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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 yo

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
- ryandrake 3y ago
  It’s probably mostly temporary, until CEOs decide the “bad economic climate” is over and start hiring again. I know decent former tech company employees who are stocking shelves at Home Depot until hiring picks up.
  - maerF0x0 3y ago
    I'd rather collect $14 an hour on unemployment than earn $18 exacerbating the ageism I'll face when the market picks up.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
  Investment banking
- datavirtue 3y ago
  I went back to being a cook, then a mechanic. Then I freelanced for a while, slung mass code in personal projects and slid back in as an application support engineer. Now I'm a senior senior dev that can drive product design/strategy, architect, code, and write copy for marketing.
MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
1 definitely tracks. My last company did lots of layoffs and the people who didn’t have a problem getting a new, maybe more senior or well paid, job were the ones that did a great job and put some oomph into their work. Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5, but the people who did reasonable work and then were unavailable after 5 are the ones that are having issues getting new jobs. I don’t think the next best thing is to start a company however. Because the people who didn’t get jobs from their network are more likely to be the people who won’t necessarily excel at this. Plus there are so many variables here. Next best thing in my view is to grind the heck out of Hacker Rank problems and get a job out of pure spite from brute forcing software challenges. Not fun or interesting, but can work really well to land someone a high paying job without having to think about starting a company. Next best thing, or parallel best thing if this is your preference, is probably to get a more local dev job. There are surprisingly many local companies who don’t post remote roles, don’t post roles on HN, pay less than FAANG market, but are comfortable, in person roles with medium expectations. This is way better than being a liquor store clerk.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  >> Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5, Kids, life, have these things. Just make sure you are hitting your marks, that your helpful that your gonna roll your selves up and get shit done. If you have to leave, then leave, bow out. If you cant come in, or have to go cause you need to be at the gym or your spin class or D&D night. No one is calling you back right now. They remember that you put you first and not the team. It does NOT have to be, and SHOULD NOT be, toxic.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Easy enough to say, but when you’re going against people that put their life aside to deliver, and you’re not getting called back, and you’re emptying that 401k… I mean, I get where you’re coming from, but also, shit.
    - zer00eyz 3y ago
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
I was box number three - tried to be box number two and went bankrupt, and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs. Couple of months in I had coded up a sort of automated PC fix program - turned 2 hours into 5 minutes. There is always a way to find an entrepreneurial gap - even if I never quite exploit it to my own financial benefit Worst day in that job when I was trying to crawl out of bankruptcy was meeting a few of my ex-colleagues while wearing the crappy purple uniform. I was putting food on the table and they looked like I was a joke. I still put food on the table, the job market always wants people who can just code. Networking is hard and requires longitudinal effort. But the jackpot remains elusive. Keep trying
- bluedino 3y ago
  >> and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs My first non-restaurant job (starting in high school) was Best Buy. Before they had the Geek Squad, they just had a generic tech area. You could get your VCR cleaned and your PC upgraded in the same spot. Anyway, it seemed like once or twice a year someone would come in and take all the good sales people by offering them more money and fulltime hours. First it was the Gateway Country store (that didn't last long), then it was the local dial up ISP, then the regional DSL provider...
- M95D 3y ago
  Any advice for those who absolutely hate networking?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I think they're giving the answer. You might need to do something else at least for a time--including mostly crappy service sector jobs. But, honestly, even during better times I've relied on my network and you may end up severely disadvantaged if you don't. (Note. Networking doesn't mean going to networking events. It just means keeping in touch with and reaching out to people you've worked with.)
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Be nice to the people you work with. If you can't do that, at least don't be a jerk. Do your job. Do it well. Your coworkers will know whose code works. When someone leaves for a new job, get a personal email. Put it in a file somewhere (not in a work computer). That's networking. It doesn't have to be going to the bar every night with your bros from work. It can just be that people know you, know your work, and have moved on to other places.
Scubabear68 3y ago
After getting laid off after the .com bust, I did a variation on 3), accepted a contract job with a terrible company. It got me by until the market improved and got a much better job. The trick in a bad market is to understand that mostly the cool perks are gone, and for a time you need to lower your expectations. I think that is going to be very difficult in this cycle.
- hsuduebc2 3y ago
  Out of curiosity. How long till things turned to be better in these days?
  - Scubabear68 3y ago
    I held on to the crap job for 1 year 11 months. In 2004 I quit and found a Wall Street gig that was much better.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    It was years in my case but should arguably have been less. (It wasn't a crap job by any means but didn't pay well by many tech standards at that point.) It's always been through personal contacts but I've surely been lucky.
emh68 3y ago
Nope, it's different this time. 1. My entire network is struggling, even the ones who have jobs are worried. Despite being universally acclaimed and vouched for by my past coworkers, it seems to have no impact. Companies don't trust their own employees references right now. 2. Maybe this is changing, but it seems like entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. Nobody has ideas, everyone just wants to go to sleep at a comfy 9-to-5. Maybe bootstrapping a company is so outside of people's comfort zone that they can't even fathom it.
- ulfw 3y ago
  The only 'ideas' allowed are AI and AI if done from the ground up can only be afforded by billion dollar companies, which is why you see nvidia, microsoft, google owning most of it. The entrepreneurship of ten years ago of two dudes sitting in a house coding apps is gone.
  - codethatwerks 3y ago
    Not sure. Read the recent PG essay. But I reckon you are going to be writing the procurement app for a midsized building firm, or a ERP for a road haulage firm, or a shift management system for a hospital, rather than some low hanging tech bro idea fruit. What they call “IT”.
  - PheonixPharts 3y ago
    This is not true. The one benefit of all the AI hype is that there are many small teams of smart people getting funding. Maybe in 2-5 years they'll all get acquired or go under, but right now is some of the most fun I've had in industry in a long time. And, despite all the hype, there is a lot of unexplored stuff in this space that can be done on hardware that can be run in a home office. Yes, it's not literally coding apps any more, but I know quite a few people working on small, funded teams having a lot of fun right now.
- pascalxus 3y ago
  it has nothing to do with ideas. It's about opportunities: and right now there's not very many of those.
ghaff 3y ago
I was really lucky. After getting laid off. Called a guy who I had been a client for and had a lunch with him and a business manager. Ended up with a job in the post-2K bubble. Didn't pay well and barely made it to the other side but ended up the basis for how I ended out career.
codethatwerks 3y ago
I disagree with #1. Not entirely but it is about perception. Working an extra 10-20 hrs a week for free in return for a chance but no guarantee of a vouch is in itself a bad deal. So while you may have reasons for working long hours, hoping someone has your back is not a great one. Unless you have known them since you were 8 or something and even then.
- pokstad 3y ago
  It’s called hustling. Not everyone makes it, but putting in extra effort improves your odds. It’s pretty amazing to me that this is now considered controversial.
  - nytesky 3y ago
    My perception of hustling isn’t about long hours, unless those are hours hanging out after work building relationships. It’s more about making your self visible for the work you do, being memorable in a positive way, maybe helping people who in a way that leaves an impression. Working late to deliver one day early, no one is going to notice.
  - codethatwerks 3y ago
    Given you are happy to work say 60 hours a week, what is the optimal use of the extra 20. For some it might be free work for their employer in return for something. Example might be in financial trading etc. to get a bonus or raise or promotion in a shop that is killing it. For some it might be leetcode and reading everything on levels.io and teamblind. For some it might be active investing for example property renovation. For some a side business. For some TOGAF and Scrum qualifications. But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters. Etc.
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      > But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters. Yeah, at 50/hr that's $50,000 for a chance of someone vouching for you in the future that may never come to pass. There's also the chance that maybe they were the manager that made you work 60hrs in the first place, so they don't see you as going above and beyond. Whoopsie, you just wasted 1000 hours of your life. No thanks. I'll get the job on my own merit.
acdha 3y ago
I’d add one other option: look outside of tech. I knew people who were hit by the dotcom bubble pretty hard but ended up getting jobs in government, academia (I left for a computational research lab myself), non-profits, and high-touch but not tech businesses (e.g. a friend bailed to a law firm - they were flush with cash but none of the partners knew how or wanted to run the IT side of things.). I’d especially add that this can be good for people without extensive personal networks or who are worried about discrimination. If you’re on, say, https://usajobs.gov https://usajobs.gov they are going to be a lot more fastidious about equal opportunity laws than many private companies and won’t think twice about hiring a middle-aged person with cubicle bod who has to go home at 5pm to pick up their kids rather than grabbing beers after work.
- beauzero 3y ago
  I would agree with this for state work as well. Alabama, because Montgomery is super cheap, is a very good option. I will warn you though...the red tape can take a while. Fill out the paperwork or call the local contract recruiters. We find most of our people that way. They come in on contract, which I did, and convert to government. Depends on the department but once you are in it is fairly easy to move around. DOT is Java, Banking is a mixture of Microsoft and open source, Medicaid is a mix etc. If there is nothing immediately it may take 6-9 months before you get a call but if you are reading this you will be in the top candidates. Sometimes I think we are as "out of the way" as Alaska as far as people considering working here but we would love to have you. I love the state and I didn't start here until I was in my late 40's. Shooting for retirement at 70-75+...I really just love doing this for a living. I moved to government after my 4th 5 year startup/SMB experience. Just needed the stability, someplace I could code and feel good about what I was doing again, and good health insurance. It's the nicest group of people I have ever worked with.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Yeah, I mentioned federal because that’s where I have experience but I know more people who went to state level agencies, libraries, etc. Nobody gets rich that way but you also don’t get asked to work unpaid overtime or mysteriously laid off when you turn 50, either, and if you have any reason to be in a different part of the country outside of a tech hotspot that might be an easy way to stay near family, too.
nytesky 3y ago
Interesting you don’t mention a huge option that opened up after 2001 — govt/defense work. There was a huge ramp up in military spending in the 2000s and it was still “tech” work, albeit often of the more “move slow, change incrementally” variety.
- pokstad 3y ago
  I spent the start of my career in Defense in the late 2000s. People told me it was foolish to leave defense for less money/benefits in tech startups where nothing was guaranteed. I ended up finally leaving and it was the best career decision I ever made.
  - nytesky 3y ago
    Without question. I had a kid around that time so startup life seemed really mismatched, so now kinda stuck.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I worked a decade in the DoD, and then another decade in various tech companies. I was laid off from a startup 12 months ago. There are definitely pros and cons of both sides. Here's my take on working for the DoD: - PRO: Having a long tenure means you really get to know the software systems you're developing, and the people with whom you're collaborating. - PRO: Lack of commercial / profit pressure lets you focus on what seems good for the country, rather than for stockholders. - CON: Congress is insane. They still haven't passed a defense budget for FY24. The DoD is the only employer I've ever had that missed payroll. - PRO/CON: Supporting the U.S.'s military might is good or bad, depending on how it's used. A lot of soul-searching may be required to do the work. But working for the private sector can also feel awful, especially in this age of surveillance capitalism. - PRO/CON: The pay is okay-ish compared to the private sector (PRO), but there's no potential for major bonuses / RSUs (CON). - PRO: Layoffs are far less common than in the private sector. There's no boom-and-bust cycle tied to interest rates (AFAIK). - PRO: The hiring process is 10000x better than what I've endured from the private sector since being laid off about 12 months ago. No LeetCode tests, no 5 rounds of interviews followed by being ghosted. And yet, despite the far simpler hiring process, my corner of the DoD generally managed to hire good people. - CON: Bureaucracy. It can be soul-sucking. But since leaving the DoD, I've learned that it's just a symptom of massive organizations in general. E.g., I encountered a lot of the same frustrations working at Intel under Brian K and Bob Swan. - PRO/CON: Physical facilities. At least where I worked, the DoD offices were generally run down compared to typical big-corporation offices. On the other hand, the DoD workspaces weren't under financial pressure to maxize programmers per square foot. So there weren't any open-office floor plans. Everyone at least had a cube, more senior people generally had offices. - PRO: No significant ageism. If you start working for the DoD, and don't egregiously screw up, you don't need to worry about being laid off because of your age. But beyond that, many of these systems / problem domains have long learning curves, so long-tenured developers generally command a lot of well-deserved respect. ** Right now I'm actually interviewing for private sector jobs (Microsoft) and DoD jobs. I might have to take an offer from Microsoft because of financial considerations. But I'm also kinda hoping I end up back at the DoD.
PheonixPharts 3y ago
> The rest left tech for good. This is an important reality check for many people. I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash. At that time software engineers got paid well, but not insane. Additionally, every software engineer I met was passionate about writing code. Honestly, around 2019 I was really missing those days. The field has become flooded with people looking for a high paying job with essentially no interest in software or computer science beyond the paycheck it provides. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I do miss virtually everyone in the industry being genuinely fascinated with software and programming. The good news is, if you're the kind of person who would write code even if it paid minimum wage, you'll survive this. People whose book shelves are filled with CS books, who find themselves working on coding problems at night because it's fun, who can't help hacking around with new ideas on the weeked, will very likely continue to work in software. You'll likely make less money, but you'll also have more fun. Unsurprisingly, in this current market I'm getting paid less but having more fun at work than I've had in nearly a decade.
- jacknews 3y ago
  Any open positions there?
- nytesky 3y ago
  I sympathize with your perspective, when most programmers were really nerds was a magical time. I do wonder if we are indulging in an “eternal September” mindset though.
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    I have been theorizing that they all get FAANG jobs now. Free everything, stock options, good pay.... Crush the competition before it gets its feet under it. It isnt that we dont have as many nerds, they are all just "locked up".
    - mech422 3y ago
      I sometimes think FAANGs select for that group... Basically, all they have to offer is the paycheck. Outside of a few 'interesting' departments, most FAANG stuff seems to be the same sort of work you'd get in any other industry. And they make sure to run you thru a gauntlet of interviews for the positions. I think a lot of the "lifelong geek" crowd just finds more 'interesting' work (for whatever qualifies as 'interesting' to them...) in other companies without jumping thru all the hoops (and for less pay, of course). Lots of startups, niche companies, etc offer challenges that can make up for the lower pay.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Thank you. This article is just downright silly (and that does not mean I don't have a ton of empathy for people who are job searching right now). All of the following are true: 1. There was a massive amount of tech hiring not just over the pandemic, but really in the whole period from the end of the Great Recession until the latter half of 2022. 2. Many of those jobs were not just unsustainable pandemic hiring, but they were really just speculative hiring enabled by the ZIRP era, where more companies were worried about being left behind than overspending. Some examples: during the "Big Data Boom" there was an explosion of "data scientists" and "data analysts". I put those titles in scare quotes not because they're invalid jobs or something, but just that there was so much of a "just throw bodies at the problem" attitude that many of these roles were poorly defined at companies. Similarly, lots of companies staffed up massive user research teams. Turns out a lot of that low hanging fruit has been picked, and many companies have realized they can get by with much smaller, more targeted user research. 3. We are now undergoing a massive job restructuring, I would argue even stronger than what happened post dot com bubble, for a bunch of reasons: (1) the end of the ZIRP era coinciding with the end of pandemic-specific overhiring, (2) I've heard it said "Elon Musk showed with Twitter that you can run tech companies with a lot smaller teams" - while I strongly disagree (I'm always thinking, have you actually even used the complete garbage cesspool X has become, even more than before???), I think there is a valid point that a lot of companies just had way too many people than they needed, and (3) Gen AI really is having an impact on specific roles, e.g. copywriting roles and low-level data analyst roles. It's simply a game of musical chairs where a ton of chairs were taken away all at once. Yes, the job application process is painful, AI-assisted ATS tools can feel like a labyrinth, and there are a lot more scams. But that is not the root cause. There are just a ton more people looking for jobs than there are roles available.
benreesman 3y ago
“Shitty job market” is an awfully charitable way to say “illegal, anti-market activity is de-facto sanctioned now”. We spent the lion’s share of the 20th century building a vast “sovereign wealth fund” of technology via effective partnerships between the public and private sectors (substantially though not exclusively under “defense” budgets of one kind or another): everything from the transistor to the laser to the packet-switched Internet to Unix, the list goes on and on. Then, somewhat abruptly in the scheme of things, a few things happened around the same time: “Dutch” Reagan was sharp enough to realize that he was a fucking movie star not a policy person, and needed some academic and intellectual heft to round out a serious presidential bid. The exact causal structure remains unclear to this day, it seems mostly to be related to cashing in on a Cold War that was winding down but good for one last corruption orgy, but somehow he and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan all got together and sold the public on a bunch of policies that were and remain disasters (Greenspan has since grudgingly admitted that he was wrong about pretty much everything in the kind of tortured language people like that use when they’re wrong about everything), Lewis Ranieri realized that in his words “Mortgages are math” and began a disastrous trend of extreme complexity financialization that created modern K Street (basically figured out how to buy up the commons for pennies on the dollar by gutting any remaining taboos against flagrant bribery of elected officials) and smoothly pivoted all of this into the Clinton Administration while codifying “Goldman Sachs is where we source finance people” in the form of Robert Rubin and his heirs, and the piece de resistance: brought Larry Summers into the mix, whose biography reads like the prelude to impeachment proceedings: everything the guy has ever touched has been illegal, icky, stupid, racist, misogynistic, kleptocratic, corrupt, or all of the above. The last person to put up a serious fight was Brooksley Born, who was in the middle of preventing both the 2001 and 2008 financial meltdowns (and therefore almost certainly preventing the rise of reactionary populism in the Western World) when the cabal of incompetent Randian fuckups knee-capped her (using gender discrimination as a lever) and basically started running the “build a technology-denominated sovereign wealth fund” process in reverse: it’s been game on regarding raiding that cookie jar if you have the right “network” ever since. The Department of Justice was taking time out of its typical day chasing around terrorists and human traffickers and what not to try to police stuff like trivial collusion and flagrant wage fixing in technology as recently as like 2011-2012, but seems to have kind of given up: it’s a losing battle. The last major legal action around big cap tech wage fixing wound down with a 400MM parking ticket in ~2011. Three guesses where Summers is putting his greasy thumbs (the rest of that clique is dead or retired) on the scale now and who is the heir apparent to this nightmare.
eru 3y ago
> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market. But is the job market actually shitty? I still get plenty of recruiter spam on LinkedIn.
antisthenes 3y ago
> 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. Regarding this...I was the guy on both ends of the spectrum. The Rockstar that goes above and beyond and the guy who was punching the clock (sometimes a little too early). It made no appreciable difference in the quality of my network - it is still essentially non-existent, since none of my peers or ex-peers have much influence over hiring decisions. My best shot at networking into a job is through a personal friend who works in a non-tech sector at a high level position. He's probably the only person who can actually get my resume seen by hiring people out of several hundred that I have met over my lifetime.
sevensor 3y ago
> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market. Just as we saw in 2001, the market is worst for (a) recent graduates who have not yet established a professional network and (b) people who had poured into fungible commoditized job roles during the boom and were a dime a dozen when the bust came. (b) is roughly "programmer/analyst" in 2001, "Java developer" in 2008, and "data scientist" today. It's not that some people working under those titles don't have non-fungible skills, but that there are so many others with that job on their resume, that it's hard to differentiate. My advice is, _don't go looking for those jobs._ The opening anecdote in the article describes how terrible it is to try to get hired as a data scientist right now. And no wonder. The job market is flooded with low-quality data scientists. My experience working with data scientists has drastically lowered my expectations: you get a mediocre Python programmer (you must be willing to accept Pandas + Jupyter notebooks as their work output), combined with a mediocre statistician (can do linear regression and ANOVA, but don't expect them to do it right), combined with a mediocre SQL programmer (probably SELECT, maybe JOIN if you're lucky), and a mediocre machine learning specialist (has a list of preferred sklearn functions in random priority order depending on training, plus maybe one other random library that stops working in the middle of the project due to an API change). They made up for their cheap salaries by spending lots of money on AWS. Maybe I just got unlucky. Didn't know how to hire well. I'm sure there are good Data Scientists out there, but it's so easy to hire bad ones that it's no wonder people are reluctant to do it. If you're one of the good ones, and if you're in any way qualified for a job with a higher barrier to entry, or even just a job with a more unusual title than Data Scientist, go for that instead of trying to stand out in a sea of mediocrity.
wolfie69 3y ago
> do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game. Ha ha so true! I entered tech in 2000, right as everything was going down. Hey, it was fun for the 8 months I worked for what we now call a startup in Miami. They closed abruptly, and luckily I was able to get another job within about 4 months. The market in tech is definitely worse than 2020 (I don't know why some here say those were the days of wine and roses) and I was always able to find work during the financial crisis, though it could take a couple of months. So, I'd say that the job market for tech is not as bad as the dot com crash but worse than 2009 or 2020.

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
ryandrake 3y ago
It’s probably mostly temporary, until CEOs decide the “bad economic climate” is over and start hiring again. I know decent former tech company employees who are stocking shelves at Home Depot until hiring picks up.
- maerF0x0 3y ago
  I'd rather collect $14 an hour on unemployment than earn $18 exacerbating the ageism I'll face when the market picks up.
MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
Investment banking
datavirtue 3y ago
I went back to being a cook, then a mechanic. Then I freelanced for a while, slung mass code in personal projects and slid back in as an application support engineer. Now I'm a senior senior dev that can drive product design/strategy, architect, code, and write copy for marketing.

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago

1 definitely tracks. My last company did lots of layoffs and the people who didn’t have a problem getting a new, maybe more senior or well paid, job were the ones that did a great job and put some oomph into their work. Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5, but the people who did reasonable work and then were unavailable after 5 are the ones that are having issues getting new jobs. I don’t think the next best thing is to start a company however. Because the people who didn’t get jobs from their network are more likely to be the people who won’t necessarily excel at this. Plus there are so many variables here. Next best thing in my view is to grind the heck out of Hacker Rank problems and get a job out of pure spite from brute forcing software challenges. Not fun or interesting, but can work really well to land someone a high paying job without having to think about starting a company. Next best thing, or parallel best thing if this is your preference, is probably to get a more local dev job. There are surprisingly many local companies who don’t post remote roles, don’t post roles on HN, pay less than FAANG market, but are comfortable, in person roles with medium expectations. This is way better than being a liquor store clerk.

zer00eyz 3y ago
>> Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5, Kids, life, have these things. Just make sure you are hitting your marks, that your helpful that your gonna roll your selves up and get shit done. If you have to leave, then leave, bow out. If you cant come in, or have to go cause you need to be at the gym or your spin class or D&D night. No one is calling you back right now. They remember that you put you first and not the team. It does NOT have to be, and SHOULD NOT be, toxic.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Easy enough to say, but when you’re going against people that put their life aside to deliver, and you’re not getting called back, and you’re emptying that 401k… I mean, I get where you’re coming from, but also, shit.
  - zer00eyz 3y ago

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

I was box number three - tried to be box number two and went bankrupt, and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs. Couple of months in I had coded up a sort of automated PC fix program - turned 2 hours into 5 minutes. There is always a way to find an entrepreneurial gap - even if I never quite exploit it to my own financial benefit Worst day in that job when I was trying to crawl out of bankruptcy was meeting a few of my ex-colleagues while wearing the crappy purple uniform. I was putting food on the table and they looked like I was a joke. I still put food on the table, the job market always wants people who can just code. Networking is hard and requires longitudinal effort. But the jackpot remains elusive. Keep trying

bluedino 3y ago
>> and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs My first non-restaurant job (starting in high school) was Best Buy. Before they had the Geek Squad, they just had a generic tech area. You could get your VCR cleaned and your PC upgraded in the same spot. Anyway, it seemed like once or twice a year someone would come in and take all the good sales people by offering them more money and fulltime hours. First it was the Gateway Country store (that didn't last long), then it was the local dial up ISP, then the regional DSL provider...
M95D 3y ago
Any advice for those who absolutely hate networking?
- ghaff 3y ago
  I think they're giving the answer. You might need to do something else at least for a time--including mostly crappy service sector jobs. But, honestly, even during better times I've relied on my network and you may end up severely disadvantaged if you don't. (Note. Networking doesn't mean going to networking events. It just means keeping in touch with and reaching out to people you've worked with.)
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Be nice to the people you work with. If you can't do that, at least don't be a jerk. Do your job. Do it well. Your coworkers will know whose code works. When someone leaves for a new job, get a personal email. Put it in a file somewhere (not in a work computer). That's networking. It doesn't have to be going to the bar every night with your bros from work. It can just be that people know you, know your work, and have moved on to other places.

Scubabear68 3y ago

After getting laid off after the .com bust, I did a variation on 3), accepted a contract job with a terrible company. It got me by until the market improved and got a much better job. The trick in a bad market is to understand that mostly the cool perks are gone, and for a time you need to lower your expectations. I think that is going to be very difficult in this cycle.

hsuduebc2 3y ago
Out of curiosity. How long till things turned to be better in these days?
- Scubabear68 3y ago
  I held on to the crap job for 1 year 11 months. In 2004 I quit and found a Wall Street gig that was much better.
- ghaff 3y ago
  It was years in my case but should arguably have been less. (It wasn't a crap job by any means but didn't pay well by many tech standards at that point.) It's always been through personal contacts but I've surely been lucky.

emh68 3y ago

Nope, it's different this time. 1. My entire network is struggling, even the ones who have jobs are worried. Despite being universally acclaimed and vouched for by my past coworkers, it seems to have no impact. Companies don't trust their own employees references right now. 2. Maybe this is changing, but it seems like entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. Nobody has ideas, everyone just wants to go to sleep at a comfy 9-to-5. Maybe bootstrapping a company is so outside of people's comfort zone that they can't even fathom it.

ulfw 3y ago
The only 'ideas' allowed are AI and AI if done from the ground up can only be afforded by billion dollar companies, which is why you see nvidia, microsoft, google owning most of it. The entrepreneurship of ten years ago of two dudes sitting in a house coding apps is gone.
- codethatwerks 3y ago
  Not sure. Read the recent PG essay. But I reckon you are going to be writing the procurement app for a midsized building firm, or a ERP for a road haulage firm, or a shift management system for a hospital, rather than some low hanging tech bro idea fruit. What they call “IT”.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  This is not true. The one benefit of all the AI hype is that there are many small teams of smart people getting funding. Maybe in 2-5 years they'll all get acquired or go under, but right now is some of the most fun I've had in industry in a long time. And, despite all the hype, there is a lot of unexplored stuff in this space that can be done on hardware that can be run in a home office. Yes, it's not literally coding apps any more, but I know quite a few people working on small, funded teams having a lot of fun right now.
pascalxus 3y ago
it has nothing to do with ideas. It's about opportunities: and right now there's not very many of those.

ghaff 3y ago

I was really lucky. After getting laid off. Called a guy who I had been a client for and had a lunch with him and a business manager. Ended up with a job in the post-2K bubble. Didn't pay well and barely made it to the other side but ended up the basis for how I ended out career.

codethatwerks 3y ago

I disagree with #1. Not entirely but it is about perception. Working an extra 10-20 hrs a week for free in return for a chance but no guarantee of a vouch is in itself a bad deal. So while you may have reasons for working long hours, hoping someone has your back is not a great one. Unless you have known them since you were 8 or something and even then.

pokstad 3y ago
It’s called hustling. Not everyone makes it, but putting in extra effort improves your odds. It’s pretty amazing to me that this is now considered controversial.
- nytesky 3y ago
  My perception of hustling isn’t about long hours, unless those are hours hanging out after work building relationships. It’s more about making your self visible for the work you do, being memorable in a positive way, maybe helping people who in a way that leaves an impression. Working late to deliver one day early, no one is going to notice.
- codethatwerks 3y ago
  Given you are happy to work say 60 hours a week, what is the optimal use of the extra 20. For some it might be free work for their employer in return for something. Example might be in financial trading etc. to get a bonus or raise or promotion in a shop that is killing it. For some it might be leetcode and reading everything on levels.io and teamblind. For some it might be active investing for example property renovation. For some a side business. For some TOGAF and Scrum qualifications. But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters. Etc.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    > But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters. Yeah, at 50/hr that's $50,000 for a chance of someone vouching for you in the future that may never come to pass. There's also the chance that maybe they were the manager that made you work 60hrs in the first place, so they don't see you as going above and beyond. Whoopsie, you just wasted 1000 hours of your life. No thanks. I'll get the job on my own merit.

acdha 3y ago

I’d add one other option: look outside of tech. I knew people who were hit by the dotcom bubble pretty hard but ended up getting jobs in government, academia (I left for a computational research lab myself), non-profits, and high-touch but not tech businesses (e.g. a friend bailed to a law firm - they were flush with cash but none of the partners knew how or wanted to run the IT side of things.). I’d especially add that this can be good for people without extensive personal networks or who are worried about discrimination. If you’re on, say, https://usajobs.gov https://usajobs.gov they are going to be a lot more fastidious about equal opportunity laws than many private companies and won’t think twice about hiring a middle-aged person with cubicle bod who has to go home at 5pm to pick up their kids rather than grabbing beers after work.

beauzero 3y ago
I would agree with this for state work as well. Alabama, because Montgomery is super cheap, is a very good option. I will warn you though...the red tape can take a while. Fill out the paperwork or call the local contract recruiters. We find most of our people that way. They come in on contract, which I did, and convert to government. Depends on the department but once you are in it is fairly easy to move around. DOT is Java, Banking is a mixture of Microsoft and open source, Medicaid is a mix etc. If there is nothing immediately it may take 6-9 months before you get a call but if you are reading this you will be in the top candidates. Sometimes I think we are as "out of the way" as Alaska as far as people considering working here but we would love to have you. I love the state and I didn't start here until I was in my late 40's. Shooting for retirement at 70-75+...I really just love doing this for a living. I moved to government after my 4th 5 year startup/SMB experience. Just needed the stability, someplace I could code and feel good about what I was doing again, and good health insurance. It's the nicest group of people I have ever worked with.
- acdha 3y ago
  Yeah, I mentioned federal because that’s where I have experience but I know more people who went to state level agencies, libraries, etc. Nobody gets rich that way but you also don’t get asked to work unpaid overtime or mysteriously laid off when you turn 50, either, and if you have any reason to be in a different part of the country outside of a tech hotspot that might be an easy way to stay near family, too.

nytesky 3y ago

Interesting you don’t mention a huge option that opened up after 2001 — govt/defense work. There was a huge ramp up in military spending in the 2000s and it was still “tech” work, albeit often of the more “move slow, change incrementally” variety.

pokstad 3y ago
I spent the start of my career in Defense in the late 2000s. People told me it was foolish to leave defense for less money/benefits in tech startups where nothing was guaranteed. I ended up finally leaving and it was the best career decision I ever made.
- nytesky 3y ago
  Without question. I had a kid around that time so startup life seemed really mismatched, so now kinda stuck.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
I worked a decade in the DoD, and then another decade in various tech companies. I was laid off from a startup 12 months ago. There are definitely pros and cons of both sides. Here's my take on working for the DoD: - PRO: Having a long tenure means you really get to know the software systems you're developing, and the people with whom you're collaborating. - PRO: Lack of commercial / profit pressure lets you focus on what seems good for the country, rather than for stockholders. - CON: Congress is insane. They still haven't passed a defense budget for FY24. The DoD is the only employer I've ever had that missed payroll. - PRO/CON: Supporting the U.S.'s military might is good or bad, depending on how it's used. A lot of soul-searching may be required to do the work. But working for the private sector can also feel awful, especially in this age of surveillance capitalism. - PRO/CON: The pay is okay-ish compared to the private sector (PRO), but there's no potential for major bonuses / RSUs (CON). - PRO: Layoffs are far less common than in the private sector. There's no boom-and-bust cycle tied to interest rates (AFAIK). - PRO: The hiring process is 10000x better than what I've endured from the private sector since being laid off about 12 months ago. No LeetCode tests, no 5 rounds of interviews followed by being ghosted. And yet, despite the far simpler hiring process, my corner of the DoD generally managed to hire good people. - CON: Bureaucracy. It can be soul-sucking. But since leaving the DoD, I've learned that it's just a symptom of massive organizations in general. E.g., I encountered a lot of the same frustrations working at Intel under Brian K and Bob Swan. - PRO/CON: Physical facilities. At least where I worked, the DoD offices were generally run down compared to typical big-corporation offices. On the other hand, the DoD workspaces weren't under financial pressure to maxize programmers per square foot. So there weren't any open-office floor plans. Everyone at least had a cube, more senior people generally had offices. - PRO: No significant ageism. If you start working for the DoD, and don't egregiously screw up, you don't need to worry about being laid off because of your age. But beyond that, many of these systems / problem domains have long learning curves, so long-tenured developers generally command a lot of well-deserved respect. ** Right now I'm actually interviewing for private sector jobs (Microsoft) and DoD jobs. I might have to take an offer from Microsoft because of financial considerations. But I'm also kinda hoping I end up back at the DoD.

PheonixPharts 3y ago

> The rest left tech for good. This is an important reality check for many people. I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash. At that time software engineers got paid well, but not insane. Additionally, every software engineer I met was passionate about writing code. Honestly, around 2019 I was really missing those days. The field has become flooded with people looking for a high paying job with essentially no interest in software or computer science beyond the paycheck it provides. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I do miss virtually everyone in the industry being genuinely fascinated with software and programming. The good news is, if you're the kind of person who would write code even if it paid minimum wage, you'll survive this. People whose book shelves are filled with CS books, who find themselves working on coding problems at night because it's fun, who can't help hacking around with new ideas on the weeked, will very likely continue to work in software. You'll likely make less money, but you'll also have more fun. Unsurprisingly, in this current market I'm getting paid less but having more fun at work than I've had in nearly a decade.

jacknews 3y ago
Any open positions there?
nytesky 3y ago
I sympathize with your perspective, when most programmers were really nerds was a magical time. I do wonder if we are indulging in an “eternal September” mindset though.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  I have been theorizing that they all get FAANG jobs now. Free everything, stock options, good pay.... Crush the competition before it gets its feet under it. It isnt that we dont have as many nerds, they are all just "locked up".
  - mech422 3y ago
    I sometimes think FAANGs select for that group... Basically, all they have to offer is the paycheck. Outside of a few 'interesting' departments, most FAANG stuff seems to be the same sort of work you'd get in any other industry. And they make sure to run you thru a gauntlet of interviews for the positions. I think a lot of the "lifelong geek" crowd just finds more 'interesting' work (for whatever qualifies as 'interesting' to them...) in other companies without jumping thru all the hoops (and for less pay, of course). Lots of startups, niche companies, etc offer challenges that can make up for the lower pay.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Thank you. This article is just downright silly (and that does not mean I don't have a ton of empathy for people who are job searching right now). All of the following are true: 1. There was a massive amount of tech hiring not just over the pandemic, but really in the whole period from the end of the Great Recession until the latter half of 2022. 2. Many of those jobs were not just unsustainable pandemic hiring, but they were really just speculative hiring enabled by the ZIRP era, where more companies were worried about being left behind than overspending. Some examples: during the "Big Data Boom" there was an explosion of "data scientists" and "data analysts". I put those titles in scare quotes not because they're invalid jobs or something, but just that there was so much of a "just throw bodies at the problem" attitude that many of these roles were poorly defined at companies. Similarly, lots of companies staffed up massive user research teams. Turns out a lot of that low hanging fruit has been picked, and many companies have realized they can get by with much smaller, more targeted user research. 3. We are now undergoing a massive job restructuring, I would argue even stronger than what happened post dot com bubble, for a bunch of reasons: (1) the end of the ZIRP era coinciding with the end of pandemic-specific overhiring, (2) I've heard it said "Elon Musk showed with Twitter that you can run tech companies with a lot smaller teams" - while I strongly disagree (I'm always thinking, have you actually even used the complete garbage cesspool X has become, even more than before???), I think there is a valid point that a lot of companies just had way too many people than they needed, and (3) Gen AI really is having an impact on specific roles, e.g. copywriting roles and low-level data analyst roles. It's simply a game of musical chairs where a ton of chairs were taken away all at once. Yes, the job application process is painful, AI-assisted ATS tools can feel like a labyrinth, and there are a lot more scams. But that is not the root cause. There are just a ton more people looking for jobs than there are roles available.

benreesman 3y ago

“Shitty job market” is an awfully charitable way to say “illegal, anti-market activity is de-facto sanctioned now”. We spent the lion’s share of the 20th century building a vast “sovereign wealth fund” of technology via effective partnerships between the public and private sectors (substantially though not exclusively under “defense” budgets of one kind or another): everything from the transistor to the laser to the packet-switched Internet to Unix, the list goes on and on. Then, somewhat abruptly in the scheme of things, a few things happened around the same time: “Dutch” Reagan was sharp enough to realize that he was a fucking movie star not a policy person, and needed some academic and intellectual heft to round out a serious presidential bid. The exact causal structure remains unclear to this day, it seems mostly to be related to cashing in on a Cold War that was winding down but good for one last corruption orgy, but somehow he and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan all got together and sold the public on a bunch of policies that were and remain disasters (Greenspan has since grudgingly admitted that he was wrong about pretty much everything in the kind of tortured language people like that use when they’re wrong about everything), Lewis Ranieri realized that in his words “Mortgages are math” and began a disastrous trend of extreme complexity financialization that created modern K Street (basically figured out how to buy up the commons for pennies on the dollar by gutting any remaining taboos against flagrant bribery of elected officials) and smoothly pivoted all of this into the Clinton Administration while codifying “Goldman Sachs is where we source finance people” in the form of Robert Rubin and his heirs, and the piece de resistance: brought Larry Summers into the mix, whose biography reads like the prelude to impeachment proceedings: everything the guy has ever touched has been illegal, icky, stupid, racist, misogynistic, kleptocratic, corrupt, or all of the above. The last person to put up a serious fight was Brooksley Born, who was in the middle of preventing both the 2001 and 2008 financial meltdowns (and therefore almost certainly preventing the rise of reactionary populism in the Western World) when the cabal of incompetent Randian fuckups knee-capped her (using gender discrimination as a lever) and basically started running the “build a technology-denominated sovereign wealth fund” process in reverse: it’s been game on regarding raiding that cookie jar if you have the right “network” ever since. The Department of Justice was taking time out of its typical day chasing around terrorists and human traffickers and what not to try to police stuff like trivial collusion and flagrant wage fixing in technology as recently as like 2011-2012, but seems to have kind of given up: it’s a losing battle. The last major legal action around big cap tech wage fixing wound down with a 400MM parking ticket in ~2011. Three guesses where Summers is putting his greasy thumbs (the rest of that clique is dead or retired) on the scale now and who is the heir apparent to this nightmare.

eru 3y ago

> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market. But is the job market actually shitty? I still get plenty of recruiter spam on LinkedIn.

antisthenes 3y ago

> 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. Regarding this...I was the guy on both ends of the spectrum. The Rockstar that goes above and beyond and the guy who was punching the clock (sometimes a little too early). It made no appreciable difference in the quality of my network - it is still essentially non-existent, since none of my peers or ex-peers have much influence over hiring decisions. My best shot at networking into a job is through a personal friend who works in a non-tech sector at a high level position. He's probably the only person who can actually get my resume seen by hiring people out of several hundred that I have met over my lifetime.

sevensor 3y ago

> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market. Just as we saw in 2001, the market is worst for (a) recent graduates who have not yet established a professional network and (b) people who had poured into fungible commoditized job roles during the boom and were a dime a dozen when the bust came. (b) is roughly "programmer/analyst" in 2001, "Java developer" in 2008, and "data scientist" today. It's not that some people working under those titles don't have non-fungible skills, but that there are so many others with that job on their resume, that it's hard to differentiate. My advice is, _don't go looking for those jobs._ The opening anecdote in the article describes how terrible it is to try to get hired as a data scientist right now. And no wonder. The job market is flooded with low-quality data scientists. My experience working with data scientists has drastically lowered my expectations: you get a mediocre Python programmer (you must be willing to accept Pandas + Jupyter notebooks as their work output), combined with a mediocre statistician (can do linear regression and ANOVA, but don't expect them to do it right), combined with a mediocre SQL programmer (probably SELECT, maybe JOIN if you're lucky), and a mediocre machine learning specialist (has a list of preferred sklearn functions in random priority order depending on training, plus maybe one other random library that stops working in the middle of the project due to an API change). They made up for their cheap salaries by spending lots of money on AWS. Maybe I just got unlucky. Didn't know how to hire well. I'm sure there are good Data Scientists out there, but it's so easy to hire bad ones that it's no wonder people are reluctant to do it. If you're one of the good ones, and if you're in any way qualified for a job with a higher barrier to entry, or even just a job with a more unusual title than Data Scientist, go for that instead of trying to stand out in a sea of mediocrity.

wolfie69 3y ago

> do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game. Ha ha so true! I entered tech in 2000, right as everything was going down. Hey, it was fun for the 8 months I worked for what we now call a startup in Miami. They closed abruptly, and luckily I was able to get another job within about 4 months. The market in tech is definitely worse than 2020 (I don't know why some here say those were the days of wine and roses) and I was always able to find work during the financial crisis, though it could take a couple of months. So, I'd say that the job market for tech is not as bad as the dot com crash but worse than 2009 or 2020.