8 ms·

Tech Jobs Have Dried Up–-and Aren't Coming Back Soon

54 points by matltc 2y ago

breckenedge 2y ago
Was this really a tech job, or just a white collar job at a tech firm?
- tower-shield 2y ago
  What I can read before paywall says the person being described was in an online marketing role at eBay…
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    An online marketer who's solution for himself not having a job involves hanging up fliers in his neighborhood like it's a yard sale.
    - paulcole 2y ago
      Was that his solution for getting a job or do you think he was marketing himself? Did it work? Is he featured in a WSJ article? Do you think that helped get his name out more than clicking Easy Apply on LinkedIn?
    - fzzzy 2y ago
      Sounds like a go getter willing to get their hands dirty.
indigodaddy 2y ago
Anyone have a non-paywalled link? Looks like archive.ph/org are not able
- Braasch 2y ago
  https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-jobs-artificial-intelligence-cce22393?st=BfAypV https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-jobs-artificial-intelligence-c...
  - indigodaddy 2y ago
    Thanks but still paywalled for me.
    - Braasch 2y ago
      I guess generating an email link doesn’t work for WSJ anymore. No wonder traditional media gets its back kicked in.
- kcartlidge 2y ago
  https://archive.is/jF7Qr https://archive.is/jF7Qr
  - indigodaddy 2y ago
    hey thanks!
bloqs 2y ago
Fear Uncertainty and Doubt to sell media, nothing more
Eumenes 2y ago
If you worked for a venture backed startup between 2018 and 2021, you saw the massive growth. Engineering teams doubling every 6 months. New teams spinning up left and right. Excess amounts of junior/boot camp developers. DEI/Employee experience/People Ops teams standing around doing nothing. I for one welcome the steady more tactical approach to hiring.
- jacknews 2y ago
  Except some of us with decades of deep experience are barely floating in the water, while the decks are suposedly crowded with those recent hires.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Surprisingly, I’ve had more luck on the job boards of discord servers than LinkedIn, at least with getting interviews. The elixir, go, is, and rust discord servers have pretty active job boards. Also yconbinators job site seems good if you live in sf.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    That is a cruel way of discovering that one's skills are low value or obsolete. But an economy is quite cruel.
    - jacknews 2y ago
      You presume. But you are wrong. Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc. I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary). But you can think it through step by step. No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve. So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".
pasttense01 2y ago
Non-paywalled MSN repost: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/tech-jobs-have-dried-up-and-aren-t-coming-back-soon/ar-AA1qOssG?ocid=BingNewsVerp https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/tech-jobs-have-dried...
anymouse123456 2y ago
So many cycles of irrational exuberance followed by contraction, followed by... If you're passionate about this work and having trouble getting paid for it, remember: You don't need anyone's permission to start solving problems. The last time I looked, we weren't running low on problems that need to be solved. Every contraction I've seen hurts some really good folks, but mostly weeds out the poseurs and wannabe's, the parasites and bureaucrats, while those of us who make, just get back to the business of making.
- namaria 2y ago
  Yeah it all sounds to me like the 'coders' are getting driven out by senior developers using llms. Trend should continue until big tech stops subsidizing the gpu farms, at which point bootcamp coders may become competitive again.
  - glimshe 2y ago
    Boot camp coders are an artifact of the low interest rate environment. Until we see low interest rates again, it's unlikely that there will be a significant market for people with superficial experience in Software Engineering.
    - namaria 2y ago
      Zirp drove demand of low quality code. LLMs drive supply. Bootcampers are being squeezed on both sides, and remote work adds foreign competition on all levels of competency. Zirp also drove supply of capital. Inflated cloud and now gpu farm business. In the absence of gpu farms churning out code, it drove demand for bootcampers. If normal interest rates deflate supply of capital, it will also deflate supply of automatically produced low quality code, so it should be possible that normal interest rates actually accelerate a reverse to mean as in structural demand for low quality code supplied by bootcampers primarily. Inflated pay for low quality code was an artifact of zirp. Supply and demand should settle at a place where bootcampers are not getting rich anymore which sounds more normal.
  - orwin 2y ago
pydry 2y ago
This is part of a war on tech worker compensation by shareholder activists and other investors, not AI. E.g. https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/... If anything, AI investor FOMO is probably having a fairly positive effect on hiring, but nonetheless it's a good scapegoat if you want to wage a war on tech worker compensation and keep it on the down low.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  If anything, once people wrap their head around AI they will realize the enormous amount of development required to leverage it. This is a whole new opportunity. I'm just worried about the non-technical people (the business) being able to understand and capitalize on it. So much change, yet again.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RivieraKid 2y ago
Personally I'm much more worried about AI than a one time decline in demand. Pieces of what's necessary to create a competent software engineering agent are starting to fall into place.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
rufus_foreman 2y ago
"He worried about his mortgage payments. He finally landed a job in the spring, but it required him to take a 5% pay cut." Not exactly Grapes of Wrath type material there.
- satisfice 2y ago
  Wherever there’s a fella not getting free snacks from his employer, he’ll be there…
axegon_ 2y ago
Clickbait. Yes, there is a shift but it has little to nothing to do with AI. While there are entire companies getting hyped about generative networks and LLM's(read "managers thinking they will get a fleet of devs for little to no money"), those are the exception and will go extinct sooner or later - I can name a few off the top of my head. There was a huge boom around Covid, sure, when infrastructure was clearly not ready to cope with the demand so as many people had to be dragged into the equation. There were also companies aggressively hiring tech people partially because of the demand but also to establish a monopoly. And the rise of one-online-course developer programs was the cherry on top. That was bound to collapse and Musk's campaign over at Twitter gave everyone the confidence that there's no need for anyone but a few managers and prompt "engineers". And we are reaching the "find out" part for all players involved. If you are a tech worker with skills, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about: AI can only write trivial code which normally would be thrown at an intern - stuff like "write a function that takes in a hashmap containing key-value mappings and a second hashmap to swap out the said keys", which you will likely still need to tweak to make it safe. But for any serious or critical code, if you are relying on a LLM to do the logic for you, you are basically walking around blindfolded, holding a loaded gun pointed at your head. Sadly I know a lot of people who actively do that exact thing. The other part is that the market is over-saturated with products that no one needs. How many more social medias do you need? None. How many more trading platforms? None. How many more messenger apps? None? Dating apps? None. Yet new, "revolutionary" ones pop out daily. Guess how many of them fail? Their marketing campaign was "blockchain" 5 years ago. Now it's "ai". My coffee machine needs neither of those, who are you trying to sell this to? When it comes to the tech sector, people should understand that this is not a bottomless pit and it all boils down to a finite amount of people that will use your product(consciously or not). And by implications you need a finite amount of tech workers. The jobs have not dried up, it's partially normalization after the Covid hype and to a lesser degree managers thinking AI will do their tech work - the same people who have become Musk cult members. I used to work for one and guess what - the company he founded in 2017 with very noble intentions and received a really good funding is collapsing cause they are unable to roll out a product. Those are bound to fail either way. As for courses - there are talented people who have only done a bunch of those, but they are the extreme exception and realistically most of the people who enrolled in those were simply there because they thought that's a cheap ticket to a 6-figure salary.
juancn 2y ago
This is anecdotic, but personally I'm seeing much more recruiter activity on my inbox. Specially targeted recruiters for startups. The trend has been going up for the last few months. It's looking like the startup scene is about to warm up again (in the next year or so).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deepfriedchokes 2y ago
  Also anecdotal, but I’m in the advertising industry and all our clients are blowing up our phones right now trying to book more projects. I think it was the rate cut.
bradlys 2y ago
Tech jobs are drying up but like the article says - if you’ve got some serious qualifications in AI - you can get paid 2-4x the amount of other engineers. 7 figure comp is not uncommon for people in AI. It’s also the one type of tech worker that they cannot seem to get enough of. It’s no surprise that the grifters in my professional network all shifted to AI stuff 2-3 years ago. The people who wanted to deliver genuine and good work have all (foolishly?) stayed the same - the folks who chase fame and money all shifted to AI. I’ve been on “sabbatical” for 2.5 years. I saw the downturn and decided to not work. I figured we’d be back to normal by now but considering FB just rescinded my offer - we’re far from it.
- christophilus 2y ago
  I’m late to this thread, but my money is against the grifters. There is much to be said of technicians who k ow their craft and have solid experience and wisdom. I don’t think those of us who are in our 40s or 50s have anything to worry about. Time will tell, though.

54 points by matltc 2y ago

breckenedge 2y ago

Was this really a tech job, or just a white collar job at a tech firm?

tower-shield 2y ago
What I can read before paywall says the person being described was in an online marketing role at eBay…
- willcipriano 2y ago
  An online marketer who's solution for himself not having a job involves hanging up fliers in his neighborhood like it's a yard sale.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Was that his solution for getting a job or do you think he was marketing himself? Did it work? Is he featured in a WSJ article? Do you think that helped get his name out more than clicking Easy Apply on LinkedIn?
  - fzzzy 2y ago
    Sounds like a go getter willing to get their hands dirty.

indigodaddy 2y ago

Anyone have a non-paywalled link? Looks like archive.ph/org are not able

Braasch 2y ago
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-jobs-artificial-intelligence-cce22393?st=BfAypV https://www.wsj.com/tech/tech-jobs-artificial-intelligence-c...
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  Thanks but still paywalled for me.
  - Braasch 2y ago
    I guess generating an email link doesn’t work for WSJ anymore. No wonder traditional media gets its back kicked in.
kcartlidge 2y ago
https://archive.is/jF7Qr https://archive.is/jF7Qr
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  hey thanks!

bloqs 2y ago

Fear Uncertainty and Doubt to sell media, nothing more

Eumenes 2y ago

If you worked for a venture backed startup between 2018 and 2021, you saw the massive growth. Engineering teams doubling every 6 months. New teams spinning up left and right. Excess amounts of junior/boot camp developers. DEI/Employee experience/People Ops teams standing around doing nothing. I for one welcome the steady more tactical approach to hiring.

jacknews 2y ago
Except some of us with decades of deep experience are barely floating in the water, while the decks are suposedly crowded with those recent hires.
- dartos 2y ago
  Surprisingly, I’ve had more luck on the job boards of discord servers than LinkedIn, at least with getting interviews. The elixir, go, is, and rust discord servers have pretty active job boards. Also yconbinators job site seems good if you live in sf.
- roenxi 2y ago
  That is a cruel way of discovering that one's skills are low value or obsolete. But an economy is quite cruel.
  - jacknews 2y ago
    You presume. But you are wrong. Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc. I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary). But you can think it through step by step. No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve. So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".

pasttense01 2y ago

Non-paywalled MSN repost: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/tech-jobs-have-dried-up-and-aren-t-coming-back-soon/ar-AA1qOssG?ocid=BingNewsVerp https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/tech-jobs-have-dried...

anymouse123456 2y ago

So many cycles of irrational exuberance followed by contraction, followed by... If you're passionate about this work and having trouble getting paid for it, remember: You don't need anyone's permission to start solving problems. The last time I looked, we weren't running low on problems that need to be solved. Every contraction I've seen hurts some really good folks, but mostly weeds out the poseurs and wannabe's, the parasites and bureaucrats, while those of us who make, just get back to the business of making.

namaria 2y ago
Yeah it all sounds to me like the 'coders' are getting driven out by senior developers using llms. Trend should continue until big tech stops subsidizing the gpu farms, at which point bootcamp coders may become competitive again.
- glimshe 2y ago
  Boot camp coders are an artifact of the low interest rate environment. Until we see low interest rates again, it's unlikely that there will be a significant market for people with superficial experience in Software Engineering.
  - namaria 2y ago
    Zirp drove demand of low quality code. LLMs drive supply. Bootcampers are being squeezed on both sides, and remote work adds foreign competition on all levels of competency. Zirp also drove supply of capital. Inflated cloud and now gpu farm business. In the absence of gpu farms churning out code, it drove demand for bootcampers. If normal interest rates deflate supply of capital, it will also deflate supply of automatically produced low quality code, so it should be possible that normal interest rates actually accelerate a reverse to mean as in structural demand for low quality code supplied by bootcampers primarily. Inflated pay for low quality code was an artifact of zirp. Supply and demand should settle at a place where bootcampers are not getting rich anymore which sounds more normal.
- orwin 2y ago

pydry 2y ago

This is part of a war on tech worker compensation by shareholder activists and other investors, not AI. E.g. https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/... If anything, AI investor FOMO is probably having a fairly positive effect on hiring, but nonetheless it's a good scapegoat if you want to wage a war on tech worker compensation and keep it on the down low.

datavirtue 2y ago
If anything, once people wrap their head around AI they will realize the enormous amount of development required to leverage it. This is a whole new opportunity. I'm just worried about the non-technical people (the business) being able to understand and capitalize on it. So much change, yet again.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

RivieraKid 2y ago

Personally I'm much more worried about AI than a one time decline in demand. Pieces of what's necessary to create a competent software engineering agent are starting to fall into place.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

rufus_foreman 2y ago

"He worried about his mortgage payments. He finally landed a job in the spring, but it required him to take a 5% pay cut." Not exactly Grapes of Wrath type material there.

satisfice 2y ago
Wherever there’s a fella not getting free snacks from his employer, he’ll be there…

axegon_ 2y ago

Clickbait. Yes, there is a shift but it has little to nothing to do with AI. While there are entire companies getting hyped about generative networks and LLM's(read "managers thinking they will get a fleet of devs for little to no money"), those are the exception and will go extinct sooner or later - I can name a few off the top of my head. There was a huge boom around Covid, sure, when infrastructure was clearly not ready to cope with the demand so as many people had to be dragged into the equation. There were also companies aggressively hiring tech people partially because of the demand but also to establish a monopoly. And the rise of one-online-course developer programs was the cherry on top. That was bound to collapse and Musk's campaign over at Twitter gave everyone the confidence that there's no need for anyone but a few managers and prompt "engineers". And we are reaching the "find out" part for all players involved. If you are a tech worker with skills, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about: AI can only write trivial code which normally would be thrown at an intern - stuff like "write a function that takes in a hashmap containing key-value mappings and a second hashmap to swap out the said keys", which you will likely still need to tweak to make it safe. But for any serious or critical code, if you are relying on a LLM to do the logic for you, you are basically walking around blindfolded, holding a loaded gun pointed at your head. Sadly I know a lot of people who actively do that exact thing. The other part is that the market is over-saturated with products that no one needs. How many more social medias do you need? None. How many more trading platforms? None. How many more messenger apps? None? Dating apps? None. Yet new, "revolutionary" ones pop out daily. Guess how many of them fail? Their marketing campaign was "blockchain" 5 years ago. Now it's "ai". My coffee machine needs neither of those, who are you trying to sell this to? When it comes to the tech sector, people should understand that this is not a bottomless pit and it all boils down to a finite amount of people that will use your product(consciously or not). And by implications you need a finite amount of tech workers. The jobs have not dried up, it's partially normalization after the Covid hype and to a lesser degree managers thinking AI will do their tech work - the same people who have become Musk cult members. I used to work for one and guess what - the company he founded in 2017 with very noble intentions and received a really good funding is collapsing cause they are unable to roll out a product. Those are bound to fail either way. As for courses - there are talented people who have only done a bunch of those, but they are the extreme exception and realistically most of the people who enrolled in those were simply there because they thought that's a cheap ticket to a 6-figure salary.

juancn 2y ago

This is anecdotic, but personally I'm seeing much more recruiter activity on my inbox. Specially targeted recruiters for startups. The trend has been going up for the last few months. It's looking like the startup scene is about to warm up again (in the next year or so).

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
Also anecdotal, but I’m in the advertising industry and all our clients are blowing up our phones right now trying to book more projects. I think it was the rate cut.

bradlys 2y ago

Tech jobs are drying up but like the article says - if you’ve got some serious qualifications in AI - you can get paid 2-4x the amount of other engineers. 7 figure comp is not uncommon for people in AI. It’s also the one type of tech worker that they cannot seem to get enough of. It’s no surprise that the grifters in my professional network all shifted to AI stuff 2-3 years ago. The people who wanted to deliver genuine and good work have all (foolishly?) stayed the same - the folks who chase fame and money all shifted to AI. I’ve been on “sabbatical” for 2.5 years. I saw the downturn and decided to not work. I figured we’d be back to normal by now but considering FB just rescinded my offer - we’re far from it.

christophilus 2y ago
I’m late to this thread, but my money is against the grifters. There is much to be said of technicians who k ow their craft and have solid experience and wisdom. I don’t think those of us who are in our 40s or 50s have anything to worry about. Time will tell, though.