17 ms·

Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

• djkbjhrdn 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• whimsicalism 7mo ago
  the 2020 ‘recession’ wasn’t really bad for tech employment at all
  • CrossVR 7mo ago
    In fact in sectors like the game industry the pandemic resulted in a massive hiring boom. The layoffs only materialized after the pandemic was well and truly over.
    • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
      Yeah, pandemic was good overall. Next generation of consoles looming, sales overall were up since people were forced inside, there were finally some loosening of dev kit practices to accommodate for the lack of offices to go into (I never would have imagined in 2015 having a dev kit in my home 5 years later) .Pretty much the only art medium to benefit from the times while cinema collapsed, Streaming services were running a defecit war where no one won except Netflix, and music stalled for a bit. But as per usual, the bust hit just as hard as the boom. Multiple high profile failures in games and initiatives as a whole, Microsoft and Apple decided to stop bleeding money with their respective subscription deals, mobile gaming (from the advent of Genshin Imapct and co) became less an easy cash grab and more a 2nd wing of AAA development, investments dried up overnight for indies (unless 'AI'). And the headcount, of course: https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-workers-laid-off-2025-1236644512/ https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-wo...
  • locusofself 7mo ago
    on a personal level I was hired (by Microsoft, my first and only "big tech" job) in April 2020 and I am still working here... all these companies "over-hired" during the pandemic, and the term "covid hire" is even a thing..
    • zdragnar 7mo ago
      I remember interviewing someone who got hired by Facebook, sat around for a few weeks for a team to open up while they went through onboarding / Junior training, then was let go. COVID did weird things to the industry, that's for sure.
      • locusofself 7mo ago
        I seem to hear often that Meta is perhaps the most egregious offender of "hire to fire". Seems really wasteful. But man, they pay their employees a lot.
      • jarjoura 7mo ago
        Before Musk made it cool to mass layoff, there was a genuine belief inside of Facebook/Meta that great engineers were extremely hard to find or hold onto and if they weren't on the payroll at Meta, they would go somewhere else. There was always a "clock" for junior engineers to prove they could handle the high pressure and high intensity work, and as long as they were meeting the bar, they were safe. They called on-boarding, "Bootcamp", and was for every engineer, junior to staff, to learn the process and tooling. Engineers were supposed to be empowered to take on whatever task they wanted, without pre-existing team boundaries if it meant they were able to prove their contributions genuinely improved the product in meaningful ways. So, come in, learn the culture, learn the tooling, meet others, and then at some point, pick your home team. Your home team was flexible, and you were able to spend weeks deciding, and even if you selected one, you could always change, no pressure. Happy engineers were seen as the secret sauce of the company's success. I remember that summer, vividly. They told the folks in Bootcamp, pick your home team by the end of the week, or you will be stuck in Bootcamp purgatory. At the same time they removed head count from teams, ours went down to a single one. A new-grad, who had literally just arrived that Monday, picked our team on Tuesday, and then had to watch as most of their fellow Bootcamp mates got left behind. People wondered what would happen to them for weeks, and then, just like that, the massive layoff sent them all home. It was shitty because from where I sat, it was basically a slot machine. Anyone of the folks in Bootcamp were just as capable, but we had one seat, and someone just asked for it first.
  • francisofascii 7mo ago
    I think 2001 and 2002 were worse than 2000. I was lucky to find a job in 2002 after graduating. There were hiring freezes and layoffs everywhere.
• GenerWork 7mo ago
  There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more competition than before.
  • zthrowaway 7mo ago
    Yup. Amazon doubled their workforce through the pandemic. I think a lot of tech companies are still cutting fat from those days.
  • kypro 7mo ago
    Those of us who have been in the industry for 15-20 years we remember a time when tech was just a job. In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in. It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding bootcamps suddenly landing 6 figure jobs. Some of these people were even working at multiple companies at the same time. The optimist in me hopes this all shakes out with those people who had no interest in tech moving on to other things. These types of people were not only bad employees, they were also bad for the industry, and in my opinion responsible for culture shift from tech being a place dominating by "nerds" and "geeks" in the 90/00s to the modern "tech-bro" stereotype. The realist in me though will continue to warn people the tech job they're working at today is likely their last. Between tech industry growth slowing, the excessive over production of tech talent and AI + SASS automating a lot of traditional software development work it's going to be exponentially harder to remain employed in tech in the coming years. So much so you might as well find a relatively worse paid job if it means you don't have periods of months of unemployment every year.
    • gozucito 7mo ago
      >In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in. I remember it was even earlier than that, in the 90s when Bill Gates became the richest man in the world. You're right about 6 month bootcamps leading to jobs in 2021 though! A true gold rush.
• kaeruct 7mo ago
  https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916364664611242 https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...
  • QuercusMax 7mo ago
    What that graph looks like to me is that there were a ton of marginal folks hired during COVID, and we're shedding a lot of those folks who probably shouldn't have been hired anyway.
    • dimgl 7mo ago
      Unfortunately... I want to mirror this sentiment. I interviewed a lot of candidates (and worked with many teammates) in my last few roles and I saw some pretty worrying trends...
    • jatins 7mo ago
      I mean COVID was 5 years ago and many companies have had multiple rounds of layoff since then, how long will we keep calling it covid shedding
• palmotea 7mo ago
  The ideal software engineer will code himself out of a job and be happy about it. Be that ideal. The shareholders are counting on you!
  • locusofself 7mo ago
    But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly...
    • palmotea 7mo ago
      > But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly... Exactly my point. Encourage LLM adoption, faster, faster. Be excited about your homeless future, software engineers!
      • vaxman 7mo ago
        Are we in the Cathedral or the Bazaar now? I get that confused. Everyone upload their code to GitHub --keep your truth (philosophically AND mathematically) in the Cloud ;) Oh and don't forget to document your critical thinking, on Slack. It goes much deeper tho. [cue the POS https://youtu.be/SP-gN1zoI28 https://youtu.be/SP-gN1zoI28]
  • groby_b 7mo ago
    Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead. So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at. The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironically, that means they won't be able to code themselves out of a job)
    • palmotea 7mo ago
      > Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead. What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished one project but your employer had another one for you, which you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"? My comment was just mocking the foolish selfless ethos of many software engineers, who don't look out for themselves and idealize giving to psychopathic organizations that will screw them the moment that's advantageous. Many software engineers have a pathological level of naivete and confusion about the role they really inhabit (e.g. righteously going on about buggy-whip makers).
• RivieraKid 7mo ago
  Interesting, this shows growth in open positions: https://www.trueup.io/job-trend https://www.trueup.io/job-trend
  • ICantFeelMyToes 7mo ago
    True but there is also a massive proliferation of ghost jobs. Dirty secret for a bunch of Series A places
    • 10xDev 7mo ago
      Something needs to be done about these bots, it is getting eerie. Yesterday a bot created an account named 100xLLM the moment I responded to it to respond back with.
    • fred_is_fred 7mo ago
      I see everyone say this but what is the point of making a fake job opening? Are companies just doing that to see if a unicorn applies?
      • xrd 7mo ago
        Two reasons. One, they have already filled it internally but legally have to post the job. Two, they are gathering data on market trends and what salaries people will take, which is useful if they are considering firing people and rehiring with lower salaries. I've applied for many jobs where I was perfectly qualified and got rejection notices immediately. I applied on a Sunday and got rejected on Sunday an hour later. No human reviewed that application I made, it was auto rejected, and if that's the case, what other explanation is there than "ghost jobs."
        • phil21 7mo ago
          > and if that's the case, what other explanation is there than "ghost jobs." You didn't pass some arbitrary ruleset given to an AI or machine learning algorithm. Companies can be very selective now, and usually implement this selectivity fairly stupidly. There also is the problem of being genuinely swamped with bullshit applicants for positions, so the false positive rate is likely quite high at the moment. I've found it extremely difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff right now. Finding competent people is more difficult than ever, but the sheer number of applicants is at least an order of magnitude higher. Botting has made applying to jobs exceedingly low friction, so there is very little downside to someone entirely not qualified to apply to 600 jobs a day and hope they get lucky. We have positions that have been open for months that go unfilled simply due to lack of time to sort through applicants, and the few we do have time to interview usually are obviously unqualified within the first 5 minutes of talking to them.
• teagee 7mo ago
  The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever. Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days. Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • causal 7mo ago
    Thanks for pointing this out - title is extremely misleading. Total tech jobs is not lower than 2008 just because YoY is down.
    • OJFord 7mo ago
      General media, news, etc. gets this wrong all the time, see any commentary on inflation, GDP growth, rate of change in house prices, etc.
      • abustamam 7mo ago
        As an aside, I remember some time ago that Tesla stock went down because the growth of the Model 3 sales went down... After years of being one of the best selling cars on the planet. If number don't go up fast I guess people get scared.
        • lambertsimnel 7mo ago
          It could have been that so much future growth was priced in that a reduction in the growth rate could have justified a reduction in the share price
          • abustamam 7mo ago
            I didn't think of that! That's certainly possible.
• Oras 7mo ago
  Tech hiring is bad, for sure, but the the graph does not make a clear picture. What is software publishers category? As it seems it’s picking up while Computer system design is the largest negative impact. I would appreciate if there was a better chart explaining sort of roles and locations that had the largest impact
• mattas 7mo ago
  It sure looks like during the ZIRP era, tech substantially overhired. Post-ZIRP companies are correcting that (but under the guise of AI).
  • zamadatix 7mo ago
    To save some a search: Zero Interest-Rate Policy
    • bazmattaz 7mo ago
      Thanks you. Not sure what an acronym was needed for that
      • shagie 7mo ago
        It's a term that's been used in financial literature for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy > Zero interest-rate policy (ZIRP) is a macroeconomic concept describing conditions with a very low nominal interest rate, such as those in contemporary Japan and in the United States from December 2008 through December 2015 and again from March 2020 until March 2022 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. An article from 2008 https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomc20081212memo03.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/fomc2008... (ZIRP is used 11 times in the document).
• mjr00 7mo ago
  In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
  • electronsoup 7mo ago
    > and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
    • chillacy 7mo ago
      I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate. I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
      • lumost 7mo ago
        I’ve observed radically different workflows amongst senior candidates vs junior candidates when using an ai. A senior candidate will often build an extremely detailed plan for the agent - similar to how you would do a design for/with a junior engineer. Then let the agent go full throttle to implement the plan and review the result. Juniors seem to split into the category of trust everything the ai says, or review every step of the implementation. It’s extremely hard to guide the ai while you are still learning the basics, opus4.6 is a very powerful model.
        • devin 7mo ago
• nphardon 7mo ago
  Seems like my co is shedding US jobs and moving them to Taiwan, and paying up to 75% less in salary.
• roxolotl 7mo ago
  How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely. EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916364664611242 https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124... There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expected.
  • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    I was working in 2000 in Atlanta GA at boring old enterprises companies with 4 years of experience back then. If you were working for/targeting profitable non tech companies, the world was your oyster. I was working at a company that printed bills for utility companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc. The world didn’t stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash
  • tunesmith 7mo ago
    In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.
    • ryanSrich 7mo ago
      The equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering
      • markus_zhang 7mo ago
        Housing is the ultimate decider so I’d say that’s equivalent to at least 50 bucks today.
        • andai 7mo ago
          Damn, never thought about it like that. That seems a lot more practical and relevant than the Big Mac Index.
• ppeetteerr 7mo ago
  Those are raw numbers. I would look instead at the job changes over total employment numbers. I don't have the numbers but I would wager we have many more people working in tech today (overall) than we did in 2008. Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical nature.
  • mrweasel 7mo ago
    Maybe I'm reading the graph wrong, but the decrease comes after years on continuous growth, so total employment numbers in tech should still be absolutely massive, compared to 18 years ago? If it continues, then yes it could be bad, but so far it seems like a correction for over-hiring in 2021 - 2023. Seems a little weird to be focusing on a decline in 2024 - 2026, without addressing the large increase right in the years before.
    • SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago
      There's a lot of dynamics where it's the short-term numbers that matter. If you're a developer who needs a new job after your spouse got transferred to LA or something, it does you no good that the absolute numbers are massive, nor that a different person looking for a job 3 years ago would have found it uncommonly easy.
  • oblio 7mo ago
    Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers (US). Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9. Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m. Different ball game.
    • game_the0ry 7mo ago
      > Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m. Wow. Just wow.
    • nabbed 7mo ago
      >Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m. I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000. Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to a larger group.
• alephnerd 7mo ago
  As I previously mentioned, based on person experience assumptions around hiring have changed due to the Twitter layoffs, demands for FCF positivity, and WFH inadvertently justifying offshoring [0], not necessarily due to interest rate changes. --- As I also mentioned, the only way you can survive in American tech at this point is to: 1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers. Seattle used to be a good option, but WA's norms around noncompete clauses incentivize larger employers which reduces the ability for startups to truly scale. 2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case, they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off 3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS. Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire. 4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business problems into technical requirements. This means also understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will prioritize it. 5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence. The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561
  • pm90 7mo ago
    I don’t believe this is true. There are plenty of roles that are happy to hire remotely. Sure, there is an in person requirement for many job listings but Ive found EMs/companies to be very flexible if they need to hire talent. For people that can’t/dont want to move to the “hubs”, just know that there is absolutely still a career path. I will say though that you need to have above average communication skills and proactively build relationships during in person off-sites.
• kittikitti 7mo ago
  Although the graph lists BLS data as the source, it's hard for me to find the specific datasets that back it up. It's March 2026 and the graph indicates it would encapsulate 2025. In fact, the "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States" indicate something different, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T60O https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T60O I was able to find the following: - Software Publishers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051320001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051320001 - Regional data available only, numerous national statistics are discontinued - California region matches up, but places like Boston don't https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU25000005051320001 - Computing Infrastructure Providers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051800001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051800001 - Matches up perfectly, no notes here. - Computer Systems Design https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001 - However, the graph in the tweet doesn't include the February data (even though it claims "recent") which shows an increase - Web Search Portals https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051900001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051900001 - Matches up, but February data isn't in the graph which shows an increase from January - Streaming Services https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051620001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051620001 - Doesn't include January or February 2026 data, doesn't match up with graph in tweet I wasn't able to find the following: - Custom Computer Programming Services There are numerous open questions in this analysis which I would need to be addressed before drawing any conclusions. My gut feeling would love to accept it at face value but I never trust my gut.
• wnolens 7mo ago
  Anyone else's inbox slammed with recruiters, more than it ever has been in the past? Feels like there's 10x the jobs available, but perhaps it's just that LLMs have automated a recruiter's job and they're letting the slop fly
  • alephnerd 7mo ago
    Depends on your geo. If you're in the Bay, NYC, and maybe a few other hubs hiring remains strong. The "inshoring" hubs like RTP and Denver or those hubs that are dominated by a handful of oversized companies like Seattle are the worst impacted.
  • Ancalagon 7mo ago
    Mine is too. Absolutely no outreach from the major players however. Mostly AI startups with a few larger/older SaaS startups sprinkled in.
  • Sevii 7mo ago
    Nope its totally dead
  • sodafountan 7mo ago
    No, but it used to be. What mediums are you using for recruiters to contact you? Do you have a linked-in or are you applying directly to recruiting companies? Are you active anywhere else? Genuinely interested in how you're receiving so many recruitment emails. That used to be my go to way to hit the job market.
    • wnolens 7mo ago
      I'm not applying at all! Happy employed and not looking. They're mailing me through linkedIn (i have a profile, and it's not set to looking and i'm completely inactive there), and or finding my email on the internet somehow and going direct.
      • sodafountan 7mo ago
        Thanks, I must just be going through a string of bad luck. I have a profile on Linkedin and my email is out there. Hoping things change for the better. I was laid off not long after Covid and have been having trouble finding something steady since.
• caesil 7mo ago
  Misleading title. The change in tech employment is worse, but actual tech employment remains high thanks to the massive 2021-2023 hiring spree.
• Trasmatta 7mo ago
  Purely anecdotal, but I'm a senior engineer with about 15 years of experience and a decently impressive resume. In the past, I almost always get to at least the interviewing stage, and have frequently received multiple offers at the same time. Recruiters used to spam me constantly. I haven't heard from a recruiter in probably 6 months. I recently put my feelers out and applied to a handful of positions I was qualified for, and got rejection letters from all of them.
  • Joel_Mckay 7mo ago
    Try only including your last 2 positions, as most senior staff tend to scare insecure brogrammers. They probably still won't hire, but you will get more interviews. There are also a lot of people posting fake jobs for feeding LLM datasets, running scams, and bidding down labor costs. =3
• Ancalagon 7mo ago
  Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth? https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-global-intelligence-crisis/ https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
  • jatins 7mo ago
    Yeah, I was thinking the same. It seems like you can get data for whatever argument you want to support
  • andai 7mo ago
    I've heard other people say, situation has greatly improved over the past year, esp. 6 months.
  • Rexxar 7mo ago
    Doesn't seem necessarily a contradiction. Job posting growth logically happens before effective job growth.
  • candiddevmike 7mo ago
    Biggest thing hurting folks is RTO. Unless you live in a large metro, tech jobs are slim/none.
    • stanleykm 7mo ago
      That’s how it was before the pandemic.. Is it unusual that the jobs are where the people are?
  • uncivilized 7mo ago
    How many of those are real jobs?
• rvz 7mo ago
  Yet, no-one here is talking about building a start up. Which is the actual answer.
  • overgard 7mo ago
    I'm an outsider, but VC looks like it's in a bad place right now. The returns have been pretty bad this decade, and AI companies are eating all the dollars so if you're not doing that it strikes me it'd be hard to get funding. And idk, if you already have an AI startup then you're hoping for the best, but if you were starting a business today I think that bubble looks like it has a lot of needles around it
• stackedinserter 7mo ago
  Are there real positions these days? I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's still "we decided to no move forward". At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single line of code, on their own laptop, in their own IDE. Make it make sense.
  • cyberpunk 7mo ago
    It’s bananas how many utterly crap candidates we get at the moment too. One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with his current work laptop and couldn’t find the $ key on it for a basic scripting question. I can’t make it make sense either.
    • dlivingston 7mo ago
      We had a guy interview for a senior C++ position that hadn't used Git before and had no idea what a "merge" was.
      • jeffbee 7mo ago
        A person who only has real industry experience can very easily have never needed git at all. I know this shocks people who only have hobby or startup experience but git works very poorly at large scale and there are many big organizations who don't use it either because their solutions predate git, or they are newer companies that simply have good taste.
        • cyberpunk 7mo ago
          I’ve been in dev since CVS was a thing and did migrations across all of them really, svn, mg and finally git. I’ve worked in a broad swathe of industries and never once over 25 years have I ever seen an org not using source code management. I just don’t believe this at all.
• overgard 7mo ago
  I know people will say AI, but I don't think it's that. The whole "everyone should learn to code" bullshit of the last 15 years or so has created a lot of developers that frankly aren't very good, and then you mix in the massive overhiring of the pandemic, and what you're seeing is a hard correction. CEOs love to use "productivity improvements from AI" as a smokescreen and investor catnip but the research shows it's not having the effects claimed.
  • tracerbulletx 7mo ago
    Blaming the employees is BS. A pretty large % of the people losing their jobs are also high performing excellent people. I feel like anyone who worked at one of these companies doing lay offs knows this.
    • bluecheese452 7mo ago
      Also wtf were we supposed to do? I graduated during the great recession. No one was hiring. Everyone from the president on down told us to learn to code. So we did.
    • stanleykm 7mo ago
      The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes performance into account, but that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.
      • tracerbulletx 7mo ago
        Its only the part about casting any aspersions at the people laid off for being low performance that bothers me because I know so many incredible people for whom they absolutely did not deserve it and its not fair to assume anything about their value or quality of their work specifically.
      • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
        Depends on the industry and product, as usual. On an large level, I do not think there's "too many engineers and not enough problems to be solved". Companies are simply hunkering down for a recession we can't say out loud.
• stego-tech 7mo ago
  It's bad, yeah, especially for folks on the job market (it me). Some statistics first, from my own job search logs: * Since I hit the pavement in late January, I've tracked 100 job applications * Of those 100, only 7 have turned into interviews * Of those seven interviews, 3 turned into second-round * ~50% of all applications never receive a response * ~20% of rejections for any reason have the role re-posted within thirty days * For rejections stating "higher quality applications", that role re-post rate is closer to 50%, suggesting ATS systems culling too many candidates to fill the role or ghost jobs * Despite my state requiring salary requirements be posted in the JD, only around 70% of postings included what could be considered "reasonable" estimates * 100% of interviews have been for local employers requiring 3+ days on-site And now, some observations not captured in the data directly: * Employers are trying to "under-title" folks; Senior roles want to hire former Leads, and Management roles want next-rung candidates for prior-rung titles (e.g., hiring what should be a Senior Manager for an entry-level management role) * Employers are also trying to underpay workers by a large margin, especially folks coming from Big Tech ("We don't pay {SV_FIRM} money" while offering salaries below the local 50%ile for the role in question); they're blaming a "surplus of tech talent", which may or may not be true (I lack the data to prove either way) * The two above points are in conflict, because rent/mortgages in these areas are so steep that even with major lifestyle changes to cut costs, these wages simply aren't survivable for local areas * "Credential Creep" is back in force: Architect certs required for mid-level engineering roles, buzzwords prioritized over outcomes and achievements, and AI ATS' rejecting qualified candidates flat-out * College Degrees are relevant again as a means of pruning candidates; fifteen years of experience is irrelevant for a lot of Senior roles if you don't have a BS or Masters, which wasn't the case even last year * Industry-specialization is also back, even for roles where industry specialization is generally moot or easily picked up (e.g., Corporate IT stuff) * A significant number (~75-85%) of roles explicitly reject H1B and other visa workers; not a problem for me (Citizen), but this is the worst possible time to be job hunting on a non-LPR status. And now, my personal experiences: * There's a very strong attitude of "you're being entitled" when it comes down to salary negotiations, even when you show your math for essentials - and share prior compensation history reflecting the cuts you've already taken since your Big Tech salary to "rejoin the market". * Employers generally have no clue how expensive it is to live right now, especially in major metros; one such employer who balked at my comp floor genuinely had no clue the median rent was three and a half grand per month. * Compensation seems particularly tilted towards working couples; as in, neither alone makes enough to survive, and employers assume you have a FTE spouse to shore up finances so they can pay you less * Employers also don't seem to know what they actually want or need. Specialist Engineer roles (e.g., Cloud Engineer, Network Engineer) cite required experience and expertise with the full technology stack inclusive of ERP and HRIS nowadays, which is something that used to be handled by a specific team for the entirety of my career thus far, even in smaller (<1k) orgs. I've also seen Architect roles demanding Help Desk work, and Software Dev roles who want experience supporting Entra. * AI does not feature in as many interviews as I would've thought. The few times it does, it's very much a "that's nice, but we're taking a wait and see approach" attitude * There's a lot of eagerness to hire domestically again (I think even middle managers were tired of outsourcing or offshoring), but a lack of budget to afford domestic talent. Ultimately, it's pretty bleak - but still better than last year, at least thus far (~300 apps, ~2 companies interviewed with, 1 offer in 2025). AI isn't the value-add I was sold on by career counselors and LinkedIn (huge surprise there /s), and there definitely seems to be the appetite to hire, but not the realism of what to expect or how much it'll cost. I very much view it as a sort of tug-of-war at the moment, between workers who did everything expected of them and have cut to the bone already, and employers who somehow think they can pay <50%ile wages while mandating 4-days on-site in a major metro for experienced talent. If you're an employer looking to hire, I have some advice: * Ditch the AI ATS or AI summaries and read resumes, especially if you're requiring local presence. * Understand what you need (and what that will cost you) before posting the JD * Understand the local cost of living, and budget accordingly (i.e., if your Senior Engineer can't afford median rent, they're not going to stick around when things improve) * If you value loyalty and aren't paying TC to afford a median home in the area, then you don't actually value loyalty * Don't pigeonhole yourself with hyper-specific candidates as a means of winnowing down applicants; that level of specialization will flee the second they get a better offer elsewhere * Post salaries in the JD, required or not, so you don't waste your time with candidates whose expectations don't align with your budget
• kojeovo 7mo ago
  Seems like a tough market for those nuking their prod db with an ai agent
• frankbreetz 7mo ago
  Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems to be doing better then most sectors... "Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year "Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries" "Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is the only area to grow under information. This seems different then what the post says. They also said worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree. I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are the using different BLS data then me? https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
  • jimbokun 7mo ago
    "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" It's a weird employment category that includes both Google SWEs and your local librarian.
• lich_king 7mo ago
  This is the plot of the first derivative of employment. It shows a comparatively small but lasting dip after a massive, prolonged, and unwarranted boom between late 2020 and early 2024 that coincided with the dying breaths of ZIRP. I have no idea about what's coming, but I wouldn't pay a whole lot of attention to people who are looking at the plots of a highly volatile and cyclic industry that goes through constant boom-and-bust cycles, and are trying to position this as proof that AI is or isn't having an impact.
  • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    Well I pay a lot of attention to the fact that there's much much tepid responses to applications I put out. Something something irrational markets.
• d--b 7mo ago
  This is YoY change. It's impossible to read. And it only goes back to 2016.
  • shagie 7mo ago
    There's another post for it that went back to the early 90s. I've grabbed it at https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF though it's a smaller image (Imgur resizing).
• jlhawn 7mo ago
  Here's the same post on Bluesky for those who prefer that platform: https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3mgfh6ddrxs26 https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3mg...
  • schmichael 7mo ago
    Thank you! Could HN switch the links? bsky doesn't require a login to view replies. bsky is just a superior viewing experience.
    • davidw 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      • 0x3f 7mo ago
        Is this relevant to the question of whether we should replace the link? Seems like we're going to spend a lot of time running down the views of the UBO of every domain posted here.
        • davidw 7mo ago
          [flagged]
          • rmm78 7mo ago
            [dead]
    • boca_honey 7mo ago
      I don't know if switching from a extreme partisan site to another extreme partisan site is the right solution just because of the need of login credentials. In any case, Twitter/X has been online almost 20 years. Bluesky still has to prove its staying power long term.
      • 7mo ago
• globular-toast 7mo ago
  What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real, grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.
  • johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    Games are a weird sector. Long term I simply want to go it indie. Even if I doesn't pan out, it's some kind of passive income and I have something to show to that is fully "mine" (so no ambiguity about how much I really contributed at BigCo.). Short term I'm freelancing and doing whatever else I can find to get by. Hoping for one more full time role before I start my self published ventures.
  • cosmicgadget 7mo ago
    Why don't those developers just learn to mine coal?
  • beastman82 7mo ago
    I think that's a very good plan FWIW. I'm going to consider cabinetry which I predict will be a semi-retirement in terms of income
  • Maximus9000 7mo ago
    That's funny, I'm also thinking about Electrician.
  • oceanplexian 7mo ago
    Repairing classic cars. We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up forever. They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding, drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering, cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all wrong and doing it again. Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like to take on a classic car project.
• stokemoney 7mo ago
  There are different types of engineers, those who don't engage with product and have soft skills will feel the burn
• djkbjhrdn 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• givemeethekeys 7mo ago
  A look at the number of replies to "Who's Hiring?" each month over the past year or so compared to prior years made it loud and clear. Traditional tech has been in a recession for a couple of years, at least!
  • mahatofu 7mo ago
    It’s also worth noting that the economy and job market as a whole is in a recession.
  • rsanek 7mo ago
    Indeed, things really changed in late 2022 / early 2023. https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/ https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/
• weird_tentacles 7mo ago
  [dead]
• mlsu 7mo ago
  I just can't get over how short and intense the period between 2021 and 2023 was. There was SO much hype, such stupendous hiring, in such a compressed timeframe. Within the span of like 9 weeks it went from full steam ahead to completely seized. At the same time, the economy at large didn't seem to change very much. Why did this happen?
  • game_the0ry 7mo ago
    Near zero interest rates + COVID remote work + PPP loans = Booming economy What is happening now is the unwinding of the above. Now its: Higher rates + AI + too many SWEs (bootcamps and over-hiring) = Busting economy I think what we are in right now is more the norm and the post covid boom was an exception.
    • kccqzy 7mo ago
      And also the section 174 change too, which suddenly increased the tax bill for any companies doing software development.
      • candiddevmike 7mo ago
        That has been undone now, though.
        • t-writescode 7mo ago
          Has it? I haven’t seen anything about that.
          • stock_toaster 7mo ago
            I thought it was mostly rolled back for domestic R&D as part of the terribly named OBBBA. [1]: found a ref https://www.bnncpa.com/resources/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-section-174-research-costs-overhauled/ https://www.bnncpa.com/resources/one-big-beautiful-bill-act-...
        • 7mo ago
• janalsncm 7mo ago
  I have been getting automated emails from a slew of different recruiters now. Usually one or two per day. I believe they are LLM generated. However, I usually don’t respond. The next step is for me to respond with an LLM. Maybe if my LLM is good enough it’ll convince their LLM to skip the interview and just offer me a job.
• mariopt 7mo ago
  For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc. I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
  • markus_zhang 7mo ago
    IMO it’s just depression for tech. Back then 33% of total employment got gutted, which is probably better than tech today or in a few years when big techs start AI gut.
  • janalsncm 7mo ago
    Wow, that stinks. Are you just doing freelance in the meantime?
  • ptrrrrrrppr 7mo ago
    Sometimes it looks like the longer you're looking for a job, the harder it gets for some reason. That's unintuitive for me, as you should be getting more confident in interviews etc
    • bluefirebrand 7mo ago
      Companies take your unemployment length as a negative signal "He's been unemployed for 13 months? Why doesn't anyone want to hire him? Must be something wrong with him"
      • leptons 7mo ago
        It's typically easiest to find a job when you have a job.
        • Waterluvian 7mo ago
          Maybe. Probably? But I also sense a fallacy here. I could get a new job tomorrow. Maybe it took me 8 years to find that job and I didn’t realize that because I was employed the whole time. Does that make sense?
• zadikian 7mo ago
  Remember it's the first derivative. The title and chart suggested at first that there are fewer tech jobs vs the start, but really it must be way more. I still kinda want to see this going back to 2000. That must be the biggest tech crash by far. 2008 and 2020 were overall market crashes, but tech was booming.
• loeg 7mo ago
  Yeah but like... area under the curve. All of those jobs and more were added very recently, 2020-2022. It's a major retreat from that growth, but the trend since, say, 2008 or 2010 or 2018 is still positive growth. 2020-2022 was just a huge shift due to a very weird Covid/ZIRP market.
• jmward01 7mo ago
  A key thing in this graph is that it doesn't seem to correlate to the rise of code assistants. That is a (relatively) recent last year thing from my point of view. Yes, they were there before, but they hadn't really hit in a way that I think hiring decisions had shifted because of them. This is just tech laying off, not AI taking jobs.
• marginalia_nu 7mo ago
  Funny how the dip started years before we had meaningful AI codegen. Could speculate this is likely to be a shift in what gets funded and invested in.
  • islandfox100 7mo ago
    That's because it's a macroecon dip, and the effect of AI on hiring has been greatly pre-empted as excuse
    • RealityVoid 7mo ago
      Yes, it's not that the company is doing badly, we're right sizing because of AI!
• tokyobreakfast 7mo ago
  This industry is a race to the bottom and long overdue for a massive salary reset. There is no society on Earth where someone who codes JavaScript (poorly) should make more money than, say, a doctor. Yet here we are.
  • honeycrispy 7mo ago
    A lot of doctors are just pill prescribers. I can't tell you how many times I've been to useless doctors that don't help and give you a big fat bill on the way out the door.
  • caminante 7mo ago
    How much do you think doctors make?
    • tokyobreakfast 7mo ago
      Some make less than new grads at AMZN with 0 YOE.
      • caminante 7mo ago
        > Some You're really playing loose with the Venn diagram here. Only "some" Amazon SWEs would "code JavaScript (poorly)."
        • tokyobreakfast 7mo ago
          Yet they're all expendable because their chosen skills are not essential for society to survive. They could all disappear tomorrow and the web and everything around it would move on.
  • lp4v4n 7mo ago
    >The median salary for a urologist in the United States is approximately $590,000 per year as of March 2026. Most urologists earn between $550,000 and $630,000 annually. This guy really thinks doctors make 120k/year.
• gzoo 7mo ago
  What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER will be coding everything for their company lol.
  • hackmack10 7mo ago
    Software will become cheaper to write and more software will be written. A senior will always outcompete a junior when it comes to logical thinking and a true understanding of IT. A programmer will always outcompete a non-programmer when it comes to using AI tools. Bottom line, if programmers are fucked, so is just about anyone else.
    • gzoo 7mo ago
      "Universal Basic Income" is what they are telling us. What do you think
      • wiseowise 7mo ago
        Who’s going to pay it, though? And it’s pretty much minimum salary level.
        • gzoo 7mo ago
          I know. I was being sarcastic.
      • duskdozer 7mo ago
        That that's naive. If you want to guess what may happen, look to the rhetoric and language about people now: the homeless, disabled, unemployed, elderly
        • gzoo 7mo ago
          Yes. I wasn't being serious :)
• byronic 7mo ago
  yes, ha ha ha... yes
• cmiles8 7mo ago
  Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion. The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.
  • raincole 7mo ago
    Things look crazy around 2022 in hindsight.
    • kerbs 7mo ago
      Looked crazy at the time too!
      • y-curious 7mo ago
        Bootcamp grads getting hired at huge TC and everyone thought it would never end
    • shagie 7mo ago
      Even the ramp up in the late 2010s with the increase in "software publisher" hiring was crazy. Covid put a dent in that, but the increase in the increase in hiring goes back further than the post covid boom.
  • dmix 7mo ago
    This has been pointed on HN about 50 times but the headlines keep coming.
  • daheza 7mo ago
    I don't believe its over hiring I believe its offshoring. Blaming Covid after so many years doesn't make sense.
    • loeg 7mo ago
      People have been booggeyman'ing offshoring since before I entered the industry and it's never been all that significant of a factor. Time zones are a big piece but there are a lot of other factors that make offshoring less appealing than a naive analysis of Fully Loaded Cost per head.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• righthand 7mo ago
  Did we ever leave the 2020 recession?
• blobbers 7mo ago
  If anyone saw that LinkedIn post about someone at Block resigning guilt of being offered a raise and retention after the layoffs, I'd say that is a signal that tech is heading down. Most people would be thankful to have a secure well paying job in the post AI blow off; increasingly it's going to harder to differentiate yourself against anyone else using AI. That we have people still in the thick of AI that don't understand that is a strong signal that AI boom is still going to come take some jobs. If you're in a software related role and AI isn't making you more productive, it's on YOU as a dev to figure things out quickly. AI is coming for your job so you can either be an AI manager, or you can get managed out for AI. caveat: This is my take as someone who used to do a lot of hand coding, and now regularly has a small team of AI doing anything that would have normally required mostly brute coding strength but not too much thought; that's facet'ed plots, refactoring libraries, improving pipeline efficiency, adding parallelization where possible, building presentations, adding test coverage.
  • ares623 7mo ago
    mmhmm. That's a lot of me me me. Are you reviewing others' work who produce the same output as you?
• mugivarra69 7mo ago
  [dead]
• thcipriani 7mo ago
  This has a misleading title. This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month change is worse than 2020. But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020 (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even. Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for what this chart shows. (Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101 (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) + CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find other ones quickly and gave up :))
• gusfoo 7mo ago
  Nota bene: these aren't "tech" jobs, these are "laptop job" over-hired email people. Not real people.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• commandlinefan 7mo ago
  I've had my suspicions - this seems way worse than anything I remember before. I think right now is worse than the 2000 dot-com bust, too.
• 999900000999 7mo ago
  I've been lucky enough to stay employed, but eating a massive pay cut hurts. I have no realistic hope of getting back to my peak salary anytime soon . Jobs are now significantly more demanding too, do more and make less.
  • twistedpair 7mo ago
    The last several years have been monotonically busier for me, year over year, and I've been a principal contributor in this game for many years. Sure, I can push out 1000 PRs a year by riding 4 concurrent agent hoards, but at some point our heads will simply explode. There's a human limit here, at some point.
• jrsj 7mo ago
  If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry don’t have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included. I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.
  • colesantiago 7mo ago
    And AI will just shut out people just starting their careers Too bad I guess.
  • kilroy123 7mo ago
    I know a very senior engineer who took their life the day after Trump was elected. He was unemployed for a while. While I think a lot more was going on with him than being unemployed, I'm convinced AI hitting the scene had a bit to do with it. They were an older dev 50+.
  • tossandthrow 7mo ago
    Please see a professional if these thoughts take up a lot of space. You are not your profession. Life can and will change.
• eunos 7mo ago
  After reading many anecdotes of top school alumni struggling to even secure some interviews, I'm really curious about what opportunities available for median American freshgrads e.g. 3.0 GPA from T100-200 Unis.
• jokoon 7mo ago
  People constantly tell me "oh you're a dev it's easy to find work" I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience, and no degree in France. 3 years without a job. I yearn for a new pandemic. Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I have good savings. Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If there is a job offer and recruiters are calling me, I answer and I accept. But I'm not applying to all positions I can see and I won't run after them.
  • cyberpunk 7mo ago
    I’ve never really found there to be all that much of a market for specifically c++ developers. If you do decide to look for work more seriously I wouldn’t be too hung up on language, if you can code in one you can pretty much code in all of them, and I’ve never hired a developer for specific language skill outside of a few rare cases it’s something really specific we are trying to fix (e.g erlang or something), even then it wouldn’t be a complete showstopper. YMMV but that’s coming from a guy who writes in at least 3 languages at current $dayjob.
    • wiseowise 7mo ago
      This. Especially now with LLMs value of grinding C++ trivia gets close to nothing. “Oh, you know 12 ways to initialize a value in C++? That’s cute”
  • hshsiejensjsj 7mo ago
    > Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous Oh to be French
    • tossandthrow 7mo ago
      Well, they live on borrowed time before the EU is putting them on austerity.
      • 7mo ago
• spacebuffer 7mo ago
  I am in my 20s. At the moment I've got a part time job, but I am preparing myself for the worse. In the next few years I am planning to volunteer at farms through workaway. Maybe one day I can become self sustainable,tech and nutrition wise also getting into plumbing, curious to see what others are doing in this regard.
  • twistedpair 7mo ago
    I got a new boiler installed recently. $20K. I looked up the _retail_ price for the components/fittings/consumables, ~$6K. Even with overhead, that plumber made a good take for 2 days work. I'm only half kidding when I suggest the kids of today should be destined for the trades.
• Bombthecat 7mo ago
  Don't worry, it will go up again! Just keep at it!
• dasil003 7mo ago
  The graph does a really poor job supporting the conclusion, most obviously because it only goes back to 2016, the peak of boom times, it doesn't go anywhere near 2008 so why does the caption talk about that? Just this same graph alone going back to 1990 would be super eye-opening. The other thing is it's showing first derivative, not absolute numbers, which is a very questionable way to derive "worst employment situation" in a field that has been on world-changing boom over the last 50 years.
  • stemlord 7mo ago
    Theres a zoomed out version immediately below that tweet. https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916369056079975 https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916369056079975
    • dasil003 7mo ago
      Ah, I can't see that because I'm not logged into Twitter. Doesn't quite pack the same punch does it?
      • shagie 7mo ago
        https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF https://imgur.com/a/kB9CAKF via Imgur (though you get resizing - its bigger on my screen) The question that I have for this data though is that its showing the derivative - the change each year in hiring. The dot com crash is clear and very visible in there. The global financial crisis is also a dip in there (I'm saving this for when people claim the number of jobs lost compared to the dot com crash). From 2010 to 2020, there was a fairly steady linear growth of employment. There was the dip in 2020, but 2020 to 2024 had a much higher peak. My "I want to know about the data" is "is the area above +150k jobs from 2020 to 2024 greater than the area below 0 from 2024 to 2026?"
• moomoo11 7mo ago
  Good. Too many useless people got into tech because any monkey can memorize LC and outperform the monkey who also memorized LC and now is part of the interview panel so they can show off to the other monkeys that he deserves more bananas. Tech was and still is the easiest way to make 200k base salary, before even thinking about the stock. We need a reset and anyone who can’t make it can go fill the jobs we need in construction, education, etc.
• post_break 7mo ago
  My friend who has worked for some big name companies is absolutely struggling to find work. So many interviews, 3rd, 4th round, and then they go with another candidate, or I can only assume someone internally and the listing never existed. It's killing me watching him struggle to find work.
• asah 7mo ago
  That's cute. 2001 and 1993 have entered the chat.
• agentultra 7mo ago
  Good to know it’s not just me. Sheesh. Are there signs that it’ll bounce back again? I’ve been looking for work for nearly seven months. I can write low level systems code in C and C++ to web applications in Python and compilers in Haskell. I have tons of industry experience. Yet most places I apply to ghost me or follow up a month later that the position has been filled. Companies that have been lying off people claim they are seeing record profits. It seems like we went from a relatively stable growth to just chaos.
• Frogeman 7mo ago
  As an employer it’s very very hard to actually discern who did CS as a prestige degree vs people who are actually into it. Signal v noise ratio so much higher in hardware, nobody performatively studies mechanical engineering to make $60k in ohio.
• coolThingsFirst 7mo ago
  I can't even get an interview. The most recent one few months ago and I passed it with great score, top 5% of candidates etc but that wasn't enough to get me hired. Terrible market, i'm at my wits end to even how to approach this.
• lgleason 7mo ago
  So much for that golden age.
• joelhammer 7mo ago
  Wait until the fallout of all that AI code hitting produciton
• joelhammer 7mo ago
  Wait until all that AI generated code hits production on safety devices and they need to explain it in court.
• benbojangles 7mo ago
  I don't really agree, i am making more money now than ever.
• reenorap 7mo ago
  2008 wasn't that bad for tech and neither was 2020. 2020 in fact lead to the highest employment craziness in the tech field ever. It's no wonder that the entire industry has indigestion from so many workers hired.
• vondur 7mo ago
  I mean, didn't a ton of people get hired immediately after 2020 during the pandemic? Also,I don't remember the tech sector getting hit too hard during 2008 time period, it was mostly everyone else.
• heymgr 7mo ago
  I have PayPal, Amazon, LinkedIn, <<mid size company>>, <<mid size company2>>, <<startup>> as a manager on my resume. I didn't get a call back after applying for two weeks. I got 4 or 5 standard rejections. I have non-English name so that definitely hurts. I have AP EAD which is a stage between H1B and Green Card and I still require sponsorship. It's complicated but I can't just switch to EAD right away. It's not just engineers. It's managers and experienced people as well. Don't believe top comment that it is bimodal. Unless you are supertar (99.99%) it becoming hard to get noticed. I thought of going back to IC role but it is hard to pick up and do leetcode all over again. It is extremely hard with a special needs kids at home. Any suggestions or recommendations for me?
  • mancerayder 7mo ago
    I understand this a lot. I had managerial* position I ghosted because they had Leetcode literally written on the agenda. * - managerial is replaced with Lead. Lead is expected to be hands-on as well as have serious managerial experience. Since it's easier to lie about managerial experience, you have people lying into these roles and becoming terrible managers.
• alex_young 7mo ago
  Headline is misleading. Should be something like tech employment rate of growth is lower than it was in 2008 or 2020. There are many many more tech workers than at either of those points.
• vicchenai 7mo ago
  [dead]
• pclowes 7mo ago
  I don't recall any recession with respect to tech in 2020. It was a hiring frenzy. Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest. Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse. Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)
• Drunkfoowl 7mo ago
  [dead]
• halfmatthalfcat 7mo ago
  As someone who has been hiring the past six months, the candidate pool has been absolutely abysmal. Slop resumes, misrepresentations, bad interviewing skills, etc. I'm baffled at the other end at how much inbound crap there is.
• ph4rsikal 7mo ago
  Tech jobs are up, just not in the US. I know personally 2 people who got hired without an interview to fill two open roles. https://muneebdev.com/software-development-job-market-india-2025/ https://muneebdev.com/software-development-job-market-india-...
• eranation 7mo ago
  In my very humble view, the mythical 10x developer can now be a 100x developer, and the 2x developer usually stays a 2x developer. We live in two parallel worlds right now. Some run an army of agents and ship somehow working and testable code, and some try to prove AI is not as good as them.
  • monero-xmr 7mo ago
    I haven’t seen any evidence of an army of agents producing unicorn companies. If this was the case we’d see a rash of < 10 employee startups being worth $1 billion, and to my knowledge that’s zero
    • eranation 7mo ago
      Wait a few mouths. Also, Cursor made Microsoft’s 2 year blow their lead (with GitHub Copilot) with just 30 employees.
      • twistedpair 7mo ago
        Honestly, Copilot is the worst of the AI tools at this point. IDK how they lost that lead so handily.
        • eranation 7mo ago
          I hate predictions, but when the dust settles, Copilot will take the lead. They are deep in the enterprise ecosystem, and they practically give it for free.
  • vbezhenar 7mo ago
    > somehow working and testable code, And then 1x developer comes and rewrites it to actually work.
    • eranation 7mo ago
      I know it sounds like a good take, but I don’t really see it happening much in real life anymore. It’s more like the 1x developer gets frustrated and defensive, and shows the 5 stages of grief, try using AI and finds all the reason why it’s bad. Then goes ahead and refactors everything and breaks production.
• broknbottle 7mo ago
  This is a culling and the fake it until you make it crowd that focused on surface level only knowledge are finding out why they should have went deeper. The ones that honed their craft and really focused on the foundational and core stuff are in demand.
• koito17 7mo ago
  I wonder how the figures look for countries outside of the United States. For what its worth, I ended up getting a tech job in Japan instead. Ironically, the requirements at U.S. startups are much higher, and U.S. startups fit the stereotype of Japanese work culture more than Japanese companies nowadays.
  • saxenaabhi 7mo ago
    I did this search a month ago on Linkedin. Show number of jobs if you search for "Software Engineer". US: 77,000 European Economic Area: 58,000 India: 51,000 China: 48,000(probably undercounted) UK: 9,000 Canada: 7,000 Brazil: 6,000 Mexico: 4,000 Aus & NZ: 2,000 Eastern Africa: 300 Western Africa: 500 Southern Africa: 600 Northern Africa: 1,000 Within europe: Nordics: 3,000 Germany: 15,000 France: 8,000 Italy: 3,000 Poland: 5,000 Romania: 2,000
• romulussilvia 7mo ago
  [dead]
• qwertyuiop_ 7mo ago
  There are hidden jobs out there that are not listed. Try https://www.jobs.now/ https://www.jobs.now/
  • prewett 7mo ago
    There appear to be zero "C++" jobs within 100 miles of SF, Austin, Chicago, and one at a finance company in Boston. None of those locations had any "React" jobs. So either the job market is abysmal, or those jobs are still hidden.
• sebgr 7mo ago
  this makes sense, in 2018-2022, I would get tons of emails from recruiters at meta, doordash, snap, stripe etc now I barely see any (maybe they've given up ) My friends who are still at Google also say that most job postings will end up going to someone internally - in fact people say they don't do that many external interviews anymore. Finally the interview cycle seems to take a lot longer than I remember with quite a few added rounds.
• manoDev 7mo ago
  I believe it would be interesting to compare to graduates / etc. in the same timeframe.
• fn-mote 7mo ago
  I have to say, this comment section is wonderfully full of very specific (low-bullshit) responses about projects people work on, both LLM-enhanced and otherwise. It has been a pleasure to read. Thank you for sharing.
• arun6582 7mo ago
  whats the point of posting this on HN? is this linkedin i came to HN so i can avoid posts on linkedin.
• nis0s 7mo ago
  Something else is afoot in the markets, I wouldn’t take rando tweets at face value, especially if they’re confirming a narrative you’re biased to accept. https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-global-intelligence-crisis/ https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
• anovikov 7mo ago
  Wow it looks like people really didn't realise just how bad the overhiring was in 2020-2023...
  • shagie 7mo ago
    I'd contend that 2020-2023 is a continuation of the slope from... 2017 with a an outlier for 2020. That is especially evident in the software publisher part of the increase. And then there's the significant change in computer infrastructure, data processing (AI hype?), web hosting, & related. If sustainable growth is at the +125k/year (picking a number out of the hat), there is a lot above that line. Also, this is the plot of the derivative... if there's a line with a slope greater than 1 there, then the corresponding "how many people are in the field" is accelerating. ... And also compare the increase in hiring rate for 2020 to 2023 to 1990 to 2000. The peak for the dot com boom (which was associated with irrational exuberance and hiring for things with no feasible way to make money) was lower than the post covid boom. Looking at the data, I wonder if the 2023 correction was enough of a dip... and if not, then the other side of it is that the length of the period of job contraction will be longer.
• socalgal2 7mo ago
  This feels like one of those "damed statistics" type of posts. In 2008 Google employed 20k people. Now they employ 190k people. So from that point of view they'd have to fire 170k+1 people to be "worse than 2008". In 2020 they employed 135k people so they'd have to fire 55k people to get back there. Facebook: 2008: 0.8k, 2020: 58k, 2026: 74k Apple: 2008: 32k, 2020: 147k, 2026: 155k Microsoft: 2008: 91k, 2020: 163k, 2026: 220k
  • willis936 7mo ago
    Recessions are contractions: getting smaller, not being smaller.
  • tossandthrow 7mo ago
    No, you can't cherry pick.
• j45 7mo ago
  The tech skills in demand are also significantly different in 2026 than 2020, than 2008, and continuing to change very quickly.
• AbstractH24 7mo ago
  Does that mean we might be closer to bottoming out than it might feel?
• password54321 7mo ago
  The field more than likely has peaked out for software developers. Jevons paradox means there probably will not be enough agents anytime soon as ambition grows but that doesn't mean the number of developers will grow with it. You will probably need less "real" pilots behind these agents as tools improve around them and so do the agents themselves before they can essentially fully pilot themselves and work in parallel. Work may even increase for the developers that remain where they are expected to do the work of >10 developers as a single dev but to expect the number of developers to increase with the number of agents seems unlikely as having more people will actually end up being a bottleneck then a lean team that can orchestrate a growing force of agents. AI companies have set themselves up for this scenario. They won't solve themselves out of the equation, they will only solve you.
• chazburger 7mo ago
  I haven’t hired anyone this year, and expect our existing SWE’s to work and not spend time commenting about useless stuff online. Those who produce will get rewarded with amazing pay and company stock, those who sit around and whine get let go.
• chadtd1 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • varjag 7mo ago
    That "idea" part was always present in development but was the smallest and least skilled part in making a product. You now see it more prominently because the rest is getting eliminated.
• r33b33 7mo ago
  Why would a tech guy look for a job in ADBE when they can vibe code open source Photoshop analog in their bedroom using Claude Cli?
• lukasm 7mo ago
  I tried to gather some numbers and the situation is not great. 10 years ago there were 10 jobs for a single dev, now is 1:1. https://lukasz-madon.github.io/hacker-news-monthly-top-level-comments/ https://lukasz-madon.github.io/hacker-news-monthly-top-level... I'd be great to access some data on how many SDE were in top 1000 companies and how many jobs openings there were in the last 15 years.
  • throwawayk7h 7mo ago
    That was a 10:1 ratio of job openings to those seeking employment. That's not at all indicative of a 10:1 ratio of jobs to devs.
    • lukasm 7mo ago
      Yep, jobs as in jobs on HN
• twistedpair 7mo ago
  I don't think everyone will easily make the jump to coding at warp speed. Pushing 6 agentic sessions at once, while seeing a half dozen new features/fixes out to prod is more mental gymnastics. If you're the "add a button to a form" enterprise developer, this is going to feel like a dramatic shift in how you're used to working.
• jazz9k 7mo ago
  I've been contracting for over a decade, and I added multiple new clients this year. After all the people I know that got laid off, I just can't trust a single company to provide most of My monthly income anymore.
• RSHEPP 7mo ago
  It's great, I'm in my 30's, two kids, relatively high income family, but can't make any financial decisions because it feels like on a dime we will be living paycheck to paycheck all while having zero debt. It's a stress I never thought I would have.
• fckbootcampdevs 7mo ago
  fuck all you boot campers haha this is good