Ask HN: What do you guys think of the current job market in tech?
Almost all of them have been looking for a job since past 6 months.
As of now all of them are not employed since last 6 months or so.
Earlier these same people used to get offers left, right and center.
HR people were ready for interviews with them even at mid-night. And now, those same people won't even get replies from anyone.
And they all have varying tech, some in Django, some in React, some in DevOps, some in pure python, some in frontend. etc
Also, I know for a fact that these people are not bad at interviews, I've worked with them, I've seen them interview at other places. I've seen them grab those jobs and be good at what they do.
I am wondering, is the job market that bad ?
I thought it was bad only for freshers, but it looks like that everyone is struggling.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadNo issues landing offers fairly regularly. I never stop interviewing as I don’t want to be out of practice so I get about 1 offer a month.
Definitely slower, but far from dead.
Good wage slave, here’s your pizza and happy Friday.
The limiting factor still is the number of software developers, not the software demand.
This is an overly dramatic take.
I now have to learn other talents to make me relevant. Not entirely sure what that is yet, but I feel a sense of urgency
It's fun to reduce a job to "the grind" but sometimes dependable income and benefits are better than freedom and risk
what did you do? Consulting or your own product/startup?
I am from India, but the people I am talking about are from everywhere, but specifically, US, UK, Germany, India and Australia.
They are in all sorts of tech like Django, React, pure python, full frontend stacks etc.
I think people just expected the mad hiring to continue but it clearly wasn't sustainable.
My background is in Physics but I've worked on software in the Engineering industry now for 10 years nearly. My most recent project at work drew on maths I used in my doctorate (various bits of Fourier analysis applied to mechanical systems). Not that someone who hadn't got my background couldn't do it but I could jump on that project and finish it in 2 months and I doubt anyone else in my team could have picked it up and done it in less than 6-9 months just because of the research and needing to understand the maths + algorithms.
I regularly get contacted by companies working in the same or adjacent domains, whereas some of my more 'pure' software friends are hearing nothing at the moment.
I'm sure down the road that time in finance will probably give her a leg up in finance related tech too. Non tech experience can definitely be a boon
I used to be spammed few times a week, if not per day in previous years, now I get contacted like once a month at best.
Higher interest rates mean companies are aggressively reducing headcount.
Insanely high immigration means statistically for every 1 job being created we're importing 1.4 workers.
Job vacancies across the economy are down 16.4% yearly change according to ABS.
Also according to ABS, Job vacancies, change from February 2020 to May 2024, for IT is an increase of just 1.8%.
In summary, jobs market is getting ugly out there, triply so for IT.
The simple solution to this & the housing crisis is to restrict immigration, but instead we have record immigration because without it we'd be in recession(our economy grew 0.1% last quarter, GDP per capita went down).
No, because the NIMBYs don't want that, and if the local government has power over whether dense housing is built or not, the NIMBYs will be sure to get their local legislators to prevent it.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
There are reasons, although one might disagree with them.
Article 13 concerns freedom of movement within one's own country, and the right of return thereto.
Many articles in that document provide hints/the spirit of reasons one _might_ consider immigration a human right. I think it is easy to entertain the idea and think of potential reasons for it.
A different matter is if that is indeed the case (your point). Still, I believe there are good reasons for it: the human rights declaration points at many of them, in many different articles.
For example, here is one reason (even for self-interested people, Milton Friedman-style): equality of opportunity might give an opportunity to somebody who is more capable (who knows who is the next Einstein). It will? not necessarily. But it might? definitely, it might. That is one reason.
I a not naive in regards to implementation. But there are reasons (like the above) for considering it.
Sometimes it actually is immigration that is causing problems.
The sentiment is that right now things are tough and current immigration adds to current pressures.
See Graph 1.1: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/overseas...
Australia has had steady net immigration for quite some time .. that fell in a hole during the pandemic and right now the net intake is much higher than it has ever been - it's the normal intake PLUS the backlog of everybody who didn;t come during lock down.
Australia has always coped with a steady level of intake, right now it's creaking under a much higher level than normal.
I'm also pretty sure that people on hn are people who generally work globally (take opportunities remotly without even immigrating anywere), travel and or consider moving around the world as they see fit.
And your statistic is really interesting (pure curiosity) but most immigrants are coming on a temp visa. How much impact have 80.000 permanent visa immigrants in a year for one specific industry?
We only have 6 cities with populations bigger than 500k. We let in a number of people greater than the population of our capital city in one year.
I am not anti-immigration (I have two people in my team I've helped arrange visas for). But this insane number has seriously changed the fabric of our society in real, tangible ways, purely from the pressure it has put on the housing market.
We are already seeing anti-immigration rhetoric from the usual suspects and its only going to get worse.
A few weeks ago there were stories about recent immigrants heading back home because the opportunities here are few and the cost of living is so high there's no way they can live here (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-08/why-these-immigrants-...). (I had an Uber driver tell me he's going back to India to open a gym because he can't afford to live here in Brisbane any more.)
And now literally today we're getting early warning signs of stress in the employment market, which is going to hurt the new immigrants the most (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-23/economists-warn-unemp...).
Again - not anti-immigration. We /need/ it in Australia. There are many reasons why we're in the mess we're in and not all of them are immigration. But at the end of the day our housing market is completely fucked and the flow on effects from this are dramatic. I don't think we're simplifying the problem down to "immigration" but it's simply undeniable that it is a factor in our current situation.
Check the tone of the comments by myself and trog above, we're a mostly friendly nation happy to meet people from across the globe, currently something like 25% of the Australian population was born overseas.
If you look at the graph I linked in a comment above you can see the current pressure - way more new people arriving than normal .. overstressing the existing means for absorbing fresh meat into the BBQ Borg collective.
The extremists we have a few but feral .. we have small pockets of bush nazis and some leafy suburbs with nervous elders who remember a distant White Australia policy. I think they're most worried about the first people moving in next door: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu0_Hb7QRlw
With the graph above, australia gained in avg 200k people per year
Dealing with an average of 200k has been manageable (well, some would argue with this - we still haven't been building enough houses, but leaving that aside).
If you look at 2023 specifically the raw number of people was over 500k - more than double the average. It was a surge that the housing market - amongst other things - simply was not prepared for.
I think the job stats are starting to reflect that these people did not suddenly all become gainfully employed, as well - I have thought for a while that there might be a more serious crash if we enter a recession because of this surge.
Australia has 1/3rd the population of the UK on a literal continent.
In Ireland we also have a housing crisis, because ironically all of our young construction workers have emigrated to Australia because there's a huge construction boom there. If you restricted immigration you'd have a bigger housing crisis
See the case study of a housing development of 52 flats that was prohibited because it’d harm the view out of a pub garden.
https://m.independent.ie/business/irish/smithfield-eight-sto...
Companies are treating it as a crime to ask for remote work.
Things I've learned in the process (and from being on interview panels myself)
1) I tend to stay in a job a long time (5 years plus) and this is highly valued by interviewers
2) in tech interviews you need to constantly remind yourself that you are not really coding, you are demonstrating knowledge. Talk through every thing you do, explain why you did it, or what an alternative way could be.
3) referrals really help. I've gotten interviews from referrals when there wasn't a position advertised yet
4) every place out there is doing something with AI. Put a bit of python on your CV and play with ChatGPT, ask them about it, work in into conversation that you're learning it.
5) I put side projects on my CV and I get asked a lot about them. If you have something semi serious, employers will listen.
I believe this is an EU thing for us. I had informal discussion with friends from US/CA, and there, it is somehow seen as stagnation and something something about pay not improving.
Here, in France, the job market is really slowing. More than before, companies are looking for cheap people... so they let go people with some experience and try to recruit engineer out-of-school to replace them. Obviously it doesn't work really well... neither for the juniors (too much pressure/expectation) nor for the rest of the team (knowledges & experience loss, need to teach the basics of the company to the new...)
ChatGPT is sometimes a bit used by junior to help them "day to day"... but not really more than "google / stack overflow" 20 or 30 years ago.
I do agree that they want cheap people though. They rarely offer me more than 43k (which is ok in france in the region I live in but really not stunning either). I have friends that earn 70k-80k (really good in france) and they get called by headhunters for similar position but for 40k, its silly.
I would recommend expanding your field of view and learning a bit of everything. It's become a trope nowadays that one cannot understand the entire stack from top to bottom but that really isn't true.
My sense is that there are plenty of junior level opportunities still out there, although fewer than before.
But senior level positions which pay a decent salary (which i define as £200k+/year in London) are especially hard to find and get nowadays, compared to years prior.
The market is reacting to global events, as we live in an uncertain time after a full and half decade of unprecendented innovation and prosperity. If I understood my parents correctly, this is just the economic cycle. However, the massive global scale pandemic, immediately followed by mass inflation, wars, rapid rise in living cost, anticipation of a massive generation retiring soon etc.. makes everything a bit slower to recover.
Also, due to money suddenly becoming expensive and eternal global downturn as well as political turmoil made businesses clamp down and make-do with whatever they have now until this storm has passed. It will take some time before demands will rise again. Until then, need to find something to continue, like working at a local business or that uncool startup which can't pay SV money and doesn't use the most fancy tech.
Also, there is lack of investment despite apparent(according to new media reportings I read) massive generational wealth transfer. Unlike PG/Elon era, people now use inheritance or windfall towards luxury(instagram) lifestyle instead of investing in ventures.
That all being said, I don't see a lot of problems in my corner of EU. While, my linkedin inbox has been unspammed since 3-6 months now, I haven't heard anything from my circle, except some of my friends looking slowly or taking that desired timeoff/break after their employer dissolved due to lack of funding/runway.
They are from US, UK, Germany, India and Australia.
I'm a generalist with 25+ years experience. I'm on the more employable end but I can't command as much salary as a specialist.
I've been moving back into contract work though, which is different than the salary world.
Do you have any tips on how to pull it off successfully?
Meanwhile I know a lot of folks who can't find people. In most cases it looks like they're searching for a hyper-specific candidate.
At this point I don't know whether to blame new HR tools which seem to suck even more, HR putting out a lot of bunko posts to get data and look like they're hiring, or a Post-COVID job market that's absolutely flooded with marginal candidates, all of whom want remote.
Many job ads are fake and only there to confuse shareholders about the company health.
Interviewers are looking for the tiniest bit of excuse to fail you along the process while quite often they are looking for lesser engineers than themselves as this buys them job security.
Offers, when they come, are much worse (terms + money) than what they were 2 years ago.
Most of the companies don't want to invest even a day on you so you have to have the exact package they're looking for.
It is fully a (job) sellers market. OTOH if you are a company and you find it hard to find people in this market then you're doing something really wrong.
EU-Greece here.
Good luck.
Some of these got a small bump by slapping ai on their marketing site or product but so many companies just playing a shell game with vcs hoping to survive to the next zirp era
> I thought it was bad only for freshers, but it looks like that everyone is struggling.
It's better for people with 10+ years of experience. For everyone else is harder than in previous years.