8 ms·

Why does getting a job in tech suck?

66 points by InfamousRece 2y ago

jarsin 2y ago
> Interest rates are most likely the single biggest factor for why tech hiring has gotten worse. The fed just made it official that the easing cycle is beginning. The 10yr has already front run them by about 1.7%. So if the article conclusion is correct tech job market could look good going into the new year.
- tmn 2y ago
  The effect takes place with a lag in both directions. Positive impact due to interest rates being lowered is likely further out than start of next year. But that’s just my guess
crackalamoo 2y ago
Really interesting idea overall. But I disagree with this part: > Algorithms are tiny parts of large systems. The algorithm part can usually be abstracted as an API call that provides some value(s) with inherent uncertainty; an ML endpoint is in essence an API call with few or no side-effects that returns an uncertain value. It turns out, the system design surrounding this almost always matters more than the algorithm and the dumb algorithms tend to do well enough anyway. I think this is basically dismissing almost all APIs and algorithms in favor of system design. But system design is pretty similar in many apps, while the value of each app is very different. So clearly the API/algorithm is very important, and often the most important part. I also disagree about AI not taking jobs. GitHub copilot definitely makes programming about 30% faster. To keep up the jobs, we would have to write 30% more code. But it seems innovation is the limiting factor more than typing code, so maybe we'll only write 15% more code, and we can have less devs.
- ai4ever 2y ago
  agree that anyone making broad generalities like "algos dont matter" is always mistaken. but API design is more about the system, and how it is carved out into components, and what each component does is the algo. so, api and algo are tied together. compilers eased the production of assembly code. that didnt reduce the need for folks coding at a different layer of abstraction.
- cellis 2y ago
  The current AI is producing more garbage to maintain, which means those who can do trash-compactor work will be in even MORE demand, and companies tend to over-hire in search of the garbage taker outers...so AI is creating MORE work, not less.
eclectic29 2y ago
A whole article about getting a job in tech and no mention of the abominable leetcode. Surprise! From junior to principal Leetcode is here to stay. Good luck solving 2 problems in 35 mins.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  I explicitly said no leetcode when I was an employee and getting hired and reached close to half a million dollar salary. So at least another path is present if devs don't give in.
5350-uiop-1130 2y ago
AI has certainly made me feel like coding is low value. the derivative and repetitive nature of most coding tasks. when I ask GPT for some code and it spits out 200 lines of boilerplate in 2 seconds, i feel sick. what am i doing with my life.
- ai4ever 2y ago
  you misunderstand how software systems are built. These days, they are "assembled" out of building blocks which have clean interfaces. similar to how houses are built from prefabricated components. Imagine that the AI is producing these pre-fab parts to order. But the design of the interfaces and assembly is still an art. if you think of your job as a mason assembling bricks to build components, you are mistaken. you need to think of your job as an artist creating systems that work well built out of pre-fab components. there is a story of how woz wrote the entire software for the early apple in assembly. nobody does that anymore. because, we have tools that produce assembly like compilers and such. that didnt take away the jobs of software engineers, because, someone had to now produce code at a different layer of abstraction. imagine you ranting at the compiler 50 years back because it took away your job producing assembly code.
- steve_adams_86 2y ago
  I’m thinking about how that boilerplate isn’t going to move the business forward because it lacks domain insights, isn’t structured quite right, ignores the needs of the end users, and looks too much like the code conventions we’ve been trying to move away from (for example). Yes you can prompt your way out of that, but by the time you have you could have written the code yourself. I have never been able to use a large output directly from an LLM. They’re useful for starting from nothing or tickling your brain when you’re blocked on something, but they’re nowhere near making me wonder what I’m doing with my life. There’s so much more to software than code. I get that the final implementation is code, but the path to that delivery is incredibly complex. Especially with existing code belonging to relatively non technical teams. They need a real human to connect to them, their history, current and future needs, nuances of the teams’s capabilities, etc. AI is nowhere near serving teams like this, and I have a hard time imagining when that would change.
- 2y ago
somethoughts 2y ago
I think an interesting follow-up discussion/blog post would be - okay getting a job in tech may suck... but doesn't getting a job outside of tech suck even harder? In other words, if you were starting college today, would you still do tech? Is it still better than getting any other job for equivalent pay bands? Specifically comparing early career job seekers: * Easier/harder to get $50-100K tech job versus $50-100K job in other fields? * Easier/harder to get $100-150K tech job versus $100-150K job in other fields? * Easier/harder to get $150-200K tech job versus $150-200K job in other fields? Other fields are things like marketing, accounting, law, medical, biotech. A quant/finance job is probably CS or CS adjacent these days so its basically a tech job. My take is that by the time you get above $130K there probably is not any other field outside of tech where this is possible unless there is some very unique skill. And instead of annoying but somewhat objective leetcode/live coding whiteboard interviews; hiring is way more subjective, credential based, network based and gate kept.
- cheschire 2y ago
  I would be interested in seeing how many tech jobs within two standard deviations of the mean pay above $130k, especially once you start adjusting for cost of living.
- nradov 2y ago
  Getting a job in medicine is usually somewhat more straightforward with less BS about skills tests, at least for the common specialties. Most organizations have shortages of physicians and other high-level practitioners so they can't afford to turn away qualified candidates unless there are major red flags. Of course medicine has other downsides as a career field which makes it maybe not a great choice unless you really love it.
  - Icathian 2y ago
    You can't really be making this comparison, though? Getting an MD and residency and rotations means you're in your thirties before you get your first real job. At least in the US. It's wildly more difficult.
mianos 2y ago
A big thing is the rise and rise of bullshitters. Wall to wall buzzwords and made up stories about what they did in their last job. Leetcode filters a lot, but it also filters out, just as many, if not more, people who can actually do what they say.
- jazz9k 2y ago
  Leetcode is also there to filter out older developers. Most older developers probably never used those algorithms in college.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    example?
    - mianos 2y ago
      Example, me, I have not written a sort in C++ in 40 years. I do follow the research and often look under the hood of the libraries to get a feeling of the pros and cons to an implementation, but I have never written one from scratch, let alone in an hour in a test. I'd fail. Here is the big junior mistake, actually doing that, thinking you are going to do it better, instead of doing real work (exception: you are writing the C++ runtime).
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        Surely you have written a sort when you were in college - even if that was 40 years ago :) I see this type of a stuff as huge advantage to older developers, not disadvantage - I am older developer (50+) and I have actual had foundational CS classes in school back in the day which I am not sure how many younger developers get these days...
        mianos 2y ago
        Of course I have. I worked in embedded systems at the start, but write one from scratch nope. I do agree with you about the lack of traditional CS. Whenever I am parsing anything, I first reach for a FSM, and none of all the bullshit string copy, string trim, strim unpad, string unpad in the middle. I also know enough about modern lock free algorithms to know that some 10 minute scribble and a bunch of buzzwords does not scratch the surface.
tekla 2y ago
It doesn't suck. Its mostly reverting to "how everyone else dealt with getting a job in the last 100 years"
yungporko 2y ago
in my experience it doesn't suck too much in the uk. i've never had a shortage of interviews and i've never had an interview like the ones frequently described by americans, where they have to write code on a whiteboard and solve extrenely difficult leetcode questions etc. i update my cv, upload it to the big recruitment websites, recruiters do all of the work, my phone rings 3-5 minutes later and the calls barely stop for a second until i've been in my new role for 2-3 months. interviews are always laid back conversations over the phone or a teams call with no curveballs, just the standard questions like what kind of stuff do you work on in your current job, what tech stack do you use, what do you think about [current popular thing], etc. i'd say i get an offer from about half of the interviews i do. my only real complaint other than the amount of recruiters who deliberately waste mine and their own time for reasons known only to them (which has always been a thing), is the very obvious coordinated push to get people "back in the office" spilling over and affecting developers, which means there are way less fully remote roles than there were even before covid.
PeterStuer 2y ago
"I think if your product doesn’t work with an off-the-shelf model, it’s unlikely to magically start working with a custom, in-house model." In my experience a lott of LLM usage in B2B is fairly basic (translation, summerization, data extraction, categorization) and fairly well handled by current SOTA foundation models. Could this be improved by custom/finetuned models? Sure, but in nearly all cases I have seen the ROI of improving other parts of the application is way higher than the investment in developing and maintaining custom models.

66 points by InfamousRece 2y ago

> Interest rates are most likely the single biggest factor for why tech hiring has gotten worse. The fed just made it official that the easing cycle is beginning. The 10yr has already front run them by about 1.7%. So if the article conclusion is correct tech job market could look good going into the new year.

tmn 2y ago
The effect takes place with a lag in both directions. Positive impact due to interest rates being lowered is likely further out than start of next year. But that’s just my guess

crackalamoo 2y ago

Really interesting idea overall. But I disagree with this part: > Algorithms are tiny parts of large systems. The algorithm part can usually be abstracted as an API call that provides some value(s) with inherent uncertainty; an ML endpoint is in essence an API call with few or no side-effects that returns an uncertain value. It turns out, the system design surrounding this almost always matters more than the algorithm and the dumb algorithms tend to do well enough anyway. I think this is basically dismissing almost all APIs and algorithms in favor of system design. But system design is pretty similar in many apps, while the value of each app is very different. So clearly the API/algorithm is very important, and often the most important part. I also disagree about AI not taking jobs. GitHub copilot definitely makes programming about 30% faster. To keep up the jobs, we would have to write 30% more code. But it seems innovation is the limiting factor more than typing code, so maybe we'll only write 15% more code, and we can have less devs.

ai4ever 2y ago
agree that anyone making broad generalities like "algos dont matter" is always mistaken. but API design is more about the system, and how it is carved out into components, and what each component does is the algo. so, api and algo are tied together. compilers eased the production of assembly code. that didnt reduce the need for folks coding at a different layer of abstraction.
cellis 2y ago
The current AI is producing more garbage to maintain, which means those who can do trash-compactor work will be in even MORE demand, and companies tend to over-hire in search of the garbage taker outers...so AI is creating MORE work, not less.

eclectic29 2y ago

A whole article about getting a job in tech and no mention of the abominable leetcode. Surprise! From junior to principal Leetcode is here to stay. Good luck solving 2 problems in 35 mins.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I explicitly said no leetcode when I was an employee and getting hired and reached close to half a million dollar salary. So at least another path is present if devs don't give in.

5350-uiop-1130 2y ago

AI has certainly made me feel like coding is low value. the derivative and repetitive nature of most coding tasks. when I ask GPT for some code and it spits out 200 lines of boilerplate in 2 seconds, i feel sick. what am i doing with my life.

ai4ever 2y ago
you misunderstand how software systems are built. These days, they are "assembled" out of building blocks which have clean interfaces. similar to how houses are built from prefabricated components. Imagine that the AI is producing these pre-fab parts to order. But the design of the interfaces and assembly is still an art. if you think of your job as a mason assembling bricks to build components, you are mistaken. you need to think of your job as an artist creating systems that work well built out of pre-fab components. there is a story of how woz wrote the entire software for the early apple in assembly. nobody does that anymore. because, we have tools that produce assembly like compilers and such. that didnt take away the jobs of software engineers, because, someone had to now produce code at a different layer of abstraction. imagine you ranting at the compiler 50 years back because it took away your job producing assembly code.
steve_adams_86 2y ago
I’m thinking about how that boilerplate isn’t going to move the business forward because it lacks domain insights, isn’t structured quite right, ignores the needs of the end users, and looks too much like the code conventions we’ve been trying to move away from (for example). Yes you can prompt your way out of that, but by the time you have you could have written the code yourself. I have never been able to use a large output directly from an LLM. They’re useful for starting from nothing or tickling your brain when you’re blocked on something, but they’re nowhere near making me wonder what I’m doing with my life. There’s so much more to software than code. I get that the final implementation is code, but the path to that delivery is incredibly complex. Especially with existing code belonging to relatively non technical teams. They need a real human to connect to them, their history, current and future needs, nuances of the teams’s capabilities, etc. AI is nowhere near serving teams like this, and I have a hard time imagining when that would change.
2y ago

somethoughts 2y ago

I think an interesting follow-up discussion/blog post would be - okay getting a job in tech may suck... but doesn't getting a job outside of tech suck even harder? In other words, if you were starting college today, would you still do tech? Is it still better than getting any other job for equivalent pay bands? Specifically comparing early career job seekers: * Easier/harder to get $50-100K tech job versus $50-100K job in other fields? * Easier/harder to get $100-150K tech job versus $100-150K job in other fields? * Easier/harder to get $150-200K tech job versus $150-200K job in other fields? Other fields are things like marketing, accounting, law, medical, biotech. A quant/finance job is probably CS or CS adjacent these days so its basically a tech job. My take is that by the time you get above $130K there probably is not any other field outside of tech where this is possible unless there is some very unique skill. And instead of annoying but somewhat objective leetcode/live coding whiteboard interviews; hiring is way more subjective, credential based, network based and gate kept.

cheschire 2y ago
I would be interested in seeing how many tech jobs within two standard deviations of the mean pay above $130k, especially once you start adjusting for cost of living.
nradov 2y ago
Getting a job in medicine is usually somewhat more straightforward with less BS about skills tests, at least for the common specialties. Most organizations have shortages of physicians and other high-level practitioners so they can't afford to turn away qualified candidates unless there are major red flags. Of course medicine has other downsides as a career field which makes it maybe not a great choice unless you really love it.
- Icathian 2y ago
  You can't really be making this comparison, though? Getting an MD and residency and rotations means you're in your thirties before you get your first real job. At least in the US. It's wildly more difficult.

mianos 2y ago

A big thing is the rise and rise of bullshitters. Wall to wall buzzwords and made up stories about what they did in their last job. Leetcode filters a lot, but it also filters out, just as many, if not more, people who can actually do what they say.

jazz9k 2y ago
Leetcode is also there to filter out older developers. Most older developers probably never used those algorithms in college.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  example?
  - mianos 2y ago
    Example, me, I have not written a sort in C++ in 40 years. I do follow the research and often look under the hood of the libraries to get a feeling of the pros and cons to an implementation, but I have never written one from scratch, let alone in an hour in a test. I'd fail. Here is the big junior mistake, actually doing that, thinking you are going to do it better, instead of doing real work (exception: you are writing the C++ runtime).
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      Surely you have written a sort when you were in college - even if that was 40 years ago :) I see this type of a stuff as huge advantage to older developers, not disadvantage - I am older developer (50+) and I have actual had foundational CS classes in school back in the day which I am not sure how many younger developers get these days...
      - mianos 2y ago
        Of course I have. I worked in embedded systems at the start, but write one from scratch nope. I do agree with you about the lack of traditional CS. Whenever I am parsing anything, I first reach for a FSM, and none of all the bullshit string copy, string trim, strim unpad, string unpad in the middle. I also know enough about modern lock free algorithms to know that some 10 minute scribble and a bunch of buzzwords does not scratch the surface.

tekla 2y ago

It doesn't suck. Its mostly reverting to "how everyone else dealt with getting a job in the last 100 years"

yungporko 2y ago

in my experience it doesn't suck too much in the uk. i've never had a shortage of interviews and i've never had an interview like the ones frequently described by americans, where they have to write code on a whiteboard and solve extrenely difficult leetcode questions etc. i update my cv, upload it to the big recruitment websites, recruiters do all of the work, my phone rings 3-5 minutes later and the calls barely stop for a second until i've been in my new role for 2-3 months. interviews are always laid back conversations over the phone or a teams call with no curveballs, just the standard questions like what kind of stuff do you work on in your current job, what tech stack do you use, what do you think about [current popular thing], etc. i'd say i get an offer from about half of the interviews i do. my only real complaint other than the amount of recruiters who deliberately waste mine and their own time for reasons known only to them (which has always been a thing), is the very obvious coordinated push to get people "back in the office" spilling over and affecting developers, which means there are way less fully remote roles than there were even before covid.

PeterStuer 2y ago

"I think if your product doesn’t work with an off-the-shelf model, it’s unlikely to magically start working with a custom, in-house model." In my experience a lott of LLM usage in B2B is fairly basic (translation, summerization, data extraction, categorization) and fairly well handled by current SOTA foundation models. Could this be improved by custom/finetuned models? Sure, but in nearly all cases I have seen the ROI of improving other parts of the application is way higher than the investment in developing and maintaining custom models.