[HN Gopher] Tech employment now significantly worse than the 200...
___________________________________________________________________
Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020
recessions
Author : enraged_camel
Score : 598 points
Date : 2026-03-06 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| the 2020 'recession' wasn't really bad for tech employment at all
| CrossVR wrote:
| In fact in sectors like the game industry the pandemic resulted
| in a massive hiring boom. The layoffs only materialized after
| the pandemic was well and truly over.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, pandemic was good overall. Next generation of consoles
| looming, sales overall were up since people were forced
| inside, there were finally some loosening of dev kit
| practices to accommodate for the lack of offices to go into
| (I never would have imagined in 2015 having a dev kit in my
| home 5 years later) .Pretty much the only art medium to
| benefit from the times while cinema collapsed, Streaming
| services were running a defecit war where no one won except
| Netflix, and music stalled for a bit.
|
| But as per usual, the bust hit just as hard as the boom.
| Multiple high profile failures in games and initiatives as a
| whole, Microsoft and Apple decided to stop bleeding money
| with their respective subscription deals, mobile gaming (from
| the advent of Genshin Imapct and co) became less an easy cash
| grab and more a 2nd wing of AAA development, investments
| dried up overnight for indies (unless 'AI').
|
| And the headcount, of course:
| https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-
| wo...
| locusofself wrote:
| on a personal level I was hired (by Microsoft, my first and
| only "big tech" job) in April 2020 and I am still working
| here... all these companies "over-hired" during the pandemic,
| and the term "covid hire" is even a thing..
| zdragnar wrote:
| I remember interviewing someone who got hired by Facebook,
| sat around for a few weeks for a team to open up while they
| went through onboarding / Junior training, then was let go.
|
| COVID did weird things to the industry, that's for sure.
| locusofself wrote:
| I seem to hear often that Meta is perhaps the most
| egregious offender of "hire to fire". Seems really
| wasteful. But man, they pay their employees a lot.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Before Musk made it cool to mass layoff, there was a
| genuine belief inside of Facebook/Meta that great engineers
| were extremely hard to find or hold onto and if they
| weren't on the payroll at Meta, they would go somewhere
| else.
|
| There was always a "clock" for junior engineers to prove
| they could handle the high pressure and high intensity
| work, and as long as they were meeting the bar, they were
| safe.
|
| They called on-boarding, "Bootcamp", and was for every
| engineer, junior to staff, to learn the process and
| tooling. Engineers were supposed to be empowered to take on
| whatever task they wanted, without pre-existing team
| boundaries if it meant they were able to prove their
| contributions genuinely improved the product in meaningful
| ways. So, come in, learn the culture, learn the tooling,
| meet others, and then at some point, pick your home team.
| Your home team was flexible, and you were able to spend
| weeks deciding, and even if you selected one, you could
| always change, no pressure. Happy engineers were seen as
| the secret sauce of the company's success.
|
| I remember that summer, vividly. They told the folks in
| Bootcamp, pick your home team by the end of the week, or
| you will be stuck in Bootcamp purgatory. At the same time
| they removed head count from teams, ours went down to a
| single one. A new-grad, who had literally just arrived that
| Monday, picked our team on Tuesday, and then had to watch
| as most of their fellow Bootcamp mates got left behind.
|
| People wondered what would happen to them for weeks, and
| then, just like that, the massive layoff sent them all
| home. It was shitty because from where I sat, it was
| basically a slot machine. Anyone of the folks in Bootcamp
| were just as capable, but we had one seat, and someone just
| asked for it first.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Overhiring implies that MSFT's headcount went down over this
| time. But that doesn't seem to be the case. They still hire a
| lot, just not in North America.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I think 2001 and 2002 were worse than 2000. I was lucky to find
| a job in 2002 after graduating. There were hiring freezes and
| layoffs everywhere.
| GenerWork wrote:
| There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the
| number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more
| people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more
| competition than before.
| zthrowaway wrote:
| Yup. Amazon doubled their workforce through the pandemic. I
| think a lot of tech companies are still cutting fat from those
| days.
| kypro wrote:
| Those of us who have been in the industry for 15-20 years we
| remember a time when tech was just a job.
|
| In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you
| had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry
| because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.
|
| It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost
| comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding
| bootcamps suddenly landing 6 figure jobs. Some of these people
| were even working at multiple companies at the same time.
|
| The optimist in me hopes this all shakes out with those people
| who had no interest in tech moving on to other things. These
| types of people were not only bad employees, they were also bad
| for the industry, and in my opinion responsible for culture
| shift from tech being a place dominating by "nerds" and "geeks"
| in the 90/00s to the modern "tech-bro" stereotype.
|
| The realist in me though will continue to warn people the tech
| job they're working at today is likely their last. Between tech
| industry growth slowing, the excessive over production of tech
| talent and AI + SASS automating a lot of traditional software
| development work it's going to be exponentially harder to
| remain employed in tech in the coming years.
|
| So much so you might as well find a relatively worse paid job
| if it means you don't have periods of months of unemployment
| every year.
| kaeruct wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...
| QuercusMax wrote:
| What that graph looks like to me is that there were a ton of
| marginal folks hired during COVID, and we're shedding a lot of
| those folks who probably shouldn't have been hired anyway.
| dimgl wrote:
| Unfortunately... I want to mirror this sentiment. I
| interviewed a lot of candidates (and worked with many
| teammates) in my last few roles and I saw some pretty
| worrying trends...
| jatins wrote:
| I mean COVID was 5 years ago and many companies have had
| multiple rounds of layoff since then, how long will we keep
| calling it covid shedding
| palmotea wrote:
| The ideal software engineer will code himself out of a job and be
| happy about it.
|
| Be that ideal. The shareholders are counting on you!
| locusofself wrote:
| But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly...
| palmotea wrote:
| > But LLMs are already doing this for us supposedly...
|
| Exactly my point. Encourage LLM adoption, faster, faster. Be
| excited about your homeless future, software engineers!
| vaxman wrote:
| Are we in the Cathedral or the Bazaar now? I get that
| confused. Everyone upload their code to GitHub --keep your
| truth (philosophically AND mathematically) in the Cloud ;)
| Oh and don't forget to document your critical thinking, on
| Slack. It goes much deeper tho.
|
| [cue the POS https://youtu.be/SP-gN1zoI28]
| groby_b wrote:
| Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out
| of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and
| keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.
|
| So have all the great engineers I've been working with -
| there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're
| currently good at.
|
| The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are
| in a different skill demographic. (Ironically, that means they
| won't be able to code themselves out of a job)
| palmotea wrote:
| > Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself
| out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up
| (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead.
|
| What _exactly_ do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished
| one project but your employer had another one for you, which
| you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or
| do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"?
|
| My comment was just mocking the foolish selfless ethos of
| many software engineers, who don't look out for themselves
| and idealize giving to psychopathic organizations that will
| screw them the moment that's advantageous. Many software
| engineers have a pathological level of naivete and confusion
| about the role they really inhabit (e.g. righteously going on
| about buggy-whip makers).
| bobanrocky wrote:
| Are you saying you want to be laid off with a nice package as
| you've been with the same employer for a long time? Couple of
| options: have a nice conversation with your manager and make
| this clear. The signs are clear that major s/w layoffs will
| happen in the next couple of years. Other option is to ease
| off - your high salary and low output will put you in the
| dustbin list
| bdangubic wrote:
| > your high salary and low output will put you in the
| dustbin list
|
| you'd think, but in my experience, once you reach high
| salary - in a lot of places - you can coast _for a long
| time_ with very little output
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Interesting, this shows growth in open positions:
| https://www.trueup.io/job-trend
| ICantFeelMyToes wrote:
| True but there is also a massive proliferation of ghost jobs.
| Dirty secret for a bunch of Series A places
| 10xDev wrote:
| Something needs to be done about these bots, it is getting
| eerie. Yesterday a bot created an account named 100xLLM the
| moment I responded to it to respond back with.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| I see everyone say this but what is the point of making a
| fake job opening? Are companies just doing that to see if a
| unicorn applies?
| xrd wrote:
| Two reasons. One, they have already filled it internally
| but legally have to post the job. Two, they are gathering
| data on market trends and what salaries people will take,
| which is useful if they are considering firing people and
| rehiring with lower salaries.
|
| I've applied for many jobs where I was perfectly qualified
| and got rejection notices immediately. I applied on a
| Sunday and got rejected on Sunday an hour later. No human
| reviewed that application I made, it was auto rejected, and
| if that's the case, what other explanation is there than
| "ghost jobs."
| phil21 wrote:
| > and if that's the case, what other explanation is there
| than "ghost jobs."
|
| You didn't pass some arbitrary ruleset given to an AI or
| machine learning algorithm.
|
| Companies can be very selective now, and usually
| implement this selectivity fairly stupidly. There also is
| the problem of being genuinely swamped with bullshit
| applicants for positions, so the false positive rate is
| likely quite high at the moment.
|
| I've found it _extremely_ difficult to sort the wheat
| from the chaff right now. Finding competent people is
| more difficult than ever, but the sheer number of
| applicants is at least an order of magnitude higher.
| Botting has made applying to jobs exceedingly low
| friction, so there is very little downside to someone
| entirely not qualified to apply to 600 jobs a day and
| hope they get lucky.
|
| We have positions that have been open for months that go
| unfilled simply due to lack of time to sort through
| applicants, and the few we do have time to interview
| usually are obviously unqualified within the first 5
| minutes of talking to them.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you don't have the time to sort them through, there's
| not much urgency to actually find someone, is there?
|
| It also might point to a filtering mismatch of your get a
| high false positive rate.
| phil21 wrote:
| Oh definitely. And our hiring practices are not exactly
| state of the art. I'll be the first to admit they need a
| giant amount of improvement.
|
| Most of the good folks have come in via word of mouth and
| networks, as they typically do.
|
| For those outstanding positions they are "very nice to
| haves" but obviously not critical. When the right
| candidate gets matched we'll jump on the opportunity, but
| it's not an existential problem for the moment.
| xrd wrote:
| This is undeniably happening as well. Totally agree.
|
| I just have had lots rejections, and some where I did
| have a good fit, that I don't think "AI auto rejection"
| is the only story. I have good credentials, several F500
| experiences, no big career gaps.
|
| The only real success I have had in the last few years is
| targeted emails (from who is hiring on HN) or through my
| network.
|
| It's very different than at any other time and I believe
| it is a combination of a terrible market, AI rejections,
| and ghost jobs. And I'm sure there are more than a few
| ghost jobs.
| jghn wrote:
| I can't imagine applying to a job where I didn't already
| have some sort of personal connection. That was already
| true, and that's even more true now. Likewise, these days
| as a hiring manager I'd be unlikely to hire someone that
| came in via random application for the same reason
| caminante wrote:
| _> Two reasons. One, they have already filled it
| internally but legally have to post the job._
|
| This scenario isn't a "fake job," which are more akin to
| ghost/scam/non-existent openings.
| rexpop wrote:
| I had an AI-agenerates answer for you, but then I realized
| something deeper: moral hazard.
|
| > Moral hazard is when one party takes actions that impose
| costs on others because they don't fully bear those costs
| themselves. With ghost jobs, employers get benefits (brand
| signaling, resume mining, internal optics) while job
| seekers eat the time, emotional, and sometimes financial
| cost of chasing something that never really existed.
| salawat wrote:
| As a hiring manager, I have to write the job description.
| HR is responsible for posting the damn thing where people
| can see it, then into the ATS you go. We also know
| recruiting posts can be a source of competitive
| intelligence and signal for investors. We don't want it
| used that way, but we're aware of it. Bit of a dirty
| secret. That means, alas, the only people hurt are the
| applicants looking for work. I'll work through the queue
| when I have a billet to fill, but otherwise... You're
| shouting into the void. Not sure who is responsible for
| reporting headcount increases to BLS, but I've actively
| looked and never found the person. So... I honestly have no
| idea how they get their numbers unless there is a pipeline
| from the major payroll processors; which feels kinda ick if
| you think about it.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| https://www.bls.gov/k12/teachers/posters/pdf/how-bls-
| collect... This says statistics, i've seen unsourced
| articles saying that they pull Unemployment Insurance
| numbers as part of it which are part of the payroll
| process, but BLS seems to say sampling and surveys.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| AI training?
|
| There's a IT careers site that was sold, I believe, went
| through a re-branding. And now they also offer AI and
| "personal" resume reviews _and_ writing, cover letters, and
| they even have members do a 10-15 minute AI virtual
| interview that ostensibly could be shown to a hiring
| manager.
|
| I was unemployed as a PM for about three month. I applied
| to in the order of 100 roles at this site, as well as
| applications on the other sites you'd expect, from LI to
| more niche.
|
| I _felt_ that this site was "underperforming". Jobs I'd
| applied to that I'd only really seen on there I'd never
| heard from. I saw jobs that were advertised in other places
| on there too.
|
| What sealed it for me was that towards the end of the three
| months, I got an email from the site. "Your profile has
| been viewed". I open it, "An employer is looking at your
| profile". I'd never seen this type of email from them
| before, and sure enough: "Your profile has been viewed 1
| time in the last 90 days". That was it. No contacts, and
| only one employer has even looked at my profile on the site
| (and this is the kind of site where that'd be the only
| place they could look at your application). And that
| employer didn't even have positions open.
|
| But the site does ask you questions to "submit to the
| employer" about "why you want to work here" "why you'd make
| a good fit", etc.
|
| And I'm entirely convinced that the jobs they're
| advertising are only (a very small) fractionally "real" and
| ever reviewed by anyone at all (maybe the "promoted"
| jobs?), and they're harvesting positions and jobs from
| other sites or employers (there's no positions that don't
| actually seem to exist, or at least not ads)...
|
| ... and that their chief motivation for this is getting all
| your answers to train their models for their actual revenue
| generator - AI resume writing, cover letter writing, etc.
| All pre-seeded with other people's real answers to such
| questions.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| There's a dozen different angles all coming out at once.
| I'll try to summarize some.
|
| - really wants to hire H1B, but needs to pretend to
| interview first for compliance. These usually have absurd
| requirements to make it viable to reject anyone.
|
| - really wants to do an internal or referral hire or
| promotion, but needs to interview for HR compliance. These
| usually have such specific requirements that only the
| person they want qualifies.
|
| - posts jobs because a company wants to look like its
| growing, even when it's not.
|
| - posts jobs to either signal to an employee that they are
| replaceable, or to try and relieve a stressed employee that
| more help is coming. Either way, it's a bluff
|
| - yes, sometimes you want to hold out for the perfect
| unicorn and are not in any way in a rush to find them.
| There's no distinction for this, but job posts are cheap so
| why not?
|
| - outdated posts that still stay up because There's no rush
| to take it down.
|
| - a technique used to lower compensation. They post a job,
| see how many applications it gets. If it's more than
| enough, they take it down (with no interviews) then put it
| up once more at a lower rate. Repeat until not enough
| people apply. This may or may not lead to interviews
| because the actual goal is market probing.
|
| -purely to advertise the company instead of actually hire.
| Usually done at career fairs where you talk and realize
| there's no actual open positions.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| Thanks for that. I have seen internal hire before or even
| "we know who we want but legal makes us post it for 7
| days".
|
| The comp technique you mentioned though seems like a lot
| of work for price discovery, surely there are data sets
| out there?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's probably not the most efficient means, no. Probably
| one of the cheapest methods, though. It's definitely not
| something you can get away with in a good job market.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > outdated posts that still stay up because There's no
| rush to take it down.
|
| Can also happen when it takes 3 months to get a job
| posting approved, so once you get one you just leave it
| up.
| mamcx wrote:
| I'm looking for job (in Rust) now and is absurd how many
| positions are for training LLMS -in Rust!- (yeah, lets help
| the people that wanna put everyone out of jobs)
| tayo42 wrote:
| What companies are hiring people to use rust?
| OJFord wrote:
| Loads, I come across it frequently and I'm not actively
| looking for them.
| nxm wrote:
| If you don't then someone else will... genie is out of the
| bottle
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Well looking for a "programming job in $x" is going to be a
| problem going forward. Programming itself is going to be a
| commodity between AI and its harder to stand out in a
| saturated market. I sell myself as someone who can get
| stuff done using technology and can lead larger initiatives
| teagee wrote:
| The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on
| these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech
| is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever.
|
| Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of
| what would define "tech" these days.
|
| Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a
| very narrow view
| causal wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out - title is extremely misleading.
| Total tech jobs is not lower than 2008 just because YoY is
| down.
| OJFord wrote:
| General media, news, etc. gets this wrong _all the time_ ,
| see any commentary on inflation, GDP growth, rate of change
| in house prices, etc.
| oblio wrote:
| Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers.
|
| Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.
|
| Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
|
| Different ball game.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The chart shows devs still growing, and "Computer System Design
| SERVICES" getting hammered (most of the total loss).
|
| I'm not even sure this chart tells the story of the title.
| klooney wrote:
| Is this WITCH companies?
| janalsncm wrote:
| The chart shows the derivative of the thing people care about
| which is total cumulative change. The area under the curve
| shows cumulative change.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth.
|
| Can't believe how many people are commenting without looking at
| what the chart means. We've lost 50k jobs last two years after
| decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs
| of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s,
| 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Yes, but...
|
| The health of the market is not a function of the total number
| of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the
| number of people to fill them.
|
| The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that
| there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people
| entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still
| we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires
| from the last decade moving into increasingly senior roles, and
| there won't be space for them (unless you devalue the meaning
| of "senior" even more).
|
| So the year over year change matters a lot. If it plateaus, or
| even declines slightly, it's more than enough to make a
| terrible market.
| magicnubs wrote:
| YoY change in jobs is still probably not the best way to
| visualize overall market health. As you say, you also have to
| take into account the number of people of fill the jobs. To
| me it seems like the least misleading statistics would be a
| graph showing unemployment and underemployment % over time.
| I'd probably also toss in graphs of length of unemployment
| period as well as various median wage percentiles (quintiles
| or deciles maybe) over time.
| causal wrote:
| It shows growth or decline but it absolutely does not show
| what the title implies.
| Oras wrote:
| Tech hiring is bad, for sure, but the the graph does not make a
| clear picture.
|
| What is software publishers category? As it seems it's picking up
| while Computer system design is the largest negative impact.
|
| I would appreciate if there was a better chart explaining sort of
| roles and locations that had the largest impact
| mattas wrote:
| It sure looks like during the ZIRP era, tech substantially
| overhired. Post-ZIRP companies are correcting that (but under the
| guise of AI).
| zamadatix wrote:
| To save some a search: Zero Interest-Rate Policy
| mjr00 wrote:
| In my experience, tech employment is _incredibly_ bimodal right
| now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but
| an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time
| finding a position.
|
| Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors
| are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting
| hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as
| capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are
| the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.
| electronsoup wrote:
| > and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
|
| Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is
| magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get
| more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
| chillacy wrote:
| I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI
| can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of
| damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the
| sometimes poorly designed code they can generate.
|
| I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best
| practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more
| constrained environment.
| lumost wrote:
| I've observed radically different workflows amongst senior
| candidates vs junior candidates when using an ai. A senior
| candidate will often build an extremely detailed plan for
| the agent - similar to how you would do a design for/with a
| junior engineer. Then let the agent go full throttle to
| implement the plan and review the result.
|
| Juniors seem to split into the category of trust everything
| the ai says, or review every step of the implementation.
| It's extremely hard to guide the ai while you are still
| learning the basics, opus4.6 is a very powerful model.
| devin wrote:
| My observation has been that there are a lot of personal
| styles to engaging with the LLMs that work, and "hold the
| hand" vs "in-depth plan" vs "combination" doesn't really
| matter. There is some minimum level of engagement
| required for non-trivial tasks, and whether that
| engagement comes mid-development, at the early design
| phase, or after isn't really that big of a deal. Eg;
| "Just enough planning" is a fine way of approaching the
| problem if you're going to be in the loop once the
| implementation starts.
| foldr wrote:
| I don't claim to have any special skill at AI, but as a
| 'senior' dev, my strategy is exactly the opposite. I try
| to be as lazy, dumb and concise as I can bring myself to
| be with my initial prompt, and then just add more detail
| for the bits that the AI didn't guess correctly the first
| time around.
|
| Quite often the AI guesses accurately and you save the
| time you'd have spent crafting the perfect prompt.
| Recently, my PM shared a nigh-on incompressible hand-
| scribbled diagram on Slack (which, in fairness, was more
| or less a joke). I uploaded it to Gemini with the prompt
| "WTF does this diagram mean?". Even without a shred of
| context, it figured out that it was some kind of product
| feature matrix and produced a perfect three paragraph
| summary.
|
| I've never really seen the value in the planning phase as
| you're free to just throw away whatever the AI produces
| and try again with a different prompt. That said, I don't
| pay for my tokens at work. Is planning perhaps useful as
| a way of reducing total token usage?
| mjr00 wrote:
| For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why
| those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now.
|
| For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors...
| there's not much difference in output between them and a good
| junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor
| for software development.
| fhd2 wrote:
| My thinking is a bit different here: Seniors, even mediocre
| ones, already learned a lot of hard lessons by doing things
| pre-LLMs, even pre-SO. Those skills are valuable and I
| don't know how to train them into juniors.
|
| I find it easier to get a reasonably smart senior to use AI
| in a good way, than to train a junior in what thinking to
| do, and what to outsource, learning basics about good
| design, robustness and risk analysis. The tools aren't the
| problem per se, it's more about how people use them. Bit of
| a slippery slope.
|
| That's just my anecdotal experience from not a whole lot of
| data though. I think the industry will figure it out once
| things calm down a bit. Right now, I usually make the bet
| to get one senior rather than two juniors. Quite different
| to my strategy from a few years ago.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer
| is bigger than ever.
| nfm wrote:
| 100% this. AI is automating the code generation.
|
| Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI
| to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work
| on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is
| kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what's going
| to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes...
| all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and
| project organisation skills.
|
| AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to
| skill up faster, but they're not getting the same results.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever
|
| I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you
| mean people working at actual AI companies such as
| Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an
| AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers
| who previously worked in "FAANG".
| yesb wrote:
| Relating it to performance is just silly. Most companies barely
| understand the performance of their employees much less
| candidates. The market has shrunk but not catastrophically so.
| Most people haven't been majorly affected but that doesn't mean
| they're automatically the most deserving or best performing.
|
| People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies
| in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Most people haven't been majorly affected
|
| Apparently it is over a third affected in my domain. Which is
| crazy. Pretty much everyone in my immediate band has been hit
| at some point. That that weren't were usually around 5-8
| above me. So basically a different generational band
| altogether.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > People with experience and/or credentials desired by
| companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high
| demand
|
| This is tautological.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No it isn't, because in the context of the comment it
| should be read "people with experience and/or credentials
| desired [...] are always in high demand " _regardless of
| their actual performance level_.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I'm not sure it is just that, I don't even see positions listed
| where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower
| upper limits than my second best offer three n half years ago.
| Considering the high inflation, that's crazy.
|
| I would not mind switching but 1. I don't see interesting
| positions 2. they don't pay well, and only 3. they might not
| even want me.
|
| It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position
| feels completely impossible for me.
|
| I am doing cross platform mobile development and I'm wondering
| how I could transition into backend development or I started
| even considering the decentralized finance...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know if I'd call myself competent (I'm late
| intermediate/early senior. So the worst of the curve here).
| But there's a difference between "interviews have gotten a
| lot harder now" and "I can't even get a response back". It's
| far, far more in the latter.
|
| My resume isn't bad on paper either. It's not FAANG coded,
| but it's decent experience.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > than my second best offer three n half years ago
|
| 3.5 years ago was peak ZIRP hiring craziness.
|
| It wasn't a normal reference point.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs.
| senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out.
|
| The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very
| simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're
| no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree
| is no longer protection.
|
| The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is
| even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole
| architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want
| to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely
| get slowed down.
|
| While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior
| usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and
| knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not
| always.
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can
| indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the
| blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher.
| High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are
| gonna crush it relative to juniors.
| weatherlite wrote:
| > Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old
| timers
|
| I guess? I don't really see why that would be the case.
| Being a senior is also about understanding the requirements
| better and knowing how/what to test. I mean we're talking
| about prompting text into a textarea, something I think
| even an "old timer" can do pretty well.
| llbbdd wrote:
| I've seen a few people I would consider senior engineers,
| good ones, who seem to have somewhat fallen for the
| marketing if you look at the prompts they're using.
| Closer to a magical "make it so" than "build the code to
| meet this spec, that I wrote with the context of my
| existing technical skills".
|
| I'm not sure why junior engineers would be any better at
| that though, unless it's just that they're approaching it
| with less bias and reaping beginners luck.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's like having an early/broken chess engine.
|
| An amateur with a chess engine that blunders 10% of the
| time will hardly play much better than if they didn't use
| it. They might even play worse. Over the course of a game,
| those small probabilities stack up to make a blunder a
| certainty, and the amateur will not be able to distinguish
| it from a good move.
|
| However, an experienced player with the same broken engine
| will easily beat even a grandmaster since they will be able
| to recognise the blunder and ignore it.
|
| I often find myself asking LLMs "but if you do X won't it
| be broken because Y?". If you can't see the blunders and
| use LLMs as slot machines then you're going to spend more
| money in order to iterate slower.
| jghn wrote:
| I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset
| now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks
| like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this
| remains a moat at all.
|
| So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around
| leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all
| pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I
| question if even those are testing the correct things for the
| modern era.
|
| And then what happens in a year when the models can handle
| that as well?
| jimbokun wrote:
| "And then what happens in a year when the models can handle
| that as well?"
|
| Either the machines exterminate us or we become glorified
| pets.
|
| Hope the AIs prefer us to cats (even though that's a long
| shot).
| plagiarist wrote:
| There'll definitely be a niche for us, similar to how
| people keep parrots as pets.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I've put a lot of thought into hiring in this era, and what
| I've personally found works the best is:
|
| Let them use their preferred setup and AI to the full
| extent they want, and evaluate their output and their
| methodology. Ask questions of "why did you choose X over
| Y", especially if you're skeptical, and see their
| reasoning. Ask what they'd do next with more time.
|
| It's clear when a candidate can build an entire working
| product, end-to-end, in <1 day vs. someone who struggles to
| create a bug-free MVP and would take a week for the
| product.
|
| In addition to the technical interview, hiring them on a
| trial basis is the absolute best if possible.
|
| Taste and technical understanding of goals and
| implementation to reach those goals is the biggest
| differentiator now. AI can handle all the code and syntax,
| but it's not great at architecture yet - it defaults to
| what's mid if not otherwise instructed.
| jghn wrote:
| I don't disagree per se, but these are more or less the
| same tropes that we've seen over the last couple of
| decades, no? Especially the "hiring them on a trial basis
| is the absolute best if possible." part which has been an
| ongoing debate here on HN since at least the early teens.
|
| I do feel like there's something *different* about the
| required skillset now, and it's not something that all
| engineers have even experienced ones. But I can't put my
| finger on what exactly it is. If I'm right though,
| classic interview techniques won't select for it because
| they never were intended to do so.
| dakiol wrote:
| > While this could be done by junior or senior, I think
| junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-
| native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with
| AI, though not always.
|
| But juniors don't (usually) have the knowledge to assess if
| what the AI has produced is ok or not. I agree that anybody
| (junior or senior) can produce something with AI, the key
| question is whether the same person has the skills to asses
| (e.g., to ask the right questions) that the produced output
| is what's needed. In my experience, junior + AI is just a
| waste of money (tokens) and a nightmare to take
| accountability for.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I see it the opposite way actually with respect to the CS
| degree. If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before
| 2022 or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and
| grow and grow until the last few people who had to learn
| before AI are dying out like the last COBOL developers
|
| AI has fundamentally broken the education system in a way
| that will take decades for it to fully recover. Even if we
| figure out how to operate with AI properly in an educational
| setting in such a way that learners actually still learn, the
| damage from years of unqualified people earning degrees and
| then entering academia is going to reverberate through the
| next 50 years as those folks go on to teach...
| kakacik wrote:
| That's not something enthusiasts here and elsewhere want to
| hear, that's pretty obvious also in this discussion. People
| seems extremely polarized these days.
|
| AI is either the next wheel or abysmal doom for future
| generations. I see both and neither at the same time.
|
| In corporate environment where navigating processes,
| politics and other non-dev tasks takes _significantly_
| longer than actual coding, AI is just a bit better google
| search. And trust me, all these non-dev parts are still
| growing and growing fast. Its useful, but not elevating
| people beyond their true levels in any significant way (I
| guess we can agree ie nr of lines produced per day ain 't a
| good idea, rather some Dilbert-esque comic for Friday
| afternoon).
| jjmarr wrote:
| > If you earned your CS degree (or any degree) before 2022
| or so, the value of that degree is going to grow and grow
| and grow
|
| In my experience, target schools are the only universities
| now that can make their assignments too hard for AI.
|
| When my university tried that, the assignments were too
| hard for students. So they gave up.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| We're now reaching the point where people have gone their
| whole college education on AI, and I've noticed a huge rise
| in the number of engineers that struggle to write basic
| stuff by hand. I had someone tell me they forgot how to
| append to a list in their chosen language, and couldn't
| define a simple tree data structure with correct syntax.
| This has made me very cautious about maintaining my fluency
| in programming, and I'll usually turn off AI tools for a
| good chunk of the day just to make sure I don't get too
| rusty.
| andai wrote:
| "Those who can't, do..."
| boomskats wrote:
| What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality of
| academic education, but the baptism by firehose that entry
| level CS positions used to offer - where you had no choice
| but learn how things actually work while having a safe
| space to fail during a period in your career when
| productivity expectations of you were minimal to none.
|
| That time when you got to internalise through first hand
| experience what good & bad look like is when you built the
| skill/intuition that now differentiates competent LLM
| wielding devs from the vibers. The problem is that
| expectations of juniors are inevitably rising, and they
| don't have the experience or confidence (or motivation) to
| push back on the 'why don't you just AI' management
| narrative, so are by default turning to rolling the dice to
| meet those expectations. This is how we end up with a
| generation of devs that truly don't understand the
| technology they're deploying and imho this is the
| boringdystopia / skynet future that we all need to defend
| against.
|
| I know it's probably been said a million times, but this
| kinda feels like global warming, in that it's a problem
| that we fundamentally will never be able to fix if we just
| continue to chase short term profit & infinite growth.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > What I think is disappearing is not so much the quality
| of academic education, but the baptism by firehose that
| entry level CS positions used to offer - where you had no
| choice but learn how things actually work while having a
| safe space to fail during a period in your career when
| productivity expectations of you were minimal to none
|
| I would say that baptism by fire _is_ where the quality
| of an academic education comes from, historically at
| least. They are the same picture.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| That's an insight that a project I'm working on has built
| upon: https://unratified.org/connection/ai/higher-order-
| effects/#1...
|
| Education and training and entry level work build
| judgement.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I was skeptical but I'm really starting to see the
| productivity benefits now.
|
| I very much follow the pattern of having the whole
| architecture in my head and describe it to the AI which
| generates the appropriate code. So now the bottlenecks are
| all process related: availability of people to review my PRs,
| security sign offs on new development, waiting on CI builds
| and deployments, stakeholder validation, etc. etc.
| vict7 wrote:
| Could you provide an example of your "very simple tests" ?
| weatherlite wrote:
| > The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed
| very simple tests pre-AI
|
| Did you consider tech whiteboard / leetcode interviews are
| unnatural stressful environments ? Have you gone through a
| mid/difficult technical appraisal yourself lately ? Try it
| out just to get an idea how it feels on the other side...
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Simple: don't do that.
|
| It's been well over a decade that I've had to do the coding
| interview monkey dance and I actually turned down an offer
| where I did pass a coding interview because I found it
| insulting and took a job for slightly less money where the
| new to the company director was interested in a more
| strategic hire (2016). That was the same thing that
| happened before in 2014 and after in 2018 - a new
| manager/director/CTO looking for a strategic hire.
|
| In fact even my job at BigTech -AWS ProServe (full time
| blue badge RSU earning employee) as a customer facing
| consultant specializing in app dev was all behavioral as
| well as my next full time job as a staff consultant in
| 2023.
|
| I'm 51 years old and was 40 in 2014. If I'm still trying to
| compete based on my ability to reverse a b tree on the
| whiteboard even at 40, I have made some horrible life
| decisions.
|
| (Well actually I did make a horrible life decision staying
| at my second job too long until 2008 and becoming an expert
| beginner. But that's another story)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > ability to reverse a b tree on the whiteboard
|
| I can never get over how this became a thing. Was
| listening to a Brian Cox video on YouTube the other night
| (something about his voice helps me sleep). He said "I
| don't memorize formulas, it's easy to look them up."
|
| If you ever need to reverse a b tree (in 30+ years of
| writing code, I never have) it's easy to look that up. It
| tells me nothing about your ability as a developer of
| real software that you spent time memorizing trivia
| before an interview.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Being able to reverse a binary tree isn't something you
| need to memorize. If you can't do that it tells me that
| you're not fluent in your chosen programming language.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I had an interview where I was asked to implement a data
| structure. I transparently told the interviewer I hadn't
| thought about that particular data structure since
| university, and that I was looking it up on Wikipedia to
| see how it worked before I wrote the implementation. I
| got that job.
| andai wrote:
| I'd always heard inverting a binary tree thrown around as
| some kind of absurdly hard problem. I took a look at it
| and it was trivial. I was able to do it on the first
| attempt with no preparation. (And the point of these
| interviews is that you study for them, right?)
|
| It's a contrived scenario, but the whole point is that it
| measures min(a,b) where `a` is your ability to think, and
| `b` is your ability to prepare (and memorize answers
| ahead of time). (I'd personally try to find ways to
| measure `a` instead of `b`, maybe by asking questions
| people wouldn't have heard before.)
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| > mid/difficult
|
| You're assuming the question has to even be that difficult.
| I've proctored sessions for senior-level webdev roles where
| the questions were akin to "baby's first React component"
| -- write a component that updates a counter when you click
| a button. So many candidates (who purported to be working
| with React for years) would fail, abysmally. Not like they
| were just making small mistakes; I didn't even care about
| best practices -- they just needed to make it work. So many
| failed. Lot of frauds out there.
| xeromal wrote:
| I think some of this is probably attributed to being
| maintenance devs who don't build a lot of greenfield
| stuff. I got this way in one of my past jobs. I think us
| as devs really need to practice creating things from
| scratch from time to time. Working out those kinks is a
| good skill (less with AI) but also good practice for
| those baby components you'd need to make in an interview.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| TBH I'm like that, but how hard could writing a React
| component be? I'm not even a React programmer but I can
| probably write working code on a whiteboard.
| dolebirchwood wrote:
| The best candidates would have that question wrapped up
| in 5 minutes. Like they're not even having to think about
| it, which is honestly all I cared about testing for -- do
| something really easy really fast so I know you're not
| BSing me, and then we can move on to just having a
| conversation about your past experience.
|
| One of the worst guys took 20 minutes, with me having to
| coach him through it the entire time. It was a true
| exercise in patience, but I don't mind helping people
| learn new things. When he got his rejection email, he
| actually complained to the recruiter because he thought
| he did really well. Dude...
| sbrother wrote:
| My version of fizzbuzz (I'm in backend/ML/NLP) is
| counting how many times each word appears in a string.
| Literally `return Counter(text.lower().split())` but it's
| totally fine if you want to do it in a for loop or
| whatever, as long as you can fluently write an incredibly
| simple function.
|
| Half of the people I screen fail it. It's crazy.
| ryandrake wrote:
| When I did tech interviews, I used to think I could just
| jump right in with an intermediate level question and go
| from there. But the reality is that most of the
| candidates I interviewed couldn't even answer a trivial
| question that just required a basic for-loop with an if-
| statement inside it. These are not pressure-cooker
| interviews where they need to balance a binary tree while
| having Baby Shark blasted at them on full volume. These
| are chill interviews where I ask them to iterate through
| a string and tell me where the first "x" character is.
|
| There are so many software engineering candidates who
| literally cannot write the simplest code. I even had
| someone actually say "I don't really write code at my
| current job, I'm more of a thought leader." Bzzzzzt.
|
| I've always prepared what I called level 1, level 2, and
| level 3 questions ready for candidates. But, I almost
| never even got to level 2, and never in 20 years of
| interviewing got to my level 3 questions.
| jghn wrote:
| I always wonder when people tell these stories exactly
| what the metric is.
|
| I've been around the block for over 3 decades. I've had a
| number of high level positions across both IC and
| management tracks. These days I'm very hands on keyboard
| across a number of clients. If you asked me to write a
| basic for loop or if statement, there's a small chance
| I'd flub the exact syntax if writing on a whiteboard.
| Both because I bounce between languages all day and wires
| get crossed on the fly, but also the standard interview
| pressure type arguments. Whereas if the test is "does
| this person understand what a for loop is and how it
| works?", then yes, I can easily demonstrate I do.
|
| In real life I'm not going to take an interview where
| there's not already that degree of trust so if that
| questions comes up something is already wrong. But I'm
| sure there are interviewers in the world who'd fail
| someone for that.
| nottorp wrote:
| There's the old Joel theory that the good programmers
| don't apply for jobs because they just get invited...
| andai wrote:
| >You're assuming the question has to even be that
| difficult
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-
| program/
|
| Most interviewees failed fizzbuzz, and that was 20 years
| ago.
| naet wrote:
| I used to do online interviews with full access to Google
| or any online resource (so long as you shared your screen
| and I could see). Use your own code editor, no penalty at
| all for searching up syntax or anything else.
|
| I always asked a simple question like here is an array full
| of objects. Please filter out any objects where the "age"
| property is less than 20, or the "eye color" property is
| red or blue. It was meant more as a sanity check that this
| person can do basic programming than anything else.
|
| Tons and tons of people failed to make basically any
| progress, much less solve the problem, despite saying that
| they worked programming day to day in that language. For a
| mid level role I would filter out a good 8 or 9 out of ten
| applicants with it.
|
| I would consider it a non-leetcode type of question since
| it did not require any algorithm tricks or any optimization
| in time/space.
|
| Nowadays that kind of question is trivial for AI so it
| doesn't seem like the best test. I'm not hiring right
| now,.but when I do I'm not sure what I will ask.
| post-it wrote:
| > The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in
| their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
|
| I think this must be part of it. I see so many posts about
| people burning a thousand dollars in AI credits building a
| small app, and I have no idea why. I use the $20 Claude plan
| and I rarely run out of usage, and I make all kinds of
| things. I just describe what I want, do a few back-and-forths
| of writing out the architecture, and Claude does it.
|
| I think the folks burning thousands of dollars of credits are
| unable to describe what they want.
| paulmist wrote:
| > The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in
| their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI
|
| I'd go a step further and say the engineers who, unprompted,
| discover requirements and discuss their own designs with
| others have an even better time. You need to effectively
| communicate your thoughts to coding agents, but perhaps more
| crucially you need to fit your ever-growing backyard of
| responsibilities into the larger picture. Being that bridge
| requires a great level of confidence and clear-headedness and
| will be increasingly valued.
| hnthrow0287345 wrote:
| This stupid industry doesn't have the wherewithal to actually
| make a good credential and training process like medicine and
| law, and instead lets everyone come up with their own process
| to vet people. We could even do it as an apprenticeship
| model, not like that hasn't served humanity throughout the
| ages.
|
| I should have a credential I have to maintain every few
| years, one or two interviews, and that should get me a job.
| empath75 wrote:
| I have found in the last 3 months that there are two clear
| tiers of developers in the company I work at, the ones that
| can code with AI and the ones that can't, and the ones that
| can't are all going to be unemployed in 6 months.
|
| We have a lot of people where if you gave them clear
| requirements, they could knock out features and they were
| useful for that, but I have an army of agents that can do
| that now for pennies. We don't need that any more. We need
| people who have product vision and systems design and
| software engineering skills. I literally don't even care if
| they can code with any competency.
|
| Btw, if you think that copying and pasting a jira ticket into
| claude is a skill that people are going to pay you for, that
| is also wrong. You need to not just be able to use AI to
| code, you need to be able to do it _at scale_. You need to be
| able to manage and orchestrate fleets of ai agents writing
| code.
| tcgv wrote:
| Makes sense. You just reminded me of the article "Why Can't
| Programmers... Program?" [1].
|
| Before gen AI, I used to give candidates at my company a
| quick one-hour remote screening test with a couple of random
| "FizzBuzz"-style questions. I would usually paraphrase the
| question so a simple Google search would not immediately
| surface the answer, and 80% of candidates failed at coding a
| working solution, which was very much in line with the
| article. Post gen AI, that test effectively dropped to a 0%
| failure rate, so we changed our selection process.
|
| [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-
| program/
| Eridrus wrote:
| > they're just as capable as using AI as anyone
|
| They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what
| they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks
| like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do
| something vs asking the LLM directly?
| alienbaby wrote:
| The junior engineer will become a senior. An llm wont. For
| now, anyway.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Because a lot of stuff doesn't need to be good it needs to be
| done.
|
| Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates
| yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops
| instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an
| intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the
| week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it
| apart and fix something in a year it'll either take no time
| because they know enough to do it easily or it'll be a good
| low stakes learning exercise for a junior.
|
| Everyone wants to think their stuff is important but 99.9% of
| code is low stakes support code either in applications or in
| infrastructure around them.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| I don't think that's true
|
| If intermediates were being pushed out they would just take
| junior roles to have something
|
| Companies really don't like hiring Juniors in general
| soperj wrote:
| > just as capable as using AI as anyone
|
| This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the
| most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know
| the pitfalls of what they're doing.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out
| there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching
| for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have
| had 4 interviews in the last month.
|
| Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs
| junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What
| I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of
| getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very
| much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1
| than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.
|
| From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-
| pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who
| where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The
| ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in
| demand. People cared _much_ more about leetcode performance
| than an impressive portfolio.
|
| Now reminds me _a lot_ of 2008 in terms of the job market and
| what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of
| projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being
| an OSS dev was a _big_ plus (I found it not infrequently to be
| a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than
| actually build something).
|
| Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time.
| They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire
| you don't have to _do_ all that annoying stuff anymore. But the
| teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and
| getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and
| working hard to get things shipped.
| sanufar wrote:
| In your experience, what's the best way to increase signal? I
| feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial
| process of getting past screening, drawing attention to
| projects, etc.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume
| reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring.
|
| Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems
| like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet
| that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of
| resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by
| 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates
| nothing useful and we all know that revenue going up 23%
| YoY was not attributable to this single programmer doing
| anything at all.
|
| Often I'll get candidates into interviews and they light up
| telling me about impressive things they did at a past job
| with enough detail to convince me they know the subject,
| but their resumes are garbage because they've followed too
| many influencers.
|
| So try to work on your resume first. Try different resumes.
| Rewrite it and see what makes interviewers take notice and
| what they ignore. The most common mistake is to write a
| resume once and then spam it to 100 jobs. I know it's not
| fun to change the resume or invest time into applying for a
| job that may not respond, but you know what else isn't fun?
| Applying to 100 jobs and not getting any responses because
| every hiring manager has 20 tailored resumes in their inbox
| ahead of yours.
|
| Having a simple but clear LinkedIn profile helps. Many
| scoff at this, but it works. You don't have to read
| LinkedIn's social media feed or do anything with the site.
| Just set it up and leave it for them to find.
|
| GitHub portfolios and other things have low relative value
| at _most_ companies. There are some exceptions where
| someone will look at it and it might tip the balance in
| your favor, but it 's a small optimization. You need to be
| perfect the resume first, get a LinkedIn that looks decent
| second, and only then think about the ancillary things.
| Gigachad wrote:
| At least in my experience, applying at jobs online has
| been entirely useless for the last 5 years. No company
| ever contacts you after using the online application
| forms. And the only way I've got interviews is from
| recruiters contacting me.
| robryan wrote:
| My experience recently was something like 2/3 from
| referrals (the third I think will eventually get back to
| me but way too slow), and something like 3/10 from cold
| applications. Obviously big differences depending on
| location and experience but I was pleasantly surprised
| that some of the cold applications went somewhere.
| jdwithit wrote:
| As someone applying right now I agree. I think I've had
| _one_ company out of dozens get back to me on a cold
| application this year. Every contact that has led to an
| interview was from being referred in by a current
| employee, or a LinkedIn recruiter reaching out to me
| about a job. I assume the application forms get spammed
| with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. It 's hard
| to blame someone for not wanting to sift through all that
| muck when there's already a stream of vetted candidates
| coming in from their recruiter. Sucks for the job
| seekers, though.
|
| I'm putting more time into cleaning up my LinkedIn
| profile since that's been my most reliable route into
| hiring pipelines (other than referrals and networking).
| Gigachad wrote:
| I assume online forms are spammed with thousands of AI
| generated resumes now. The only reason I apply is it
| seems to flag your account as active which triggers
| recruiters to contact me.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing
| "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by
| 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we all know
| that revenue going up 23% YoY was not attributable to
| this single programmer doing anything at all.
|
| This is the "quantify everything" mantra career coaches
| have been repeating for decades. As the story goes, no
| company is going to care that you refactored the FooBar
| library in order to make bugs in the DingDang module
| easier to fix. You have to only write down things that
| moved some quantifiable business needle like revenue or
| signups, even if the link to that needle is tenuous.
| Obviously, this ends up penalizing hard working, talented
| devs who don't happen to be working in areas where wins
| are easily quantifiable.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Some quantification is very helpful. We're going to have
| a very different conversation if the architecture you
| built was serving 1 million users as opposed to 1000
| customers.
|
| It's the useless quantification that turns resumes into
| noise, combined with making claims that you changed
| revenue by yourself.
|
| > You have to only write down things that moved some
| quantifiable business needle like revenue or signups,
| even if the link to that needle is tenuous. Obviously,
| this ends up penalizing hard working, talented devs who
| don't happen to be working in areas where wins are easily
| quantifiable.
|
| Every hiring manager knows this game and sees right
| through it. You can't read 1000 resumes with claims of
| "Increased revenue by 13% by" followed by something that
| clearly was not the reason revenue increased 13% to
| become numb to it.
|
| Nobody believes these.
|
| The somewhat useful quantifications are things like
| "Reduced cloud spend by 50% by implementing caching".
| This can spark a conversation about how they diagnosed
| they issue, made a transition plan, ensured it was
| working, and all of the other things we want to hear
| about.
| shagie wrote:
| > Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious
| problems like typos ...
|
| This is a person who you're going to be reviewing their
| code or reading the documentation that they write.
|
| If there are typos and poor formatting in the resume
| (that they've had the leisure of reviewing themselves and
| correcting), what does this say about the quality of the
| code the code or documentation that they're going to
| write when under a time constraint?
|
| Are you going to be faced with the decision of having
| code with variables that have spelling errors and
| documentation that is grammatically or factually
| incorrect go through because of the time pressure?
|
| The resume itself is a demonstration of the applicant's
| ability to pay attention to the details that matter in
| software development without showing a single line of
| NDAed code.
| overfeed wrote:
| > I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in
| the last month.
|
| How many offers did you receive? Companies have also adopted
| your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out
| there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's still open
| after 10 months.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing
| candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've
| interviewed for that's still open after 10 months
|
| When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job
| posting down until we were done hiring people with that
| title.
|
| It made a couple people furious because they assumed we
| were going to take the job posting down when we hired
| someone and then re-post a new listing for the next person.
|
| One guy was even stalking LinkedIn to try to identify who
| was hired, without realizing that many engineers don't
| update their LinkedIn. Got some angry e-mails. There are
| some scary applicants out there.
|
| Some times a specific job opening needs to stay open for a
| long time to hire the right person, though. I can recall
| some specific job listings we had open for years because
| none of the people we interviewed really had the specific
| experience we needed (though many falsely claimed it in
| their applications, right until we began asking questions)
| fullofideas wrote:
| Honest question. Were these super specialized roles with
| such specific skill requirements that it took such a long
| time to find the right person? Looking back, do you think
| the team would have been better off hiring someone who
| came close enough, and supporting them to learn on the
| job?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Looking back, do you think the team would have been
| better off hiring someone who came close enough, and
| supporting them to learn on the job?
|
| More specialized.
|
| If we wanted to train someone, we'd start with an
| internal candidate who was familiar with the other parts
| of the job and then train them on this one thing.
|
| Hiring an outsider who doesn't know the subject matter
| and then teaching them is less efficient and more risky.
| It was better to have someone in the team learn the new
| subject as an incremental step and then backfill the
| simpler work they were doing.
| coliveira wrote:
| > some specific job listings we had open for years
|
| If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some
| specific experience, I can guarantee that you really
| didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check
| some specific artificial goal that has little to do with
| the business.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some
| specific experience, I can guarantee that you really
| didn't need that person.
|
| I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS
| for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs.
| You need to have the job listings up and ready.
|
| This was extremely true when we were working on things
| that could not be done remote (literal physical devices
| that had to be worked on with special equipment in
| office).
|
| Engineers aren't interchangeable cogs.
|
| > I can guarantee that you really didn't need that
| person.
|
| So what? There are many roles where we don't "need"
| someone, but if the right person is out there looking for
| a job we want to be ready to hire them.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS
| for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs.
| You need to have the job listings up and ready
|
| If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job
| postings. That sort of critical position is for
| headhunters
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job
| postings.
|
| Why? Not everyone is on LinkedIn or has an updated
| profile.
|
| Some of the best candidates I've hired were people who
| were in other states who were planning to move, but
| waiting for the right job opportunity to come up.
|
| We also used recruiters.
|
| Why does it make people so angry that we posted job
| listings for real jobs that we were really hiring for?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| If your real candidate pool is so small that you're
| effectively targeting a handful of people worldwide then
| you aren't "really hiring"
| Aurornis wrote:
| Yet somehow we really did hire people.
|
| If only we had listened to HN comments and given up
| instead
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| Or... your company should be training potential
| replacements. This is what the US military and "white
| shoe" consulting companies do. While expensive, it
| guarantees that critically needed skilled staff are
| always available.
|
| I recommend the article _" Up or Out: Solving the IT
| Turnover Crisis"_ [0] which gives a reasonable argument
| for doing exactly that.
|
| Notes:
|
| 0 - https://thedailywtf.com/articles/up-or-out-solving-
| the-it-tu...
| conductr wrote:
| So what did you do when those devices broke for years
| while you had no local/physical person on site? You
| either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or
| didn't need the devices to function bad enough.
|
| Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and
| you can hire them by other means that full-time
| employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were
| meant to do for your situation.
|
| Nothing about this was mission critical or even all that
| important or you would have found a way to solve the
| problem or you did and it wasn't a problem to begin with.
| I'm in a field where people often want to hire me for
| some special thing like this, but it often turns out,
| most of my life would be spent idle because no one
| company has enough demand for me. I can consult instead
| and be busy all year, or I can take a job for someone
| that's OK with me being idle for 80% of my time. I prefer
| the former for multiple reasons but just making an
| example of why hiring for specialized roles that aren't
| mission critical is often not the thing you should be
| doing.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > So what did you do when those devices broke for years
| while you had no local/physical person on site? You
| either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or
| didn't need the devices to function bad enough.
|
| I don't know why you assumed that. We had teams. We just
| wanted to grow them.
|
| We weren't sitting there waiting.
| conductr wrote:
| It's implied by you wanting more people, that you had
| more demand than could be fulfilled. Even if you have
| teams, it stands to reason that the device repair would
| have been running into backlog territory that had
| negative implications of some sort. If not, why hire?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > it stands to reason that the device repair would have
| been running into backlog territory that had negative
| implications of some sort. If not, why hire?
|
| I don't know where you're getting these ideas. We weren't
| hiring people to repair a backlog of devices. Warranty
| and repair work typically goes to the contract
| manufacturer, for what it's worth.
|
| Companies like to grow and develop more products. You
| need more people.
| conductr wrote:
| Exactly. Hire someone 80-90% there and invest in their
| training FFS.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Answered elsewhere: If we're investing in someone's
| training we'll promote someone from within who is already
| familiar with the product and then backfill their simpler
| work.
| conductr wrote:
| So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how
| hands on it was or how it took time to develop. We'd all
| prefer a magical unicorn applicant that checks every box
| but it's never possible especially the more you're
| required to know about specifics that are best learned
| internally to begin with. The whole hiring angle you
| describe seems silly in terms of process and expectations
| Aurornis wrote:
| > So you had a talent pipeline, you just didn't like how
| hands on it was or how it took time to develop.
|
| There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for
| making obvious choices.
|
| If the perfect applicant happens to be looking for a job
| and it can save us the time and churn of switching
| someone internally, then yes: I would prefer to hire that
| person.
|
| > The whole hiring angle you describe seems silly in
| terms of process and expectations
|
| I think the silly part of this thread is all of comments
| from people who think they know better how to operate a
| company they know nothing about the people who were in
| it.
| brianleb wrote:
| I have to say I appreciate your aplomb in these
| responses. The whole thread is littered with shocking
| (and unsurprising?) tech-bro overconfidence that they can
| manage a situation they literally know nothing about
| better than someone who's already done it. Cheers to you
| and have a good weekend.
| shagie wrote:
| > There's a lot of anger in this thread at companies for
| making obvious choices.
|
| Elsecomment and on Reddit, you'll see the attitude that
| their years of experience should be sufficient assurance
| for their prospective employer that they can pick up
| whatever other technologies are out there.
|
| This is often coupled with the "you shouldn't need to
| learn new things outside of your 9-5."
|
| Here, you are presenting a situation where a company
| would rather promote from within (counter job hopping
| culture) and would penalize someone who is not learning
| about new things that their current employer isn't using
| in the hiring process.
|
| ---
|
| And you've mentioned it elsecomment too - it's about the
| risk. A company hiring an individual who isn't familiar
| with the technology and has not shown the ability to
| learn new material is more risky a hire than one who is
| either familiar with it professionally or has
| demonstrated the ability to learn new technologies.
|
| That runs counter to the idea of the "best" candidate
| being the one who is most skilled but rather the "best"
| candidate being the one that is the least risky of a
| hire.
| coliveira wrote:
| You probably don't realize that there are several
| thousands of people without a job who could work for a
| company that is instead just "waiting years" to find an
| imaginary worker. That's what people complain about. The
| more companies think the way you do, the more useless
| open positions are listed because companies will not hire
| anyone unless it's the perfect candidate in their dreams.
| alwa wrote:
| Or, it's the kind of place or situation where it's not
| about the job/role as some abstract commodity "function,"
| it's about specialist > internal generalist > external
| non-specialist.
|
| "We're making do, but we're kind of figuring out X as we
| go. That's working for now, but the problems keep getting
| knottier as we grow and change--it works, but it's
| expensive in terms of avoidable mistakes.
|
| Nothing's on fire, but if we ever got the chance, we'd
| value authentic expertise in this niche. But if it's just
| 'I could probably figure that out,' we've already got
| plenty of that internally."
|
| Where a good hire ends up _helping_ those internal people
| as they develop experience and expertise, and one that's
| not right is worse than none at all.
| majormajor wrote:
| How do you know if someone is 80-90% there without having
| the job posting for the profile up, and interviewing
| candidates who come along?
|
| That still takes a long time if random Senior Engineer X
| who's looking on LinkedIn is only 10% of the way there
| for what you'd need for a very specialized role.
| majormajor wrote:
| >If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some
| specific experience, I can guarantee that you really
| didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check
| some specific artificial goal that has little to do with
| the business.
|
| There's a difference between "critically needing" and
| "would benefit from."
|
| If you can find the specialist who's done what you're
| doing before at higher scale and help you avoid a lot of
| pain, it's awesome. If not, you keep on keeping on. But
| as long as you don't start spending too much on the
| search for that candidate, it's best to keep the door
| open.
| coliveira wrote:
| So this is not a job that you need to fill, it is a wish
| you may have and that is mostly impractical. If you
| really needed that person, you would go find them and pay
| way more than they're making now or give them something
| else they want to join immediately.
| overfeed wrote:
| > When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the
| job posting down until we were done hiring people with
| that title
|
| It's a small engineering org, allegedly head-hunting one
| principal engineer for the whole org, so it's a single
| opening. 10 months later they are still hunting for their
| special snowflake.
|
| > I can recall some specific job listings we had open for
| years because none of the people we interviewed really
| had the specific experience we needed
|
| This is exactly what I mean. If you can go for years
| without filling a role, it's non-essential , and are in
| effect, "seeing what's out there". More and more
| companies are getting very picky on mundane roles, such
| as insisting on past experience in specific industries:
| "Oh, your extensive experience in low-latency comms is in
| telecoms? We prefer someone who's worked in TV broadcast,
| using these niche standards specifically, even though
| your knowledge is directly transferable. We don't want to
| waste 5 days on training"
| smelendez wrote:
| You expect more nonessential roles and slower hiring in a
| slower growing economy, especially if companies only hire
| for full-time roles.
|
| For example, your company might need a full-time network
| admin once its network grows to a certain size and
| complexity. You won't hit that level for three years but
| you'd hire the perfect person now if you found them even
| though they might be spending a lot of idle time
| scrolling Hacker News for the first year or two. At 5x
| the growth rate, you'd need that person within less than
| a year, and you might be less picky about whether they
| are coming from a TV or telecom shop.
| volkl48 wrote:
| I assume that this means you're sending out rejections
| that include a mention of "we've hired someone else for
| this role".
|
| If your hiring model is hiring multiple people through
| one posting, then you will probably get a lot fewer angry
| ex-candidates being weird (because they think you've lied
| to them since the posting is still up) by just sending
| out rejections that don't say that and just get the
| "we're no longer interested in you for this role" message
| across.
|
| Nicer/more corporate language for both, of course.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I assume that this means you're sending out rejections
| that include a mention of "we've hired someone else for
| this role".
|
| No, this isn't possible unless you delay rejections
| letters until you hire someone.
|
| We send letters as soon as the decision is made not to
| continue with that candidate.
|
| Honestly it would be cruel to string them along any
| longer.
| robryan wrote:
| From applying places recently I'd much rather get these
| fast. One company sent me them, the rest either reached
| out or I never heard from them.
| tylervigen wrote:
| What a time to be alive: Companies post roles that don't
| exist to interview candidates who don't plan to switch.
| wnevets wrote:
| I have to agree, getting tech interviews isn't a great
| gauge of the job market.
| robryan wrote:
| As a candidate I don't mind doing a few highly speculative
| interviews. After not interviewing for a while it is good
| practice.
| ge96 wrote:
| I recently did an interview and a complaint I hear from the
| interviewer and our own company, people (your competition)
| reading from AI output.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > How many offers did you receive? Companies have also
| adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see
| what's out there" - there's a job I interviewed for that's
| still open after 10 months.
|
| On the hiring side, at least in tech: interviewing really
| sucks. It's a big time investment from multiple people (HR,
| technical interviewers, managers, etc).
|
| I'm not saying it's _impossible_ that companies are
| interviewing for fun, but it seems _really_ unlikely to me
| anyone would want to do interviews without seriously
| intending to hire someone.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time.
| They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire
| you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore.
|
| A few years ago, when interest rates were 0% and companies
| were hiring at an unsustainable rate, I got a lot of
| criticism for cautioning engineers against non-coding roles.
| I talked to a lot of people who dreamed of moving into pure
| architect roles where they advised teams of more junior
| engineers about what to build, but didn't get involved with
| building or operating anything.
|
| I haven't kept up with everyone but a lot of the people I
| know who went that route are struggling now. The work is good
| until a company decides to operate with leaner teams and
| keeps the people committing code. The real difficulties start
| when they have to interview at other companies after not
| writing much code for 3 years. I'm in a big Slack for career
| development where it's common for "Architect" and "Principal
| Engineer" titled people to be venting about how they can't
| get past the first round of interviews (before coding
| challenges!) because they're trying to sell themselves as
| architects without realizing that companies want hands-on
| builders now.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yes when I saw this happen during the post COVID boom I was
| honestly shocked. Engineers I knew who were fairly senior
| thought that they could build the rest of their career in
| just boxes and arrows on a board. The whole thing just made
| me really dislike other Principal engineers.
|
| I left to a startup where I write code and design
| architecture. I even had a former coworker tell me "wow
| you're willing to do stuff like that at this point in your
| career?"
| afavour wrote:
| > The work is good until a company decides to operate with
| leaner teams and keeps the people committing code.
|
| I'm no AI booster but I think this is exact scenario where
| AI-driven development is going to allow those non-coding
| developers to shine. They still remember how code works
| (and have probably still done PR review from time to time)
| so they're well placed to write planning documents for an
| AI agent and verify its output.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Shipping is only hard when you have to deal with all the
| loose ends "builders" leave lying around.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Shippers gonna ship.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| To provide a different framing, I'm more of a builder and
| I'm happy to maintain too. What I'm not happy with, and
| have left jobs over, is being put into a box or becoming
| overly siloed.
|
| Large companies tend to over specialize and that's where I
| see the "I'm a builder" types fall apart. That takes away
| agency, lowers skills, and removes variety from work.
| That's when it stops being fun to me.
|
| I would hope most people with the builder architype are
| otherwise fine to keep building and maintaining.
| truncate wrote:
| There is famous term for those: Tactical Tornados
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394287
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Hopefully it's not too much like 2008 and we end up with
| another huge surge in unpaid internships
| flatline wrote:
| I, too, am able to get interviews. The last time I made a
| serious search was in 2022-23, and companies were clearly
| eager to hire at competitive rates. This past fall, they were
| not. My salary requirements stopped at least two interview
| processes when the question was raised. In other cases it was
| not clear that the company was serious about moving forward
| with hiring for the position at all. A three month search
| ultimately came up dry, which is fine because I'm currently
| employed, but I do not think the hiring landscape is
| promising at all right now.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I don't see this reality in the style of interview being
| performed at all.
|
| Everyone has seemingly adopted the FAANG playbook for
| interviewing that doesn't really select for people who like
| getting their hands dirty and building. These kinds of
| interviews are compliance interviews: they're for people who
| will put in the work to just pass the test.
|
| There are so many interviews I've been in where if I don't
| write the perfect solution on the first try, I'll get failed
| on the interview. More than ever, I'm seeing interviewers
| interrupt me during systems or coding interviews before I
| have a chance to dig in. I've always seen a little bit of
| this, but it seems like the bar is tightening, not on skill,
| but on your ability to regurgitate the exact solution the
| interviewer has in mind.
|
| In the past I've always cold applied places and only
| occasionally leaned on relationships. Now I'm only doing the
| latter. Interviewees are asked to risk asymmetrically
| compared to employers.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| > I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going
| from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large
| systems.
|
| Most prefer a greenfield project.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I don't know, the majority of my colleagues have no idea
| how to do anything in a greenfield environment. They need
| guardrails.
| layer8 wrote:
| > I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going
| from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large
| systems.
|
| Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why
| I've grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too
| easy, you don't learn the actually valuable lessons. As
| experience shows that projects won't stay in the nice
| greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory
| work -- you know the real challenges are yet to come.
| gtowey wrote:
| Yup. You learn the most valuable information from watching
| how things break and then fixing them.
|
| It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation --
| a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have
| been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "What kind of role are you looking for?"
|
| "Technologist flavor of NTSB investigator."
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Sounds amazing.
| eitally wrote:
| There was a two year period around 2011-2013 where I
| experimented with my dev team. We were being "forced" to
| migrate a legacy enterprise system from .Net/MSSQL to
| Java/PostgreSQL with replace the front end with a modern,
| reactive web interface. Only two of the existing
| developers had Java experience, and both were
| conveniently senior engineers in two different offices
| and running their own discrete sub-teams.
|
| One of the guys had a very strong opinion that the ideal
| architecture was something as abstracted and object
| oriented as possible with single function classes, etc. I
| let him run with that. The other guy got frustrated with
| his sub-team's inability to write code to spec in a
| language they'd never used before and where they were
| trying to build some new features they didn't clearly
| understand. He developed a strong feeling that TDD was
| the most efficient path forward: he owns the PRD and
| design, so he just created test stubs and told the remote
| team to "just write code that passes the test" even if
| they didn't understand the function of the block.
|
| So, after a few months where did we end up:
|
| 1. The "abstract everything" architect's team had an
| extremely fragile and impossible to maintain codebase
| because it was impossible for any outsider to tell what
| was going on.
|
| 2. The "just pass the damn tests" guy had a team that had
| quickly ramped on a new language and they had a codebase
| that was incomplete (because they were building it like a
| Lego project) but that everyone could understand because
| the code blocks generally stood on their own.
|
| What was the next step: to shut down the guy who
| abstracted everything and force him to drive a quick &
| dirty rewrite that would be more maintainable, and to
| also start a major refactoring of the "Lego" team's code
| because it was so fragmented that it also was fragile and
| unsuited for production.
|
| I saw this as a terrific learning experience for all
| involved and I was able to get away with it because the
| stakes were pretty low and we had time to experiment
| (part of the ultimate objective was upskilling the team),
| but the more important lessons were these:
|
| 1. Docs matter. Take the time to write clear & detailed
| specs first because you'll be forced to think of edge
| cases and functionality that you didn't originally, and
| it provides a basis for system design, too.
|
| 2. Architecture & design matter. Adhering too close to
| any single paradigm is probably a mistake, but it takes
| experience on the team to understand where the
| compromises are and make the best decision _for that
| system_.
|
| That second point will not stop being true with the
| advent of agentic assisted software development. Like
| others have said, my expectation in the job market is
| that pay will continue to be depressed for junior hires
| as employers reset expectations and generally just want
| folks who can instruct fleets of agents to do the actual
| coding. Senior staff will become increasingly critical
| and their jobs will be painful and difficult, because
| it'll be assumed they can (and will be willing to) do
| design & code reviews of artifacts originated by agents.
|
| What I am going to be most interested in is what happens
| in the SRE/Sysadmin world over the next few years as more
| AI-generated code hits prod in organizations that don't
| have adequate review & oversight functions.
| jordanb wrote:
| The nice thing about the "just pass the tests" approach
| is you end up with something sufficiently abstracted that
| it's easy to write tests for it.
| afavour wrote:
| I don't think they're mutually exclusive. You could just
| as easily describe someone with bootstrapping experience
| as being like an FAA crash investigator who investigates
| take offs. You get to know exactly what works when moving
| fast and looking for quick results, and what dooms a
| short timeline to failure.
| aeonfox wrote:
| > You could just as easily describe someone with
| bootstrapping experience as being like an FAA crash
| investigator who investigates take offs.
|
| Takeoff systems aren't analogous to prototype
| development. I don't know you'd build a prototype plane
| that's feasible to take to market, without having deep
| knowledge about how planes are built.
|
| Early design decisions matter. And you don't get to that
| realisation without dealing with legacy systems where
| some upstart made terrible decisions that you're now
| responsible for.
| detourdog wrote:
| I was just thinking yesterday that knowing all the ways
| something breaks and behaves is the key to understanding
| systems.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > You learn the most valuable information from watching
| how things break and then fixing them.
|
| Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a
| founding engineer in a startup.
|
| Many of these comments make me wonder how many people
| here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a
| lead role. You learn a lot about what's maintainable and
| scalable, what breaks and what doesn't, in the process
| rapidly iterating on a product to find your market.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| This is unironically my favorite kind of HN comment: to say
| something incredibly rude and/or condescending but wrap it
| in the right kind of thoughtful language to qualify as HN
| nice
|
| The original punchline ("you don't learn the actually
| valuable lessons.") was just a bit too sharp, so you even
| edited in a psuedo-clarification which actually just
| repeats that punchline but in a softer way, masterful!
| MrDarcy wrote:
| And yet it is correct. The most valuable engineers today
| are those who have maintained and expanded the 0..v1 crap
| from others, and are now driven and ambitious enough to
| go build the next generation of 0..v1. Armed with that
| experience, the crap is minimal and value maximized.
| rustystump wrote:
| Oof ima be the one to say it depends. This is personality
| based and the truth is a successful product has both.
| Even late on u want that person willing to break
| convention to find a new way of doing something. Early u
| need some seasoning in there too.
| layer8 wrote:
| My intention was actually to inspire others to maybe also
| start preferring long-term/maintenance work, because I
| feel there's a lack of enthusiasm for that.
|
| Almost invariably after submitting, I see how I could
| clarify and/or expand on my thoughts, so I often do end
| up editing.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This seems wrong? Like if you look at a collection of
| open SWENG positions, _most_ of them are maintenance
| roles at large companies. Greenfield software doesn 't
| have the revenue needed to justify much headcount.
|
| In my experience separating the roles out is silly if
| you're an engineer yourself. We do this a lot and that
| leads to silly mentalities. Greenfield developer vs
| maintenance engineer, MVP engineer vs Big Tech dev, FOSS
| hacker vs FOSS maintainer. Each of those dichotomies
| speaks to cultural differences that we humans amplify for
| no reason.
|
| In truth the profession needs both and an engineer that
| can do both is the most effective. The sharpest engineers
| I've worked with over the years can hack new, greenfield
| stuff and then go on to maintaining huge projects. Hell
| Linus Torvalds started out by creating Linux from scratch
| and now he's a steward of the kernel rather than an
| author!
| layer8 wrote:
| I wasn't talking about segregating roles, but about
| personal preference. People do tend to prefer building
| new stuff over maintaining projects long-term, and I'd
| like the scale to tip a bit on that. Linus is indeed a
| good counterexample: He didn't leave Linux after 1.0 to
| build the next new thing. But the latter is what
| developers in practice often prefer doing.
| shagie wrote:
| > Almost invariably after submitting, I see how I could
| clarify and/or expand on my thoughts, so I often do end
| up editing.
|
| One of the tricks of HN is the 'delay' setting.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024
|
| > There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's
| the time delay in minutes between when you create a
| comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I
| added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments,
| users can, if they want, have some time to edit them
| before they go out in the feed. Many users edit comments
| after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft
| always got shipped.
|
| I've got mine set to 2. It gives me a little bit of time
| for the "oh no, I need to fix things" or "I didn't mean
| to say _that_ " and when everyone else can see it.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Business bros will not pay high salaries to maintain
| software. Software maintenance will always end in India
| with developers making $20/hr. Or less.
|
| AI makes it look like these developers can do the same
| job the Americans did building the product to begin with.
| Even if things fall apart in the end, it won't stop the
| attempt to order of magnitude reduce the cost for
| maintenance.
| shimman wrote:
| It's correct tho. If your entire career is nothing but
| greenfield development, you'll never know the result of
| your decisions or the impact of tech chosen.
|
| Staff or principals that have a tenure of majority
| greenfield development are extremely dangerous to
| companies IMO. Especially if they get hired in a
| nontraditional tech company, like utilities, banking, or
| insurance.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Your list is places that treat development as a cost
| center, but greenfield-only devs don't want to touch that
| work with a 10-foot pole.
|
| And if your entire career is nothing maintenance and
| sustaining projects, you'll never know what decisions it
| takes to build a greenfield application that lives long
| enough to become a graybeard.
|
| You'll think you do because you see all the mistakes they
| made, but you'll only have cynical reasons for why those
| mistakes get made like "they don't care, they just make a
| mess and move on to the next job" or "they don't bother
| learning the tools/craft deeply enough moving, it's all
| speed for them".
|
| -
|
| To indulge _myself_ in the niceness a bit: I don 't think
| you write comments like the one above if you've done
| both, yet having done both feels like an obvious
| requirement to be a well-rounded Staff/Principal.
|
| Most maintenance work suffers because of decisions made
| at the 0 to 1 stage. And most greenfield work fails
| entirely, never maturing to the maintenance stage.
|
| So both sides have to do _something_ right in the face of
| challenges unique to their side. And having familiarity
| with both is extremely valuable for technical leadership.
| Lammy wrote:
| They're 100% correct, though.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| They're incorrect, and my reply to a sibling covers why
| in detail.
|
| But to reword it: if you think the reason 0 to 1 work is
| typically a duct-taped mess is because of a lack of
| experience or understanding from greenfield devs, you'll
| probably fail at 0 to 1 work yourself.
|
| Not that a noob developer great at selling has never
| landed 0 to 1 work, crapped out a half working mess and
| left with a newly padded resume... but maintenance work
| is missing out on by far the most volatile and
| unpredictable stage of a software project, with its own
| hard lessons.
|
| The duct-taped nature of 0 to 1 work is usually a result
| of the intersection of fickle humans and software
| engineering, not a lack of knowledge.
|
| -
|
| People in maintenance can do things like write new tests
| against the production system to ensure behavior stays
| the same... what happens when 1 quarter into a 2 quarter
| project it turns out some "stakeholder" wasn't informed
| and wants to make changes to the core business logic that
| break half the invariants you designed the system around.
| And then after that it turns out you can't do that, legal
| pushed back. And then a few weeks later they came to an
| agreement so now we want a bit of A and B?
|
| Or you're in consumer and there's a new "must have"
| feature for the space? Maybe you'd like to dismiss as
| "trend chasing", but that'll just doom your project in
| the market because it turns out following trends is a
| requirement for people to look at everything else you've
| built
|
| Or worst of all, you know that quality engineering of the
| system will take 8 weeks, and there's a hard deadline on
| someone else's budget of 4 weeks, and you can of course
| decline to ship it, but then you'll need a new job. (and
| I know, you'll say "Gladly, I take pride in my
| engineering!", but again, you're probably going to end up
| maintaining a project that only survived by doing exactly
| what you quit over)
|
| tl;dr it's Yin and Yang: you can't have one without the
| other, and you need to have a bit of the other side in
| you whenever you're working in the capacity of either to
| be a good technical leader.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| Not sure what type of "greenfield" startup experience
| you've had, but most of the work I'm talking about involves
| solving problems that most people simply don't have the
| combined skill set to solve. Typically problems that
| involve a substantial amount of quantitative skills
| combined with the ability to bring those solutions to prod.
|
| Nearly all of the teams I've joined had problems _they_
| didn 't know how to solve and often had no previously
| established solution. My last gig involved exploring some
| niche research problems in LLM space and leveraging the
| results to get our first round of funding closed, this
| involved learning new code bases, understanding the
| research papers, and communicating the findings publicly in
| an engaging way (all to typical startup style deadlines).
|
| I agree with your remarks around "greenfield" if it just
| involves setting up a CRUD webapp, but there is a wide
| space of genuinely tricky problems to solve out there. I
| recall a maintainer style coworker of mine, who describe
| himself similar to what you are describing, telling me he
| was terrified of the type of work I had to do because when
| you started you didn't even know if there _was_ a solution.
|
| I have equal respect for people such as myself and for
| people that you describe, but I wouldn't say it is _more_
| challenging, just a different kind of challenge. And I do
| find the claim "you don't learn the actually valuable
| lessons" to be _wildly_ against my experience. I would say
| most of my deep mathematical knowledge comes from having to
| _really_ learn it to solve these problems, and more often
| than not I 've had to pick up on an adjacent, but entirely
| different field to get things done.
| fsloth wrote:
| FWIW this is the best kind of job ever for me as well:
|
| "when you started you didn't even know if there was a
| solution."
|
| Regardless what the problem is - as long as I know
| _nobody knows if there is a solution_ it's an instant
| sugar rush.
|
| You are free to bang your head against a stone wall for
| months trying to crack the damn thing.
|
| OFC you need to deliver in the end. And this requires
| then ruthless "worse is better" mentality - ship
| something - anything. Preferably a the smallest package
| that can act as mvp that you know you can extend _if this
| is the thing_ what people want.
|
| Because that's the other side of the coin - if the
| solution is not known - people are also not aware if the
| solution has true value or if it is a guess.
|
| So in any case you have to rush to the mvp.
|
| Such joy!
|
| Of course the mvp must land, and must be extensible.
|
| But these type of MVP:s are not a slam dunk.
|
| The combined requirement of a) must ship within limited
| time b) nobody knows what _does_ require a certain
| mindset.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Interesting, this is a trap that I've seen multiple
| senior hires fall into. In my experience "we have a
| problem but no solution" often means (a) there actually
| is a solution but it's too expensive to implement, (b)
| there are organizational reasons why this problem exists
| and a new hire doesn't have the experience or credibility
| to navigate it or (c ) there is no solution to the
| problem or the solution is very complex, and by the time
| the new hire onboards, digs into the problem, and figures
| it out their credibility is shot because everyone was
| expecting the senior hire to figure it out in 90 days.
|
| I've found new hires to be more successful when they
| join, get some easy wins, and then find their own
| problems to solve. But maybe it's just an artifact of
| working at large companies where most of the day-to-day
| stuff is figured out.
| ua709 wrote:
| I think you forgot
|
| (d) although the initial statement seems credible, the
| problem is actually ill defined and under specified and
| therefore not solvable as originally stated.
|
| Example: our start-up plans to "fix health care"
| dainiusse wrote:
| Everyone can do 0 to 1. Because delivery drives dopamine.
| The it is the boring thing, but there comes experience to
| find interest in that part
| collingreen wrote:
| This is news to me having watched many many many people
| fail to do 0 to 1.
|
| Maybe you're just a really really good engineer and
| product thinking hybrid!
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Soooo agree. I've had to clean up the messes of people that
| did the 0-1 in my field and going from 1-unconditionally
| stable was a lot more work than the 0-1 part.
| atherton94027 wrote:
| > I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in
| the last month.
|
| Did you get any offers yet? It seems the issue is not lack of
| interviews but lack of offers. Many companies are looking for
| a goldilocks candidate and are happy to pass on anything that
| doesn't match their ideal candidate
| jdwithit wrote:
| I got laid off at the end of last year and am currently
| interviewing for Staff+ DevOps/Platform Engineer type
| roles. I definitely feel this. I've had a decent flow of
| recruiter inquiries and had multiple companies go 2-3
| rounds of interviews deep with me (not counting the initial
| "do you have a pulse" recruiter screen calls). Then the
| communication always seems to dry up and I'm left to wonder
| what box I failed to check on their hiring rubric.
|
| Semi related, holy hell do companies have a lot of
| interview rounds these days. It seems pretty standard to
| spread 5-6 Teams calls over the course of a month. I get
| that these are high salary, high impact roles and you want
| to get it right. But this feels really excessive. And I'm
| not talking about FAANG tech giants here. It's everyone,
| from startups to random midsize insurance companies.
| ghaff wrote:
| And a lot of it is networks as opposed to applying to a job
| position. My last position--that I had for many years--was
| reaching out to someone knew for not even a posted position
| and having one created for me.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out
| there in the world (sometimes I find something worth
| switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very
| hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.
|
| You've been interviewing forever. You're the well practiced
| pickup artist of job searching. Of course you'll be getting
| the call backs over the other 1000 applicants who don't have
| the same experience level applying. You "just know" how to
| read between the lines and tailor a resume, whip up a cover
| letter, etc whereas they're making mistakes.
| ta9000 wrote:
| Interviews are easy, offers are hard.
| no_wizard wrote:
| High performer is so subjective too.
|
| You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within
| cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders,
| have a history of strong technical performance.
|
| and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or
| not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a
| common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out
| of vogue for a good while.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| In tech 'culture fit' is generally a dog whistle for ageism
| in my experience.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I also think its being used to filter out people that
| aren't basically a mirror for the interviewers in many
| instances.
|
| I've noticed a huge tightening of the rope around that sort
| of thing.
|
| I can't tell you how many times I've passed all the tests,
| all the interview things, get to the final round with the
| team and the rejection email comes in despite having good
| conversations. By all accounts, I believe any person would
| say the interview went well.
|
| my peers are reporting the same things.
| ptrrrrrrppr wrote:
| Other angle: often interview with candidate A goes well,
| but then you meet candidate B who is comparable but wants
| less money. From my experience that happens more often
| now, as there are more people who are desperate and
| willing to lower their salary expectations to a level
| that I wouldn't consider reasonable few years ago.
| mjr00 wrote:
| I have hired a lot of people and I have never seen a
| situation where candidate A and B are both within the
| target salary band but one was chosen because they were
| cheaper. You'd always choose the one that was better. I
| can only see a slightly lower expected salary being a
| factor at extremely early stage startups with very little
| funding.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as
| seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still
| getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're
| just as capable as using AI as anyone.
|
| Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's
| none)
| moralestapia wrote:
| This has been my experience as well.
|
| Happy to be on the high-end ^^.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since
| the skill floor is too high.
|
| I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs
| than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a
| project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool,
| and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster
| that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more
| reliable before putting it into prod).
|
| None of this matters.
|
| The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are
| allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do
| so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work
| at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever.
| I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14%
| and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses.
|
| From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law,
| where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor
| is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not
| getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale
| goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing
| insurance defence and there's no movement between the
| categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed.
|
| We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone
| can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give
| interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get
| around this with better projects because anyone can release a
| vibe coded library.
|
| It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education
| because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't
| easy to fake.
| klooney wrote:
| I hate the credentialism. What a bummer of a place to end up.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this
| here -"What are you actually developing?"
|
| People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada
| yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce.
| Surely this should be the first thing in the post:
|
| - I am developing an X
|
| - I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc.
|
| - I have these ... testing problems
|
| - I have these problems with the VCS/build system ...
|
| Otherwise it is all generalised, well "stuff". And maybe,
| dare I say it, slop.
| jjmarr wrote:
| I'm hosting a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and trying to
| autoscale it to tens of thousands of vCPUs. The goal is to
| transparently replace dedicated developer workstations
| (edit: transparently replace _compiling_ ) because our
| codebase is really big and we've hired enough people this
| is viable.
|
| edit: to clarify, I'm using recc which wraps the compiler
| commands like distcc or ccache. It doesn't require
| developers to give up their workspace.
|
| Right now I'm using buildbarn. Originally, I used sccache
| but there's a hard cap on parallel jobs.
|
| In terms of how LLMs help, they got me through all the
| gruntwork of writing jsonnet and dockerfiles. I have barely
| touched that syntax before so having AI churn it out was
| helpful to driving towards the proof of concept. Otherwise
| I'd be looking up "how do I copy a file into my Docker
| container".
|
| AI also meant I didn't have to spend a lot of time
| evaluating competing solutions. I got sccache working in a
| day and when it didn't scale I threw away all that work and
| started over.
|
| In terms of where the LLM fell short, it constantly lies to
| me. For example, it mounted the host filesystem into the
| docker image so it could get access to the toolchains
| instead of making the docker images self-contained like it
| said it would.
|
| It also kept trying to not to the work, e.g. It randomly
| decides in the thinking tokens "let's fall back to a local
| caching solution since the distributed option didn't work"
| then spams me with checkmark emojis and claims in the chat
| message the distributed solution is complete.
|
| A decent amount of it is slop, to be honest, but an 80%
| working solution means I am getting more money and
| resources to turn this into a real initiative. At which
| point I'll rewrite the code again but I'll pay closer
| attention now that I know docker better.
| exceptione wrote:
| > The goal is to transparently replace dedicated
| developer workstation
|
| Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best
| engineers leave? I am half serious here. If you want your
| software to run slow, IT could equally well install
| corporate security software on developer laptops. Oops, I
| did it again. Oh well, in all seriousness, I have never
| seen any performance problem being solved by running it
| on Azure's virtualization. I am afraid you are replacing
| the hardware layer by a software layer with ungodly
| complexity, which you are sure of will be functionally
| incomplete.
|
| Are you sure they don't have to fix the build pipeline
| first? Tens of thousands of vCPUs for a single
| compilation run, or to accommodate 100 developers who try
| to compile their own changes?
| jjmarr wrote:
| > I have never seen any performance problem being solved
| by running it on Azure's virtualization
|
| Sorry, I wasn't clear. I am not virtualizing the
| workspace. I'm using `recc` which is like `distcc` or
| `ccache` in that it wraps the compiler job. Every
| developer keeps their workstation. It just routes the
| actual `clang` or `gcc` calls to a Kubernetes cluster
| which provides distributed build and cache.
|
| > Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best
| engineers leave?
|
| We have 7000+ compiler jobs in a clean build because it
| is a big codebase. People are waiting hours for CI.
|
| I'm sure that drives attrition and bringing that down to
| minutes will help retain talent.
|
| > Tens of thousands of vCPUs for a single compilation
| run, or to accommodate 100 developers who try to compile
| their own changes?
|
| Because it uses remote execution, it will ideally do
| both. My belief is that an individual developer launching
| 6000 compiler jobs because they changed a header will
| smooth out over 300 developers that generally do
| incremental builds. Likewise, this'll eliminate redundant
| recompilation when git pulling since this also serves as
| a cache.
| js4ever wrote:
| This makes absolutely no sense to me. Are you really
| recompiling 6000 things each time a dev in the company
| needs to add a line somewhere in the codebase? Have you
| thought about splitting that giant thing in smaller
| chunks?
| jjmarr wrote:
| > Are you really recompiling 6000 things each time a dev
| in the company needs to add a line somewhere in the
| codebase?
|
| It happens when someone modifies a widely included header
| file. Which there are a lot of thanks to our use of
| templates. And this is just our small team of 300 people.
|
| > Have you thought about splitting that giant thing in
| smaller chunks?
|
| Yes. We've tried but it's not scaling. Unfortunately,
| we've banned tactics like pImpl and dynamic linking that
| would split a codebase unless they're profiled not to be
| on a hot path. Speed is important because I'm writing
| tests for a semiconductor fab and test time is more
| expensive than any other kind of factory on Earth.
|
| I tried stuff like precompiled headers but the fact only
| one can be used per compilation job meant it didn't scale
| to our codebase.
| karmasimida wrote:
| I mean you don't need your first job go to top of the top
| companies. Your first job is to get you into the industry
| then you can flourish.
|
| How many juniors OpenAI GDM are going to hire in a year,
| probably double digits at max, the chances are super slim and
| they are by nature are allowed to be as picky as they should
| be.
|
| That being said, I do agree this industry is turning into
| finance/law, but that won't last long either. I genuinely
| can't foresee what if when AGI/ASI is really here, it should
| start giving human ideas to better itself, and there will be
| no incentive to hire any human for a large sum anymore, maybe
| a single digit individuals on earth perhaps
| jjmarr wrote:
| The problem is the lack of experience compounds.
|
| Because AI accelerates the rate of knowledge gain, this
| gets even faster.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way
| cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.
|
| Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than
| Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking
| AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which
| isn't as useful.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _Juniors are still getting hired because they 're still way
| cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone._
|
| While I could buy that hiring managers _believe_ this, it 's
| not _actually_ true.
|
| The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with
| these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't
| know what they don't know and effective prompting requires
| effective spec writing.
|
| A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no
| tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.
| geodel wrote:
| While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I
| have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming
| irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course).
| So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error
| handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM ,
| deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much
| design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc
| as those are now higher level concerns not part of code
| itself.
|
| This is also where micro services pattern fits in well
| because individual unit is so small no design needed.
| girvo wrote:
| > Code now does not need much design.
|
| I'll bite: why? Genuine question, not a weird gotcha.
| sodafountan wrote:
| Yes, this has been my experience. I'd consider myself average
| at best. I worked in the industry for almost 7 years before
| being laid off. I can't find anything at the moment and have
| resorted to moving back in with my parents.
|
| It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the
| moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview
| isn't ideal either.
|
| It feels like I'm in a hole.
| waba99 wrote:
| I'm seeing a lot of specialization. For the past 11 years I've
| marketed myself as a frontend engineer. I got laid off last
| year and the job search was largely similar to my previous job
| search 4 years prior.
|
| I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed
| drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a
| good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and
| I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking
| for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as
| prevalent years ago.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right
| now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever,
| but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard
| time finding a position.
|
| This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the
| american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.
| carabiner wrote:
| Yep - the dual economy has moved into tech itself.
| fny wrote:
| As the kids say, AI makes everyone a 10x engineer. Who would
| you you want to 10x?
| andai wrote:
| But it's measuring quantity, not quality.
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
|
| What we really need is the -10X engineer ;)
|
| Alas, his job would entirely consist of debloating the slop
| everyone else is pumping out "at inference speed".
|
| https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed
| kseniamorph wrote:
| This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another
| dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has
| always been easier for people who communicate well regardless
| of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's
| making some people more resilient to this market shift
| specifically
| girvo wrote:
| That has always been true (not that I'm saying you don't know
| that, I'm using your comment as a jumping off point) in this
| industry. I am a good developer, but I'm a very good teacher
| and leader, and soft skills are why I've had the career I've
| had over the past two decades.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| In my experience juniors are simply being replaced with
| intermediates and seniors who are willing to work for junior
| wages.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| > In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right
| now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever,
| but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard
| time finding a position.
|
| That sounds good for many of us (and don't we all like to think
| we're top candidates here on HN...) but is there any data to
| back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata,
| still useful info).
| ramijames wrote:
| I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has
| no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two
| years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly
| disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to
| work.
| alienbaby wrote:
| Juniors really aren't just as capable with AI as anyone.
| Knowing how to unambiguously describe correctly what you want
| isn't something a junior can do, nor is understanding if what
| the ai produces is good or bad.
| simonw wrote:
| That matches an observation made in that report from the recent
| Thoughtworks retreat:
| https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...
|
| > The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the
| need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than
| they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial
| net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on
| future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than
| senior engineers, having never developed the habits and
| assumptions that slow adoption.
|
| > The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during
| the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the
| fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This
| population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and
| retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed
| whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong
| learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged
| that no organization has solved it yet.
| not_ai wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this is the first I've seen this. I wish
| they had expanded on exactly what mid-level might be missing
| rather then just saying "fundamentals" and "practical
| intuition"
| milchek wrote:
| I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring
| that took place just before this employment "crash?" - if it is
| as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then
| does that make it a good thing as well.
|
| Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I
| definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don't
| mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren't contributing
| and were being malicious in that sense.
|
| Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking
| multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low
| performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.
| jordemort wrote:
| someone: (actual data)
|
| HN user: not in my experience!
| agentultra wrote:
| What is a high performer?
|
| Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands
| it?
|
| Someone who works 996 in the office?
|
| Or someone who knows what they're doing?
|
| I think this is bigger than any individual. It's just a matter
| of time before you're let go. There's no loyalty from companies
| at all. Not when they're seeing higher than expected profits
| and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year.
| There's no strategy or preference to it. I don't think this has
| to do with how you or I perform on the job.
|
| Most people I've talked to lately who are still employed are
| watching out for their job to get cut.
| nphardon wrote:
| Seems like my co is shedding US jobs and moving them to Taiwan,
| and paying up to 75% less in salary.
| roxolotl wrote:
| How's it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so
| not surprised to hear it didn't do too badly then and in 2020
| while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping
| people on remotely.
|
| EDIT: posted below as well
| https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...
|
| There's a longer term graph in the thread. We've got a long way
| to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I'd expected.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I was working in 2000 in Atlanta GA at boring old enterprises
| companies with 4 years of experience back then. If you were
| working for/targeting profitable non tech companies, the world
| was your oyster.
|
| I was working at a company that printed bills for utility
| companies and had offers from banks, insurance companies etc.
| The world didn't stop buying Coca Cola, flying Delta or stop
| buying stuff from Home Depot because of the dot com crash
| tunesmith wrote:
| In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel
| had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were
| getting slammed with applications.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| The equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Housing is the ultimate decider so I'd say that's
| equivalent to at least 50 bucks today.
| andai wrote:
| Damn, never thought about it like that. That seems a lot
| more practical and relevant than the Big Mac Index.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah I think housing is the real index. CPI doesn't make
| sense for individuals unless you build your own index.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| In Atlanta in 2000, I was making $52K a year working for a
| medium size company that printed bills. By 2002 I was making
| $65K at the same company.
|
| For context, I had my 2600 square foot 3.5/2 bedroom house
| built that year for $175K.
| eitally wrote:
| I started my career at $14/hr in 1999, was at $19/hr in 2000,
| and switched to salary at $55k by 2001. I spent 15 years in
| corp IT running software teams... total comp got way better
| when I entered the big tech industry in 2015.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Remember that the 2000 numbers are also out of a much smaller
| pool and the graph uses absolute numbers. So even if they were
| the same numbers in 2000 as 2020 it would have been a much,
| much larger percentage of all jobs.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| Those are raw numbers. I would look instead at the job changes
| over total employment numbers. I don't have the numbers but I
| would wager we have many more people working in tech today
| (overall) than we did in 2008.
|
| Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's
| expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical
| nature.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Maybe I'm reading the graph wrong, but the decrease comes after
| years on continuous growth, so total employment numbers in tech
| should still be absolutely massive, compared to 18 years ago?
|
| If it continues, then yes it could be bad, but so far it seems
| like a correction for over-hiring in 2021 - 2023. Seems a
| little weird to be focusing on a decline in 2024 - 2026,
| without addressing the large increase right in the years
| before.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| There's a lot of dynamics where it's the short-term numbers
| that matter. If you're a developer who needs a new job after
| your spouse got transferred to LA or something, it does you
| no good that the absolute numbers are massive, nor that a
| different person looking for a job 3 years ago would have
| found it uncommonly easy.
| oblio wrote:
| Asked Gemini quickly for 2000 and 2025 numbers (US).
|
| Tech employees: 5.5m vs 9.9.
|
| Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
|
| Different ball game.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
|
| Wow. Just wow.
| nabbed wrote:
| >Software developers: 0.68m vs 3.2m.
|
| I had no idea I was in such an exclusive group back in 2000.
| Everyone I knew was a software engineer or in tech one way or
| another so I suppose I got a warped sense that I belonged to
| a larger group.
| alephnerd wrote:
| As I previously mentioned, based on person experience assumptions
| around hiring have changed due to the Twitter layoffs, demands
| for FCF positivity, and WFH inadvertently justifying offshoring
| [0], not necessarily due to interest rate changes.
|
| ---
|
| As I also mentioned, the only way you can survive in American
| tech at this point is to:
|
| 1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get
| laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks
| due to the density of employers. Seattle used to be a good
| option, but WA's norms around noncompete clauses incentivize
| larger employers which reduces the ability for startups to truly
| scale.
|
| 2. Start coming into the office 2-3 days a week. It's harder to
| layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with. Worst case,
| they can refer you to their friends companies if you get laid off
|
| 3. Upskill technically. Learn the fundamentals of AI/ML and
| MLOPs. Agents are basically a semi-nondeterministic SaaS.
| Understanding how AI/ML works and understanding their benefits
| and pitfalls make you a much more valuable hire.
|
| 4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys for
| $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate business
| problems into technical requirements. This means also
| understanding the industry your company is in, how to manage up
| to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers and cost centers
| of your employer. Learn how to make a business case for technical
| issues. If you cannot communicate why refactoring your codebase
| from Python to Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no
| one will prioritize it.
|
| 5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and
| friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k
| you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build
| the support system you need for independence. The reality is the
| current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the
| tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and
| complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.
|
| [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174561
| pm90 wrote:
| I don't believe this is true. There are plenty of roles that
| are happy to hire remotely. Sure, there is an in person
| requirement for many job listings but Ive found EMs/companies
| to be very flexible if they need to hire talent.
|
| For people that can't/dont want to move to the "hubs", just
| know that there is absolutely still a career path. I will say
| though that you need to have above average communication skills
| and proactively build relationships during in person off-sites.
| alephnerd wrote:
| There absolutely are remote first roles in the US, but the
| competition is also extremely intense. The median SWE and
| HNer wouldn't make the cut.
|
| It also requires a level of maturity, clear thinking, self-
| starterness, and independence that is hard to come by without
| a proven track record and experience.
|
| My advice is for the median/average SWE and HNer, not for the
| truly exceptional.
|
| Spending a 7-10 years in a hub and then going remote first is
| the best path because you build the network you need to get
| referrals to vouch for you as a remote-first hire well as the
| track record needed to go remote-first.
| bobanrocky wrote:
| Nope, the number of remote roles are drastically reducing. If
| your are a sw dev/mgr, you'll need to be at least hybrid to
| your company's 'tech center'
| kittikitti wrote:
| Although the graph lists BLS data as the source, it's hard for me
| to find the specific datasets that back it up. It's March 2026
| and the graph indicates it would encapsulate 2025. In fact, the
| "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United
| States" indicate something different,
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T60O
|
| I was able to find the following:
|
| - Software Publishers
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051320001
| - Regional data available only, numerous national statistics are
| discontinued - California region matches up, but
| places like Boston don't
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU25000005051320001
|
| - Computing Infrastructure Providers
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051800001
| - Matches up perfectly, no notes here.
|
| - Computer Systems Design
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001
| - However, the graph in the tweet doesn't include the February
| data (even though it claims "recent") which shows an increase
|
| - Web Search Portals
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES5051900001
| - Matches up, but February data isn't in the graph which shows an
| increase from January
|
| - Streaming Services
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051620001
| - Doesn't include January or February 2026 data, doesn't match up
| with graph in tweet
|
| I wasn't able to find the following: - Custom Computer
| Programming Services
|
| There are numerous open questions in this analysis which I would
| need to be addressed before drawing any conclusions. My gut
| feeling would love to accept it at face value but I never trust
| my gut.
| wnolens wrote:
| Anyone else's inbox slammed with recruiters, more than it ever
| has been in the past? Feels like there's 10x the jobs available,
| but perhaps it's just that LLMs have automated a recruiter's job
| and they're letting the slop fly
| alephnerd wrote:
| Depends on your geo. If you're in the Bay, NYC, and maybe a few
| other hubs hiring remains strong.
|
| The "inshoring" hubs like RTP and Denver or those hubs that are
| dominated by a handful of oversized companies like Seattle are
| the worst impacted.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Mine is too. Absolutely no outreach from the major players
| however. Mostly AI startups with a few larger/older SaaS
| startups sprinkled in.
| Sevii wrote:
| Nope its totally dead
| sodafountan wrote:
| No, but it used to be.
|
| What mediums are you using for recruiters to contact you? Do
| you have a linked-in or are you applying directly to recruiting
| companies? Are you active anywhere else?
|
| Genuinely interested in how you're receiving so many
| recruitment emails. That used to be my go to way to hit the job
| market.
| albinowax_ wrote:
| Mine is, but it's AI generated slop from gmail addresses, for
| some kind of scam
| caesil wrote:
| Misleading title. The _change_ in tech employment is worse, but
| actual tech employment remains high thanks to the massive
| 2021-2023 hiring spree.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Purely anecdotal, but I'm a senior engineer with about 15 years
| of experience and a decently impressive resume. In the past, I
| almost always get to at least the interviewing stage, and have
| frequently received multiple offers at the same time. Recruiters
| used to spam me constantly.
|
| I haven't heard from a recruiter in probably 6 months. I recently
| put my feelers out and applied to a handful of positions I was
| qualified for, and got rejection letters from all of them.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Try only including your last 2 positions, as most senior staff
| tend to scare insecure brogrammers. They probably still won't
| hire, but you will get more interviews.
|
| There are also a lot of people posting fake jobs for feeding
| LLM datasets, running scams, and bidding down labor costs. =3
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth?
|
| https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
| jatins wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking the same. It seems like you can get data
| for whatever argument you want to support
| andai wrote:
| I've heard other people say, situation has greatly improved
| over the past year, esp. 6 months.
| Rexxar wrote:
| Doesn't seem necessarily a contradiction. Job posting growth
| logically happens before effective job growth.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Biggest thing hurting folks is RTO. Unless you live in a large
| metro, tech jobs are slim/none.
| stanleykm wrote:
| That's how it was before the pandemic.. Is it unusual that
| the jobs are where the people are?
| rvz wrote:
| Yet, no-one here is talking about building a start up. Which is
| the actual answer.
| overgard wrote:
| I'm an outsider, but VC looks like it's in a bad place right
| now. The returns have been pretty bad this decade, and AI
| companies are eating all the dollars so if you're not doing
| that it strikes me it'd be hard to get funding. And idk, if you
| already have an AI startup then you're hoping for the best, but
| if you were starting a business today I think that bubble looks
| like it has a lot of needles around it
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Are there real positions these days?
|
| I get rejection for every single position that I apply to. Often
| I read literally a description of myself in job posting, and it's
| still "we decided to no move forward".
|
| At the same time, I hire people and see that 8/10 candidates are
| just trash. Not in the sense they "are not aligned", or "emit
| wrong vibes", or other bs. They literally can't write a single
| line of code, on their own laptop, in their own IDE.
|
| Make it make sense.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| It's bananas how many utterly crap candidates we get at the
| moment too.
|
| One low point was an interview with a guy who connected with
| his current work laptop and couldn't find the $ key on it for a
| basic scripting question.
|
| I can't make it make sense either.
| overgard wrote:
| I know people will say AI, but I don't think it's that. The whole
| "everyone should learn to code" bullshit of the last 15 years or
| so has created a lot of developers that frankly aren't very good,
| and then you mix in the massive overhiring of the pandemic, and
| what you're seeing is a hard correction. CEOs love to use
| "productivity improvements from AI" as a smokescreen and investor
| catnip but the research shows it's not having the effects
| claimed.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Blaming the employees is BS. A pretty large % of the people
| losing their jobs are also high performing excellent people. I
| feel like anyone who worked at one of these companies doing lay
| offs knows this.
| stanleykm wrote:
| The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes
| performance into account, but that doesn't mean that the
| industry overall doesn't have too many people for the amount
| of work that needs to be done.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Its only the part about casting any aspersions at the
| people laid off for being low performance that bothers me
| because I know so many incredible people for whom they
| absolutely did not deserve it and its not fair to assume
| anything about their value or quality of their work
| specifically.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Depends on the industry and product, as usual. On an large
| level, I do not think there's "too many engineers and not
| enough problems to be solved". Companies are simply
| hunkering down for a recession we can't say out loud.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| > that doesn't mean that the industry overall doesn't have
| too many people for the amount of work that needs to be
| done.
|
| Not that I disagree with you here, but it is hard to square
| this with people who are also saying not to worry about AI
| displacement because there's limitless demand for software.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > it is hard to square this with people who are also
| saying not to worry about AI displacement because there's
| limitless demand for software.
|
| Well, that's easy to square: the idea that there is
| limitless demand for software is nonsense. Pure fiction
| overgard wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the people that got laid
| off were the ones that deserved it. Obviously politics,
| situational factors (wanting people back in the office), etc
| are a huge part (I myself am recently laid off and I don't
| think I deserved it!) What I was trying to drive at is
| developers have lost a lot of leverage and negotiation
| because there are too many people fighting for too few roles.
| Also I can't help but wonder if people have lost trust in
| developers because of the dilution of talent.
|
| That being said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that
| creating a massive influx of new developers without jobs that
| provided good mentorship (most jobs are awful at mentoring
| junior developers) is going to have huge consequences that
| we're now dealing with. I think the "learn to code" thing was
| a massive mistake. Encourage the people that want to, sure,
| but don't try to pull people in that are only marginally
| interested in a paycheck.
| stego-tech wrote:
| It's bad, yeah, especially for folks on the job market (it me).
| Some statistics first, from my own job search logs:
|
| * Since I hit the pavement in late January, I've tracked 100 job
| applications
|
| * Of those 100, only 7 have turned into interviews
|
| * Of those seven interviews, 3 turned into second-round
|
| * ~50% of all applications never receive a response
|
| * ~20% of rejections for any reason have the role re-posted
| within thirty days
|
| * For rejections stating "higher quality applications", that role
| re-post rate is closer to 50%, suggesting ATS systems culling too
| many candidates to fill the role or ghost jobs
|
| * Despite my state requiring salary requirements be posted in the
| JD, only around 70% of postings included what could be considered
| "reasonable" estimates
|
| * 100% of interviews have been for local employers requiring 3+
| days on-site
|
| And now, some observations not captured in the data directly:
|
| * Employers are trying to "under-title" folks; Senior roles want
| to hire former Leads, and Management roles want next-rung
| candidates for prior-rung titles (e.g., hiring what should be a
| Senior Manager for an entry-level management role)
|
| * Employers are also trying to underpay workers by a large
| margin, especially folks coming from Big Tech ("We don't pay
| {SV_FIRM} money" while offering salaries below the local 50%ile
| for the role in question); they're blaming a "surplus of tech
| talent", which may or may not be true (I lack the data to prove
| either way)
|
| * The two above points are in conflict, because rent/mortgages in
| these areas are so steep that even with major lifestyle changes
| to cut costs, these wages simply aren't survivable for local
| areas
|
| * "Credential Creep" is back in force: Architect certs required
| for mid-level engineering roles, buzzwords prioritized over
| outcomes and achievements, and AI ATS' rejecting qualified
| candidates flat-out
|
| * College Degrees are relevant again as a means of pruning
| candidates; fifteen years of experience is irrelevant for a lot
| of Senior roles if you don't have a BS or Masters, which wasn't
| the case even last year
|
| * Industry-specialization is also back, even for roles where
| industry specialization is generally moot or easily picked up
| (e.g., Corporate IT stuff)
|
| * A significant number (~75-85%) of roles explicitly reject H1B
| and other visa workers; not a problem for me (Citizen), but this
| is the worst possible time to be job hunting on a non-LPR status.
|
| And now, my personal experiences:
|
| * There's a very strong attitude of "you're being entitled" when
| it comes down to salary negotiations, even when you show your
| math for essentials - and share prior compensation history
| reflecting the cuts you've already taken since your Big Tech
| salary to "rejoin the market".
|
| * Employers generally have no clue how expensive it is to live
| right now, especially in major metros; one such employer who
| balked at my comp floor genuinely had no clue the _median rent_
| was three and a half grand per month.
|
| * Compensation seems particularly tilted towards working couples;
| as in, neither alone makes enough to survive, and employers
| assume you have a FTE spouse to shore up finances so they can pay
| you less
|
| * Employers also don't seem to know what they actually want or
| need. Specialist Engineer roles (e.g., Cloud Engineer, Network
| Engineer) cite required experience and expertise with the full
| technology stack inclusive of ERP and HRIS nowadays, which is
| something that used to be handled by a specific team for the
| entirety of my career thus far, even in smaller (<1k) orgs. I've
| also seen Architect roles demanding Help Desk work, and Software
| Dev roles who want experience supporting Entra.
|
| * AI does _not_ feature in as many interviews as I would 've
| thought. The few times it does, it's very much a "that's nice,
| but we're taking a wait and see approach" attitude
|
| * There's a lot of eagerness to hire domestically again (I think
| even middle managers were tired of outsourcing or offshoring),
| but a lack of budget to afford domestic talent.
|
| Ultimately, it's pretty bleak - but still better than last year,
| at least thus far (~300 apps, ~2 companies interviewed with, 1
| offer in 2025). AI isn't the value-add I was sold on by career
| counselors and LinkedIn ( _huge surprise there_ /s), and there
| definitely seems to be the appetite to hire, but not the realism
| of what to expect or how much it'll cost. I very much view it as
| a sort of tug-of-war at the moment, between workers who did
| everything expected of them and have cut to the bone already, and
| employers who somehow think they can pay <50%ile wages while
| mandating 4-days on-site in a major metro for experienced talent.
|
| If you're an employer looking to hire, I have some advice:
|
| * Ditch the AI ATS or AI summaries and _read resumes_ ,
| especially if you're requiring local presence.
|
| * Understand what you need (and what that will cost you) before
| posting the JD
|
| * Understand the local cost of living, and budget accordingly
| (i.e., if your Senior Engineer can't afford median rent, they're
| not going to stick around when things improve)
|
| * If you value loyalty and aren't paying TC to afford a median
| home in the area, then you don't actually value loyalty
|
| * Don't pigeonhole yourself with hyper-specific candidates as a
| means of winnowing down applicants; that level of specialization
| will flee the second they get a better offer elsewhere
|
| * Post salaries in the JD, required or not, so you don't waste
| your time with candidates whose expectations don't align with
| your budget
| jdwithit wrote:
| I'm also looking right now and a lot of that resonates with me.
| The posted salary ranges are often a complete joke as you
| noted. "The pay band for this role is $80,000-250,000
| commensurate with experience and interview performance". Yeah
| OK buddy are you seriously trying to tell me you have multiple
| people with the exact same job title making salaries over $100k
| apart? Feels like they're just giving the finger to lawmakers
| through malicious compliance.
|
| I've also run into the industry specialization roadblock a few
| times. Got turned down by a fintech company after multiple
| interview rounds because I did not have banking industry
| experience, for example. I guess I get it as a tie breaker but
| I've operated in a PCI compliant environment for years, seems
| like that should count as relevant experience? Also if you're
| going to dumpster candidates without banking experience why on
| earth did you waste several hours of your staff's time giving
| me tech screens?
|
| Job hunting has always sucked. But it feels particularly busted
| at the moment. The process is miserable. If you've coasted to
| an easy hiring in the last year, you're either amazing (and
| hats off to you!) or got very lucky.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The salary ranges are complete jokes on either end: they're
| either malicious compliance like you pointed out, or
| completely out of touch with reality.
|
| My example of that was when I applied for an Architect role
| (as I'm at that point in my upward career trajectory), and
| they asked me instead to apply for a Senior Admin role as
| they "didn't know what the Architect role would look like
| yet". I did, I included my comp target, and got the hard sell
| on why I was being unreasonable and should take
| {2016_PAY}/{$100k below SV_FIRM} instead. I mentioned my
| absolute floor was {$75k lower than SV_FIRM}/{$25k lower than
| my target}, ran him through my math (median rent for the
| area, on-site expectations, commute costs, food costs,
| insurance costs, 50/30/20 budgeting, etc), and pointed out
| that floor would only cover needs (50) and savings (20) with
| no fun money (30) whatsoever. Ultimately I withdrew my name
| entirely because the guy just wouldn't listen to me, and all
| but demanded I be grateful for his number in the current
| economy.
|
| I suspect something similar is going on with another company
| that's seemingly ghosted me, after I stated I was targeting
| their upper boundary of their listed comp range - still $85k
| below {SV_FIRM}, but with growth potential towards Architect
| and Director-type IT roles. Even when I'm fine eating huge
| pay cuts for work (and falling off the homebuying ladder, as
| not even {SV_FIRM} paid house-purchasing money), the
| employers out there really do want perfect diamonds for the
| cost of Halloween Trinkets.
|
| > Also if you're going to dumpster candidates without banking
| experience why on earth did you waste several hours of your
| staff's time giving me tech screens?
|
| This is also something that's grinding my gears. Had an
| investment firm put me through six technical interviews with
| glowing recommendations every step of the way only for the
| seventh round (CIO) to put the kibosh on it without a reason
| and after showing up unprepared and disinterested. Also had
| companies say I lack financial discipline experience when
| I've literally built models, showback systems, budget
| forecasts, and cemented six-figures of monthly savings in
| prior roles; same with companies saying I "lack compliance
| experience" despite calling out running infra in highly
| regulated environments, performing compliance audits for
| clients, and uplifting infra to satisfy compliance regimes.
|
| If I didn't know better, I'd say the entire HR process is
| just feeding shit into chatbots and letting them make hiring
| decisions. Nobody seems to actually care about the humans
| involved or the wider systems at play.
|
| It's immensely frustrating, but I can only keep on keeping on
| until something changes. I don't need to win every
| application, I just need to win _one_.
| kojeovo wrote:
| Seems like a tough market for those nuking their prod db with an
| ai agent
| frankbreetz wrote:
| Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems
| to be doing better then most sectors...
|
| "Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew
| month over month and year over year
|
| "Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion
| picture and sound recording industries"
|
| "Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web
| hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search
| portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is
| the only area to grow under information.
|
| This seems different then what the post says. They also said
| worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine
| the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost
| was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I
| started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree.
|
| I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are
| the using different BLS data then me?
|
| https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
| jimbokun wrote:
| "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information
| service"
|
| It's a weird employment category that includes both Google SWEs
| and your local librarian.
| lich_king wrote:
| This is the plot of the first derivative of employment. It shows
| a comparatively small but lasting dip after a massive, prolonged,
| and unwarranted boom between late 2020 and early 2024 that
| coincided with the dying breaths of ZIRP.
|
| I have no idea about what's coming, but I wouldn't pay a whole
| lot of attention to people who are looking at the plots of a
| highly volatile and cyclic industry that goes through constant
| boom-and-bust cycles, and are trying to position this as proof
| that AI is or isn't having an impact.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well I pay a lot of attention to the fact that there's much
| much tepid responses to applications I put out. Something
| something irrational markets.
| jlhawn wrote:
| Here's the same post on Bluesky for those who prefer that
| platform:
| https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3mg...
| schmichael wrote:
| Thank you! Could HN switch the links? bsky doesn't require a
| login to view replies. bsky is just a superior viewing
| experience.
| boca_honey wrote:
| I don't know if switching from a extreme partisan site to
| another extreme partisan site is the right solution just
| because of the need of login credentials. In any case,
| Twitter/X has been online almost 20 years. Bluesky still has
| to prove its staying power long term.
| dasil003 wrote:
| The justification of better UX seems reasonable regardless
| of politics. I'd prefer not to have to log in on any HN
| link, and I also can't say I want to optimize for link
| health as this is super topical and I will never want to
| look at it again after this discussion is over.
| greggoB wrote:
| This reply makes _zero_ sense to me.
|
| 1. You start off by labelling both platforms as "extreme
| partisan" - care to explain? 2. This charge is used to
| minimize the original complaint (login requirement), which
| is a hard blocker to view replies, i.e. additional context.
| 3. This all then somehow morphs into a point about platform
| longevity?
|
| How exactly does any of this address parent commenter's
| statement that "bsky is just a superior viewing
| experience."?
| boca_honey wrote:
| You're right, I went off-topic for no good reason. I was
| just reacting to my personal bias against Bluesky and its
| stereotypical user and content.
|
| Too late to edit / delete my post but I retract it and
| apologize.
| squidlogic wrote:
| If viewing replies is the goal, it looks like bsky has 2
| replies and the twitter link has 45 replies. Do with that
| information what you will.
| globular-toast wrote:
| What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd
| make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real,
| grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Games are a weird sector. Long term I simply want to go it
| indie. Even if I doesn't pan out, it's some kind of passive
| income and I have something to show to that is fully "mine" (so
| no ambiguity about how much I really contributed at BigCo.).
|
| Short term I'm freelancing and doing whatever else I can find
| to get by. Hoping for one more full time role before I start my
| self published ventures.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Why don't those developers just learn to mine coal?
| beastman82 wrote:
| I think that's a very good plan FWIW. I'm going to consider
| cabinetry which I predict will be a semi-retirement in terms of
| income
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| That's funny, I'm also thinking about Electrician.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Repairing classic cars.
|
| We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with
| 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the
| messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up
| forever.
|
| They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an
| engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that
| needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel
| until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding,
| drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering,
| cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating
| lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year
| specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all
| wrong and doing it again.
|
| Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like
| to take on a classic car project.
| stokemoney wrote:
| There are different types of engineers, those who don't engage
| with product and have soft skills will feel the burn
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| A look at the number of replies to "Who's Hiring?" each month
| over the past year or so compared to prior years made it loud and
| clear. Traditional tech has been in a recession for a couple of
| years, at least!
| mahatofu wrote:
| It's also worth noting that the economy and job market as a
| whole is in a recession.
| rsanek wrote:
| Indeed, things really changed in late 2022 / early 2023.
| https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/
| mlsu wrote:
| I just can't get over how short and intense the period between
| 2021 and 2023 was. There was SO much hype, such stupendous
| hiring, in such a compressed timeframe. Within the span of like 9
| weeks it went from full steam ahead to completely seized.
|
| At the same time, the economy at large didn't seem to change very
| much.
|
| Why did this happen?
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Near zero interest rates + COVID remote work + PPP loans =
| Booming economy
|
| What is happening now is the unwinding of the above. Now its:
|
| Higher rates + AI + too many SWEs (bootcamps and over-hiring) =
| Busting economy
|
| I think what we are in right now is more the norm and the post
| covid boom was an exception.
| kccqzy wrote:
| And also the section 174 change too, which suddenly increased
| the tax bill for any companies doing software development.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| That has been undone now, though.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I have been getting automated emails from a slew of different
| recruiters now. Usually one or two per day. I believe they are
| LLM generated. However, I usually don't respond.
|
| The next step is for me to respond with an LLM. Maybe if my LLM
| is good enough it'll convince their LLM to skip the interview and
| just offer me a job.
| mariopt wrote:
| For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited
| having 14 years of experience and being up to date with
| development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc.
|
| I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state,
| I think we are in a deep silent crisis
| markus_zhang wrote:
| IMO it's just depression for tech. Back then 33% of total
| employment got gutted, which is probably better than tech today
| or in a few years when big techs start AI gut.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Wow, that stinks. Are you just doing freelance in the meantime?
| ptrrrrrrppr wrote:
| Sometimes it looks like the longer you're looking for a job,
| the harder it gets for some reason. That's unintuitive for me,
| as you should be getting more confident in interviews etc
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Companies take your unemployment length as a negative signal
|
| "He's been unemployed for 13 months? Why doesn't anyone want
| to hire him? Must be something wrong with him"
| dimgl wrote:
| Are you based in the U.S.?
| mariopt wrote:
| EU/UK
| eitally wrote:
| Have you considered roles in the EU countries that have
| been going gangbusters for US offshoring (Poland, Bulgaria,
| Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia)?
| mariopt wrote:
| The market in the EU is strange, it doesn't matter where
| you live. Every role is being advertised as a remote one,
| over 200+ applicants and it's virtually impossible to get
| noticed.
|
| I blame this on people spamming fake AI CVs 24/7, no one
| is going to review hundreds of CVs.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| To some recruiters, there's this sweet spot between 5 and 10
| years experience where the applicant good / independent enough
| to hit the ground running, not too expensive, and still young
| enough to put up with company bullshit.
| konschubert wrote:
| I don't know. The company I work at is inviting candidates for
| interviews, and we have to make compromises because we can't
| get the exact profiles we are looking for. Something about your
| comment does not add up to me.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Locality. People want to work close to where they live and
| not all places are bustling with all kind of activity. I
| suspect you're hybrid or on site only, right?
| luckylion wrote:
| not GP, but we're hybrid but remote-first and 80% is remote
| and we have the same experience. Getting juniors is easy,
| getting seniors+ is very difficult.
| windowshopping wrote:
| I've been able to get something like 25 interviews in 2 months
| despite having long gaps on my resume and nothing especially
| impressive to my name. So I suspect you might be going about
| this wrong. I haven't gotten an offer yet, that's another
| story, but getting the interviews hasn't been hard. Applying in
| NYC/SF, senior-only.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| So what do you attribute your success in getting interviews
| to? What are you doing right, or better than other people?
| sidereal1 wrote:
| I think another big change is the offer rate. I've had plenty
| of interviews in recent years but almost no offers.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I don't think it's very silent?
|
| Maybe people just have their fingers in their ears but this has
| been a problem for years now
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah but like... area under the curve. All of those jobs and more
| were added _very_ recently, 2020-2022. It 's a major retreat from
| that growth, but the trend since, say, 2008 or 2010 or 2018 is
| still positive growth. 2020-2022 was just a _huge_ shift due to a
| very weird Covid /ZIRP market.
| zadikian wrote:
| Remember it's the first derivative. The title and chart suggested
| at first that there are fewer tech jobs vs the start, but really
| it must be way more.
|
| I still kinda want to see this going back to 2000. That must be
| the biggest tech crash by far. 2008 and 2020 were overall market
| crashes, but tech was booming.
| jmward01 wrote:
| A key thing in this graph is that it doesn't seem to correlate to
| the rise of code assistants. That is a (relatively) recent last
| year thing from my point of view. Yes, they were there before,
| but they hadn't really hit in a way that I think hiring decisions
| had shifted because of them. This is just tech laying off, not AI
| taking jobs.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Funny how the dip started years before we had meaningful AI
| codegen.
|
| Could speculate this is likely to be a shift in what gets funded
| and invested in.
| islandfox100 wrote:
| That's because it's a macroecon dip, and the effect of AI on
| hiring has been greatly pre-empted as excuse
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Yes, it's not that the company is doing badly, we're right
| sizing because of AI!
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| This industry is a race to the bottom and long overdue for a
| massive salary reset. There is no society on Earth where someone
| who codes JavaScript (poorly) should make more money than, say, a
| doctor. Yet here we are.
| honeycrispy wrote:
| A lot of doctors are just pill prescribers. I can't tell you
| how many times I've been to useless doctors that don't help and
| give you a big fat bill on the way out the door.
| caminante wrote:
| How much do you think doctors make?
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| Some make less than new grads at AMZN with 0 YOE.
| caminante wrote:
| _> Some_
|
| You're really playing loose with the Venn diagram here.
|
| Only "some" Amazon SWEs would "code JavaScript (poorly)."
| tokyobreakfast wrote:
| Yet they're all expendable because their chosen skills
| are not essential for society to survive. They could all
| disappear tomorrow and the web and everything around it
| would move on.
| gzoo wrote:
| What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete
| with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what
| will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that
| can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With
| that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER
| will be coding everything for their company lol.
| hackmack10 wrote:
| Software will become cheaper to write and more software will be
| written. A senior will always outcompete a junior when it comes
| to logical thinking and a true understanding of IT. A
| programmer will always outcompete a non-programmer when it
| comes to using AI tools.
|
| Bottom line, if programmers are fucked, so is just about anyone
| else.
| byronic wrote:
| yes, ha ha ha... yes
| cmiles8 wrote:
| Not dismissing that it's a tough market for some but folks also
| need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline
| following a massive expansion.
|
| The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of
| companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and
| they're correcting for that.
| raincole wrote:
| Things look crazy around 2022 in hindsight.
| kerbs wrote:
| Looked crazy at the time too!
| dmix wrote:
| This has been pointed on HN about 50 times but the headlines
| keep coming.
| righthand wrote:
| Did we ever leave the 2020 recession?
| blobbers wrote:
| If anyone saw that LinkedIn post about someone at Block resigning
| guilt of being offered a raise and retention after the layoffs,
| I'd say that is a signal that tech is heading down.
|
| Most people would be thankful to have a secure well paying job in
| the post AI blow off; increasingly it's going to harder to
| differentiate yourself against anyone else using AI. That we have
| people still in the thick of AI that don't understand that is a
| strong signal that AI boom is still going to come take some jobs.
|
| If you're in a software related role and AI isn't making you more
| productive, it's on YOU as a dev to figure things out quickly.
|
| AI is coming for your job so you can either be an AI manager, or
| you can get managed out for AI.
|
| caveat: This is my take as someone who used to do a lot of hand
| coding, and now regularly has a small team of AI doing anything
| that would have normally required mostly brute coding strength
| but not too much thought; that's facet'ed plots, refactoring
| libraries, improving pipeline efficiency, adding parallelization
| where possible, building presentations, adding test coverage.
| ares623 wrote:
| mmhmm. That's a lot of me me me. Are you reviewing others' work
| who produce the same output as you?
| thcipriani wrote:
| This has a misleading title.
|
| This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month
| change is worse than 2020.
|
| But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020
| (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at
| the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even.
|
| Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for
| what this chart shows.
|
| (Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101
| (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing
| Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) +
| CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find
| other ones quickly and gave up :))
| gusfoo wrote:
| Nota bene: these aren't "tech" jobs, these are "laptop job" over-
| hired email people. Not real people.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I've had my suspicions - this seems way worse than anything I
| remember before. I think right now is worse than the 2000 dot-com
| bust, too.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I've been lucky enough to stay employed, but eating a massive pay
| cut hurts. I have no realistic hope of getting back to my peak
| salary anytime soon .
|
| Jobs are now significantly more demanding too, do more and make
| less.
| jrsj wrote:
| If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people
| might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry
| don't have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included.
|
| I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if
| that just gets pulled out from under me I've got absolutely
| nothing.
| colesantiago wrote:
| And AI will just shut out people just starting their careers
|
| Too bad I guess.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I know a very senior engineer who took their life the day after
| Trump was elected. He was unemployed for a while.
|
| While I think a lot more was going on with him than being
| unemployed, I'm convinced AI hitting the scene had a bit to do
| with it. They were an older dev 50+.
| eunos wrote:
| After reading many anecdotes of top school alumni struggling to
| even secure some interviews, I'm really curious about what
| opportunities available for median American freshgrads e.g. 3.0
| GPA from T100-200 Unis.
| jokoon wrote:
| People constantly tell me "oh you're a dev it's easy to find
| work"
|
| I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience,
| and no degree in France. 3 years without a job.
|
| I yearn for a new pandemic.
|
| Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other
| things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I
| have good savings.
|
| Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If
| there is a job offer and recruiters are calling me, I answer and
| I accept.
|
| But I'm not applying to all positions I can see and I won't run
| after them.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| I've never really found there to be all that much of a market
| for specifically c++ developers. If you do decide to look for
| work more seriously I wouldn't be too hung up on language, if
| you can code in one you can pretty much code in all of them,
| and I've never hired a developer for specific language skill
| outside of a few rare cases it's something really specific we
| are trying to fix (e.g erlang or something), even then it
| wouldn't be a complete showstopper.
|
| YMMV but that's coming from a guy who writes in at least 3
| languages at current $dayjob.
| hshsiejensjsj wrote:
| > Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other
| things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous
|
| Oh to be French
| spacebuffer wrote:
| I am in my 20s. At the moment I've got a part time job, but I am
| preparing myself for the worse. In the next few years I am
| planning to volunteer at farms through workaway. Maybe one day I
| can become self sustainable,tech and nutrition wise
|
| also getting into plumbing, curious to see what others are doing
| in this regard.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Don't worry, it will go up again! Just keep at it!
| dasil003 wrote:
| The graph does a really poor job supporting the conclusion, most
| obviously because it only goes back to 2016, the peak of boom
| times, it doesn't go anywhere near 2008 so why does the caption
| talk about that? Just this same graph alone going back to 1990
| would be super eye-opening.
|
| The other thing is it's showing first derivative, not absolute
| numbers, which is a very questionable way to derive "worst
| employment situation" in a field that has been on world-changing
| boom over the last 50 years.
| stemlord wrote:
| Theres a zoomed out version immediately below that tweet.
|
| https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/2029916369056079975
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Good. Too many useless people got into tech because any monkey
| can memorize LC and outperform the monkey who also memorized LC
| and now is part of the interview panel so they can show off to
| the other monkeys that he deserves more bananas.
|
| Tech was and still is the easiest way to make 200k base salary,
| before even thinking about the stock.
|
| We need a reset and anyone who can't make it can go fill the jobs
| we need in construction, education, etc.
| post_break wrote:
| My friend who has worked for some big name companies is
| absolutely struggling to find work. So many interviews, 3rd, 4th
| round, and then they go with another candidate, or I can only
| assume someone internally and the listing never existed. It's
| killing me watching him struggle to find work.
| asah wrote:
| That's cute. 2001 and 1993 have entered the chat.
| agentultra wrote:
| Good to know it's not just me. Sheesh. Are there signs that it'll
| bounce back again?
|
| I've been looking for work for nearly seven months. I can write
| low level systems code in C and C++ to web applications in Python
| and compilers in Haskell. I have tons of industry experience.
|
| Yet most places I apply to ghost me or follow up a month later
| that the position has been filled.
|
| Companies that have been lying off people claim they are seeing
| record profits.
|
| It seems like we went from a relatively stable growth to just
| chaos.
| Frogeman wrote:
| As an employer it's very very hard to actually discern who did CS
| as a prestige degree vs people who are actually into it.
|
| Signal v noise ratio so much higher in hardware, nobody
| performatively studies mechanical engineering to make $60k in
| ohio.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| I can't even get an interview.
|
| The most recent one few months ago and I passed it with great
| score, top 5% of candidates etc but that wasn't enough to get me
| hired.
|
| Terrible market, i'm at my wits end to even how to approach this.
| lgleason wrote:
| So much for that golden age.
| joelhammer wrote:
| Wait until the fallout of all that AI code hitting produciton
| joelhammer wrote:
| Wait until all that AI generated code hits production on safety
| devices and they need to explain it in court.
| benbojangles wrote:
| I don't really agree, i am making more money now than ever.
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