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Is the Job Market Dying?

• zabzonk 3y ago
  > Completely anecdotally about sums it up
  • bluedino 3y ago
    Let's do anecdotes. I just got calls back from two jobs I applied for in November and December of last year. Interviewed, got offers for both, had the luxury of being able to choose. Found it interesting that both places pretty much knew they had their guy pretty quickly and said they were glad to finally talk to someone who knew what they were doing. I'm not sure if they were getting tricked by AI-generated resumes and cover letters, then finding the applicants didn't quite have the knowledge expected. Nothing fancy either, mid-level networking, Linux, programming...
• peterhadlaw 3y ago
  Probably the most inhumane thing ever is having to make a recorded video of yourself answering personal life questions (presumably to be reviewed by a human from HR) only to actually be processed by an algorithm.
  • airstrike 3y ago
    It's straight up dystopian.
    • cutler 3y ago
      All hail our new AI overlords. "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss".
      • ryandrake 3y ago
        SEO for resumes has been a thing for at least a decade. It’s dystopian and dehumanizing. You can only imagine how bad it is going to get when AI gets to screen, interview, and hire; totally autonomously. I’m sure companies are begging for this: cutting their entire recruiting budget would surely return at least 0.01% to the almighty shareholders.
        • richrichie 3y ago
          This has been the case since professional HR came into being in tech, and people (mainly women) with no domain background were given a major role to play in shortlisting candidates.
          • bzhang255 3y ago
            The gender comment feels unnecessary.
            • richrichie 3y ago
              An empirical fact though.
  • bluedino 3y ago
    How about "Dont send us a resume! We aren't a traditional company. Make a crazy video showing us your personality and why you'd be the best person for the job. Costumes are a bonus."
    • brysonreece 3y ago
      There’s a Black Mirror episode somewhere in here akin to the Hunger Games.
      • zer00eyz 3y ago
        I mean, peddling the bike to keep your vim session going might be good for many of us. Well, at least me.
        • zingababba 3y ago
          Peddling to keep it closed more like.
    • throwaway74432 3y ago
      It doesn't end at hiring. At one place I worked, the CEO got new hires in a room and "spontaneously" asked them to tell an embarrassing story about themselves one by one, to break the ice. People were very uncomfortable but did it. Nobody was having fun, it was pretty cringe. Then it was the CEO's turn (she went last), and she told the most flattering "embarrassing" you could imagine, which was basically just a huge flex about her life and opportunities. Some company leaders just like to humiliate the people who work for them because they can.
      • datavirtue 3y ago
        [flagged]
      • sys_64738 3y ago
        I’ve been in such a situation but I don’t do group stupid so got up and left.
  • ClimaxGravely 3y ago
    Is that really a thing happening these days? Sounds horrible.
    • ZoomerCretin 3y ago
      Oh, it's been happening since 2020. I was offered a few of these HireVues, but I could never finish any because the experience of speaking to a screen like it's a person is so dehumanizing. I believe one of them was from General Motors.
      • ClimaxGravely 3y ago
        Wow, it's easy for me to say in my current situation but I think if I had to do that I would start considering another line of work.
      • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        If they'll dehumanize you in the hiring process, what would it be like to work there?
• chiefalchemist 3y ago
  My sense is, there is less movement. It's like musical chairs. When more people are changing more often those that have been waiting on the side lines have a greater chance of jumping in and getting a seat. Now that the tempo has slowed down, more people are left standing longer. Some big name layoffs aside, the market feels to be roughly the same size. What's missing is the churn.
  • cyberlurker 3y ago
    To add to this, the churn creates inefficiencies within companies since new employees need to onboard and can take as long as two years to truly understand what the heck is going on within the org. If you have less churn, you have better efficiency and perhaps can get more done with fewer engineers. Also interviewing and onboarding people takes a lot of time and effort from other employees, if it is being done right. I don’t know to what degree this is happening but people staying in roles longer definitely helps. Even better if they are happy in those roles and not held hostage by a tougher job market.
    • chiefalchemist 3y ago
      > If you have less churn, you have better efficiency and perhaps can get more done with fewer engineers. True. But the downside is groupthink. New hires bring new ideas, new perspectives, etc. Heck, even something as simple explaining X or Y during onboarding forces the "teacher" to rethinking and reinterpret. No chun? No new blood. No new ideas.
      • cyberlurker 3y ago
        I 100% agree. There is a balance and also different dynamics based on the trajectory of the company. When a company is growing, you could have new blood and old hats. When a company is shrinking, everything sucks.
  • saltminer 3y ago
    My department pays out any leftover budget as a bonus at the end of the fiscal year. I got an email recently that, due to retention, there probably won't be much of a bonus come June. Churn is indeed down.
• eru 3y ago
  > In fact, a recent survey of 1,500 job candidates by the staffing firm Aerotek found 70% of people find their current job search more difficult than the last, even though people are more qualified than before. I wonder how much survivorship bias is in there? If the job market is strong, then people who are candidates now are only those left who have a harder time finding a job? Or simpler: you'd expect the reported difficulties of the average person who's currently out of a job to stay roughly constant; a really good economy will shrink that population of people. (Ie people as a whole are better off on average, but the average of that specific, and shifting sub-group won't change much.)
  • Retric 3y ago
    Different kinds of people find jobs more and less easily as the job market shrinks or grows. The young grad with 2 years of job experience looking on the west coast vs the 45 year old with 20 years of boring enterprise crud on the east coast see very different things when markets are loose or tight. Critically people experience each job market differently as they move between buckets. This happens even if not that much time passed. The guy who retired early at 45 then got bored and starts looking at 50 is just in a wildly different position.
  • ianbicking 3y ago
    That does seem like it would be a problem! Like if you imagine 50% of people have an easy time (1 month search) and 50% have a hard time (2 months) and each person had two searches with no correlation: The groups will be 25% each, ie .25 EH, .25 EE, etc., if you track only people who start looking for a job during the first month of their search. In the second month it will be 50% EH and 50% HH. So a total of 3/8 EH, 3/8 HH, 1/8 HE, 1/8 EE. Or 3/8 bad, 1/2 same, 1/8 better.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      Hard time = looking for the better part of a year or more. Not 2 months which is pretty common outside of the tech boom.
      • 3y ago
• myth_drannon 3y ago
  She brings an example of a person who after sending 75 applications considers changing fields. On Reddit people are sending more than 1000 applications to get a job.
  • joshuamcginnis 3y ago
    I recently stumbled upon a freelance gig from someone looking to hire someone to submit applications for software engineering positions on their behalf. They were willing to pay a few dollars per application and would provide all of the content for the submitter.
    • ryandrake 3y ago
      Where did you find it? This sounds like a tempting service! I’d love to have an “agent” who would deal with all the drudgery of finding me a job and screening companies (and even interviewing on my behalf if that was even possible), and would probably be willing to pay multiple tens of thousands of dollars for this service next time I job hop. It would have to be more than a typical hired recruiter who just periodically sends me a few job listings and said “whaddayathink?” It would have to be: “Here’s my comp. Get me to a job offer paying comp+$50k and I’ll pay you $25k.”
  • paxys 3y ago
    If you get rejected by the first 5-10 companies you apply to then you need to take a step back and figure out what you are doing wrong, because spamming the same resume to 1000 more companies isn't going to change anything. 5 strong leads is infinitely better than 1000 weak ones.
    • esafak 3y ago
      You don't have any feedback to improve your approach other than the fact that you did not get a response.
      • xyzelement 3y ago
• zer00eyz 3y ago
  No, it is not. For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market. 1. Your best bet to get a job is your network. If you were a clock puncher, if you didn't go above and beyond, if you aren't the person who is gonna make the co-worker who vouches for you look good... you are not gonna get much help in your network. 2. The next best bet is to either a) start your own company or b) find someone who wants to start their own company. You know what got us out of the 2000 crash? Web 2.0 was the sexy name but it was ad tech that put money in the bank. Pop unders for Netflix, free iPods, and mortage sign ups... all sorts of nonsense... Today it's much easier to get something small going that pays the bills nothing is stopping you other than you. 3. If neither of these things are for you, and you want to be in tech then you might have to suffer. Job at the liquor store checking out drunks while you do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game. Every one I know who survived not having a job when the 2000 bubble burst fit in one of these buckets. The rest left tech for good.
  • nextworddev 3y ago
    Interesting- what trades did the people who left tech back in the first Dot Com bubble end up going into?
    • margalabargala 3y ago
      It was during covid, not dot-com, but this person went into carpentry: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477 https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
    • zer00eyz 3y ago
      Preacher, Painter (houses, now has a painting company), two cooks, a few went back to school for various non tech things and I lost track of them at that point.
    • esaym 3y ago
      Real estate
    • 3y ago
• spamizbad 3y ago
  This person seems to be sharing anecdotes about the Data Science job market. That field, which exploded over the last decade, has experienced a rapid contraction. Data teams have shrunk and contain far fewer traditional “Data Scientists” and lean more heavily on engineers who orchestrate and plumb data around. Data Scientists have become the “HTML programmers” of the tech bubble. My advice: take a pay cut and pivot to becoming a business analyst or something.
  • noirbot 3y ago
    Yea, I feel like "Data Science" was always a Zero Percent Interest phenomenon. It's the software company version of Dogecoin or GameStop or AMC. If you've got free money, why not throw 10mil at the moonshot of discovering a diamond in the rough of your data that revolutionizes your business. For the last 10 years, every data team I've been adjacent to has had a near infinite budget, hired more people than the rest of the company combined, had an abundance of "scientists" for whom any sort of data process, version control, scientific method, or cost controls were never part of the equation. It really doesn't surprise me that companies have decided they're not throwing good money after bad. There's absolutely good work to be done in Data, but it requires people who know what they're doing, and not just "here's 10 years of postgresql databases. I dunno, find us 10% profit somewhere in it". There's not many companies that really have the data or personnel to make it happen.
    • acdha 3y ago
      I think that’s a bit harsh – but only so much, as I’ve had to explain basic stats literacy to several consultants – but there’s a common factor to many “AI” initiatives: some executives really want to be able to tell their buddies that they’re doing amazing things, and often believe there are huge untapped opportunities to make or save money which all of the employees they don’t trust haven’t mentioned. In reality, of course, there probably just isn’t that much money at play so the high-budget approach is unlikely to break even, and more critically it’s unlikely that people are prepared to change how the organization makes decisions. I’ve known some people who worked for places where they had data showing solid improvements but it either hit politics or was simply small enough that their executives didn’t want to go with it because it wasn’t the magnitude they’d promised to justify the data science program.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• paxys 3y ago
  The job market is normalizing, not dying. It's hard to get a job in tech? No shit, that's how it should be. Sleepwalking into a $300K-500K/yr job with no effort and no expectation to perform was the anomaly, and that's over now.
• datavirtue 3y ago
  Because a "data scientist" can't get a job? Not surprising at all.
• west0n 3y ago
  I know that some companies are developing AI-based interview products. In a video conference, the AI asks questions and then evaluates the candidate's answers, giving a score. This can save a lot of time for the interviewer. Such a world is quite scary.
  • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    Record everything folks, can't wait for the lawsuits about this when AI asks a totally stupid question.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• riku_iki 3y ago
  Is there a route for high skilled engineer for going through this mess? Say, I am happy and confident to do all your leetcode/homework assignments + 8h interviews, but I want to be also top candidate as result.
  • drdrey 3y ago
    if there is an OSS project that you have your eye on, you can easily get noticed by engaging with them and starting to fix/address small issues or convenience features. I know a handful of people who got hired this way.
    • riku_iki 3y ago
      I think this is very unreliable channel, but something worth to try in parallel. To be specific, I am not looking for a job atm, but current approach seems broken, and wondering why companies don't like to use more efficient ways to hire.
  • monero-xmr 3y ago
    Go for small firms, apply direct, see if you can mingle with the employees or even hiring manager somehow - a meetup they are attending, friends of friends, who knows. One time around 2008 I was at a horrible conference put on by Blackberry (even then it was clear they were going to die), and I wound up talking to a guy for an hour about this and that, and it ended with an offer for a job at his firm. Essentially you just need more hustle. When the standard situation is mass applications that are ignored, you need to try something novel and higher-effort.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    > Say, I am happy and confident to do all your leetcode/homework assignments + 8h interviews, but I want to be also top candidate as result. Perhaps not a 100% guaranteed one. Some interviewers just do a bad job. For example, in some of my recent interviews, the (always young) interviewer posed brainteaser questions that have approximately nothing to do with the skillset and knowledge that the job requires. I'm sure those questions are good for identifying candidates with very high IQ and/or familiarity with that particular puzzle. But as a very experienced developer, it really pisses me off to be passed over because I didn't answer those to the interviewer's satisfaction. Long story short: interviewing well is a skill, and as a candidate you can't guarantee a good interviewer.
• purplezooey 3y ago
  This article has a lot of text but does not offer much besides anecdotes, and some generic advice about how companies should write hiring ads.
• ulfw 3y ago
  Dying? It's been dead. I haven't been able to find a job in a year+. And that's with almost 20 years of product leadership experience. Bunch of interviews for company that at the end laid off another 20% of people rather than hire me etc etc. Tons of war stories, ghost job postings and recruiter bullshit. But no job.
  • jondwillis 3y ago
    In a similar boat and I feel your pain. FINALLY expecting an offer on Friday (from a Who’s Hiring HN thread.) Hang in there…
• richrichie 3y ago
  This is by no means limited to tech sector. This is economic depression.
• hsuduebc2 3y ago
  I can't speak for US but in Europe there is significantly less working options but old rusty corporates like insurance companies or banks are always hiring because their rusty boring old systems need mainteance and constant rewriting. At least thats my bet. Wait through bad times here. You can get easily starting point of six figures per year. Heh. It is not much but it's honest work.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• mp05 3y ago
  It's been said over and over for the past number of months, but fewer companies have a lot of use for a person whose sole talent is "sling code" and you just need to start bringing more to the table, or be a top 1% leetcode nerd. I'm seeing some self-taught quant/econ guys getting real software jobs without a ton of formal CS coursework, but a lot of practical experience. Turns out the employers love that shit.... go figure?? ;)
• jacknews 3y ago
  It is for me!
• oraphalous 3y ago
  Did this post get removed? Why? Isn't this an important topic for the community right now?
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    I think it just quickly fell off the front page. (I think I found it on page 3.)
  • AznHisoka 3y ago
    No, it is clickbait, also as someone said, it’s a BUNCH of text but not saying anything new or insightful actually. Just sophisticated, pretentious blathering to put it kindly
• hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  It is very bad for juniors and new graduates. It's fine for seniors and good for seniors who have good skills and connections.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    > It's fine for seniors and good for seniors who have good skills and connections. This has very much not been my experience. (I imagine we're both drawing from personal experience, so I guess what we really want is some solid data.)
    • hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
      Yes personal and a few colleagues. I wish you good luck.
  • jacknews 3y ago
    But not too senior, or you'll be almost completely ignored.
  • red-iron-pine 3y ago
    this has been my experience. had a couple people reach out to me for PM and DevOps roles, on the Sr / Manager level. was metaphorically flirting with another group where the leadership were people I used to work for too, kept poking them to keep in touch, sounded like there may be some options. we'll see if they score more funding though; if not, they may not be able to offer roles or pay, but they keep talking like it'll happen... Meanwhile on places like r/itcareerquestions and r/cscareerquestions it sounds like there are a lot of noobs and juniors fighting for a handful of roles.
• cjbgkagh 3y ago
  There seems to be some survivorship bias in the advice people are giving. I think it is very possible that we will never see that tight of a labor in tech ever again - even without AI. On the economic side it's more difficult to control inflation than it was in previous downturns so there isn't the option of dropping interest rates to the floor. There isn't much room to lower reserve requirements for banks either. I think stimulus measures will be largely ineffectual and the inflation produced increasingly unpopular. So it looks like the pending recession will not have the cushioning that we've had in the past and may be longer and more painful as a result.
• ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  Every time Americans in tech mention applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs to get any position, Europeans are typically incredulous. This does not appear to be an issue on the other side of the ocean. The problem is that the American hiring culture is uniquely toxic, and this is not at all limited to tech. I read stories of people who are desperately hiring but outsource the application and screening process, only to find the outsourcers put decent candidates in the bin for being from the wrong college, or merely having adjacent (and highly relevant!) experience but not exact experience. In other words, they will only accept a purple squirrel. I once applied to a maintenance job at a facility where a relative works. No dice. I asked my relative. "Yeah they keep hiring construction contractors who quit immediately because they aren't paying enough, but I already talked to the manager and he would love to have you." Didn't matter, I couldn't get past the gatekeepers in HR. So because the "talent experts" didn't want to hire someone without carpentry experience to change air filters, or pay the carpenters they hired the $20/hour they wanted, they instead hired outside contractors for $150/hour. In no other country would any of the above be tolerated. Even during the "job boom" of 2021, it was not as easy as it is in Europe to land a medicore position at a mediocre wage. We have a serious cultural issue with hiring and a high degree of arrogance on the part of those doing the hiring. I have no idea how this problem can even be tackled, except if maybe the federal reserve let the economy run hot for several years and forced employers to lower their absurd expectations.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• paulcole 3y ago
  Where I work we stopped posting jobs publicly and stopped promoting them on job sites. We now get candidates in 4 ways: • Internal referral – Sometimes a complete miss, sometimes a quick hire. • External recruiter (rarely) – For some roles their network has been beneficial and we’ve negotiated down to as little as 8% of yearly salary in exchange for a case study or something. • Direct Targeted LinkedIn Outreach – So much cheaper to pay for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite and reach out to promising candidates. I get a near 100% response rate and it’s been so much faster than twiddling my thumbs waiting and hoping for good applicants. • Inbound queries through our careers page - We rewrote this to be honest about what it’s generally like to work with us, including what we like and what other people have disliked. Anybody who writes to us directly after reading it is guaranteed a 30-minute conversation to see if they’re a good fit for either now or in the future. I’ve been surprised how many people have found this page and read it. This has cut our cost to hire for most roles by nearly 70% (also factoring in time cost) compared to promoted posts on job sites. Our time to hire is much faster as well. Part of the trick is realizing you don’t really need The Best People. Find somebody who you’ve got reasonable confidence can do the job well and make them an offer.
  • jacknews 3y ago
    "Part of the trick is realizing you don’t really need The Best People. Find somebody who you’ve got reasonable confidence can do the job well and make them an offer." Right, the whole industry seems to focus on Hunger Games winners, when most of the jobs can be done by normal people, the the superstars are likely to leave at the drop of a hat anyway.
• sotix 3y ago
  I was laid off in January due to my job being outsourced overseas after I built the product. My job search has been terrible. Unfortunately my network is very small since I was in my first job after switching from a previous career in accounting. It feels crazy being able to provide results but not have any options. The market is incredibly conservative. I’ve ended up deciding to attend recurse center in the meantime and see where things are in a few months.
• ghaff 3y ago
  It's not a great tech job market generally. (Was talking to someone knowledgable yesterday and we basically agreed it's not dot-bomb nuclear winter but more like 2008, although different.) However, the scenario described in the post (that's somewhat backed in some of the comments here) is that it's become easy enough to apply to hundreds or even a thousand or more jobs that companies are forced to apply very simple heuristics or "AI" filters (which is pretty much the same thing) to deal with the volume. This means that, for a given job, you have a near-zero chance of winning the lottery to even talk to a person. Therefore, your only chance is pretty much to have a direct path to a human (but, because it's not a great market, that's far from a guarantee either).
• Generous8030 3y ago
  Despite all the noise claiming the contrary, the market is shitty, and I think it will remain that way for the rest of the year. It's election year and it would look really bad on the incumbent for numbers to be "down", so ghost jobs and layoffs will continue (only way to prop stocks up)
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