Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?
The tech sector underwent rapid manpower growth, and recently, rapid reduction [1,2,3].
What advice do you have for new grads in CS/EE fields looking for jobs? For example, I am finishing my PhD in AI-related work this spring. Colleagues I've talked to in several companies have told me about frozen hiring. Is this true in your experience?
Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for? Should I reach directly to managers in different teams? Who are the best people/kinds of firms to reach out to when the industry is slowing hiring?
[1]: https://layoffs.fyi/ [2]: https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/ [3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/tech-jobs-hit-the-hardest-by-layoffs-last-year-report.html
269 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadI recently came across this quote from PG in one of his earlier essays [0] describing the early days of the dotcom bust regarding yahoo. Sounds very similar to the situation we're in now:
> It was not just our price to earnings ratio that was bogus. Half our earnings were too. Not in the Enron way, of course. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. What made our earnings bogus was that Yahoo was, in effect, the center of a Ponzi scheme. Investors looked at Yahoo's earnings and said to themselves, here is proof that Internet companies can make money. So they invested in new startups that promised to be the next Yahoo. And as soon as these startups got the money, what did they do with it? Buy millions of dollars worth of advertising on Yahoo to promote their brand. Result: a capital investment in a startup this quarter shows up as Yahoo earnings next quarter—stimulating another round of investments in startups.
0. http://paulgraham.com/bubble.html
Today we have an ecosystem that is far more diverse and what I'd call "real". Yes, there's probably quite a few over valued dogs out there but there are a lot of businesses that are legit creating revenue streams and growing well past 20%, 30%, etc. This is why I believe the parent is right in that we are in a harsh correction and not a meltdown.
Agreed because this time the asset bubble extends well beyond tech. This is a much larger problem and will take much longer to unwind, cutting much deeper than that.
1) The secular trend in falling interest rates and "low" interest rates will continue longer term. Raising rates rapidly has been disruptive but it also gives some breathing room and the ability to slowly lower rates again, which will be needed to stimulate demand again. Lower interest rates obviously impact asset prices as borrowing becomes cheaper so you can borrow more.
2) 40-year fixed rate mortgages will be a think soon. This will increase many asset prices and allow people to continue to participate in buying real estate and generating wealth over time. This is a massive priority to the government because home owners are one of the most valuable things a government can have as they generate property taxes and give people skin in the game which means continued support of the regime. This impacts real estate assets because the monthly payment is lower which means you can pay more for things using cheaper money.
3) The rapid inflation we saw had nothing to do with low interest rates, at least not on their own. It was 100% because of the pandemic and how we reacted to it. Lots of liquid money was pumped into the system and this is the important part - it was liquid. Also, our entire supply line and logistics structure was optimized for a certain existence and the pandemic disrupted all of that. Suddenly money was being spent on different things and it has created all sort of supply and demand problems. This is beginning to smooth out and by 2025 I expect the effects of the pandemic on inflation will be gone. This means we can resume the secular trend of generally lowering interest rates long term.
Given that you include it in your predictions, I would not put much stock in them. You're confusing domestic propaganda and saber-rattling with actual assessments of geopolitics. It's up there with feeling threatened by a communist Grenada.
As for Russia, it's been a year, and it's still having quite a time in failing to invade the poorest country in Europe. There's a colossal gap between how you think the world stands, and how it actually stands. Russia's a failing Potemkin village, whose only asset of note is 10,000 nuclear weapons.
There are only three kinds wars that will ever be waged between the US and Russia.
1. A proxy conflict which one or both of the sides aren't actually deeply invested in. (<---- As of 2023, we are here.)
2. None at all.
3. End-the-world Armageddon.
None of these are a good fit for the rest of your narrative. It's just a hodgepodge of political anxieties.
The dot-com collapse was due to a million startups selling $10 bills for $9. None of the major firms doing layoffs now have that as their core line of business.
I can't speak as to what's going on in the startup space.
Maybe startups specifically look worse than other companies right now? But I never got the appeal of startups anyway (more likely lower pay, less stability, more likely to have poor work life balance and have to deal with inexperienced management).
Also... I was under 30 and I was just ecstatic to have a position of most of my time was greenfield projects. ( as opposed to maintain legacy code for crappy clients because of the aforementioned gloom and doom )
I can see small structures with a purpose being a ok time to spend a recession.
Beyond that always keep looking at what's out there and network, network, network.
Starting out is hard, but after you put a bit of time in your resume will begin to speak for itself. For what your resume can't do for you that is what your contacts within desired companies are for.
Also, contributing to open source projects is great material for the resume!
Message hiring managers and recruiters on LinkedIn that say "hiring" in their bio. This should get the ball rolling a little bit faster.
Good luck and cheers!
In general I'd say no although I'm not sure it applies to you. I know some people who graduated into the Internet apocalypse of 2002. They picked up crappy jobs and then got pigeon-holed into that crappy job for a very long time. It's a lot easier to get a job in a cool field as a new grad than it is as someone with experience doing manual testing or another crappy field.
Normally I'd recommend someone in your position to go for their Master's or Ph.D rather than getting a crappy job, but you already have your PhD so I'm not sure how much of my advice applies to you. PhD signals a deep specialization which may overcome the stigma of a crappy job.
And you have a hole in your resume you have to explain.
It’s almost always better to take any job you can get and keep looking. Every month that you aren’t working, you have to make more to make up for the time of unemployment.
I would rather be “pigeonholed” (won’t happen) than be unemployed. The hardest thing is breaking the can’t get a job <-> don’t have experience cycle.
I’ve transitioned between many technologies since I started working in 1996.
Reaching out to managers at big cos won't get you much. They are getting a ton of twitter/etc candidates and have stricter hiring policies and rubrics to prevent nepotism and favoritism. If you can network and ask for referrals through your friends / professors that can work better. Or reaching out to early stage startup cofounders can work really well.
ML/AI is less frozen then some other areas so that is good. Most really competitive new PHDs will have either a couple of internships, strong academic contributions or previous engineering experience demonstrating strong coding ability.
You should also consider post docs or academic engineer postings. The grant cycle insulates these a bit from the economic cycle and they can be a good place to gather some experience while you ride out the cycle.
And definitely consider very early stage start ups. A startup that just raised and has 2 years of runway is probably one of the safest places to be at the moment as they are still focused on growth. A lot of great companies proved themselves as startups during the 2008 cycle and grew rapidly after. Networking can mean a lot more here as early stage founders often literally just hire their friends or people they get along with without a ton of process.
Those candidates tend to be great as they are up on industry practices/technology like source control and databases where as some phds can have only academic coding experience. And they tend to have studied something they really knew they were interested in and really been the driver on their thesis project vs just contributing to their advisors research.
You also see great phds who didn't wait but really took ownership of their project, used source control, figured out distributed computing, contributed to open source, scraped/built their own datasets, understood the real world implications and hacked on side projects to develop coding skills.
And you see some who just completed a theoretical + computational project their advisor suggested on an existing dataset with the minimal amount of coding needed and little thought to implications/applications.
Entering the work force now or in the next few years, a new grad will very likely have an easier time navigating the job market than people who have spent nearly a decade working for bubble-frenzied, VC backed companies.
In the years following the dotcom bust I new tons of software folks desperately trying to reconfigure their careers. It's not hard for a fresh grad to change course, most people don't end up working in a career that is directly related to their major.
Entering the work force will be harder and harder but new grads will have less expectations and bad habits they have to overcome to find an occupation that works for them (they also won't have no-longer-reasonable comp expectations).
I also wrote something here on how to stand out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2022/09/19/ways-to-stand-...
Finally, you ask:
> Is it better to get any job than keep searching for the job I'd be most suited for?
That depends on your financial situation and emotional runway, but my advice would be that in general it is far easier to get a job once you have a job. I wouldn't advise taking a job digging ditches (unless you need the $$$), but if you can find something that is related to your chosen profession, isn't clearly toxic, and is a full time paying job, take it.
If the company is good, you'll have the ability to grow internally and you'll be a known quantity.
If the company is not great, you'll at least have some experience to put on your resume. You may even be able to help improve the company. At worst you'll have a salary and title and be able to job search from there.
Furthermore, it's easier to negotiate, and you'll feel less desperate (and thus hopefully less stressed) about the process as a whole. Prospective employers know you can walk away if you already have a job -- but they also know you aren't likely to walk away if you don't.
As far into my career as I am at this point, I've both a finely honed radar and zero tolerance for toxic bullshit, but as a new developer, it's a whole lot harder to have both the self-confidence and self-awareness to recognize that the reception you're getting isn't because you're an unqualified idiot, it's because Sr. Developer Jim's dad was an asshole and Engineering Manager Bob doesn't know how to or have the confidence in his role to rein in his Sr. Developer from berating the new grad for things that new grads do until emotionally balanced mentors teach them not to. I have good friends who've spent a lot of time in therapy undoing what toxic workplaces did during vulnerable years.
My advice, look for some decent, experienced people in any job you have, but even more so in your first. Build a trustfull relationship with at least one of those folks and get as much advice, mentoring and context out of them as possible.
The one thing you don't want to do is to talk about these things with a report or with a co-worker, and I've seen too many managers making this mistake with me.
I could be getting paid more, but my current workplace has only a couple completely worthless human beings. The supervisor knows who they are and what they're like and steps right in if there's a conflict. That's worth at least an extra $20k/year in my book. For my part, I try to advocate for less-established coworkers who are getting hit with the same crap I did from those individuals. Keeps the couple jerks from running off potential talent who will make my job more pleasant in the long run.
That happened to a report of mine once, obviously with a previous mutual agreement, but some recruiters mentioned that trend to me as well.
I think having a set date to leave is healthy, especially at this point in someone's career. You just do your job and you're rewarded with money and experience. You shield yourself from toxicity in a way, since don't want to depend on the job for having "best friends". Also you don't play office politics since you know it's ephemeral.
When you hire a new grad, and then spend a year getting them all up to speed with the process and CI system and code reviews and familiarization with the code base and they're just now starting to take on the responsibility for some of the code... and they leave a year and a day after you hired them.
And so then you hire another new grad... and {repeat}... and they leave a year and a day after you hired them.
At this point, management is a bit frustrated. They give it one more go... and they leave a year and a day after you hired them.
And now, when that position is opened up again, it is no longer an entry level position but rather a mid level. We forgo the extensive onboarding and gradual ramp up for a new grad and instead have a mid who should be able to understand the nature of a CI system, issue tracking, and so on and be able to start being a positive contributor in a month or two and so if they also leave a year and a day later, we've had several months of them being a positive contribution on the team.
... and now its just that much harder for a new grad to find a job.
With new grads, we can't hold 'em at all. For people who came in with 5+ years of experience, the average tenure here is 15 years. People are more likely to retire than quit. (Seriously, I've got 200 hours of "manager makes sure you use it" vacation, sabbatical accrual, an honest to goodness funded pension, and one of the better health insurance policies).
The only thing I would add is to always try to shoot for a company where technology is seen as an asset and not just a cost center. Traditionally, that was software companies and places like Wall Street. Now that net is wider, but beware jobs with titles like "Programmer II" or "Programmer/Analyst", indicators of companies where IT is a cost center and you get stuck as a minor cog in a minor wheel.
On the hiring side, I've found quite a bit of anecdotal success finding really talented junior engineers who have fallen into this trap, where a close read of the resume and cover letters shows a passion that's not covered by the actual keywords on the resume. I'll often stretch our requirements to give interviews to people I have a good gut feeling about - "diamonds in the rough" so to speak. But it takes a lot of time and focus to not simply screen out a resume based on these negative keywords - and given that recruiting teams at a lot of companies have been reduced as well, many won't have the time to do this well, if they ever did to begin with.
As a candidate you can absolutely mitigate this with open-source contributions, if you have time. But it can be hard to find that focus, time, and mentorship/community, especially if the day-job environment is toxic.
Practicality, in my experience, has always been of tremendous importance.
Also, for me, I tended to take low-paying jobs, if the technology/company interested me, because I wanted to learn.
Learning is difficult; especially learning to ship. Feasts of Humble Pie, Egg-On-Face, and Crow, with side orders of stress and overwork. A surprising number of folks don't actually want to do it.
In my experience, it has always been worth it; even the "negative learning" experiences.
This is even more straightforward. Yes it is.
I know many who are being hit by layoffs. The situation sucks. I don't think there's any advantage to downplaying this right now whether in your own mind or through advice to others. There's a huge number of tech workers laid off simultaneously and very bluntly you should look for any job that supports your Visa as the priority.
The truth is that they can't find someone with the skills who will work like a pittance and who will worry about being deported if they leave/get fired.
On the above I would correct that it’s not “US Citizen” but someone with full employment eligibility, which could be for example a Green Card holder.
That doesn't matter if they all find a new job very quickly, what's more relevant is the unemployment rate. Is it increasing?
At least when it comes to the overall unemployment rate, it seems to be very low when I see articles like this: https://www.businessinsider.com/december-jobs-report-labor-m...
I didn't find IT-specific stats to be fully sure (well it's somewhere on https://www.bls.gov if you're so inclined), but I'd be surprised if the IT industry were much worse (if at all) than the average over all industries.
The first 2 jumps were due to compensation, was able to get a nice raise each time.
The third job was a good fit, however the role evolved into something I didn't like as much and didn't fit my career goals.
I took the fourth job to try something new, quickly found out the role had nothing I enjoyed doing.
All of the experiences were valuable in terms of experience: different industries, meeting different people, and learning what I like to do.
Though after reading HN long enough, I have to question whether you ever end up in this relatively bad situation, especially if every jump was basically a promotion.
Someone who has stayed at a place or two for a couple years and been promoted there and then had a bunch of 1-year stints? I’m more open to hearing the explanation.
The good news for me was that even though I had terrible grades, I knew how to code a Knight’s Tour or 8 Queens, work through some algorithm that appears to be N^2 but has a clever N solution, or if someone asked me about manholes, I could say “that’s a stupid question, here’s the default answer, and here’s why I think it’s a stupid question.”
I think I got 9 job offers from 10 interviews with a <3.0 GPA (before the dotcom crash).
In short, studying for the test helped with the SAT’s and it helped get my first job. When I applied to a FANG years later, there was not leetcode, just different design questions or basic things like making sure I could reverse a linked list or implement substr without an off by one error.
That being said, I've never interviewed at FAANG before. I suspect they are the ones who would be asking the tougher questions if only just to reduce the absurd number of applicants they receive.
Sure, but why exactly? I hate when FAANGs reach out to senior, employed people - then whole process afterwards assumes they're the ones begging to work there. Kind of tiring to hear the "we get soo many applicants" tone when they are the ones reaching out.
Two lessons
1. Spend your lunchtimes job hunting. Treat it like a job
2. Move around as a new grad. Think of it like dating, you have to kiss a few frogs just to get an idea of what is out there.
(Most people who stay in one job really mean lots of different jobs inside one giant conglomerate)
So don't be afraid to move around. And focus on the code. Ignore the management bullshit, the meetings the agile talk. Focus on code.
This is related, but I got my start in a small consulting company and think it is a great place for anyone to start. Small is anything from 10 to 100. The one with 100 employees will have more process and stability, but your impact at a 10 person company will be larger (and possibly easier to get hired by). Pick your poison.
You'll get lots of experience across domains and technologies, because it is a consulting company.
What you write and do will actually matter, because it is small.
And, of course, at a consulting company, as a developer, what you do is directly tied to revenue for the company, since they typically sell hours (or dev expertise, bundled in project scopes, which are measured internally in hours or hour equivalents).
I wrote some advice on how to approach these companies here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253168
If they're good and have been around for a while, they'll know how to ride out the ups and downs that are coming (because they actually probably had ups and downs even during the good times; that's the nature of consulting).
Consulting, and specifically exposure to a large number of corporate cultures in your clients, is a great accelerator at the start of a career.
It doesn't even need to be a giant conglomerate. Roles evolve. Products/projects/priorities/technologies change. Certainly at the two 10K, give or take, employee companies I've worked for over ten years, I've done a lot of different things even though I went by some variant of the same title the whole time.
... but not too much/too soon. Best to understand what you can/should learn and try and achieve that before looking for a change.
I took a non-tech job for survival money, and in spare time looked for a high paying dev job.
Everyone was pushing me to take an entry level tech support position.
There’s no shame in a survival job, especially if it helps you find a good position.
When I interview, I get asked why I left so many jobs developer (companies went under), but nobody asks why I left my job as a janitor.
Since you are a high achiever in an in-demand field, you should still have good leverage during the job search. I would hold out for a role or company which you believe will suit your skill set.
I would not, under any circumstances, hold out for a "perfect" fit. It is unlikely to exist and if the company/recruiter is making it seem perfect they are almost certainly lying to you. A former colleague of mine was burned by this not long ago.
I ended up close to insolvent during the 2008 recession, and I bit the bullet and took a terrible job just to get by. Be willing to swallow your pride and do the same if that's what it takes. That little voice in the back of your head that says "Well I just graduated from Stanford! Surely I can do better than this!" Ignore it for now.
app:phone_screen:interview:offer
In general divide the first number by 10 if you have at least 12 months post grad professional experience. If you have a shiny high GPA diploma from a top school but no intern or any experience whatsoever change last two numbers to zero.
Also I'll never forget just how rude and pretentious recruiters were during that time with their new found power. You see the true colors in such times.
I've felt this way for a few years now.
The biggest thing that helped me was having some Android apps. Another was that I had some COBOL knowledge. I also lowballed my salary request, which might have helped me get the job , but I'm still paying for that today.
Today, I'm simply grateful to have a fantastic job, and strive to live below my means assuming that things can go back at the snap of someone's finger.
In terms of practical advise for a new grad, there are tons of startups and enterpreneurs doing really interesting work. They need good programmers but can't afford to pay as much. This sort of place can be a great place to kickstart your career, at least for a few years, till the broader picture gets better.
20:5:3:1
From my experience, it's just a bullshit step with a recruiter just to check you're not totally dumb.
Yikes. I have been in Software Engineering for about 11 years and never had it any other way and even then interviewing and managing applications was stressful. Having to apply to 10s, 100s of companies would destroy me. I am very, very scared of my company going under and me having to compete in this market. I hope it gets better soon and people stop doing the "learn to code to get rich quick" routine.
If you do get laid off you can reach out to these folks immediately and get recommendations or even just feedback on your resume. The sooner you start doing this the better, don't wait to be called into a private meeting with HR and your boss to start this process. The harsh reality is that for senior positions you're either going to spend a LOT of time smashing submit on hundreds and thousands of applications while hearing _nothing_ back, or you're going to tap your connections and have a job lined up relatively quickly. New grads have it a lot easier in the open market IMHO.
I also have a good friend who is already department head in my countries biggest bank. I keep telling me he can always get me a job when I can‘t fall asleep.
Maybe the top 10% of new CS grads have it easy, by virtue of having easier access to university -> big tech hiring pipelines for junior engineers.
But there’s no comparison to the ease of being a senior and having job offers flood in to your LinkedIn on a weekly basis. Getting a new job becomes a function of simply contacting the past 5 recruiters and asking for the interview.
Splitting hairs a little here, but I've got > 25 years of experience and have not once, ever, received a job offer through LinkedIn, let alone weekly. I've had recruiters showing varying levels of interest contact me there, but never "Hi, person I've never met, great resume! Here is your job offer letter, we're offering $XXX,XXX compensation..."
Senior people do get contacted by recruiters, but they're fishing, and all of these contacts are extremely early in the pipeline. We have to go through the whole process, just like junior folks. The endless phone screens, the whiteboard hazing, the ghosting, the salary negotiation. Being senior and experienced doesn't let you bypass it. "Networking" doesn't let you bypass it.
I know that's probably what you mean, but the simplifying-meme "job offers flooding your inbox" gets repeated and I think people get the wrong idea about how easy it is.
And we're not talking some fluke small company with no controls. This was a fortune 500. The job had no particularly interesting requirements so I guess somebody just said fill the seat for a few months and I was just grabbed. At the time I was doing a lot of international wandering so it was a nice easy refueling top up stateside.
It scarred us forever.
Oh, the irony…
I disagree with this take entirely.
* Senior engineering positions, at least looking at the layoffs over the past year, trend to be the least impacted by layoffs. Empirically this appears to be the case, and it makes logical sense: they may be more expensive, but if that person/role is capable of doing more with less then its worth that investment versus training up mid-levels/juniors, dealing with inexperience, etc. Of course, ideally companies want both, but the industry has matured well past the point of "just keep the cheapest people"; we know better nowadays versus previous recessions.
In other words; during a layoff, there's less liquidity in the senior engineering talent pool than in other pools.
* In a similar vein; when companies have openings in this recession; they want Senior people. Either in the title, or just a bias when interviewing candidates; seniority matters. I've seen this in my own small-city startup community; startups with three or four junior/mid-level engineers, put up a posting for Senior talent, and it stays up for months (I'm looking at some right now which date back to October). Great companies, great culture, great compensation (not FANG, but); just very low liquidity in that talent pool to meet the demand.
The one caveat; Senior engineers who come from a FANG-salary background may have issues if they enter interviews with that expectation. But there's a lot of numbers between entry-level compensation and FANG-compensation.
* Why do companies hire junior/mid-level talent? Its the most liquid talent pool. Cheaper. Maybe you make the argument that junior talent has more loyalty/staying power because they can grow with the company. Etc. One issue with this recession is: All of these companies still have a LOT of money. This isn't, for most companies (especially FANG), an issue of "we don't have the money to meet payroll so need to cut"; its an issue of spending the past two years blowing cheap money on as many people as they could, realizing that they got a lot of low-tier talent, managing all that growth is HARD, and in some cases there just isn't enough high-impact work to justify some roles. This recession legitimately isn't leading to layoffs which are just about cost-cutting; its as much if not more about reorganization, refocusing managerial resources on high-impact projects, cutting bloat, cutting moonshots, etc. That changes the firing/hiring dynamic; its not necessarily about saving money on hires, its about reindexing on what makes a Good Hire.
That makes being a junior engineer very hard; after all, the best way to convince a hiring manager that you're a great hire is to say "Yeah I've worked on something similar to this problem before, let me tell you about it." Junior engineers don't have that.
> you're going to tap your connections and have a job lined up relatively quickly.
But this is absolutely, undeniably true. Its universally, physically, fundamentally impossible to overstate how much impact connections have in getting jobs during a flat or declining job market.
To the point of the original post, and to junior engineers: Stop worrying so much about actual technical skills. Obviously, be competent. But: Your #1 priority needs to be networking and socialization. Go to tech meetups. Offer to give presentations. Join local young professionals associations. Make friends and get drinks with them.
Say a company averages a $1M ROI per engineer, but a senior is 3-5x more likely to actually produce that ROI within a year. They’re not gonna bat an eye towards paying them 200k vs a junior at 100k
This advice always cracks me up.
Most people don’t have deep networks of people who can hook them up with a senior level engineering position. Like, even the people I know who are quite well connected don’t really have this option.
Sure, everyone has a buddy who’d love to pay them half for twice the work. But we’re talking relatable fields and jobs that are worth it and that’s just not realistic for majority.
Alternatively, if people had social networks with people who have potentials roles for them, who wouldn’t already think in the social media era “oh yeah, i’ll ask the people I know who have an in instead of going to random strangers”
And, yet, all three jobs I've had in the last 25 years (including one in 2001), I landed because I knew someone senior at the company pretty well. Not strictly engineering but tech and tech ecosystem companies. Was that lucky and atypical? Perhaps. But those were my experiences.
The last job I got through "normal" channels was from a campus interview at grad school.
If you started your career 25 years ago, you were present in the field before it massively expanded. Your peers are nothing like my peers (Started 13 years ago), and nothing like the peers of someone who started 3 years ago.
It's my reading!
Your friends are statistically more likely to be closer to the top of the pyramid than mine, and my friends are closer to the top than a fresh no-name college graduate's.
Connections obviously aren't the only way to land jobs. But, especially in leaner times, having someone you've worked with lay eyes on your resume certainly helps.
I’ve had around 5 jobs, am much younger, and none of them were due to connections (which I have well over 100 professional people who would vouch for me)
I think you’re either in a very fortunate place in society or you’re old enough in this industry to feel the small world effects
Trust me, for the vast majority your situation isn’t normal.
I‘d recommend trying to lobotomize yourself with a few psychopharmaca prescribed by a psychiatrist first. What‘s the worst that could happen?
You probably haven‘t tried everything yet and you can always try to stop trying to stay alive at a later point.
You should probably call your countries crisis hotline. You can ask google how to commit suicide to get the number.
There's this conveyer-belt view of life: we are supposed to go directly from birth to school to job to kids to bigger job to death. Some people really do live that. Most people don't.
But we're expected to fit that mold, so anyone who's stepped off the belt will usually keep quiet about it. So it's easy to start believing that the only valid life is some linear path.
Still. Unemployment is stress and uncertainty. But bad job markets aren't forever. Good luck with finding a job, or managing to enjoy the interim.
Nyanpasu.
The one saving grace for me is I do have enough savings to get me through a depression. I know that's not a luxury for everyone, though.
I'm curious what your discipline is in?
In an extended bear market / downturn, throw that ratio out the window. Unless you're literally John Carmack or Ken Thompson, you're not going to just have headhunters begging you to work at their companies. In fact, even fishing expeditions from recruiters are going to quickly die out. You'll have to apply--a lot! You'll have to struggle to stay on your recruiters' radars. You'll have to follow-up, pinging for updates, "let me know how I can help move this forward" and so on. Things aren't just going to fall into your lap. This will be the case until we flip back to a bull market and hiring returns to "normal."
BTW my discipline is embedded / mobile development and then project management. Not that I think it matters--macroeconomic effects tend to hit uniformly across engineering disciplines.
I assumed the UK had it worse than the USA, but maybe not?
Dot com bust was 1999; I came in around 2009, right after the Great Recession, one of the worst economic periods in recorded history. That’s the data. All of it. I’m not sure who the person I replied to got their data, but we’re talking about approximately 24 years of it, and most of those years were pretty damn good. So unless that person hasn’t moved jobs in the last decade and a half, they would certainly not be warning people, in general terms, about the impacts of a downturn economy. Either that, or their experience is rather singular. Looking at posts across Reddit and Hacker News, and the general consensus of people in this industry, it seems like this person is far outside the norm of employment viability.
Tech as a developer is still, far and away, the best job market to enter.
I know a fair number of people who dropped off the map and I assume the careers of many never got back on track.
So, while I'd be even more emphatic if the OP were a newly minted undergrad, I'd definitely recommend either extending academia a bit if practical or just trying to find something.
Now it's all coming back down to reality and I'm rapidly re-adjusting my expectations. Interviews are getting much much harder, I'm getting ghosted after final stages, and it's easy to get discouraged. Looking at the news it's not just me becoming a crap dev overnight, but the entire tech economy looking like crap.
Let's hope it at least stabilizes soon. As is I think I'll have to take a massive paycut.
I interviewed with Amazon last year and was specifically informed that it isn't possible to interview with them more than once a year. How did you interview four times in two years?
One of the saddest memories not related to the usual stuff like funerals and such is the job fair at the university after graduation. I bought a suit. I shouldn't have bothered. (Only worn it once more since then!) When I first walked up it looked OK; had like 15 booths. But EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. was just collecting resumes and telling you they didn't have any openings. Would have preferred to just attend an empty job fair or have been told it was cancelled. That was a truly crushing half an hour.
Took a relatively crap job after that. It actually wasn't bad on a personal level, it wasn't like I hated it, but, no future. Obviously a dead end. Crap job. Went to work for a similar crap job at a startup after that, which was pretty lucky itself. The out-of-work-hours noodling I did led to a real job, a few years later.
Do what you need to do. May not even be a programmer job. My personal opinion, which shouldn't be taken as anything more than that, is that A: the next few years are going to be rough, possibly rougher than the dotcom crash but B: in the end, programmer is still a good career choice. Companies simply can not compete without automation any more. Software will continue to eat the world for the forseeable future. I don't expect AI or low-code to do much more than peck at the opportunities available. (Maybe I'm wrong, but if we do get to the point that AI really does successfully replace programmers we have essentially hit the singularity and all bets are off.)
Programmers also have had and will continue to have the unusual ability that many other disciplines do not have where you can continue to learn skills even if you are underemployed. It's hard to practice industrial-scale chemical engineering at home while you're unemployed, but you can learn Rust, or Terraform, or AWS, or source control, or whatever, and even into the teeth of an underemployment period you can still be developing. That helped me and I recommend putting at least some effort into that.
Just don't forget that while learning Rust is more fun, it's not putting resumes out there, hitting trade shows, networking, etc. That is way less fun and much more emotionally expensive, but more likely to lead to even that job that puts food on the table.
Those years created such trauma for me and set me back so far financially that I didn't recover or pay off my student loans (meaning I had no disposable income whatsoever) until I was 40. I can say with confidence that those experiences all but ruined my career, and many others in Gen X. We didn't get promoted, or trusted to manage others, or even have children. It's like we never existed, especially the tail end, the "Elder" Millennials like me. All we hear about now is the success of billionaires - the Tony Starks of the world, but I'm with the losers - I'm Ivan Vanko.
Thankfully the situation today is nothing like the Dot Bomb or the Housing Bubble collapsing in 2008. Nobody can find employees right now. And with the arrival of AI, even the most prescient geeks have absolutely no idea what's going to happen in the next decade. The years effectively go 1999,2000...2023 with 2 lost decades in between. The only innovation has been in GPUs, Moore's law effectively halted in 2007 when R&D started going to reducing cost and power consumption. That may change with RISC-V and the open sourcing/democratization of hardware. So for the first time in a _very_ long time, I'm actually cautiously optimistic about the future.
To get to the point: I'd recommend rejecting most job hunting advice. Stop thinking about what you need to do, or what others expect you to do. Remember that being alive and kicking is what matters. You can survive on next to nothing. The world doesn't come to an end just because you lose your job or run out of money.
Instead, picture a business owner's goals. They just want you to solve their problem, and hopefully be able to pay you. So start with the fundamentals: shows like Mad Men. Learn how to listen and communicate. Don't assume that the person you're talking with has any more of a clue than you do. They may be interviewing 100 people because none of them emphasize how much they are there for their employer. If you're solid, and dedicated, and show up, that can do more for your career than credentials. Just be on the level, is what I'm saying.
One pitfall to watch for is settling. I made the mistake of moving furniture for the first 3 years out of school to support my struggling shareware business. I came out of that job a different person than when I went in. It built my intestinal fortitude but destroyed my psyche. But I've fallen back on it when I needed money. Donating plasma works too. And stuff like Bacon is the Uber of handyman work. It's important to know you can do that stuff to subsist, so that you aren't desperate when you go to an interview. It's all dating, basically.
I don't have data to back this up though, just my general feeling and seems like what happened in the past
Ditto. I got my undergrad after the dot-com crash and finished grad school before 2008. You've reminded me the bad old days. I was considering seriously to go back to my old profession established during my teenage years.
I got lucky to get my first real adult job from my grad school's industrial partner, which paid with peanuts. At least I kept a great credit score. My undergrad education was paid partly by my old profession's gigs. Grad school was tuition-free with a stipend.
To get my first position involved applying everywhere no matter the skillset asked. When I finally landed an interview we had to create an application. I created an application an hour after the interview was complete emailed it over and that sold me. They didn't believe I did this myself so quickly I had to provide some of my db scripts. The other candidates were stronger on paper (finished a 4 year computer science degree) but none could finish or finish as completely as I did.
It turned a little rough. One of the other candidates came in for lunch a week after I was hired. The founder and this person became friends during the interview process. She literally brokedown and cried that day because she wanted the job so badly. I'm surprised they didn't hire her just based on culture fit but this was a nonprofit with one 6 month contract available and tons of challenging problems to tackle.
My advice is to grind it out and pry that first job out however you can.
I was sending out a lot of CVs treating it more or less as a full time job. In the UK at the time the job center would pay for postage for applications, though these days paper applications are a lot less common.
Places that accepted CVs got a lot lower responses than big corporations with their long winded online forms that took a couple of hours or more to fill out, with the usual crappy questions of "give an example e of when you displayed leadership qualities" and the likes. Keep a note of your responses, as after a few, it becomes a lot less effort, as you have probably answered a similar question in a previous one, and can just copy paste with a little adjustment.
Get some interview practice and get good at that. Looking back I was pretty down after a while saying things like "I'll take anything at this point" when I asked why I wanted the job. True, but not what potential employers want to hear. Think of it from the employers point of view and what they want to hear. Again, practice helps and you get better with time.
I got a couple of temporary jobs one for pretty minimal wage but that made a huge difference actually having some real world experience on my CV in terms of getting invited for interviews.
Have some code that you can show people. Build some example projects. I would advise spending some time building a more comprehensive project one time to show that rather than doing a crappy throwaway project from scratch for each interview - something I still seem expected to do after 20 years of experience. The hiring process in this industry sucks and is very exploitative in this way, happy to waste candidates time like this.
So, go out and grab the best job you can. Just be prepared for the life at the bottom of the hill.
Business people run companies according to business principles. The board and shareholders will focus on the short term and the stock price. Also, are these layoffs really about keeping companies afloat, or are they about maximizing shareholder value?
If Google laid off all of their engineers that were working on money losing projects that they are going to probably cancel in a year anyway, no one would see a decrease in service and their net income would increase.
As far as tech startups, they are mostly Ponzi schemes anyway where the investors were planning to pawn off their companies via either acquisition or an IPO.
Can you name one major tech company that has IPOd and created a profitable sustainable business in the last decade besides AirBnB?
For BS CS/EE (or any engineering field): do not overthink the "recession is coming" news. US employers always want young engineers, as they consider them energetic, willing to learn and work for less salary than late career staff. Look up and polish the in demand skills. Brush up on the basics (Python, databases, git) at least to the extent of being able to solve "one step up from fizzbuzz" problems. And apply. You might get less generous terms and no sign-up bonus, but you are almost certain to still land something that you can use as a springboard 2-3 years later.
For PhD in AI: I would apply to good companies only and consider deferring graduation for a year if your fishing turns up nothing. This requires both your mental readiness and your advisor's physical/financial one, but in general your advisor should be thrilled to have you work for him another year for a relative pittance of a graduate stipend. It should not come to this (the market is not dead), but I would personally take it easy and focus on the job search for another year in grad school over taking some soul-sucking job at a company no one has heard of.
My 2c. And good luck!
The one thing I'd add is look beyond "tech sector" companies. Your skill set can be translated and refocused for any number of industries that will thrive in the coming years (e.g. food producers, energy, natural resources, healthcare, etc).
One way to do this is if your institute has a co-op program, reach out to the head and express interest in industries that could be interesting to get into. They'll likely be happy to help and connect a Top AI Expert with companies the university already works with. Of course you'll be doing more applicative work than theoretical
I would advise shifting expectations a bit, it’s likely offers will still be good but not quite as lucrative as last year.
As for accepting any job- just because you’ve accepted a job does not mean you can’t keep interviewing (in the US at least). Even starting at a company doesn’t mean you can’t keep interviewing. I ran a college hire onboarding program a few years back. Of the 20 people we had , 3 had new jobs within 3 months of hire. We weren’t happy about it, but they got legitimately better offers and we couldn’t match.
So, maybe say yes to a “safety job.”
Once you start, keep your expenses low, although you don’t need to live like a pauper. Living with a roommate (or SO), picking less expensive housing, limiting bar/club attendance, and driving a less expensive car really adds up.
That all being said, my impression is that the AI market remains one of the strongest in the tech sector for “real” practitioners. I think you’ll be ok.
I am coming up on month 3 of my new job and not liking the team and leadership. I can tell it will only get worse.
I really want to leave and luckily have the opportunity to close the loop on all my current projects.
Should I just make it quick and send an email to manager tomorrow that I feel it's not a good fit and Friday is my last day? Make it quick and easy before I get more assignments and waste more time.
I have no job lined up but 9 years of experience and at least a year in savings.
My brother quit his (admittedly bad) job in February of 2020. He didn’t find work beyond Amazon warehouse temp till 2021. He blew through a ton of savings and is still recovering. While don’t believe and sincerely hope we are looking at anything like 2020 again, it is impossible to know and it’s way better to pay it safe.
Your job search will be easier while still employed and less stressful.
Don’t worry about getting assigned more assignments. You can leave those behind when you take a new job. Seriously, after a few years you’ll have seen plenty of people come and go, sometimes suddenly. Organizations will find a way to fill the gap (or try aren’t a very good organization).
Line up a new job first. Might not be as easy as you think.
If you want a break in between tell your new job you can't start for a couple of months.
Like another responder, I left my job in Feb 2020 without something lined up. There were bumps, one company I was in the hiring pipeline with laid off their whole recruiting dept. It took a few months more than I was expecting but I had a better paying job by summer.
My current company had steep layoffs late last year but has some openings already. I suspect many companies will be the same, with positions opening up again.
Focus on being the best version of yourself. Be passionate. Stand out not by being what they're looking for, stand out by being what they didn't even know they were looking for until they found you.
Focus on solving problems, not just being a warm body in a seat. Companies need problems solved, not seats filled. Identify the issue they are trying to solve before you even show up, and then make it clear you're the person to solve it.
Focus on being human. If you're not the most personable person (not everyone is, and that's fine) then spend time to make sure they know that you aren't their average applicant.
And if your prospective employer says "In 100 words or less, tell us what makes you different from the rest!" for the love of all that is recruiting, do not just paste in your cover letter. I've disqualified SO many applicants without even looking at their resume or cover letter because they couldn't bother to follow the most basic direction.
"Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers"
Job Outlook, 2021-31 25% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
"Information Security Analysts"
Job Outlook, 2021-31 35% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...