Can somebody explain what's happening? If I just scroll a bit, then try to go back I get another graph. Then if I try again to go back it works. It's probably accidental, but I'm curious what is causing this behavior.
I feel BLS is a bit of a lossy dataset imo - their classification for professions is a bit meh (CIS for all types of Software adjacent roles for example).
USCIS Datasets might be useful as a proxy but aprochryally white collar immigration to the US basically tanked from 2020 onwards due to a mix of COVID restrictions and xenophobia so I'm not sure if such a proxy would be useful in the 2020-2023 timeframe compared to anytime between 2010-2020z
Every mass layoff article posted on HN (Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc) had people posting comments showing the staff counts sometimes doubled in size in a few years prior then reduced by 1/5th (or less) of the pre-growth number via a layoff. A bubble would typically cannibalized all the growth, not a small subset.
I can see how an overeager company who bought into their short term growth numbers as long term realities might overhire during unexpected growth when you don't really know what the upper limit is.
A short term (relative) explosion in demand growth can put businesses in a difficult spot where they can't handle the growth presently and they don't know if the 10% increase will turn into 20%. Hiring is a longer term investment you can't just turn on/off since on-boarding and training is a big investment, and humans are involved, so there's a fundamental timeline disconnect.
There's also the flood of capital from the public markets. Even before COVID tech stocks increased quite a bit.
This is pretty different than a "bubble" which is a completely fake boom that explodes 100% then falls back to zero when people realize it's bullshit. This is more like a boom that goes from +20% to +10%. Which yes still ultimately left a sizeable group in the crosshairs.
Finally someone who isn’t over eager to catastrophically moralize the situation instead of being level headed.
I was a 9 year fang veteran whose pay was grown 70% without my input over Covid. Everyone hired except me who felt this would cool. I tried to stay level headed and build a money making division. I succeeded. And was laid off for my efforts.
So I hope the people who like telling people like me we were just dumb idiots overhyping ourselves never get a taste of how things really work.
Still counts as a bubble. The bulk of the tech hiring done during that period wasn't just to meet the increased pandemic demand but rather based on lofty corporate projections saying that the demand was here to stay. But then a couple years later the exponential growth didn't continue, didn't slow down, didn't even stabilize – it completely reversed back to pre-pandemic levels. And then all those companies found themselves with significantly higher payroll costs than they could afford.
Not every company is Google or Microsoft. You have to remember that the vast majority of the ones that had layoffs, including $100B+ "unicorns", have never made a single dollar of profit in their entire existence.
If there weren't protests, then we would still be locked down. Government loves lockdown. It is wrong to refer to it as pre-pandemic as opposed to pre-lockdown. But you probably are still wearing a mask in your car when driving by yourself.
... but aren't job postings a poor measure of actual hiring? Once you reach the point of not being able to hire the people you want in a timely manner, you can create _lots_ of postings, on different channels, at different levels of seniority, with different kinds of focus, etc, as a desperate and ineffective measure of getting some qualified applicants in your pipe.
But that would always be the case and wouldn’t explain the pandemic bounce. You need there to be a sudden relative increase in this type of behavior at the beginning of the pandemic.
> You need there to be a sudden relative increase in this type of behavior at the beginning of the pandemic.
1. Increased funds available to VC due to low interest rates and hot tech companies.
2. Many tech companies having a pandemic-fueled field day.
3. VCs pushing startups to hire aggressively to meet current demand (smart) and prepare themselves for the remote work, tech revolution paradigm shift (smart in moderation, less smart when leaned into too aggressively).
If you're looking for jobs on Indeed I'm confused as to what you're doing. I found nothing useful there when looking in February, meanwhile LinkedIn was incredibly useful.
Did about 15 interviews and accepted an offer. No issues.
Indeed never had a single attractive company to apply to in that time: It was all consulting.
Man I thought it was just me, but yeah Indeed is truly terrible. My only way of getting interviews has been linkedin (both applying to and getting messaged) or directly applying on company's websites thus far in my career.
Are there any other job boards that are actually authentic?
Agree with this. Forgot they removed the board as it’s been kind of a while now.
One thing I didn’t really like was having your stack overflow profile be relevant in hiring decisions - probably good for some/many devs though
I heard GlassDoor also has jobs but I never used them, only LinkedIn and Indeed (I'm EU-based).
Never got hired through Indeed but they have a few jobs that aren't on LinkedIn.
Also, is it me not knowing to use Indeed or does their interface not support the most basic thing? EU-wide search. With LinkedIn I type "European Union" in the location box, shows me all EU. Indeed, I have to select every individual country, it's much more limiting and I'm getting bored fast.
Sure, I can select "United States" but dudes, having EU countries listed individually with no option of doing a whole area search is like having to manually search "Arkansas" or "Oklahoma" jobs in the US, it's retarded and myopic to say the least.
I can’t figure out why there seems to be a new heavily advertised jobs/employment site every couple of years. The first one I remember was monster.com. Now it’s Indeed. There have been a number of others. Why do these sites spring up, seem to be everywhere, and then get replaced after a couple of years?
It may be a location thing, but in the upper midwest I see just absolute garbage on LinkedIn and just mostly garbage on Indeed. Both are full of consultancy garbage, but LinkedIn refuses to show me local jobs. I suspect they don't want to return a mostly empty search page, so they fill the results with Accenture consulting listing that are supposedly for my smallish metro. Indeed at least shows me local listing.
Although my situation might be a hit niche for this board, since I'm in a small area and I'm not interested in remote work for mental health reasons. But odd that a geography change causes such a complete reversal of which site is better. LinkedIn is still worth it for the professional network features, but honestly I kinda would prefer the Craigslist interface since that is actually searchable.
I'm a tech lead in France with a detailed resume and LinkedIn sometimes shows me positions as a nurse in the US. No clue how their algorithm works, but I'm not highly confident in its quality :)
My last search, Indeed was great. They did free, decent resume consultation with me, and assigned me some rando to point out some good listings to apply for here and there (that surprisingly were generally well curated). Got several interviews and a job in short order.
(no affiliation, they just were surprisingly helpful... I still don't know why, my situation at the time did not make me an amazing candidate or anything)
I’ve noticed that many applicants for positions at my company from Indeed.com are entirely unqualified. Often truck drivers, etc. for a software engineering role and the resume will have no engineering related experience.
I’ve been told that many of these applicants are people applying to jobs they have no hopes of getting interviewed for. In many states you must prove you are actively looking for a job to collect unemployment benefits.
I noticed there were a lot of job listings for crypto which just stayed up for ages. I suspect they had trouble hiring as they need someone smart enough to work on this stuff, while also lacking the ethics to avoid scamming people, and often being dumb enough to be scammed themselves in to having part of their payment be rug pull tokens with conditions blocking selling for x months/years (after the pull)
These no hope listings probably inflated numbers a fair bit.
I have coworkers who were offered tokens in a previous engagement. They were given the option to sell the tokens as soon as they received them (and receive cash instead), and they made quite a lot of money from them.
Crypto companies have a more sinister reason for keeping job postings up.
It's all about marketing for crypto companies that have tokens on exchanges. Their goal is to raise the token price so they can dump on retail. Having many active job postings show that they're active in development and they have plenty of money to keep the project going. If they don't have any job postings, it can be interpreted that they've already rug pulled.
It's all part of how they fool the gullible.
There are literally analytics companies that use job postings as a data point for crypto companies to see if they're active or rug pulled.
Keeping job postings up is free.
Source: Worked in and consulted for a few crypto companies years ago and analyzed many crypto scams.
I subscribe to a couple RSS feeds for some remote job sites.
A very large % of jobs are for crypto (ok "fintech" but look closely it's crypto) in March 2023. I wonder how these companies are still going, or maybe the listings just haven't been taken down yet.
Yeah, the "day in the life of a software engineer at X name brand company" has been on YouTube for years and definitely predates the TikTok trend. It dates to at least a few years prior to the pandemic.
The reality for most of us I suspect was sitting at home on our couch fixing an obscure bug in a CI pipeline while half-listening along to an all-hands meeting.
They’re a terrible measure. From a comment I made about this assumption elsewhere on HN a few weeks ago:
I am hiring at an early stage startup myself. There is absolutely no way we’d extend offers for all of the roles we have open if a candidate arrived for all of them next week. Growing that much so quickly would be a disastrous onboarding experience for most of the new hires and potentially risk our ability to build a consistent culture with the team. So we’ll hire whichever candidate(s) successfully complete the process first and then pause the other roles until we’re ready to onboard more people.
Then there’s also the reality at this stage you need people who can wear multiple hats. And there’s a bunch of roles where your ideal candidate doesn’t have a neat pre-established label. So sometimes we’ll post the exact same role with different titles to try and make sure it gets the attention of someone who most strongly aligns with one of those job titles.
At a previous place we worked remotely, and so the same job would be posted as both remote and then also as a dozen different specific city locations too. But if we were hiring multiple of any roles you wouldn’t multiply that, you’d just post the one listing(s) and keep it open until all the positions were filled.
A jobs page is a marketing artefact for potential hires, it’s not a financial reporting/forecasting tool.
TLDR: don’t make any assumptions from a job board about how many roles a company is realistically hiring for.
This would also explain part of the uptick in postings post-pandemic, as companies become more open to hiring remotely are more likely to post dozens of identical job postings in a variety of cities.
Actually I used to work producing data from job posting stats. I think there’s a strong correlation between job demand and job posts (job posts cost money, after all!) but as you point out, it may not be linear, as the more desperate people are to hire, the more they’ll post.
They don't necessarily match, but the aggregate directional numbers are meaningful. Indeed postings aren't free. The mismatch between tech and overall also matches the broader narrative about a tech recession, but the rest of the economy is doing sorta ok, at least until January 2023.
So you're right, but it matches enough things that I wouldn't dismiss it.
That's a weirdly-specific conclusion to make when even the article's own graph shows that general job postings stagnated at the same time programmer and broader IT postings stagnated. Tech jobs declined sooner, but it looks as if general job postings are starting to decline as well.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that we're either on the verge of a recession or already in one. This is more than a particular job sector being a bubble; the whole economy is arguably a bubble.
No, you're not suppose to notice. I mean just last week there was another "tweak" to the CPI calculation[1], but we still came in absurdly hot at 6% YoY. It's about the 4th change in two quarters if I'm remembering correctly.
> Starting with January 2023 data, BLS updated weights annually for the Consumer Price Index based on a single calendar year of data, using consumer expenditure data from 2021. This reflects a change from prior practice of updating weights biennially using 2 years of expenditure data.
Well, a lot of small corrections seem better than a few large ones to me. Maybe it captures some noise, and it's worse, but I don't think one year of data is small enough to go past the optimum.
It is healthy to have some amount of mistrust of official data, but those adjustments are very well defined, and there's no evidence that they deviated from the usual procedure on making them. It's not them happening that taints the data.
We're in an employee shortage, recession or no recession, the largest segment of workers in the US ever (the boomers) are retiring and the largest cohort just turned 65 the last quarter of 2022. They've been squawking about the impending recession since 2015 and here we are, they keep saying it but it doesn't happen.
True, but tech has grown a lot in the past 30 years, so the worker age distribution skews younger. At older tech companies that are big, boring, and still do things (Intel, Cisco), it probable skews a little older.
> They've been squawking about the impending recession since 2015 and here we are, they keep saying it but it doesn't happen.
Mostly because the Fed has been creative about keeping the economic bubble going and preventing the numbers from "officially" indicating whether a recession has started. Those folks "on the ground" are more exposed to the reality of the situation: wealth inequality is expanding, wages haven't kept up with rents in decades, inflation and plain old profiteering are resulting in higher prices for worse quantities/qualities... for anyone other than those at the top of the economic ladder (who are largely insulated from the effects of their own economic policies), it's readily apparent that the current economic system is unsustainable, and it's entirely a matter of "when", not "if", the Fed and the broader financial system runs out of tricks to maintain our suspension of disbelief.
General long term workforce participation by those not in specialized or career fields has been overall declining since the mid 2000s. 2012-2017 saw a spike in specialized field jobs thanks to online media, but career positions continued to decline in overall numbers while still being occupied [1]. In general labour the trend has been to reduce staff sizes, drive more hours per day per worker, and reduce overall weekly hours [2]. Which naturally results in fewer job positions.
There is no recession coming up, because the truth is we never escaped the one that occurred in 2008 to begin with. We've just been covering it up.
Career positions in government and finance were stable in hiring and retention if slightly reduced month over month, while non-career positions such as retail reduced in number.
I wonder if we’ll go through an irrational counter bubble. Where the prevailing wisdom will say “don’t hire too many devs, they create trouble with their activism” and “look at what <startup> did with 10 people” and “with copilot/ChatGPT we don’t need hardly any devs”
There is a lot of talk about Google as the role model of what not to do. Their employee base became a center of activism that bullied the management around. Not much came of it at the time because the company continued to generate tons of cash. But now everyone is seeing how mismanaged Google has been and likely distracted.
It’s not the devs fault but rather bringing in too many people that believe the workplace is a political place.
> too many people that believe the workplace is a political place.
I heard a kid ask what politics was all about. It's an interesting question for anyone to stop and think about.
Everyone will come up with their own conclusions, but I personally would ask what in a workplace is _not_ political ?
From hiring practices, environmental impact, customer/community management (minorities, disabled people, freedom of speech etc.), social mission, where the funds come from, where the lobbying money goes...your argument could be that employee should ignore everything a company does except what they are explicitly ordered to care about, but that doesn't look like what we socially expect from employees and people will be personally affected by how their company behaves as a whole.
I'm not arguing for extreme activism everywhere you work, but saying the workplace is free of politics goes way too far on the other extreme.
> From hiring practices … [to] where the lobbying money goes.… What in a workplace is _not_ political?
These are all great examples of "not your job" precisely because the people responsible for these concerns are the owners, and by extension the board, and by even further extension the "officers" appointed to concern themselves with these issues.
To take just one role as an example, it's certainly within a tech lead's purview to write a memo if she observes something that can be improved, but much beyond that and I think the tech lead would be straying from their mandate.
No matter how good their intentions, they're not going to be effective because they're not charged with those duties and so they rarely have the tools and authority to implement the changes they might be advocating. That lack of agency leads to frustration and discontent, and it distracts those looking to you for direction.
What is _not_ political as a tech lead? Making sure tickets are scoped well. Identifying poorly tested parts of the codebase. Anticipating future requirements and designing systems that will accomodate them. Setting expectations and ensuring that your team meets them, such as good commentary, an appropriate level of testing, or the quality of code reviews given amongst your team.
Of course, you need to be a good leader to accomplish those things, and there's a political aspect to good leadership, but those duties don't have much to do with, say, the environmental impact of the company.
To be clear, I'm not saying any of the causes you brought up aren't important, but I do feel like a lot of people have taken up those causes in venues where they're personally unlikely to be very effective (and content).
> To take just one role as an example, it's certainly within a tech lead's purview to write a memo if she observes something that can be improved, but much beyond that and I think the tech lead would be straying from their mandate.
It's trickier than that I think.
Imagine for instance as a tech lead you realize the resumes of some specific minority all get shutdown by HR before interviewing. As a tech lead you make a polite inquiry, and they tell you nothing's wrong, they have their reasons they can't tell you, and you should mind your business.
You could argue any move from there could be out of your mandate...but as a tech lead you're told to bring the most technical value possible to your team. And hiring the best people fits into these optics. So you'd talk with some colleages about how you think it makes your team worse you couldn't hire that specific person you pushed as a candidate. The discussion extends to hiring criteria in general. More people come to you to share ideas. And now you have a group chat about hiring ethics that makes the management uncomfortable.
> ... as a tech lead you're told to bring the most technical value possible to your team.
This feels like a rationalization for a crusade.
This falls into the "write a memo" bucket. You notice a trend (like all applications by a specific minority get shut down). You document it by pulling a report. You identify the potential ramifications. Hit send. If it gets round filed and the trend continues, it's time to vote with your feet and explain why in your exit interview.
I think if you start bringing it up with your colleagues after you've been told "there are reasons and mind your business", and you encourage a conversation about the company's hiring criteria, and finally start an informal, unsanctioned working group on a matter you have no authority to change... You've definitely exceeded your mandate and distracted your colleagues.
It's only political because of the choice to build a faction and enter into a power struggle with HR vs. call attention to it so that those whose job it is to worry about it, can worry about it if they weren't aware of it.
> This falls into the "write a memo" bucket. You notice a trend (like all applications by a specific minority get shut down). You document it by pulling a report. You identify the potential ramifications. Hit send. If it gets round filed and the trend continues, it's time to vote with your feet and explain why in your exit interview.
Thing is, I don't think this attitude would apply to many other subjects.
For instance you notice your company has difficulty hiring so you talk to HR to give more visibility in tech conferences for instance. They drag their feet and don't want to bother, but you start looking around, discuss internaly and see the idea has traction and people are willing to volunteer to do it, so you come up with a realistic proposition for meetups on friday evenings. The plan is greenlit by your boss, you talk to your office manager, get the ball rolling, and 6 months later your company officially has a meetup event every month, and everyone's pretty happy you did it.
So where's the line between expanding company's hiring practices and expanding company's PR practices ?
My point is, at some level (I assume "tech lead" is not some grunt worker) you're supposed to interpret your mandate as broadly as it still makes sense from a practical point of view, and will be rewarded for moving things in the right direction.
Saying "getting the right people for the job in your team" should stop at the memo level doesn't fit my experience of what is expected from that kind of role.
On the other hand, perhaps I have been formatted by being in too many small/start-up companies, but my experience is that is no such thing as "not your job". You can entrust someone to do that job while you're working on something else, but if you realize that a tool or process is broken, you should probably do something about it.
There definitely is such a thing as "spending way too much company time on politics", though.
I don't disagree with you. Maybe a more nuanced way of putting it than "not my job" is to ask "what is my role to play here?" In a smaller company/start up, your role might well be to look for things that need doing and do them.
Everything is also math, or physics, or chemistry, or biology, or computation, or philosophy, or economics, or psychology.
It's not profound to put on blue-tinted glasses and marvel at how blue everything is. The only thing it tells me is the POV you chose for yourself.
"Everything is politics" is usually used as a wedge against uninterested people. Either you join my cause, or you're responsible for all current evil. It's certainly not an enlightened neutral observation. It's a call for culture war.
Google's wounds were self-inflicted and totally public: introduce a product, let in linger for 2 years, kill it, over and over again, dozens of cycles of this.
No political explanation needed, just very obvious senior level mismanagement.
Ex-Googler here. I'm kind of surprised Google leadership lets themselves get bullied so hard. E.g. when Diane Greene lied several times about the nature of Google Cloud's involvement with the Air Force, a ton of employees complained, but it's not like they quit the next day. The retention numbers were always very smooth curves seemingly unaffected by the drama of the day. If you went around and talked about the latest thing, 80% of employees had no idea what you were talking about.
It's kind of cynical, but if Google management doesn't want activism, they should ignore their employees, wait for the activists to burn themselves out and quit, and then be happy with all the paycheck collecting cogs that remain.
It's because they don't "get bullied". They _want_ this kind of stupid identity activism and encourage it from the top with their DEI propaganda officers. Any "activism" and identity outrage is an opportunity to make it look like they're doing something "progressive" without actually doing anything meaningful (i.e. expensive) and precludes any material change that would actually help people and threaten the upper classes' power or wealth. The instant that "activists" aren't useful to them anymore, they get axed immediately. Just look at Microsoft's AI ethics team. An entire team dedicated only to whitewashing their corporate image.
I don't think this is true. Why would they spend millions of dollars making elaborate surveillance and censorship tools for a Chinese version of Google search if they wanted everyone to accidentally find out about it later and throw a hissy fit? Why would they try to make deals with the Air Force, DoD, and ICE if they want their employees to sour them? Why create an underclass of contractors if they want their employees to advocate for them? There have been so many political conflicts between employees and management and they mostly end up in the nytimes.
DEI is kind of a different beast. Largely, the employees and management are aligned. There isn't a political war going on.
The AI ethics teams and DEI teams are often powerless appendages that make it seem like they are doing something, but they aren't activists. They are just doing their job.
Not all of the office politics is in their favor. I think modern companies have realized that it's much easier to refocus employee's attention than to outright forbid any dissent. Surveillance and contractor abuse are actual issues that materially affect people, so I suppose it's good that the employees called them out on it. Other issues that get pushed by upper managers... not so much. Also, I don't want to say that all the DEI officers and upper management are conspiring to evilness. Many of them do believe in the cause, but in the grand scheme it works out that way. Political parties certainly know how the ball rolls and abuse identity politics to the maximum extent. Private companies are then all too glad to go with that, even if the good-meaning employees don't know what they're really doing.
> they aren't activists. They are just doing their job
But they try to make their job some sort of activism (especially academics who should strive the most to be unbiased), which usually leads directly to discrimination in some form or the other, since that is the only thing they're allowed to do.
A lot of people were talking 5-10 years ago about what would happen to Google when the original devs cashed out and mediocre company suits took over. We are living through that reality now. For the first time in 25 years Google actually looks vulnerable- the opportunity to win in internet search is up for grabs now in a way that it hasn't been since the '90s.
And when the new search giant steps onto the scene, you can bet that they will be paying top dollar for their devs.
I'm honestly surprised this hasn't been more prevalent. Freshdesk [0] did this way back in 2011. There's certainly no lack of talent in India, I'm not sure if it's a cultural or systemic issue that has prevented Indian startups from getting more traction.
India has some of the most exciting growth in startup sector recently. If anything they're going through a massive bull market buoyed by the modernization of their online infrastructure. Their digital finance (UPI vs Zelle) and digital identification system (Aadhar vs SSN) is the envy of other countries now.
I think just about anything would be improvement over SSN if the system was actually designed as a national identification system instead of being improvised into one.
I think it doesn't nearly tell the story though, the tech market is highly stratified and specialized.
Was there an over-hiring of sales people, hr, middle managers, and underqualified engineers? Yeah, definitely. I saw bartenders becoming "tech recruiters" or "front end engineers" overnight with no formal technical education. I'm not a credentialist, but I am a realist, and the safer bet is someone w/a BS in CS to most companies.
Is there still massive demand for experienced and qualified engineers? Absolutely. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of tech, there is a massive flee to value that usually accompanies turmoil in the markets and it' time that tech focused more on value.
It would be interesting to see some stats on the types of engineers that have been laid off in recent months, unfortunately, I don't think there's any data that really breaks it down to that level of granularity.
Something I saw with a chart shows that despite massive layoffs recently total Microsoft headcount has only just returned to pre COVID-19 levels. On a long term trend from 2008 to present it's still a significant increase.
When we talk about tech hiring we often focus on demand and don't think about supply. The number of IT/software graduates has been steadily increasing as well. And they have to work somewhere. If there are no jobs these new grads can "flip burgers" or something, but more likely they'll find someone willing to hire them to crank out code. Of course the cause and effect are intertwined. More code means more apps get made, which means more investors think the market will keep going up, which makes them invest. That's the "bubble".
I've been coding for 10 years. The coding profession has been a thing for maybe 40 years. The industry still hasn't worked out how to plan for these labor shortage and surplus cycles.
> And they have to work somewhere. If there are no jobs these new grads can "flip burgers" or something, but more likely they'll find someone willing to hire them to crank out code.
If there are no jobs, then how? The market doesn't have to use up the entire supply of skilled workers. It's not going to create jobs just to give people jobs.
1) create enough of a safety net or give people enough cash that they can start businesses taking advantage of the increased productivity of ai
2) austerity: let them get fired from jobs in failing industries with no safety net, they will not have the opportunity to create businesses, and they will work in crappy tedious jobs a robot or ai could easily do, but because companies can afford cheap humans and they don’t have capital for robots, they will hire people desperate to do anything to keep their family from homelessness.
What I've noticed, at least in New Zealand, is a lot of work that is being done is replacing legacy systems with many organisations having kicked the can down the road only to get the point that they've run out of road. The IT cycle appears to come in waves where there are moments of transition only for things to die down as organisations move to maintenance mode until the next technology arrives and thee is a start of a new transition. A good example is how browsers have become more sophisticated and it is now possible to do things that used to require bespoke programs to do tasks that can now be pushed into the cloud. A good example of that would be at my work place where moved to using Amazon Connect via Chrome, from having a locally run Exchange server to it being thrown into Google Workspace along with macros used in Microsoft Office being migrated into Google Docs. It'll be interesting to see whether there is a bounce back as the big players embrace AI or whether it'll be about improving what already exists rather than entirely new software platforms.
No they don’t. Plenty of professions generate way too many graduates. Law is a good example—probably 2-3x as many graduates than are really needed.
It leads to a bimodal distribution of salaries. The big firms pay 200k to a grads with decent grades from good schools. But a lot of people can’t even find a 60k job in law.
Of course it was a bubble 2021 was nuts. People with just a few years experience were getting senior jobs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, then leaving soon after to a new job earning even more. All the while WFH doing so sweet FA. I've never seen anything like that job market.
I’m baffled how so many smart people bought into the “new normal” narrative and believed that our pandemic era weirdness would last forever.
It was across the board. People in my hometown set up restaurants, cafes, coworking spaces - businesses that don’t see an ROI for a few years at least - all because they thought the young people who had returned home during the pandemic would stay there forever.
Of course, now almost everyone has gone back and these businesses are dead or struggling.
No they aren’t. They got paid large joining bonuses and 4 months of severance. They probably made 2 years worth of money in a single year. I’m recommending most of my friends at FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies to go join a late stage startup that has high cash comp, since the equity value is pretty shitty everywhere right now. Once the market improves in a year or 2. Their resume will start getting shortlisted again because it had FAANG on it.
I think the days about caring about your employer are now in the past, given how companies have treated employees.
For the love of god you can get for hundreds of thousands of dollars actual senior engineers from Europe. It's baffling that US companies are not doing it.
There is a ton of noise in data like this. Also, large companies don't hire the same way and for the same reason as smaller companies.
1. A lot of job postings are fake. They are meant to keep recruuting pipelines open. There can be a long delay between posting an ad, getting applicants, filtering them, doing phone screens, doing interviews, doing team-matching, extending an offer, negotiating that offer, having it accepted and that candidate start. It can easily take months. You may start recruiting before you have a position to fill. Or you may hire proactively;
2. You can't discount the effect of visa job postings. This is where you have to "prove" you can't fill a job with a US resident or citizen. One thing you have to do is post a job. There's a whole cottage industry in posting these jobs in obscure places (eg newspapers, caulk boards in obscure places in an office) and in finding legally valid way to reject applicants.
3. Smaller companies will have positions to fill. Larger companies have hiring targets and budgets, fill positiosn and then figure out what to do with them.
4. Part of all the above is large companies definitely over-hire as normal practice in case people are needed for something and to deny those people to other employers.
What we're seeing now is a reduction in that over-hiring buffer plus some virtue signaling layoffs all while having a useful opportunity to attack labor costs. It's a double bonus.
That's nice. But doesn't help those of us who lost their jobs with lots of experience and actual previous work ('not just sitting around/overhired') and now can't find anything.
The odd thing is that it's not (just) these recent "overhires" getting laid off but lot of us more experienced employees as we are more expensive.
Tech companies have done a lot of aggressive hiring expecting a rise in business, but with the economic downturn coming, the business opportunity is dwindling .so they have to cut cost. And ofcourse as the corporate logic goes, instead of reducing pay or withholding certain benefits of the top paid executives, it's the lower paid employees who are Expendables and hence on the firing line first.
Postings don't necessarily correspond to hires, but where did all these people come from?! I can't imagine there were that many more CS grads around that time, or that a lot of CS grads were immediately going to a different job after graduation.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadIf that’s the case I had no issue going back on iOS Safari.
The only jobs I see from my current employer are entry level anybody can apply jobs, very basic help desk and retail.
USCIS Datasets might be useful as a proxy but aprochryally white collar immigration to the US basically tanked from 2020 onwards due to a mix of COVID restrictions and xenophobia so I'm not sure if such a proxy would be useful in the 2020-2023 timeframe compared to anytime between 2010-2020z
If you look at the rate online sales growth during the pandemic if anything it's a surprise that tech-hiring wasn't even more elevated.
I can see how an overeager company who bought into their short term growth numbers as long term realities might overhire during unexpected growth when you don't really know what the upper limit is.
A short term (relative) explosion in demand growth can put businesses in a difficult spot where they can't handle the growth presently and they don't know if the 10% increase will turn into 20%. Hiring is a longer term investment you can't just turn on/off since on-boarding and training is a big investment, and humans are involved, so there's a fundamental timeline disconnect.
There's also the flood of capital from the public markets. Even before COVID tech stocks increased quite a bit.
This is pretty different than a "bubble" which is a completely fake boom that explodes 100% then falls back to zero when people realize it's bullshit. This is more like a boom that goes from +20% to +10%. Which yes still ultimately left a sizeable group in the crosshairs.
I was a 9 year fang veteran whose pay was grown 70% without my input over Covid. Everyone hired except me who felt this would cool. I tried to stay level headed and build a money making division. I succeeded. And was laid off for my efforts.
So I hope the people who like telling people like me we were just dumb idiots overhyping ourselves never get a taste of how things really work.
>Higher payroll costs than they could afford.
I find it disingenuous for companies having record profits, stock buybacks etc to use such an excuse
I’m fairly certain that there were quite a few job postings that were one of the following:
- one of several for the same position, framed in different ways (as parent reply suggested)
- fishing for a unicorn candidate who undervalued themselves
- absolute fantasy… no one who was qualified for the job would take it with that company for what they were offering
I think that some of this may have been used as an illusion to project growth where there was none.
This is what we call the 'I can't find any qualified domestic candidates, so I need to sponsor an immigrant' hiring strategy.
1. Increased funds available to VC due to low interest rates and hot tech companies.
2. Many tech companies having a pandemic-fueled field day.
3. VCs pushing startups to hire aggressively to meet current demand (smart) and prepare themselves for the remote work, tech revolution paradigm shift (smart in moderation, less smart when leaned into too aggressively).
Can you show the analysis for this claim?
2. Interact with said people.
3. Occasionally look at job postings to see what’s up.
4. Draw conclusions, usually via some sort of triangulation (i.e., not just using one source).
That’s the process.
Other than that, it’s anecdotal with many, many data points, and it’s completely not scientific (nor was it claimed to be).
Feel free to believe me or not — I am just an observer and a peripheral participant in the performance art that is the tech world.
If you're looking for jobs on Indeed I'm confused as to what you're doing. I found nothing useful there when looking in February, meanwhile LinkedIn was incredibly useful.
Did about 15 interviews and accepted an offer. No issues.
Indeed never had a single attractive company to apply to in that time: It was all consulting.
Are there any other job boards that are actually authentic?
Never got hired through Indeed but they have a few jobs that aren't on LinkedIn.
Also, is it me not knowing to use Indeed or does their interface not support the most basic thing? EU-wide search. With LinkedIn I type "European Union" in the location box, shows me all EU. Indeed, I have to select every individual country, it's much more limiting and I'm getting bored fast.
Sure, I can select "United States" but dudes, having EU countries listed individually with no option of doing a whole area search is like having to manually search "Arkansas" or "Oklahoma" jobs in the US, it's retarded and myopic to say the least.
- Hired (1 lead, did match my profile but not what I wanted to do);
- HiredSweet (0 leads);
- WellFound (a few interesting leads);
- Hacker News Who's Hiring (a few interesting leads);
- Hacker News Who Wants to be Hired (a few interesting leads);
- LinkedIn applying (a few interesting leads);
- LinkedIn messaged (dozens of leads);
- Reddit /r/rust (a few interesting leads).
Although my situation might be a hit niche for this board, since I'm in a small area and I'm not interested in remote work for mental health reasons. But odd that a geography change causes such a complete reversal of which site is better. LinkedIn is still worth it for the professional network features, but honestly I kinda would prefer the Craigslist interface since that is actually searchable.
(no affiliation, they just were surprisingly helpful... I still don't know why, my situation at the time did not make me an amazing candidate or anything)
It paid for this ad and others you may have spread around recalling the situation.
I’ve been told that many of these applicants are people applying to jobs they have no hopes of getting interviewed for. In many states you must prove you are actively looking for a job to collect unemployment benefits.
These no hope listings probably inflated numbers a fair bit.
It's all about marketing for crypto companies that have tokens on exchanges. Their goal is to raise the token price so they can dump on retail. Having many active job postings show that they're active in development and they have plenty of money to keep the project going. If they don't have any job postings, it can be interpreted that they've already rug pulled.
It's all part of how they fool the gullible.
There are literally analytics companies that use job postings as a data point for crypto companies to see if they're active or rug pulled.
Keeping job postings up is free.
Source: Worked in and consulted for a few crypto companies years ago and analyzed many crypto scams.
A very large % of jobs are for crypto (ok "fintech" but look closely it's crypto) in March 2023. I wonder how these companies are still going, or maybe the listings just haven't been taken down yet.
People filming themselves eating free snacks and doing yoga and whatever else other than working.
I am hiring at an early stage startup myself. There is absolutely no way we’d extend offers for all of the roles we have open if a candidate arrived for all of them next week. Growing that much so quickly would be a disastrous onboarding experience for most of the new hires and potentially risk our ability to build a consistent culture with the team. So we’ll hire whichever candidate(s) successfully complete the process first and then pause the other roles until we’re ready to onboard more people. Then there’s also the reality at this stage you need people who can wear multiple hats. And there’s a bunch of roles where your ideal candidate doesn’t have a neat pre-established label. So sometimes we’ll post the exact same role with different titles to try and make sure it gets the attention of someone who most strongly aligns with one of those job titles.
At a previous place we worked remotely, and so the same job would be posted as both remote and then also as a dozen different specific city locations too. But if we were hiring multiple of any roles you wouldn’t multiply that, you’d just post the one listing(s) and keep it open until all the positions were filled.
A jobs page is a marketing artefact for potential hires, it’s not a financial reporting/forecasting tool.
TLDR: don’t make any assumptions from a job board about how many roles a company is realistically hiring for.
So you're right, but it matches enough things that I wouldn't dismiss it.
By the time the official figures are released, you are already too late. No point in waiting for them in the first place.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185591
It's becoming increasingly apparent that we're either on the verge of a recession or already in one. This is more than a particular job sector being a bubble; the whole economy is arguably a bubble.
Put "us economy recession 20*" into google for any year, and you will get results
No, you're not suppose to notice. I mean just last week there was another "tweak" to the CPI calculation[1], but we still came in absurdly hot at 6% YoY. It's about the 4th change in two quarters if I'm remembering correctly.
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[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/notices/2023/methodology-changes-202...
> Starting with January 2023 data, BLS updated weights annually for the Consumer Price Index based on a single calendar year of data, using consumer expenditure data from 2021. This reflects a change from prior practice of updating weights biennially using 2 years of expenditure data.
It is healthy to have some amount of mistrust of official data, but those adjustments are very well defined, and there's no evidence that they deviated from the usual procedure on making them. It's not them happening that taints the data.
Mostly because the Fed has been creative about keeping the economic bubble going and preventing the numbers from "officially" indicating whether a recession has started. Those folks "on the ground" are more exposed to the reality of the situation: wealth inequality is expanding, wages haven't kept up with rents in decades, inflation and plain old profiteering are resulting in higher prices for worse quantities/qualities... for anyone other than those at the top of the economic ladder (who are largely insulated from the effects of their own economic policies), it's readily apparent that the current economic system is unsustainable, and it's entirely a matter of "when", not "if", the Fed and the broader financial system runs out of tricks to maintain our suspension of disbelief.
There is no recession coming up, because the truth is we never escaped the one that occurred in 2008 to begin with. We've just been covering it up.
[1]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/otm-employme...
Career positions in government and finance were stable in hiring and retention if slightly reduced month over month, while non-career positions such as retail reduced in number.
[2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/irregular-work-scheduling-an...
Tech companies were some of the first employers that chose to fall on the Fed's "layoffs please" sword, so that might explain the trend.
It’s not the devs fault but rather bringing in too many people that believe the workplace is a political place.
I heard a kid ask what politics was all about. It's an interesting question for anyone to stop and think about.
Everyone will come up with their own conclusions, but I personally would ask what in a workplace is _not_ political ?
From hiring practices, environmental impact, customer/community management (minorities, disabled people, freedom of speech etc.), social mission, where the funds come from, where the lobbying money goes...your argument could be that employee should ignore everything a company does except what they are explicitly ordered to care about, but that doesn't look like what we socially expect from employees and people will be personally affected by how their company behaves as a whole.
I'm not arguing for extreme activism everywhere you work, but saying the workplace is free of politics goes way too far on the other extreme.
But you are right. Everything is politics when it comes down to it, the only difference is whether something is considered a norm or not.
These are all great examples of "not your job" precisely because the people responsible for these concerns are the owners, and by extension the board, and by even further extension the "officers" appointed to concern themselves with these issues.
To take just one role as an example, it's certainly within a tech lead's purview to write a memo if she observes something that can be improved, but much beyond that and I think the tech lead would be straying from their mandate.
No matter how good their intentions, they're not going to be effective because they're not charged with those duties and so they rarely have the tools and authority to implement the changes they might be advocating. That lack of agency leads to frustration and discontent, and it distracts those looking to you for direction.
What is _not_ political as a tech lead? Making sure tickets are scoped well. Identifying poorly tested parts of the codebase. Anticipating future requirements and designing systems that will accomodate them. Setting expectations and ensuring that your team meets them, such as good commentary, an appropriate level of testing, or the quality of code reviews given amongst your team.
Of course, you need to be a good leader to accomplish those things, and there's a political aspect to good leadership, but those duties don't have much to do with, say, the environmental impact of the company.
To be clear, I'm not saying any of the causes you brought up aren't important, but I do feel like a lot of people have taken up those causes in venues where they're personally unlikely to be very effective (and content).
It's trickier than that I think.
Imagine for instance as a tech lead you realize the resumes of some specific minority all get shutdown by HR before interviewing. As a tech lead you make a polite inquiry, and they tell you nothing's wrong, they have their reasons they can't tell you, and you should mind your business.
You could argue any move from there could be out of your mandate...but as a tech lead you're told to bring the most technical value possible to your team. And hiring the best people fits into these optics. So you'd talk with some colleages about how you think it makes your team worse you couldn't hire that specific person you pushed as a candidate. The discussion extends to hiring criteria in general. More people come to you to share ideas. And now you have a group chat about hiring ethics that makes the management uncomfortable.
This feels like a rationalization for a crusade.
This falls into the "write a memo" bucket. You notice a trend (like all applications by a specific minority get shut down). You document it by pulling a report. You identify the potential ramifications. Hit send. If it gets round filed and the trend continues, it's time to vote with your feet and explain why in your exit interview.
I think if you start bringing it up with your colleagues after you've been told "there are reasons and mind your business", and you encourage a conversation about the company's hiring criteria, and finally start an informal, unsanctioned working group on a matter you have no authority to change... You've definitely exceeded your mandate and distracted your colleagues.
It's only political because of the choice to build a faction and enter into a power struggle with HR vs. call attention to it so that those whose job it is to worry about it, can worry about it if they weren't aware of it.
Thing is, I don't think this attitude would apply to many other subjects.
For instance you notice your company has difficulty hiring so you talk to HR to give more visibility in tech conferences for instance. They drag their feet and don't want to bother, but you start looking around, discuss internaly and see the idea has traction and people are willing to volunteer to do it, so you come up with a realistic proposition for meetups on friday evenings. The plan is greenlit by your boss, you talk to your office manager, get the ball rolling, and 6 months later your company officially has a meetup event every month, and everyone's pretty happy you did it.
So where's the line between expanding company's hiring practices and expanding company's PR practices ?
My point is, at some level (I assume "tech lead" is not some grunt worker) you're supposed to interpret your mandate as broadly as it still makes sense from a practical point of view, and will be rewarded for moving things in the right direction.
Saying "getting the right people for the job in your team" should stop at the memo level doesn't fit my experience of what is expected from that kind of role.
On the other hand, perhaps I have been formatted by being in too many small/start-up companies, but my experience is that is no such thing as "not your job". You can entrust someone to do that job while you're working on something else, but if you realize that a tool or process is broken, you should probably do something about it.
There definitely is such a thing as "spending way too much company time on politics", though.
It's not profound to put on blue-tinted glasses and marvel at how blue everything is. The only thing it tells me is the POV you chose for yourself.
"Everything is politics" is usually used as a wedge against uninterested people. Either you join my cause, or you're responsible for all current evil. It's certainly not an enlightened neutral observation. It's a call for culture war.
No political explanation needed, just very obvious senior level mismanagement.
It's kind of cynical, but if Google management doesn't want activism, they should ignore their employees, wait for the activists to burn themselves out and quit, and then be happy with all the paycheck collecting cogs that remain.
DEI is kind of a different beast. Largely, the employees and management are aligned. There isn't a political war going on.
The AI ethics teams and DEI teams are often powerless appendages that make it seem like they are doing something, but they aren't activists. They are just doing their job.
> they aren't activists. They are just doing their job
But they try to make their job some sort of activism (especially academics who should strive the most to be unbiased), which usually leads directly to discrimination in some form or the other, since that is the only thing they're allowed to do.
And when the new search giant steps onto the scene, you can bet that they will be paying top dollar for their devs.
[0] https://www.freshworks.com/freshdesk/general/the-freshdesk-s...
All we do know is that nop postings round-tripped from the beginning of the pandemic. This isn’t surprising, a lot of things did that.
For what it’s worth, I looked deeper in FRED and it doesn’t appear there’s longer term data on this anywhere.
Was there an over-hiring of sales people, hr, middle managers, and underqualified engineers? Yeah, definitely. I saw bartenders becoming "tech recruiters" or "front end engineers" overnight with no formal technical education. I'm not a credentialist, but I am a realist, and the safer bet is someone w/a BS in CS to most companies.
Is there still massive demand for experienced and qualified engineers? Absolutely. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of tech, there is a massive flee to value that usually accompanies turmoil in the markets and it' time that tech focused more on value.
I've been coding for 10 years. The coding profession has been a thing for maybe 40 years. The industry still hasn't worked out how to plan for these labor shortage and surplus cycles.
If there are no jobs, then how? The market doesn't have to use up the entire supply of skilled workers. It's not going to create jobs just to give people jobs.
1) create enough of a safety net or give people enough cash that they can start businesses taking advantage of the increased productivity of ai
2) austerity: let them get fired from jobs in failing industries with no safety net, they will not have the opportunity to create businesses, and they will work in crappy tedious jobs a robot or ai could easily do, but because companies can afford cheap humans and they don’t have capital for robots, they will hire people desperate to do anything to keep their family from homelessness.
Which one do you think we’re going to do?
If there are no jobs, they can't find someone willing to hire them to code, that's what "no jobs" means.
No they don’t. Plenty of professions generate way too many graduates. Law is a good example—probably 2-3x as many graduates than are really needed.
It leads to a bimodal distribution of salaries. The big firms pay 200k to a grads with decent grades from good schools. But a lot of people can’t even find a 60k job in law.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sweet%20FA
It was across the board. People in my hometown set up restaurants, cafes, coworking spaces - businesses that don’t see an ROI for a few years at least - all because they thought the young people who had returned home during the pandemic would stay there forever.
Of course, now almost everyone has gone back and these businesses are dead or struggling.
But to SF? Mountain View is now more expensive than SF for a one-bedroom apartment.
I think the days about caring about your employer are now in the past, given how companies have treated employees.
1. A lot of job postings are fake. They are meant to keep recruuting pipelines open. There can be a long delay between posting an ad, getting applicants, filtering them, doing phone screens, doing interviews, doing team-matching, extending an offer, negotiating that offer, having it accepted and that candidate start. It can easily take months. You may start recruiting before you have a position to fill. Or you may hire proactively;
2. You can't discount the effect of visa job postings. This is where you have to "prove" you can't fill a job with a US resident or citizen. One thing you have to do is post a job. There's a whole cottage industry in posting these jobs in obscure places (eg newspapers, caulk boards in obscure places in an office) and in finding legally valid way to reject applicants.
3. Smaller companies will have positions to fill. Larger companies have hiring targets and budgets, fill positiosn and then figure out what to do with them.
4. Part of all the above is large companies definitely over-hire as normal practice in case people are needed for something and to deny those people to other employers.
What we're seeing now is a reduction in that over-hiring buffer plus some virtue signaling layoffs all while having a useful opportunity to attack labor costs. It's a double bonus.
They never had much in terms of ability, they just got attracted by ludicrous wages and went through a stupid boot camp or two.
It's like a gold rush tapering off, except anybody could be a gold miner.
Cafe owners are rubbing their hands.
There won't be any bread lines.