market.
    • throwup238 3y ago
      There's only so much Maple syrup to harvest!
    • drpgq 3y ago
      With a massive growth of people.
    • wyclif 3y ago
      Isn't Canada still hiring loads of Filipino nurses, physical therapists, and caregivers?
      • brailsafe 3y ago
        I don't know why Filipino would be a necessary qualifier, even if that's been a pretty common demographic, but yes there's a lot of health care stuff still.
  • hooverd 3y ago
    How many of those 100K unfilled jobs are real?
• marstall 3y ago
  i think I applied for all of them
• UncleOxidant 3y ago
  So if it wasn't for jobs added in December it would've been negative. On the bright side, given the large number of tech jobs added in December, maybe things are starting to picking up again? (seems a bit odd as usually there's not much hiring going on around the holidays, yet in 2023 December had the highest hiring numbers according to that data)
  • freedude 3y ago
    With the current state of reporting, I would expect those numbers to be revised down like they did for the last year or so. It seems for the last year or two the numbers are revised down once or twice after they are released.
    • microtherion 3y ago
      For the last year, yes, in all but one month the numbers ended up being revised down. In 2022, there were slightly more months (7) with upward revisions than downward (5) https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    I've been out of work for about 9 months. Anecdotally, my job search started feeling more promising around mid-December.
    • switch007 3y ago
      > my job search started feeling more promising around mid-December. Probably because of new budgets in the new financial year right? My company tends to hire and promote a load of people in Jan
      • CoastalCoder 3y ago
        I'm not sure overall. In my particular case One company is planning to make me an offer, but they have to wait for the new FY to start in February before they can seek approval for another remote employee. The other company is hiring to replace someone who recently left. The team is pretty lean, so IIUC they can't easily cover the departing employee's skillset.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "IT Employment Grew by Just 700 Jobs in 2023, Down From 267,000 in 2022 Despite business and investor hype around generative AI last year, information-technology hiring slumped as companies laid off workers and sought to cut costs The information-technology sector grew by only 700 jobs over 2023, a drastic slowdown from the 267,000 jobs added in 2022, even as artificial intelligence and ChatGPT spawned huge interest from businesses. Job losses in the first half of 2023, including layoffs at technology-driven companies that dominated the period, hurt overall hiring for tech jobs in all industries, said Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of consulting company Janco Associates. The firm bases its findings on data from the U.S. Department of Labor." Once companies see how much they can save by spending less on IT, they might not go back to overspending.
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• neonate 3y ago
  https://archive.ph/g2HAm https://archive.ph/g2HAm
• ulfw 3y ago
  I am utterly shocked it grew at all. I am only seeing layoffs and I haven't been able to secure employment in a year. Product Management seems particularly dead in terms of hiring, especially here across APAC.
• delphico 3y ago
  While a vast majority of comments here seem to indicate a lot of jobs being moved offshore, there are massive layoffs (even entities shutting shop in India. Github closed its office here, Twitter reduced its presence dramatically etc. Where I work, there are no back-fills for voluntary attrition or restructuring). Layoffs are a taboo of some kind here too, affected are treated as "non-performers" and recruiters will look down upon you. A lot of hiring here is for low end work or at very junior levels (If you are a 10+ years experienced guy, good luck getting a job. I know a close friend of mine struggling to get one - ready for even a 40pc pay cut) If you apply for a Principal or Staff position (few), be ready to grind out 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard Leetcode problem and doing a System design interview where you do FB with Instagram design reels all at once in 1 hour). Surprisingly when you attend meetups and talk with "Senior" managers who used to hire dozens with shambolic interviews, seem to be opting for getting "good" "resources" with DSA skills from this market (Imagine working in core engineering and then going on to do body shop consulting at an IT provider migrating from Java 4 to Java 17) While the general sense on lot of jobs are going offshore is true, it is possibly very low paying entry level jobs. You can now possibly correlate these to a lot of comments you see, junior folks who (no offense intended) : * Given a spec hack something up and never think of how a customer will use this * Exceptions (sorry, we code Hail Mary scenarios) * Monitoring (sorry, that is ProdOps issue not mine) * Alert Management (this is non critical anyway & maintenance is someone else's job) * Testing (shambles) Add to this targets such as "automate" with "Gen AI", We paid your co-pilot license where is the productivity increase number (you are an under performer and did not "customer delight" experience) Sure is frustrating (onshore or offshore) & sad to see this where this is. One just thinks we'd have to live with this at-least for now. Hoping that things get better (overall in the world), sanity prevails and we can all have better lives ahead of us
  • piskov 3y ago
    I would say the article is about Pax Americana. Anywhere else — like Russia, Asia, Africa — IT is booming with stronger demand than ever. Probably, one of the main reasons for layoffs in “US and what have you” is new wave of deglobalization and having your own google, visa, etc. “just in case”. This way possible markets shrink and big “IT troops” become less economically feasible. We may even see in the not so distant future some IT migration from US to the countries outside of Pax Americana.
• smcleod 3y ago
  * in the USA
• hackerbrother 3y ago
  I may be dumb but is the second derivative of a job sector declining that disastrous? Is that not just normal ebb and flow? Also I think the HN title is wrong; IT employment's yearly growth increase by just 700 jobs/year in 2023.
  • BadCookie 3y ago
    No, the article says that total IT employment increased by 700 jobs last year. The first derivative declined but was still positive (barely), so the second derivative was negative.
• GoogleCloudC 3y ago
  I work for Google Cloud on the sales and consulting end. We’re hiring exclusively in Canada and India. We have a handful of US positions open, but leadership wants us to prioritize Toronto. Now we’ve been asked what teams could operate 100% in Toronto without customer being the wiser. I don’t expect we’ll have a functional team that isn’t primarily leadership in the United States by the end of 2025.
  • sosodev 3y ago
    How does that make sense? Canadians are cheaper to hire than Americans but not by that much, right?
    • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      In the Google pay scale, not a huge difference really. At least for engineering. Or at least some years ago when there was an internal spreadsheet circulating. Big part of compensation is in RSUs, in USD. Now... cost of living in Toronto is as high as the Bay Area. I wonder if the above commenter meant Waterloo (hour from Toronto), because that is where the bulk of the SWE staff is.
      • tylerhou 3y ago
        Canadian compensation for Google engineers AFAIK is about 60%-70% what it is in the Bay Area.
        • cmrdporcupine 3y ago
          Base compensation, or GSUs? My base compensation was only maybe 1/3rd of my total comp.
          • tylerhou 3y ago
            Total, and for L3/L4. But this was my impression a few years ago; Google has changed comp a fair bit since then (e.g. vesting schedule).
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  I was laid off at the end of last year and at the time I felt pretty bad about it. To land that job I spent the longest period in my entire career applying to jobs and I was extremely worried I'd have to repeat that process. But you know what: there is something fundamentally different about the job market at this point of time, during this time of year. This is only anecdotal but I'm seeing some of the best companies hiring for new positions. I'm seeing new, very promising startups spring up that are managing to raise money in a crushing bear market (I work in FinTech which due to regulation and a serious number of horrible events have sent the industry to its lowest point yet.) If you're currently jobless you have one amazing advantage for you: January is the best possible time of year to find roles. Don't be discouraged when you see jobs with hundreds of applications. Most people just mass spam and aren't even remotely qualified. If you have the experience the best way to get hired is to engage with the job post. Show that you've read it, that you understand the companies mission, that you understand how the company is uniquely positioned and what value they're trying to create compared to everyone else. Then talk about how you can help solve their main challenges to make them successful. I guarantee you will stand out above everyone else who is just spamming generic cover letters. But this means only applying to jobs that also stand out to you. tl; dr: im getting interviews just like every other time when the market was actually healthy. At the very least this is the best time of year to apply. So take advantage of it while you can.
  • jonnycoder 3y ago
    Man I sure hope so. I spent the last month or two working on my portfolio website to help stand out. I built an interactive resume ai, mostly as novelty, but to help get back into frontend dev. I'm building projects, writing tech articles and engaging on twitter with fellow solopreneurs/entrepreneurs. My worst case scenario plan is to build something that makes me money eventually.
• stevenjgarner 3y ago
  How much of this do you think involves senior programmers using LLM and AI-generated code to do a lot of the grunt work, thereby not needing to either employ, outsource or train? I am amazed how much more productive I have become with the leading LLMs, especially with specialized full-stack tasks that I do not do every day. Many things that I regularly outsourced once a year I now just get an LLM to assist. Could it be that this is more of a factor already than the economic factors indicate?
  • delphico 3y ago
    True to a large degree. The key is "grunt" work. The definition of that varies though. New services are "grunt" for some, Knowledge base based production support is "grunt". The challenge is this , but from what we can see, it is a huge factor
  • hasty_pudding 3y ago
    Just a random estimation but I'd say LLMs make me at least 5x more productive.
  • gumballindie 3y ago
    Senior developers detect junior developers by how blown away by llms are. For instance, I can tell you a junior dev, or not a dev, by reading your comment.
    • stevenjgarner 3y ago
      Interesting. While I wear your grading me as a junior dev with pride, I think the opposite is true. Junior devs simply don't know enough and have not had enough experience to appreciate just how disruptive LLMs already have become. Most of the senior devs I know see this breakthrough in our industry as genuinely disruptive and without precedent. When I say "I am amazed how much more productive I have become", I have used a plethora of software (and other) tools to increase productivity over the past decades, and LLMs are the first tool I have encountered that are more profitable to use than simply outsourcing or employing additional expertise.
• booleandilemma 3y ago
  Let's import more H-1B's.
  • huytersd 3y ago
    Well their jobs are counted too in the figures. No one is getting jobs.
• lisa6611 3y ago
  A professional hacker with a passion for the written word and software creation. With a proven track record of executing successful hacking projects. thanks for doing this redhackpro on IG WhatsApp +44 7760697547
• wait_a_minute 3y ago
  The need for competent IT will only increase, especially in the US. There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary. Some may say that AI will do this, but by the time AI is capable of doing this then all labor of any kind is deprecated as a concept and we'll have transitioned to a different type of economic system anyway. So don't be afraid, there's a lot of work coming. There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on. Even though there may be economic downturns when it's harder to find work, and I was affected by this in the last two years so I understand what it's like, the long term trend until labor is irrelevant is that we'll always need IT and software engineers and software developers. The good ones will continue to earn a really great wage because it's difficult to become a really good one and a lot of other shops will want your great devs. It does not matter where you're located on earth - if you're great, a better shop will take you.
  • loa_in_ 3y ago
    > There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary > There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on Will putting additional effort and in turn paid man hours increase the profit margin?
    • wait_a_minute 3y ago
      Absolutely. Maintaining and modernizing code means making use of the newest capabilities so your systems are more efficient, thereby reducing their costs. Newer tech also has many more capabilities which means older products can become new again, which would lead to more sales. It also reduces the bus factor since you will be able to find many more experienced people to intervene in your system if it experiences significant issues. I recently worked on a platform that still used Silverlight well after its deprecation. They needed to deprecate and then extricate that dependency. For a very long time, people would pursue features over this maintenance task since the maintenance wouldn't have increased revenue. However, eventually the very old dependency slowed down their ability to produce features that customers want and presented a security risk as well. These certainly will reduce profit margin...so a lot of the time, tech investment will be about not losing the profit margin that already exists, and biding time until new capabilities become available to add new features and decrease system costs.
• mahbran10 3y ago
  [dead]
• roda73 3y ago
  As still a young dev, I haven't even finished my college, this seems nice to see even though I probably wont be able to find a job. I feel like it's nice to see a great filter since there are a lot of so called programmers that do web dev these days. I find it laughable to think that these are the programmers and all they know how to do is js and html/css. This will better the world and make people learn more, as they should. I am learning absolutely everything there is and right now I could write in any language (except ASM, not quite there yet) even if I have never worked in it. With a few google searches I will learn the basic syntax. With AI, people are losing jobs on a huge rate, which might be sad but this is new tech and every tech changes the world. People probably complained about losing their jobs when computers were made, or diggers when heavy machines were made. It's normal and sooner people understand that the better. I just hope governments are going to recognize these problems. If I can't go to the wild and survive on my own, then provide me with basics for human survival in modern society like it is done in Germany for example.