10 ms·

Soft landing except for us in tech who have been unemployed for months or years

by ulfw 3y ago

iraqmtpizza 3y ago
[flagged]
cj 3y ago
On the flip side, tech was booming during Covid when a ton of people in retail, restaurants were affected. All industries and all sectors can’t always be booming without there being a perpetual bubble. We have trouble finding good engineers to hire, so I’m skeptical when I hear people having trouble finding engineering jobs. My assumption (could be wrong) is a lot of people having trouble getting work haven’t adjusted to “the new norm” whether that be decreased salary levels, changing WFH expectations, etc. E.g. while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  What do you consider "unrealistically high", because I find that hard to apply to what I'm seeing. For example, I was recently contacted about a bay area principal engineer spot for 150-190k. To give some context, a fast food place near my house has signs in the window offering 160k+ for managers. Maybe fast food is paying exceptionally well these days, but I have my doubts.
  - EduardoBautista 3y ago
    I cannot imagine the stress of being a fast food manager. I wouldn't survive a week.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Depends on the chain, management at McD and Burger King was always rather well paid. Also high turn-over high pressure.
    - throwway120385 3y ago
      Retail management means you're on call 24/7 even when you think you're on vacation. And even when another manager is nominally running the store. Also you're not totally responsible for hiring, and underperformers can and do get stuck on your team. And also you're responsible for your store hitting its sales targets regardless of where it's located and what changes in the environment.
      - infamouscow 3y ago
        In practice, this sounds no different than most engineering manager roles outside of very tech-savvy organizations.
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    Does the bay area role also come with equity? I doubt that's true for the restaurant manager.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      Probably, but the comparison wasn't meant to imply that fast food is a reasonable alternative. The point was to illustrate how bad things in tech are that recognizable companies (Oracle in this case) are hiring for extremely senior positions at salaries that make fast food look even remotely competitive. It's a very different market from two years ago.
      - infamouscow 3y ago
        I think what's happened is compensation packages have normalized or converged. If you live in an HCoL area, you're probably not very happy about this, but if you live in a LCoL area these compensation packages are excellent.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - leoqa 3y ago
    I've started interviewing this last two weeks and have 6 interviews scheduled for staff FANG remote. Meta, Amazon, Netflix are all hiring.
  - cj 3y ago
    > What do you consider "unrealistically high“ Sorry, poor choice of words. I should have said “salary expectations above current market salaries”. I’ve interviewed people is 2 yrs experience (2 yrs out of college, or 2 years after doing a bootcamp) asking $160k fully remote outside Bay Area. Basically anyone that entered the tech workforce during the COVID boom has really high expectations around compensation and benefits that are unlikely to be met in future jobs now that the market has cooled/stablized.
- EchoChamberMan 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire... You're not looking hard enough.
- pm90 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire And then > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries. Maybe these things are related. “Normal” has changed. The engineers I know have moved away and are very happy with the flexibility of their new WFH lifestyle and the work life balance it provides. And they will refuse to work for organizations like yours that continue to hold regressive views on WFH.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Yea I think normal is back a lot more than you want to believe.
    - pm90 3y ago
      Office occupancy levels in SF beg to differ.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cj 3y ago
    > And they will refuse to work for organizations like yours that continue to hold regressive views on WFH. Which is 100% their right! (But don’t then go on tech forums complaining about how difficult it is to find a job) PS. My company is fully remote (and was remote pre-Covid) so I definitely don’t have “regressive” views on WFH. I rejected a candidate recently who said they wanted to work out of a van while driving the US. As a 100% remote company I’m cool with people working from different places occasionally, but at a minimum I want our employees to have a desk. I don’t want to hire someone for $150k who’s working from the back of a van. I might have hired them in 2021, but in 2024 not having a permanent residence to have an office in is a disqualification.
    - ulfw 3y ago
      What an arbitrary limitation. So you don't hire on merit or what your candidate is able to deliver. You hire on desk space
- oytis 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore Might be related?
  - bboygravity 3y ago
    From what I've seen freelancing for more than 10 years, most companies will rather go bankrupt than allow remote working. The only thing that can explain this perfectly well in my opinion is: manager ego. As simple as that.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      General rule: When your explanation is that everyone else is an idiot, it almost always means that your view is far too simplistic.
    - mech422 3y ago
      I've had the opposite experience as a contractor and FTE... I've been remote for 20 years, and every year it seems to get easier / more normal...
- themagician 3y ago
  Things are different now. The reality is that probably close to 80-90% of self-described software engineers face permnanet unemployment as they will be replaced by low paid "prompt engineers", likey from India. It's already happening and it's happening at scale. The top 10% will see enourmous income gains as they will be the only people left who actually know what they are doing and how to correct mistakes that can't be corrected via prompt. If you are great you are good. If you are average you are !@#$ed. The shift is happening fast. It won't be measured in years, but weeks and months. By year's end everything will be different. In 24 months entire career paths will be obliterated and there is no time to retrain. It's a cotton gin moment.
  - oytis 3y ago
    That's a very weird market you're describing. Can't the top 10% do "prompt engineering" themselves? What's the point of creating a layer of incompetent human programmers in the middle?
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      That's the normal market reaction to some kind of automation. The most competent few can do a lot more, and command a higher salary, while the masses discover they are out of jobs. After that, people discover that the product is now cheaper, so they may or may not buy more of it, maybe or maybe not increasing the total they spend, and maybe or maybe not creating more jobs for the mass that was displaced earlier. Anyway, believing that LLM-programming is going to have that impact is just ridiculous.
  - throw1234651234 3y ago
    Genuinely reads like a scare-mongering myths. I am doing the basic of the basic atm - adding an API endpoint to call an internal API and get a subset of data and ChatGPT can't even accomplish that. I have been reviewing the usability of AI for at least a year now, and it's still nowhere near even replacing juniors, despite these posts.
    - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
- hirako2000 3y ago
  >We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries. Let me rephrase. "I'm not open to hire people who refuse to be dictated by me, the boss, how they should live their lives. I'm now demanding again that my employees get stuck with locality market constraints as they tend to play in my favor. Except that, I struggle to find good enginners. I find normal people who aren't good enough to make demands though, thanks to the coordinated massive layoffs, so I will keep fighting." See, workers, those who truly do the work that is. Have for the most part figured out the manipulations. A layoff squeeze, or two or even 10 to pressure the job market, to make demands for fairer salary be under control, simply won't work. Temporarily, maybe. As people do need not just to eat but also pay back mortgages. But what it did mostly is creating more noise for the employer side. Great enginners don't get laid off. Those who do know usually very well their value, get recommendations and a new role in no time. The economy isn't collapsing, demands is there otherwise there wouldn't be an inflation to fight , we need more workers than ever. the capital refuses to accept a certain reality. That is that Workers will continue to have access to more information. Hence making it futile to exercise manipulations. I'm for free markets and find the disguised attacks and ambushes against the "working class" appalling. Workers aren't even unionized. They just individually have neurons and access to the internet. The same who have been promoting the idea that we better all get richer finally realized that's not fun, that fewer should be much richer and the rest poorer
- piva00 3y ago
  We have no issues with hiring at the company I work for, dozens of good CVs for each open position. The difference seems to be that we don't have a RTO policy and actually encourage WFH a lot, you just need to live in a country we have a registered entity for tax reasons, so no digital nomads either. Maybe your new normal isn't working, you're paying the price for it.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > unrealistically high salaries That's expected if you don't want to pay the salaries your candidates want. Admitting to not being able to find qualified workers is admitting fundamental incompetence as an employer and as a business. Hiring and retaining workers is the foundation of any business that employs people. Haven't it struck you that maybe you are unrealistic about salaries if you are having trouble hiring?
  - hirako2000 3y ago
    This. Of course the comment is not just paradoxal, it's contradictory. Behind a basically bias mind, blinded even by the irresistible desire to basically pay little, bank fat profits, and do nothing. It's an amazing time to be alive. To see how broader access to Information turning against those who used to think the asymmetry would last forever.
    - oytis 3y ago
      It's really funny to see both "times have changed" and "we can't find anyone" in one comment. And it really summarises the attitude of business post-covid. "Doing more with less" is just childish if you think about it. I'm going to do what I like, and there are not going to be any consequences. Oh, there are consequences? That definitely not because what I did.
  - cj 3y ago
    The reality is many people are taking pay cuts especially on the junior side of the spectrum. People were hiring devs straight out of bootcamps with zero experience for $160k a couple years ago. Sorry but I can’t hire someone and match their previous salary (from a company that fired them) with a total of 2 yrs experience.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      Consider the same line of thinking for other cost centers of your business. Would a restaurant say they're having trouble finding produce just because they don't want to pay the prices asked for? Would a sawmill say they're having trouble finding lumber when they don't want to pay the prices asked. If the developers you want to hire cannot produce enough for your company to make a profit at the salary levels they are asking, this is a hint that your company is not profitable enough to continue functioning. That happens sometimes when margins get thinner. The equation between what customers are willing to pay for the work, and what profit the company desires, and what salaries the workforce demands for doing the work, doesn't give a positive result anymore. So the business model doesn't work anymore. Otherwise you'd hire them right? If the company will make a profit from their work. Or are you foregoing profits out of spite? Edit: I say all this because I used to be incompetent at hiring and my business at the time suffered as a consequence. My mistake was that I was looking to hire people through networks of friends and family, instead of plain old job ads. Sounds like a dumb mistake, but as mentioned I was incompetent. Once I started publishing ads I had no problem finding a lot of good candidates. Hiring and retaining employees is a skill, the most important skill of a business owner.
- roughly 3y ago
  > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there The folks who took advantage of the ability to leave the city and get a house somewhere other than the Bay or one of the three other cities tech was hiring in are older folks for whom moving back to be near family had some resonance. They've now had 4 years to build a life there. Of course you can't find talented engineers who want to uproot their families and rip their kids away from their cousins, schools, and friends to go live in an apartment in a city and commute to whatever horseshit open floor plan dorm simulator you're calling an office, and especially not if you're not willing to pay an "unrealistically high salary." You'd need to pay me an unrealistically high salary to consider that, too. As usual, there's not a skill gap or a worker shortage, there's an unwillingness to pay talent what it's worth.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Hmm. The way you put that, it sounds like you could to some degree "pay" talent by allowing WFH rather than with dollars. I wonder to what degree that is true.
    - roughly 3y ago
      It is absolutely the case that working conditions are part of the overall negotiation for talent. You start offering folks $1M/yr cash and I promise they'll move back to the city and RTO for you. You let them keep working remote and enjoy the work/life balance, and you can get 'em a whole lot cheaper than that.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  > whether that be decreased salary levels Who can afford to be taking smaller salaries when everything is getting more expensive?
- mech422 3y ago
  yeah - I think people just didn't realize tech has cycles like all industries, because this is literally the first 'down' in like 14 years...
hef19898 3y ago
[flagged]
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
[flagged]
- Ocerge 3y ago
  Is there a good reason to downvote this? It seems undeniably true, no?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    True but perhaps too cold and too direct? "The problem is you" could have been "Maybe have peers and a mentor look at your CV" or something similar that's constructive.
  - rawgabbit 3y ago
    I believe he was referring to "Professional and technical services". This is a general category that includes legal advice and representation; accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll services; architectural, engineering, and specialized design services; computer services; consulting services; research services; advertising services; photographic services; translation and interpretation services; veterinary services; and other professional, scientific, and technical services. https://data.bls.gov/cew/apps/bls_naics/v3/bls_naics_app.htm#tab=search&naics=2022&keyword=54&searchType=titles&fromHier=true&filter=nothing&sort=text_asc&resultIndex=0 https://data.bls.gov/cew/apps/bls_naics/v3/bls_naics_app.htm...
  - lowercased 3y ago
    "Professional and technical services" covers a lot of stuff, and there may be lots more workers in 'professional services' that are not software folks. I've got more than a handful of (over)qualified colleagues that can't get hired anywhere. Hundreds of applications - not all just click/submit, but many have personal connections/intros vouch for them - hiring will take less experienced/cheaper folks, or... just put off hiring for another few months. Place near me has had the same open position for going on 16 months now. Specific language/tech stack where they also want someone onsite 5 days week. When you've had the position open that long, and you've turned away qualified people for... nitpicky stuff... the job must not be that important. Yet, somehow it's ultra-important to be onsite 5 days/week. Suspicion is that they're just riding the other devs there harder while they 'look' for someone they have no intention of hiring, all while saying "we just can't find anyone!".
silverquiet 3y ago
Creative destruction is all fun and games when it’s someone else who’s being disrupted. I guess that’s the free hand of the market directing you to another industry.
bee_rider 3y ago
We’ve been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a free ticket to the middle class and studying humanities is a total dead-end. It wouldn’t be that surprising for there to be too many programmers (in some sense; if you ask management there will never be enough as long as we have any negotiating leverage). This is a broader problem than the recent COVID-induced troubles.
- themagician 3y ago
  We've been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a fast track to a six figure income. And that's been mostly true. But now people are going to find out that a STEM degree is going to place them firmly in the real middle class, not the, "I make $240k a year and live in the Bay Area I'm middle class just like you" middle class. Possible we might see some real class solidarity if those being displaced can get over themselves.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    An STEM degree was a fast track to a desk job that might have allowed for “middle class” living, whatever that means. But electrician/plumber/nursing/other physically demanding jobs have always been the other, and more resilient, option. But they’re not desk jobs.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    I should have not used the term middle-class because it invites definition based arguments. I meant the Marxist petit-bourgeoisie, which is one of the (multiple, sometimes incompatible) definitions of the middle class. If by middle class you just mean people who have around median income or so, I’d quibble about whether that is any more “real,” but who cares? It is just a definition. Anyway, I think people generally expect something like that petit-bourgeoisie status from their engineering degrees. It is the expectation that our skills will be in demand enough that we can tell management to get bent if they ask us to do something unethical or dangerous; this is a dramatically different position in the labor market, but it requires rare and in demand skills.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ak_111 3y ago
Sorry to be critical but if you are in tech and have been unemployed for years (especially if those overlap with covid) then you are most certainly doing something wrong and need some guidance. Even now the situation is bad, but not that bad that it should take you more than a couple of months to land some kind of tech job that can pay the bills.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - avery17 3y ago
    Uhhhh
    - screenobobeano 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - screenobobeano 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    > A sea of brown faces betrays what you're up against. WTF? You can't post like that here, and we ban accounts that do. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Soft landing except for us in tech who have been unemployed for months or years

by ulfw 3y ago

Soft landing except for us in tech who have been unemployed for months or years

iraqmtpizza 3y ago

[flagged]

cj 3y ago

On the flip side, tech was booming during Covid when a ton of people in retail, restaurants were affected. All industries and all sectors can’t always be booming without there being a perpetual bubble. We have trouble finding good engineers to hire, so I’m skeptical when I hear people having trouble finding engineering jobs. My assumption (could be wrong) is a lot of people having trouble getting work haven’t adjusted to “the new norm” whether that be decreased salary levels, changing WFH expectations, etc. E.g. while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries.

AlotOfReading 3y ago
What do you consider "unrealistically high", because I find that hard to apply to what I'm seeing. For example, I was recently contacted about a bay area principal engineer spot for 150-190k. To give some context, a fast food place near my house has signs in the window offering 160k+ for managers. Maybe fast food is paying exceptionally well these days, but I have my doubts.
- EduardoBautista 3y ago
  I cannot imagine the stress of being a fast food manager. I wouldn't survive a week.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Depends on the chain, management at McD and Burger King was always rather well paid. Also high turn-over high pressure.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    Retail management means you're on call 24/7 even when you think you're on vacation. And even when another manager is nominally running the store. Also you're not totally responsible for hiring, and underperformers can and do get stuck on your team. And also you're responsible for your store hitting its sales targets regardless of where it's located and what changes in the environment.
    - infamouscow 3y ago
      In practice, this sounds no different than most engineering manager roles outside of very tech-savvy organizations.
- infamouscow 3y ago
  Does the bay area role also come with equity? I doubt that's true for the restaurant manager.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    Probably, but the comparison wasn't meant to imply that fast food is a reasonable alternative. The point was to illustrate how bad things in tech are that recognizable companies (Oracle in this case) are hiring for extremely senior positions at salaries that make fast food look even remotely competitive. It's a very different market from two years ago.
    - infamouscow 3y ago
      I think what's happened is compensation packages have normalized or converged. If you live in an HCoL area, you're probably not very happy about this, but if you live in a LCoL area these compensation packages are excellent.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- leoqa 3y ago
  I've started interviewing this last two weeks and have 6 interviews scheduled for staff FANG remote. Meta, Amazon, Netflix are all hiring.
- cj 3y ago
  > What do you consider "unrealistically high“ Sorry, poor choice of words. I should have said “salary expectations above current market salaries”. I’ve interviewed people is 2 yrs experience (2 yrs out of college, or 2 years after doing a bootcamp) asking $160k fully remote outside Bay Area. Basically anyone that entered the tech workforce during the COVID boom has really high expectations around compensation and benefits that are unlikely to be met in future jobs now that the market has cooled/stablized.
EchoChamberMan 3y ago
> We have trouble finding good engineers to hire... You're not looking hard enough.
pm90 3y ago
> We have trouble finding good engineers to hire And then > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries. Maybe these things are related. “Normal” has changed. The engineers I know have moved away and are very happy with the flexibility of their new WFH lifestyle and the work life balance it provides. And they will refuse to work for organizations like yours that continue to hold regressive views on WFH.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Yea I think normal is back a lot more than you want to believe.
  - pm90 3y ago
    Office occupancy levels in SF beg to differ.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cj 3y ago
  > And they will refuse to work for organizations like yours that continue to hold regressive views on WFH. Which is 100% their right! (But don’t then go on tech forums complaining about how difficult it is to find a job) PS. My company is fully remote (and was remote pre-Covid) so I definitely don’t have “regressive” views on WFH. I rejected a candidate recently who said they wanted to work out of a van while driving the US. As a 100% remote company I’m cool with people working from different places occasionally, but at a minimum I want our employees to have a desk. I don’t want to hire someone for $150k who’s working from the back of a van. I might have hired them in 2021, but in 2024 not having a permanent residence to have an office in is a disqualification.
  - ulfw 3y ago
    What an arbitrary limitation. So you don't hire on merit or what your candidate is able to deliver. You hire on desk space
oytis 3y ago
> We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore Might be related?
- bboygravity 3y ago
  From what I've seen freelancing for more than 10 years, most companies will rather go bankrupt than allow remote working. The only thing that can explain this perfectly well in my opinion is: manager ego. As simple as that.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    General rule: When your explanation is that everyone else is an idiot, it almost always means that your view is far too simplistic.
  - mech422 3y ago
    I've had the opposite experience as a contractor and FTE... I've been remote for 20 years, and every year it seems to get easier / more normal...
themagician 3y ago
Things are different now. The reality is that probably close to 80-90% of self-described software engineers face permnanet unemployment as they will be replaced by low paid "prompt engineers", likey from India. It's already happening and it's happening at scale. The top 10% will see enourmous income gains as they will be the only people left who actually know what they are doing and how to correct mistakes that can't be corrected via prompt. If you are great you are good. If you are average you are !@#$ed. The shift is happening fast. It won't be measured in years, but weeks and months. By year's end everything will be different. In 24 months entire career paths will be obliterated and there is no time to retrain. It's a cotton gin moment.
- oytis 3y ago
  That's a very weird market you're describing. Can't the top 10% do "prompt engineering" themselves? What's the point of creating a layer of incompetent human programmers in the middle?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    That's the normal market reaction to some kind of automation. The most competent few can do a lot more, and command a higher salary, while the masses discover they are out of jobs. After that, people discover that the product is now cheaper, so they may or may not buy more of it, maybe or maybe not increasing the total they spend, and maybe or maybe not creating more jobs for the mass that was displaced earlier. Anyway, believing that LLM-programming is going to have that impact is just ridiculous.
- throw1234651234 3y ago
  Genuinely reads like a scare-mongering myths. I am doing the basic of the basic atm - adding an API endpoint to call an internal API and get a subset of data and ChatGPT can't even accomplish that. I have been reviewing the usability of AI for at least a year now, and it's still nowhere near even replacing juniors, despite these posts.
  - EchoChamberMan 3y ago
hirako2000 3y ago
>We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there who aren’t asking for special treatment or unrealistically high salaries. Let me rephrase. "I'm not open to hire people who refuse to be dictated by me, the boss, how they should live their lives. I'm now demanding again that my employees get stuck with locality market constraints as they tend to play in my favor. Except that, I struggle to find good enginners. I find normal people who aren't good enough to make demands though, thanks to the coordinated massive layoffs, so I will keep fighting." See, workers, those who truly do the work that is. Have for the most part figured out the manipulations. A layoff squeeze, or two or even 10 to pressure the job market, to make demands for fairer salary be under control, simply won't work. Temporarily, maybe. As people do need not just to eat but also pay back mortgages. But what it did mostly is creating more noise for the employer side. Great enginners don't get laid off. Those who do know usually very well their value, get recommendations and a new role in no time. The economy isn't collapsing, demands is there otherwise there wouldn't be an inflation to fight , we need more workers than ever. the capital refuses to accept a certain reality. That is that Workers will continue to have access to more information. Hence making it futile to exercise manipulations. I'm for free markets and find the disguised attacks and ambushes against the "working class" appalling. Workers aren't even unionized. They just individually have neurons and access to the internet. The same who have been promoting the idea that we better all get richer finally realized that's not fun, that fewer should be much richer and the rest poorer
piva00 3y ago
We have no issues with hiring at the company I work for, dozens of good CVs for each open position. The difference seems to be that we don't have a RTO policy and actually encourage WFH a lot, you just need to live in a country we have a registered entity for tax reasons, so no digital nomads either. Maybe your new normal isn't working, you're paying the price for it.
carlosjobim 3y ago
> We have trouble finding good engineers to hire > unrealistically high salaries That's expected if you don't want to pay the salaries your candidates want. Admitting to not being able to find qualified workers is admitting fundamental incompetence as an employer and as a business. Hiring and retaining workers is the foundation of any business that employs people. Haven't it struck you that maybe you are unrealistic about salaries if you are having trouble hiring?
- hirako2000 3y ago
  This. Of course the comment is not just paradoxal, it's contradictory. Behind a basically bias mind, blinded even by the irresistible desire to basically pay little, bank fat profits, and do nothing. It's an amazing time to be alive. To see how broader access to Information turning against those who used to think the asymmetry would last forever.
  - oytis 3y ago
    It's really funny to see both "times have changed" and "we can't find anyone" in one comment. And it really summarises the attitude of business post-covid. "Doing more with less" is just childish if you think about it. I'm going to do what I like, and there are not going to be any consequences. Oh, there are consequences? That definitely not because what I did.
- cj 3y ago
  The reality is many people are taking pay cuts especially on the junior side of the spectrum. People were hiring devs straight out of bootcamps with zero experience for $160k a couple years ago. Sorry but I can’t hire someone and match their previous salary (from a company that fired them) with a total of 2 yrs experience.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Consider the same line of thinking for other cost centers of your business. Would a restaurant say they're having trouble finding produce just because they don't want to pay the prices asked for? Would a sawmill say they're having trouble finding lumber when they don't want to pay the prices asked. If the developers you want to hire cannot produce enough for your company to make a profit at the salary levels they are asking, this is a hint that your company is not profitable enough to continue functioning. That happens sometimes when margins get thinner. The equation between what customers are willing to pay for the work, and what profit the company desires, and what salaries the workforce demands for doing the work, doesn't give a positive result anymore. So the business model doesn't work anymore. Otherwise you'd hire them right? If the company will make a profit from their work. Or are you foregoing profits out of spite? Edit: I say all this because I used to be incompetent at hiring and my business at the time suffered as a consequence. My mistake was that I was looking to hire people through networks of friends and family, instead of plain old job ads. Sounds like a dumb mistake, but as mentioned I was incompetent. Once I started publishing ads I had no problem finding a lot of good candidates. Hiring and retaining employees is a skill, the most important skill of a business owner.
roughly 3y ago
> while I might have been open to hiring a digital nomad in 2021, I’m not open to that anymore because there are more “normal” candidates out there The folks who took advantage of the ability to leave the city and get a house somewhere other than the Bay or one of the three other cities tech was hiring in are older folks for whom moving back to be near family had some resonance. They've now had 4 years to build a life there. Of course you can't find talented engineers who want to uproot their families and rip their kids away from their cousins, schools, and friends to go live in an apartment in a city and commute to whatever horseshit open floor plan dorm simulator you're calling an office, and especially not if you're not willing to pay an "unrealistically high salary." You'd need to pay me an unrealistically high salary to consider that, too. As usual, there's not a skill gap or a worker shortage, there's an unwillingness to pay talent what it's worth.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Hmm. The way you put that, it sounds like you could to some degree "pay" talent by allowing WFH rather than with dollars. I wonder to what degree that is true.
  - roughly 3y ago
    It is absolutely the case that working conditions are part of the overall negotiation for talent. You start offering folks $1M/yr cash and I promise they'll move back to the city and RTO for you. You let them keep working remote and enjoy the work/life balance, and you can get 'em a whole lot cheaper than that.
bluefirebrand 3y ago
> whether that be decreased salary levels Who can afford to be taking smaller salaries when everything is getting more expensive?
mech422 3y ago
yeah - I think people just didn't realize tech has cycles like all industries, because this is literally the first 'down' in like 14 years...

hef19898 3y ago

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onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

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Ocerge 3y ago
Is there a good reason to downvote this? It seems undeniably true, no?
- deleted 3y ago
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- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  True but perhaps too cold and too direct? "The problem is you" could have been "Maybe have peers and a mentor look at your CV" or something similar that's constructive.
- rawgabbit 3y ago
  I believe he was referring to "Professional and technical services". This is a general category that includes legal advice and representation; accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll services; architectural, engineering, and specialized design services; computer services; consulting services; research services; advertising services; photographic services; translation and interpretation services; veterinary services; and other professional, scientific, and technical services. https://data.bls.gov/cew/apps/bls_naics/v3/bls_naics_app.htm#tab=search&naics=2022&keyword=54&searchType=titles&fromHier=true&filter=nothing&sort=text_asc&resultIndex=0 https://data.bls.gov/cew/apps/bls_naics/v3/bls_naics_app.htm...
- lowercased 3y ago
  "Professional and technical services" covers a lot of stuff, and there may be lots more workers in 'professional services' that are not software folks. I've got more than a handful of (over)qualified colleagues that can't get hired anywhere. Hundreds of applications - not all just click/submit, but many have personal connections/intros vouch for them - hiring will take less experienced/cheaper folks, or... just put off hiring for another few months. Place near me has had the same open position for going on 16 months now. Specific language/tech stack where they also want someone onsite 5 days week. When you've had the position open that long, and you've turned away qualified people for... nitpicky stuff... the job must not be that important. Yet, somehow it's ultra-important to be onsite 5 days/week. Suspicion is that they're just riding the other devs there harder while they 'look' for someone they have no intention of hiring, all while saying "we just can't find anyone!".

silverquiet 3y ago

Creative destruction is all fun and games when it’s someone else who’s being disrupted. I guess that’s the free hand of the market directing you to another industry.

bee_rider 3y ago

We’ve been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a free ticket to the middle class and studying humanities is a total dead-end. It wouldn’t be that surprising for there to be too many programmers (in some sense; if you ask management there will never be enough as long as we have any negotiating leverage). This is a broader problem than the recent COVID-induced troubles.

themagician 3y ago
We've been telling people for years that a STEM degree is a fast track to a six figure income. And that's been mostly true. But now people are going to find out that a STEM degree is going to place them firmly in the real middle class, not the, "I make $240k a year and live in the Bay Area I'm middle class just like you" middle class. Possible we might see some real class solidarity if those being displaced can get over themselves.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  An STEM degree was a fast track to a desk job that might have allowed for “middle class” living, whatever that means. But electrician/plumber/nursing/other physically demanding jobs have always been the other, and more resilient, option. But they’re not desk jobs.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I should have not used the term middle-class because it invites definition based arguments. I meant the Marxist petit-bourgeoisie, which is one of the (multiple, sometimes incompatible) definitions of the middle class. If by middle class you just mean people who have around median income or so, I’d quibble about whether that is any more “real,” but who cares? It is just a definition. Anyway, I think people generally expect something like that petit-bourgeoisie status from their engineering degrees. It is the expectation that our skills will be in demand enough that we can tell management to get bent if they ask us to do something unethical or dangerous; this is a dramatically different position in the labor market, but it requires rare and in demand skills.

deleted 3y ago

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ak_111 3y ago

Sorry to be critical but if you are in tech and have been unemployed for years (especially if those overlap with covid) then you are most certainly doing something wrong and need some guidance. Even now the situation is bad, but not that bad that it should take you more than a couple of months to land some kind of tech job that can pay the bills.

jstarfish 3y ago
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- avery17 3y ago
  Uhhhh
  - screenobobeano 3y ago
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- screenobobeano 3y ago
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- dang 3y ago
  > A sea of brown faces betrays what you're up against. WTF? You can't post like that here, and we ban accounts that do. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html