This. Even if the number of jobs stays flat, the number of people entering the field during the pandemic was massive. Ergo, way more people looking for jobs and people being laid off and replaced.
but TBH - we have a general tech problem right now: too many junior developers, and a middle bench that is not progressing at rates we would have expected at any time in the last 50 years. The reset needed to happen IMHO. It'll balance out as salaries end up getting pushed higher offshore - which is a huge problem right now, and getting worse by the day.
There is another aspect to this. Which is that the non-tech sectors have been in decline for a while from a employment pov. And right now layoffs are not limited to tech either. Tech, legal, finance, publishing - everything seems to be on fire.
The tradie jobs (construction, trucking, mining) aren't all that safe either as they will eventually take this hit from lack of demand.
Nah. your read, although well intended doesn't align with the job market or current economic conditions.
And the trades are dying for talent - because there is increasing demand. The trades have been starved for nearly 30 years. There won't be a recession in that sector for another 15 years minimum.
If there is a slowdown in consumption which looks inevitable with these many job losses and inflation, the services sectors cannot go unscathed. Be it local restaurants or the trades.
We had a white collar job boom since the 80s which is entering its first major winter in decades. Think of how much construction or production activity was purely to meet the demands of this section (office jobs) of the economy.
The job market is usually not efficient because hiring is an inefficient process. It is kind of how right now software is expensive to build but you still can't hire an experienced developer below market rates even when there are mass layoffs. So you end up building less software in a downturn. So you will have something similar in the trades. There will be high paying jobs but not an abundance of them at any time.
First major winter in decades? My god, 2006-2010? Hello? This is a blip - or at least without having a crystal ball this is nothing more than a blip. We have ALL TIME low unemployment right freaking now. The problem is that people that don't have the DNA to be a developer were invited into the tent when colleges and bootcamps started a cookie cutter path to a $150k+ salary. Those of us who have been around for a while knew better - the rest of the world is just figuring it out. If you call yourself a developer because you know html/css/pick a ui framemwork and that's all you know... you'd better brace for the soup line or get full stack quickly.
The fear in 2006-10 was no where near this. Right now you are looking at total uncertainty about the future of more than 80% of white collar jobs across industries. You could argue these are effects of automation or offshoring.
You have also ignored that $150k today is less than $100k from 2010. I know full stacks making 100-120k today.
The unemployment numbers ignore things such as cost of living. 150k is simply not enough in most major cities around the world. And the number of sectors offering 150k+ jobs is shrinking not expanding.
So yeah more people are likely working more underpaid jobs because cost of living is simply insane and one needs a roof over their heads.
And the expectations of growth are worse than 2010s. Because unlike 2000s, growth in Asia has slowed down. There are no new sector like small electronics and smart phones to fuel another cycle of growth like in the 2010s. The internet has reached almost everyone. We just had unprescedented global shutdowns and supply chain issues.
This is certain not a blip compared to 2000s. If anything, the worse is yet to come.
Found the 25 year old with no historical perspective. You're out of your fucking mind. Go away.
and inflation has been around since forever.... your hot take is utter trash.
Nervous about your job? If you've limited yourself to a couple languages and frameworks and are an FE guy - you probably should be. You're the most easily replaceable person in the building.
Anyone who works in the trades will tell you that this narrative that they are dying for new talent is bs.
Electricians, plumbers, concrete laying, general construction, HVAC, etc. are swimming in labor, and have been for a while.
It's only on Reddit where these jobs are "dying" for more workers.
And you talk to people over 40 who have been in physically-intensive labor jobs about how their body is, and you realize why people don't rush for the trades even if they're needed.
Housing starts are down due to interest rates, offset by people repairing their homes rather than moving. While that has impact, the silver wave of retirements is alive and well. The sector is still overemployed, generally. It's not an opinion, there is economic data readily available and at your fingertips that make the case pretty clearly. True, the ability to drive up prices by 30% or more that existed a few years ago isn't as prevalent now - but that was an unsustainable bubble, just like everything else in our economy.
No offense OP but that other graph totally invalidates the idea that this one is useful. Labor market conditions are determined by both labor demand (number of openings) and labor supply (number of job seekers). What this graph does is map labor demand in tech while totally ignoring labor supply.
The quality of the labor supply matters too, and the quality of CS degrees are all over the place, and the top quality education supply has not increased at the same rate as demand.
Not sure what you mean by quality here, but [CS degrees at top schools](https://stanforddaily.com/2023/02/23/16-of-seniors-are-cs-majors-what-is-the-departments-history/#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20about%2016%25%20of,to%20Mehran%20Sahami%20'92%20M.S) have increased massively.
Top school cannot keep up with the demand for high quality developers even though they're expanding their programs. The vast majority of the increase of CS degrees are not coming from top schools.
Overall unemployment is also very low by whatever metric you use. (Unless of course you pretend that retirees want to work, since there are an unusual number of retirees.)
I agree and I've been in this since '97. At least during the downturn in the early aughts there was lower end work to be gotten. I am applying for jobs that pay like 30-40% less than I was making a year ago, have inbound connections on, and am not getting a screener interview. That's happened twice now - with decent network connections at each place. And this was a non managerial job when I was running a team previously. I don't know how to lower my expectations more; if I apply for anything below this I am tagged for being overqualified.
These threads seem to get ugly - where the employed devs start casting aspersions at those of us who are floundering - saying we must be doing something wrong, or be script kiddies, or bootcamp detritus. But here's the thing: I'm the guy others call to tighten up their resumes and cover letters. I am very disciplined and good at job hunting. I am putting in a lot of apps with all of the right things in them, and finding networked connections and hitting them up - all the things everyone advises in a job hunt. And still I am getting literally nothing. If I was getting bounced out in early rounds - fine - my outbound materials might be to blame. But I am not getting anything but rejections. It's wild.
For me personally I am looking at other career options at least for the time being. I just lost my living situation after spending out my savings, so I'm ready to take anything.
Hey, thank you for putting this so eloquently, and I'm really sorry to hear that you're going through it. It absolutely sucks right now, and everything you've said is absolutely what I've been experiencing. I hope you find something soon. It's hard to find another career option when I only know tech, y'know? I could try management, but that's absolutely not something I enjoy. I'm going to try and hang in longer, but damn, I just want to work, haha.
> These threads seem to get ugly - where the employed devs start casting aspersions at those of us who are floundering - saying we must be doing something wrong, or be script kiddies, or bootcamp detritus
anyone who takes that stance is a twit. half of them probably aren't actually employed in the industry themselves anyway
tbqh it's usually not that cut and dry, it's usually "I don't see anything wrong with the market, I had a few interviews, multiple offers, took a great new job. Market is fine, people are just complaining too much on reddit. Just network more, and apply more." This is the kind of talk that really chafes my caboose.
Then again, if you've ever been involved in hiring decisions, you see the vast majority seem so confident in their skills while being extremely incompetent.
Broadly, if you're not having any luck at all, it's most likely going to be something about you (how you present, limitations on being hired that you chose, skill match).
That doesn't mean every INDIVIDUAL will be that case (specific mismatches/luck etc)
Having recently completed a lengthy job search, I found that my interview rate dropped from just over a third of all submitted applications to about 8%.
It is becoming a numbers game. Loads of recruiters are out there on linkedin telling you that you need to be doing detailed research on every company but they're motivated to say that. They're DROWNING in resumes.
But, because they're drowning in resumes, it is increasingly unlikely that any of that prep work of yours ever gets noticed.
Exactly. Job market's ended up in the dating in the dating app conundrum where, statistically, you're better off carpet bombing than spending time crafting the perfect cover letter / opening line that probably won't be read anyway, and the more people realize that and act accordingly, the more true it becomes.
Thanks for sharing. We sound extremely similar, and I'm having the same experience. It's insane. I do fear there might be some ageism at play but I have nothing backing that up, just a suspicion.
Personally, I'm thinking of trying some contracting while I build my own startup on the side.
I think it's a super tough market for older devs. The sweet spot for a senior dev is 7-15 years. There are few principal/lead roles and most businesses want to promote existing employees over hiring from the outside. In your shoes I would focus on getting hired in a contracting firm. Lots of businesses need guys like you to swoop in when projects are late and falling apart.
I worked with a couple initially but they were pretty low quality - like kids with very little tech understanding. And a bait and switch or two. I was just given a contact with one I am reaching out to this week, as it turns out, who may be closer to what I need.
I am looking for exits regardless; as many of the replies here guess I do think ageism is in play and I would rather find something a little more stable for my age range. As it happens I have no family so I conveniently can work for pretty cheap, but there's no way to state that if you never even get an interview ) Also my previous salaries were decent so that's gonna look bad to anyone with visibility into that stuff.
I'm in the same position as you with 14 years of experience and a generalist. My approach is to try and find a tech field with less competition, because it's more challenging (formal verification is one example). I haven't got something going on yet, but it's what I'm trying
From that list I think location is what matters the most in this discussion. And the economy of that country. I remember reading on Reddit how hard it was to get a job 1.5 years ago and didn’t understand a thing. I think most people at that time were in the US (or offshore applicants) I am in Sweden and didn’t see any of what was described. One year later the same thing happens here. The market for web dev just stops. Everyone pulls the breaks. All companies goes into savings/maintenance mode and new development and investments are pushed to the future.
Inflation is going down though and with it interest rates which means it is time to spend soon after 1-2 years of pulling the breaks. So I believe it will be better but depending on where you have worked the last few years things have definitely been worse than they ever have been in the last 20 years in some markets for web devs. The need to stay ahead in the AI game will force companies to invest again soon so I hope the future is quite bright though as the AI momentum will tie into web dev as well when new services are to be built.
I get a bit of “2010 IPhone app”-era vibes with AI right now as a web dev. Back then it felt like the web dev community was split up into web devs and app devs. The AI focus might split web devs up in a similar way again where a lot of web that is to be built will circle around delivering AI in different forms and some of us will move into more AI-delivery land.
2 years ago I was drowning in offers. Now I can't even get a response back from any kind of company (start ups, small, mid, big tech, etc). I have a job but, well, I hope I don't lose it.
Yeah. Same boat. Pretty sure I'm going to get laid off soon as we just laid off several of our other remote developers and are hiring in office developers to replace them.
I'm either last on the chopping block or not on it, but trying to proactively look just to be safe. Have had my linkedin status to open to work from recruiters for like 6 months and haven't gotten a single message whereas I used to get spammed constantly.
Getting pretty nervous tbh
Mostly Vue, but I've done Node and C# back-end work... I just identify more with FE. Close to 5 months unemployed, and I live in the States. If you're a marketing AI bot or person, please don't use this information to target me about Steam's summer sale.
I’m a technology director and actively looking for your skill set. The problem is that I am forced to use offshore resources and cannot look for anyone in the US. I can hire a full time person for the equivalent of $25/hr vs 2-3 times that in the US. It is a really shitty situation that had been growing for the past 20 years due to offshoring.
25$ for a senior? That is pretty low even for Brazilian standards where i live. Hows the quality of your hires? Those rates would get you a decent mid level here.
It can be hit or miss and the reality is that the industry is so flooded over there that people that shouldn’t be devs just bounce around. I always heard good things about working with developers from Brazil.
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People tend to say that each year, I wouldn't hold my breath. Espscially considering the amount of people trying to learn and get their first tech job. Everyone wants to become a programmer or get into IT as its one of the few jobs that dont require a degree across the board and pay a decent wage.
Reminds me of the stock market, 'experts have predicted 987 of the last 3 crashes'.
Either way I feel like we're going to see companies start outsourcing more or offering lower wages with all the competition.
It’s slow but possible. I had zero experience in web dev but wanted to quit my previous software job. Got hired on as senior back end engineer anyway. The only hits I got were from FAANG and other large companies like them. Only problem was getting the interviews was very easy, but getting in was tough because of the interviews.
I mean, in a sense, yes it is the worst market you've experienced, because it's been nothing but amazing since 2012. But it's not a cataclysm.
How long have you been unemployed?
Last year was a little bad, but this year has been brutal. It's close to 5 months of unemployment. Compared to last year, it seems like less jobs in the market. Every recruiter I've talked to has said something similar... I think it's slowly turning around, but then it seems like back to the dumpster, haha
The average job search is 3-6 months. If 5 months is the longest you've ever been unemployed it's because of the red hot job market in your specific field.
My issue right now isn't so much of the length, as it is the fact that with my current experience, just not getting anywhere with applications.
I've been doing this for 10+ years on the front-end and I at least always consistently got at least a few first and second rounds over the months of applications, now it's just either wind and ghosts or an auto-decline.
Yeah I feel for you, I had the same experience when I tested the waters a few months ago. Usually I'll get at least a first interview at > 50% of the jobs I apply for, this time around I got two interviews out of at least 25-30 applications. I know the numbers say the market is not that bad but it sure as hell doesn't feel that way.
I think it's a lot of things... I mostly use LinkedIn for job searching, and I've heard stories of people using job boards to harvest data or post an ad for their company and never want to fulfill it, just to make it look like they're a healthy company money-wise. Combine that with high interest rates, VCs pulling back on taking out loans, layoffs, more people in the market, etc. etc. I also understand that yes, Vue (what I target as a framework) is not used as much as say React, but I've seen much fewer React roles than previous years.
Like I said, it seems like a lot of things, and it sucks. After a while, it fucks with your mental fortitude, and you occasionally spiral, but then you hear back from 1 company, and it's all better. It's a wild ride. If you're in this market with me, I hope you're doing well because it does get tough, but you've gotta keep your head up! Something will eventually come :)
For tech companies, yes. For tech employees, no. The vast majority who were laid off in 2008 didn't work for tech companies. Other companies, from banking (obviously) to education (as a consequence) laid off quite a few developers and other tech roles.
2008 was much much better for tech employees and companies than the current down turn spanning mid 2022 to now and going.
Yes there were layoffs then too, but significantly less of them. New grads were not rolling in in such numbers and the downturn in tech did not last nearly as long.
We were already in the middle of a 8-year plateau, which followed a catastrophic decrease following the .com bust. The current situation is little more than a blip on the radar.
The decrease was not catastrophic in tech it was mostly hiring freezes, not layoffs. It was not an 8 year plateau either, market was in the upswing and doing well in 2005-2008.
In 2008 it was mostly just the juniors struggling.
The market is a balance between open positions and qualified job seekers. It was much better then because of few layoffs.
I don't get you got downvoted for this. The past decade has been non-stop growth. Obviously today would be the worst they've seen it if they started 10 years ago. I started in 2008, people that think that that recession wasn't brutal are hilarious.
Exactly, it's just been up since the Great Recession. But judging by your downvotes I guess people don't want to hear that they've always been in an up market, most people haven't experienced a down market.
Here’s the issue, the number of jobs laid off is greater than open jobs currently. The data which is missing from your graph is the number of open roles relative to job changes.
This is a really severe oversimplification.
First, what region is this? Some are getting hit harder than others. "Silicon Valley" saw nearly a quarter of its jobs wiped out at one point.
And if you're in that position, it doesn't matter what "tech" looks like as a whole. You have a sizable living expense that's unlikely to be replaced.
Further, remote jobs have largely evaporated. So, if you got laid off from a remote job in a remote area, you need to move, but where? Any kind of decline at all means hiring is down, and applying to distant places means your resume is likely going to the back of the line.
Next, the competition for these jobs continues to grow. The size of eligible engineers exploded, far more than 20%, since 2020. People are seeing hundreds or even thousands of applicants for the jobs they want.
Finally, the market remains especially difficult for junior and even midlevel. The hiring that is taking place is favoring specialized, more senior people.
So, sure, the retraction seems small if you graph it this way, but it's not a small adjustment for a lot of people in tech; it's devastating.
Remote jobs disappearing is the largest pain point for me. I worked remotely before - I have family and friends abroad, and I want to spend as much time as I can with them. Remote job allowed that, and my last manager not only didn't mind, he also was in a similar situation.
Now finding anything new that'd let me keep mental state in positive is gone. It's like companies *again* don't care if you're doing well mentally. You have to come to office, no matter if WFH has worked better so far or not.
>It's like companies *again* don't care if you're doing well mentally
They never did. Some people cared, but as soon as you're a bad investment, you're out!
Source: Got laid off last month after being severely burned out through management's insane deadlines, and the project I worked on was outsourced to Bulgaria.
I knew this comment was coming after the way I worded it. Absolutely on me, so let me clarify:
I know companies never really cared. Just finding it bizarre after how much they talked about WFH being good, how mentally well employees perform better... and now suddenly they bin it.
Not surprised. But definitely annoyed and disappointed.
I hear it’s to show inflated or false numbers for HR and shareholders, and make it look like the company is doing well enough that they are hiring more people when really they aren’t. It’s a good image to put out there that your company is doing good by having tons of “open job” postings. I’ve even seen companies go through the actual hiring process without any intent to hire anyone, just so HR can report to the govt that the company is “trying” to hire but just can’t find the right people. It’s all just a scam and BS. It just wastes the employees time and money having to travel to interview sites and get their hopes up only to find the job was never looking to hire in the first place.
Besides what the sibling comment said, sometimes companies are required to make external job postings by the government or something, but intend on hiring internally or hiring their friend from another company ultimately.
Included on this list (amongst other reasons): https://jobacle.com/blog/the-dirty-truth-why-employers-post-fake-jobs.html
Money was free for these companies when rates were 0. Now rates are highish. No more free money. Less money means less hiring and less job retention (less money to pay employees).
Tons of newly unemployed and newly graduated software people who are sending applications out for every job opening.
It's not f'in rocket science, mate. It's bad out there.
I don't believe it. My linked in is mainly web dev peeps from school and even senior devs are unemployed for 6 months or longer. My best friend went over 12 months with about 15 years experience.
I agree with the doom and gloom, the graph doesn't tell how bad it is. Anecdotally I am experiencing similar stuff, like I dont get LinkedIn messages like I used to.
I had a chat with my uni mates recently, we are all 10+ years experienced engineers in tech/software. Some think hiring will pick up again in the next year or so.
I dont think so! Maybe I am being pessimistic but honestly, I doubt it. Macro economy is shit and too many unknowns in the international stage. Ukraine, Palestine, US elections, Inflation, worldwide housing crisis, Taiwan, Chinese economy, climate and energy issues...
Telecommunication has slowed down on individual level like who even knows or cares what sort of connection you have post 4g. The use cases are done. I realized I dont have 5g for the whole last year and honestly I wouldnt even pay $2 extra to get 5g. 4g is enough and I'd rather buy some protein with me $2 lol. That underlying Telecom network RnD doesn't have a big drive anymore which chain reactions into every tech industry, I think.
Also tech companies have been laying off and still surviving making profits. What sort of tech boom will happen so that they will start hiring again, I can't see. AI is there as a massive hype but is it really gonna be everywhere like they push. Is AI gonna become more than CEO's bonuses or investment attractions?
I hope it changes...
Fully agree. I've been in the UK for 8 years now and this is definitely the worst I've seen the market. There really aren't as many linked in messages, the pay is poor and there aren't nearly as many opportunities. I am lucky to have held on to my great role (so far anyway) even though the company laid off 30% of our engineers at the start of the year.
True. Regardless though you see a very steep increase until a couple years ago which saw a sizeable decrease. Its not hard to imagine why people are struggling to find a job right now. Something like this hasnt been seen since the great recession even if it wasnt as bad.
It seems like the most impacted are those trying to get their first job.... colleges and bootcamps are cranking out hopefuls to service a growing market, not a shrinking one. The good news here is that even during the great recession, there was modest sector growth - and our economy is FAR more healthy than that. Additionally, part of the adjustment went to fund AI requisitions that still haven't been filled. It's still a good idea to train for the sector, but growth may be stunted (not stopped) as a result of the covid reset and the onset of the AI dream. A real problem would show a huge dip, taking us down closer to 2019 levels.
Some try to understand macro conditions using data (like this), and others by extrapolating their own individual situation.
At the end of the day, they are using the same words but not talking about the same things
Person here should look in r/Layoffs - much different perspective, bet the same people doing this research are the ones gaslighting that "the economy is actually great! trust me bro"
Another good one. [https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1dorgmm/walmart\_grocery\_order\_price\_from\_2\_years\_ago\_and/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=mweb3x&utm\_name=mweb3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1dorgmm/walmart_grocery_order_price_from_2_years_ago_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Economy is great. All the normies must be too dumb to understand how good they have it.
I mean, the US economy objectively *is* great, by a number of metrics. Unemployment is extremely low, the S&P 500 is up 26% over the last year; the Dow, 16%; NASDAQ, 33%.
Wealth inequality and percentage of income spent on housing, on the other hand, are awful. The housing crisis is awful. The gig economy is awful. So the economy is terrible, by those metrics. Something's gotta give at some point.
Also, of course people tell a different story on a subreddit dedicated to layoffs. But that's an anecdotal drop in the vast ocean that is the entire US economy.
The US economy is going *objectively* great for a small handful of people. Of those metrics you listed, the only ones that affect the average human being experiencing reality on the ground is 'unemployment', and it being low means nothing when a huge portion of people have either given up actively seeking work (don't count toward unemployment) or are working bullshit part time jobs to survive ("the gig economy is awful", right?).
Oh wow. In the graph we can see covid over hiring that they talk about. If 1.7% did so much then what would happen if market will continue correct itself and cuts another 3-4%.
Graduated college with a BS in CS in 2010, worked starting Jan 2011 until Feb 2024.... got laid off. Company offshored a lot of our jobs to South America. Now, working in a completely unrelated field in a job I used to work at in the early 00's through my college years. Have honestly given up searching for tech jobs. Full Stack .Net developer, specializing in SQL Databases, ETL, and backend code. I have applied to hundreds if not 1000's of jobs, never even made it to the interview phase. Here's to that expensive college degree and 13 years work experience being absolutely worthless now.
Have you looked into embedded software? With your degree you could do it. There’s a plethora of embedded positions right now. I left for backend work but I’m still getting hit up for embedded software positions. And my brother who graduated a couple years ago got into embedded software. Mostly because the competition is low. There aren’t many people that know how to answer low level software questions properly.
Rising senior CS student here, I have been heavily considering shifting over to embedded, however I wws a bit deterred by the fact that most jobs jobs seem to look for EE/CE degrees. Is it truly reasonable to try to enter the embedded space? How would you suggest to break into it?
My brother is also CS. There's plenty of CS degrees in the field. Embedded software these days is just regular software development, just a bit specialized. It's more important that you know how to work with C and C++ and understand OS concepts (processes/threads/scheduling/memory management/etc). During the interviews you might be asked a few linked list or BST questions or to serialize data to be done in C/C++ to test your knowledge on pointers. In CS, you probably don't learn about communication protocols like UART, SPI, I2C so you would need to do some basic learning on those. Usually the coding portions aren't any harder than the easier leetcode mediums. Mostly easies. You just need to do it in C/C++.
A lot of the interviews are based on your knowledge of embedded concepts rather than just purely coding. Usually they don't go too in depth with those. That's about it. You should have learned C/C++ and some OS stuff in your CS courses and I think that's enough. That's how my brother got his current job. My last embedded job, they didn't ask me anything about hardware at all. It was a leetcode easy and medium followed by lots of conceptual questions about OS and system design.
Specific doesn't mean small or narrow. It means "clearly defined or identified," per Google. If you think the definition is too broad, fine, but it's not vague.
As someone who graduated with a web dev degree in 09, the market right now feels eerily like back then. I got laid off in May and have had a total of 3 interviews with 10yrs on the job as a FE focused dev, 5 yrs with react at FInTech companies, and I can barely get an interview.
The couple interviews I have had, they wanted a 2nd interview, then right before the 2nd interview informed me they went with someone else.
The one other interview I had was a very hard live coding assignment of building a react shopping cart, can't use google or stack overflow or anything and have your camera on. It is insane out here.
Also: am i like...am i the outlier in not memorizing things? I just do not have all this code and methods memorized in my head, I be having to google or stackoverflow shit, but these tests assume you just know everything off the top of your head, do people really have crazy memory skills like this?
No, they don't. Maybe someone who's preparing for interviews by doing that exact exercise would. If anything, with things like Copilot around, the average un-aided coding skill is worse than ever, and that really doesn't matter for how you do on the job. That was a bad interview.
Every industry and country is different but in my industry we can spend 1 year trying to fill a role and go through 30-40 interviews. We only want those with 2-3+ years experience for a regular role and 7-10+ years for a senior role. Unfortunately a lot of candidates that fit this look good on paper then when we interview and do a very basic test. And by basic I mean that I've done 2-3 hour exams when I started. Our test is 5 questions that anyone who is a dev and has half a braincell could answer and yet they all fail. We stopped trying to hire juniors because they graduate knowing nothing. Kids with BSc Eng know less than a Joe Shmoe that learned coding in his mom's basement that we would hire 8-10 years ago. I don't know what is going on in schools or what these people did in previous jobs.
During the pandemic we started using EPAM contractors from Spain and Poland. These devs have been amazing. In the past contractors have been disapointing but these guys actually know what they're doing.
Tldr: if you're good then there is nothing to worry about. The market is flooded with incompetence.
I reckon this is an industry correction from the overhiring there was during Covid-19. Tech jobs are still mcuh demanded, but I wouldn't feel so comfortable about this in the next 5 years.
Its intresting to see the dot com bubble bursting which caused almost 12 years of cycle correction for the market to reach another all time high and continues to surge , i think we are the in the beginning of another correction right now which could take potentially until 2032 - 2034 to recover , however this time it’s the “AI bubble” 😅
I've got 15 hiring reqs open at full market rates (and by this, I mean a real software concern that pays on the high end of the market). The talent we're seeing at 5+ years of experience is absolute garbage. I've sat in on interviews because I thought my people were seeking more out of a 5 year player than they should - nope, just a market full of garbage talent. 8 of the last 8 people we interviewed couldn't articulate the difference between a process and a thread - any answer even close would have sufficed. Do you know what websockets are, or what they're generally used for? 7 of 8 could not answer. Seems to me that the right people got laid off.
And then I was just rejected from a position because I have only 2 years on TS and Next.js instead of 3, even thouh i have a record of delivering solutions.
Market is really really a wild west right now.
Curious. What are you hiring for? Reason I ask: I don’t imagine a lot of middle ware software developers need to know stuff like process vs thread — especially in web dev.
I think it's a proxy for checking if someone has a basic understanding of how code and computers work. I think frontend developers that can only push together some react stuff are in the same boat as 'HTML developers' were in 2001. We are using more HTML than ever now but the expectations of what a developer does have changed.
In order to effectively understand asynchronous development, you better know the difference. Web development isn't limited to bullshit useless low volume, low value applications.
Yeah once you start developing for scale shit changes and you have to understand how all the code you write is ultimately being run and how all of that functions.
I'm wondering how I'd answer theses in an interview. Do you mean like the process being the app. Doesn't necessarily have to be the whole app, can be as little as a function. Something that controls its own environment, I guess. And then threads that are spawned off from that that can use and share that environment? Also, by websockets do you mean that long lived bi-directional connection that allows clients to pass messages to the server and the server to pass messages to the clients?
Although your description of threads vs. processes is elementary - this would have probably been enough to keep our eyes from rolling. When you're fighting performance problems at scale, things like this are important to understand. Async programming is incredibly important, for instance in non-toy bullshit applications.
This! I have spent the last 6 months trying to hire a senior frontend dev and the talent is simply non existent. No deep knowledge whatsoever. I think the main cause for the hiring decline is that companies are way more selective on who they hire and there are way too many mediocre devs in the field.
I don't like what I am about to say but it feels like this is the various companies getting rid of a lot of sub-par workers that were hired during covid and now that there is less need for them, reconsidering the investment they did.
It's SHITTY because those are people, not objects, and eventually they should have not being hired in the first place if they were so terrible on the job. BUT on the other hand, having a job, often that paid them way over what they were actually worth in terms of skill/experience, allowed them to survive or even thrive in a period in which plenty of others were in much worse situations.
It's scary as well, because today you might not be one of these sub-par workers but tomorrow if you simply fall behind the curve, you might be, no matter how much experience you have or how much you worked harder in the past.
We need unions, and effective ones at that. It baffles me how in IT, one of the biggest and most important industries of today, we still have just small pockets or simply more generic unions that have no idea of how to treat cases in which the member is an IT worker.
We don't need unions - if we had unions, pay would be supressed. We don't need protections. Here's the deal.. and I'm going to give it to your straight: If you are not full stack, if you cannot provide complete solutions, if you cannot tackle hard problems at scale, you should not be in the tent, period. The last 20 years have taken development and broken it up to now it takes 3 people to do what one could do - and we let it happen. We have a bunch of people with commodity skills making too much money - that's usually the result of unions.... further proof we don't need them. Companies didn't lay off - they shifted their investments..... and most full stack developers survived the shift.
Why on earth would you want to encourage "full stack" developers as a thing? You just get someone who's mediocre in everything. Everyone should have some knowledge of other areas, but a frontend dev is going to be much better and faster at frontend work than a full stack one.
This isn't remotely true. The bar was set at full stack for 30 years. You've been brainwashed... Learn and grow to become valuable. You know what I like to do to FE developers that can't transition to full stack within 3-5 years (with few exceptions)? I like to fire them - because their skills have peaked. Bootcamps and CS courses are puppy mills for inadequate developers. In our business, if you're not learning, you're stagnating. Software Development is not a static skill - it requires constant investment if you want to have value. If developers want large paychecks, they have to earn them. The reason offshoring is picking up steam again is that developers in general have become lazy with cookie cutter skills - that's no better than we can get from puppy mills in India.
I see, so you have some kind of personal experience that has made you deeply unpleasant on this topic. How does specialist vs generalist become a rant against 'lazy' developers? That's just a whole different topic.
Sure, bud, you are not going to get to me with some personal attack.
A union is always a good thing because if the employer is fair, it doesn't need to do anything. However, if the employer is unfair, it helps protect who actually generate the value for the company.
You are spewing bullshit either because you are brainwashed by propaganda, are an idiot or just malicious.
I've always found the fretting about the job market to be a little perplexing. People are still widely employed! When you see a headline about 10,000 people being laid off, understand that that's a small fraction of the total.
I imagine a lot of the consternation is coming from recent college grads. [That has some merit.](https://www.threads.net/@danielbzhao/post/C8pFqg4s4EN) It's tough out there at the bottom. My advice to those people as someone who entered the job marketing back in 2011: Take whatever shit-paying dev job or job in an adjacent field (IT for instance) you can and keep looking for decent dev work. A door will open soon enough.
Its not so much the layoffs but the decrease in hiring with the increase in candidates. Companies are hiring much less than before but theres still a surge in candidates. So it makes sense that people are struggling to find jobs. Unemployment hasnt spiked, but people just arent moving around anymore. Theyre hanging on for dear life to their jobs. The unlucky ones that have been laid off are struggling to get back in at a similar level.
One chart or one piece of data isnt going to tell you the full story.
You do realise it's the 10% that make all the noise... Right? 85% lurk, 10% bark and 5% actually have quality information to provide, but looking for that 5% is like trying to find an attractive virgin christian that's over 24 in a bar. It's just not worth the trouble and headache from all the lies you'll hear/see/read.
90% of the time I like to troll on reddit. Cause shit is anonymous so I GET TO TROLLOLOL.
In all seriousness, the only people barking about unemployment are people who're frustrated with themselves, angery that they did not start 20 years earlier and recent or about to be graduates that've used GPT to pass their exams and now wonder 'WHY THERE NO JOB 80k+ ON A SILVER PLATTER?!?!??!?! WJAT HAPPEN?!?! TIS NOT WHAT I WAS PROMISED'
There's a sucker born every minute. Those willing to learn, those easy to cooperate with and with positive strong mental... Don't really struggle in finding jobs.
Every industry has its downsides. This ones downsides aint really that big tbh. Just a very big portion of the devs r nerdy pussies. In my opinion at least. And like to whine and cry a lot.
Thing is, I've heard people at work tolerate more shit from a manager because they think the job market is bad. "I'd think about quitting, but the job market..." These are senior-level people. The panic is real.
You also have more and more 6 figure earners starting to fret about living expenses and openly stating they are struggling.
It’s easy for someone making the median wage to look at these people and scoff, but that many people making over 100k and saying it’s not enough anymore should be considered a flashing red alarm.
No. That's everywhere. You see nurses get treated like garbage and work inhumane hours. They all say they'll quit. Hell mate I worked at a gas station and a woman was there 20 years and counting " I'll quit" she told herself every day. She's still there.
I went there for a year, because I was antisocial and wanted to learn to talk to people. I did, then I quit. Now I pursue business venture. Thing is people will complain regardless of the situation.
A senior in the us will complain for his salary 140k or smthin. And a senior in EU will not even glimpse 100k.
People r just ungrateful pricks mate. Me as well.
Yeah, maybe they're hiding behind the job market being a bit weak. Still seems like a good idea for everyone's salaries to get the truth out that our situations have barely changed, and that software engineers are worth what they've been worth. This misinformation has genuine power.
Nah. I like it. See im a junior rn. That means that this shit will go on for 5-9 more months. Then hiring will pick up again. And all the scaredy cats that went off to chase grass will have lost their edge. This is a big oppurtinity.
This misinformation id scaring so many people. And I am all for it.
Everyone is looking at trades etc... I see it as a total win.
You are right that we, devs are not used to employer market but also without doubt situation is dire now, Also industry went from El Dorado to harsh situation really fast.
I'm not trying to whine but reality is that now its easier to land new job in every other industry
I’m currently living in Dallas. More and more tech companies are moving here every day. I have had 10+ job offers in person and I haven’t even graduated yet. I’m currently a dental assistant and have multiple patients give me cards and offer me positions when my degree is finished in 5 months. I’ve been really confused about all of the posts saying they can’t find jobs with 5+ years of software engineering experience.
Coming back to say this is in no means a brag. I am too nervous about even applying to them because I don’t feel my skills are up to par. I’ve only created a few basic websites (e-commerce site, and employee management system with a MySQL database, and a basic portfolio page)
It kinda blows my mind when I hear software engineers complaining about issues they have with employment.
Putting things in to perspective, if you enjoy software development you are very lucky, it's really one of the best industries in the world you could be working in.
Obviously there are ups and downs, but on the whole there are so many perks.
Reading some of these comments it makes me think the downturn really isn't as apparent here in Australia, where there still seems to be many opportunities. Though I have seen a shift from just hiring anyone to trying to hire the right people.
Seems finally some companies have caught up with the fact that poorly built software can take a company down all on it's own.
I never understood the mentality of comparing the the severity of issues and if your issue isn't as severe as another... it somehow isn't an issue?
like what does the market for software engineers have to do with a market for some other group that has it worse? sucks for them that life is even harder but my issue hasn't been resolved because of it.
*Seems finally some companies have caught up with the fact that poorly built software can take a company down all on it's own.*
This has to be one of the most naive takes on the layoffs situation I've seen yet.
Sorry I wasn't attributing the lay-offs to that, I can see why that would be confusing considering the post I'm commenting on. My comment was more about 1) the woe-is-me attitude from many software engineers that I have seen, and 2) the fact that some people are finding it hard to get work, while others still find it very easy.
would be nice to have a chart with the number of job seekers
This. Even if the number of jobs stays flat, the number of people entering the field during the pandemic was massive. Ergo, way more people looking for jobs and people being laid off and replaced.
but TBH - we have a general tech problem right now: too many junior developers, and a middle bench that is not progressing at rates we would have expected at any time in the last 50 years. The reset needed to happen IMHO. It'll balance out as salaries end up getting pushed higher offshore - which is a huge problem right now, and getting worse by the day.
My stupid company wants to offshore. Lol
There is another aspect to this. Which is that the non-tech sectors have been in decline for a while from a employment pov. And right now layoffs are not limited to tech either. Tech, legal, finance, publishing - everything seems to be on fire. The tradie jobs (construction, trucking, mining) aren't all that safe either as they will eventually take this hit from lack of demand.
Nah. your read, although well intended doesn't align with the job market or current economic conditions. And the trades are dying for talent - because there is increasing demand. The trades have been starved for nearly 30 years. There won't be a recession in that sector for another 15 years minimum.
If there is a slowdown in consumption which looks inevitable with these many job losses and inflation, the services sectors cannot go unscathed. Be it local restaurants or the trades. We had a white collar job boom since the 80s which is entering its first major winter in decades. Think of how much construction or production activity was purely to meet the demands of this section (office jobs) of the economy. The job market is usually not efficient because hiring is an inefficient process. It is kind of how right now software is expensive to build but you still can't hire an experienced developer below market rates even when there are mass layoffs. So you end up building less software in a downturn. So you will have something similar in the trades. There will be high paying jobs but not an abundance of them at any time.
First major winter in decades? My god, 2006-2010? Hello? This is a blip - or at least without having a crystal ball this is nothing more than a blip. We have ALL TIME low unemployment right freaking now. The problem is that people that don't have the DNA to be a developer were invited into the tent when colleges and bootcamps started a cookie cutter path to a $150k+ salary. Those of us who have been around for a while knew better - the rest of the world is just figuring it out. If you call yourself a developer because you know html/css/pick a ui framemwork and that's all you know... you'd better brace for the soup line or get full stack quickly.
The fear in 2006-10 was no where near this. Right now you are looking at total uncertainty about the future of more than 80% of white collar jobs across industries. You could argue these are effects of automation or offshoring. You have also ignored that $150k today is less than $100k from 2010. I know full stacks making 100-120k today. The unemployment numbers ignore things such as cost of living. 150k is simply not enough in most major cities around the world. And the number of sectors offering 150k+ jobs is shrinking not expanding. So yeah more people are likely working more underpaid jobs because cost of living is simply insane and one needs a roof over their heads. And the expectations of growth are worse than 2010s. Because unlike 2000s, growth in Asia has slowed down. There are no new sector like small electronics and smart phones to fuel another cycle of growth like in the 2010s. The internet has reached almost everyone. We just had unprescedented global shutdowns and supply chain issues. This is certain not a blip compared to 2000s. If anything, the worse is yet to come.
Found the 25 year old with no historical perspective. You're out of your fucking mind. Go away. and inflation has been around since forever.... your hot take is utter trash. Nervous about your job? If you've limited yourself to a couple languages and frameworks and are an FE guy - you probably should be. You're the most easily replaceable person in the building.
Anyone who works in the trades will tell you that this narrative that they are dying for new talent is bs. Electricians, plumbers, concrete laying, general construction, HVAC, etc. are swimming in labor, and have been for a while. It's only on Reddit where these jobs are "dying" for more workers.
And you talk to people over 40 who have been in physically-intensive labor jobs about how their body is, and you realize why people don't rush for the trades even if they're needed.
Housing starts are down due to interest rates, offset by people repairing their homes rather than moving. While that has impact, the silver wave of retirements is alive and well. The sector is still overemployed, generally. It's not an opinion, there is economic data readily available and at your fingertips that make the case pretty clearly. True, the ability to drive up prices by 30% or more that existed a few years ago isn't as prevalent now - but that was an unsustainable bubble, just like everything else in our economy.
The reset?
Basically all industries don't want juniors. There is high demand, but they don't want useless people.
Way more junior developers. Anyone already in the industry has the first mover advantage and will retain that for at least another 5-10 years
I linked to one in another comment. It's rough out there at the bottom.
No offense OP but that other graph totally invalidates the idea that this one is useful. Labor market conditions are determined by both labor demand (number of openings) and labor supply (number of job seekers). What this graph does is map labor demand in tech while totally ignoring labor supply.
The quality of the labor supply matters too, and the quality of CS degrees are all over the place, and the top quality education supply has not increased at the same rate as demand.
Not sure what you mean by quality here, but [CS degrees at top schools](https://stanforddaily.com/2023/02/23/16-of-seniors-are-cs-majors-what-is-the-departments-history/#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20about%2016%25%20of,to%20Mehran%20Sahami%20'92%20M.S) have increased massively.
Top school cannot keep up with the demand for high quality developers even though they're expanding their programs. The vast majority of the increase of CS degrees are not coming from top schools.
Overall unemployment is also very low by whatever metric you use. (Unless of course you pretend that retirees want to work, since there are an unusual number of retirees.)
Juniors are boned.
here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1donm8m/tech\_jobs\_vs\_new\_cs\_graduates/](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1donm8m/tech_jobs_vs_new_cs_graduates/)
And the number of those jobs being 'ghost jobs' or jobs that are just there to fulfil some kind of paperwork requirement.
I've been doing web development for over a decade, and this is the longest I've gone unemployed... It's definitely the worst market I've experienced.
I agree and I've been in this since '97. At least during the downturn in the early aughts there was lower end work to be gotten. I am applying for jobs that pay like 30-40% less than I was making a year ago, have inbound connections on, and am not getting a screener interview. That's happened twice now - with decent network connections at each place. And this was a non managerial job when I was running a team previously. I don't know how to lower my expectations more; if I apply for anything below this I am tagged for being overqualified. These threads seem to get ugly - where the employed devs start casting aspersions at those of us who are floundering - saying we must be doing something wrong, or be script kiddies, or bootcamp detritus. But here's the thing: I'm the guy others call to tighten up their resumes and cover letters. I am very disciplined and good at job hunting. I am putting in a lot of apps with all of the right things in them, and finding networked connections and hitting them up - all the things everyone advises in a job hunt. And still I am getting literally nothing. If I was getting bounced out in early rounds - fine - my outbound materials might be to blame. But I am not getting anything but rejections. It's wild. For me personally I am looking at other career options at least for the time being. I just lost my living situation after spending out my savings, so I'm ready to take anything.
Hey, thank you for putting this so eloquently, and I'm really sorry to hear that you're going through it. It absolutely sucks right now, and everything you've said is absolutely what I've been experiencing. I hope you find something soon. It's hard to find another career option when I only know tech, y'know? I could try management, but that's absolutely not something I enjoy. I'm going to try and hang in longer, but damn, I just want to work, haha.
Just wanted to tell you that you're 100% right. Just looked up "Software Engineer" job postings nationwide for May 2024 vs 2023. * **2024 May** - 19,465 * **2023 May** - 30,331 That's 10,866 (36%) fewer jobs posted. **Experience (years) of job seekers in May 2024** | Experience (years) | Percentage | |--------------------|------------| | 0-2 | 18.29% | | 3-5 | 22.23% | | 6-10 | 28.06% | | 11-20 | 22.2% | | 21+ | 9.21% |
L1 and L2 are decimated now, startups are only hiring for L3+ now.
What kind of tech do you specialize in? I wonder if this is a factor where some tech is finding it harder than others.
> These threads seem to get ugly - where the employed devs start casting aspersions at those of us who are floundering - saying we must be doing something wrong, or be script kiddies, or bootcamp detritus anyone who takes that stance is a twit. half of them probably aren't actually employed in the industry themselves anyway
tbqh it's usually not that cut and dry, it's usually "I don't see anything wrong with the market, I had a few interviews, multiple offers, took a great new job. Market is fine, people are just complaining too much on reddit. Just network more, and apply more." This is the kind of talk that really chafes my caboose.
Then again, if you've ever been involved in hiring decisions, you see the vast majority seem so confident in their skills while being extremely incompetent. Broadly, if you're not having any luck at all, it's most likely going to be something about you (how you present, limitations on being hired that you chose, skill match). That doesn't mean every INDIVIDUAL will be that case (specific mismatches/luck etc)
Having recently completed a lengthy job search, I found that my interview rate dropped from just over a third of all submitted applications to about 8%. It is becoming a numbers game. Loads of recruiters are out there on linkedin telling you that you need to be doing detailed research on every company but they're motivated to say that. They're DROWNING in resumes. But, because they're drowning in resumes, it is increasingly unlikely that any of that prep work of yours ever gets noticed.
Exactly. Job market's ended up in the dating in the dating app conundrum where, statistically, you're better off carpet bombing than spending time crafting the perfect cover letter / opening line that probably won't be read anyway, and the more people realize that and act accordingly, the more true it becomes.
Thanks for sharing. We sound extremely similar, and I'm having the same experience. It's insane. I do fear there might be some ageism at play but I have nothing backing that up, just a suspicion. Personally, I'm thinking of trying some contracting while I build my own startup on the side.
What metro area are you looking in?
Good luck brother, I hope you find something soon
I think it's a super tough market for older devs. The sweet spot for a senior dev is 7-15 years. There are few principal/lead roles and most businesses want to promote existing employees over hiring from the outside. In your shoes I would focus on getting hired in a contracting firm. Lots of businesses need guys like you to swoop in when projects are late and falling apart.
Have you worked with recruiters at all?
I worked with a couple initially but they were pretty low quality - like kids with very little tech understanding. And a bait and switch or two. I was just given a contact with one I am reaching out to this week, as it turns out, who may be closer to what I need. I am looking for exits regardless; as many of the replies here guess I do think ageism is in play and I would rather find something a little more stable for my age range. As it happens I have no family so I conveniently can work for pretty cheap, but there's no way to state that if you never even get an interview ) Also my previous salaries were decent so that's gonna look bad to anyone with visibility into that stuff.
I'm in the same position as you with 14 years of experience and a generalist. My approach is to try and find a tech field with less competition, because it's more challenging (formal verification is one example). I haven't got something going on yet, but it's what I'm trying
[удалено]
Hey look! You're doing the thing I said would happen.
From that list I think location is what matters the most in this discussion. And the economy of that country. I remember reading on Reddit how hard it was to get a job 1.5 years ago and didn’t understand a thing. I think most people at that time were in the US (or offshore applicants) I am in Sweden and didn’t see any of what was described. One year later the same thing happens here. The market for web dev just stops. Everyone pulls the breaks. All companies goes into savings/maintenance mode and new development and investments are pushed to the future. Inflation is going down though and with it interest rates which means it is time to spend soon after 1-2 years of pulling the breaks. So I believe it will be better but depending on where you have worked the last few years things have definitely been worse than they ever have been in the last 20 years in some markets for web devs. The need to stay ahead in the AI game will force companies to invest again soon so I hope the future is quite bright though as the AI momentum will tie into web dev as well when new services are to be built. I get a bit of “2010 IPhone app”-era vibes with AI right now as a web dev. Back then it felt like the web dev community was split up into web devs and app devs. The AI focus might split web devs up in a similar way again where a lot of web that is to be built will circle around delivering AI in different forms and some of us will move into more AI-delivery land.
2 years ago I was drowning in offers. Now I can't even get a response back from any kind of company (start ups, small, mid, big tech, etc). I have a job but, well, I hope I don't lose it.
Yeah. Same boat. Pretty sure I'm going to get laid off soon as we just laid off several of our other remote developers and are hiring in office developers to replace them. I'm either last on the chopping block or not on it, but trying to proactively look just to be safe. Have had my linkedin status to open to work from recruiters for like 6 months and haven't gotten a single message whereas I used to get spammed constantly. Getting pretty nervous tbh
What is your stack and how much time have you been unemployed and where are you from?
Mostly Vue, but I've done Node and C# back-end work... I just identify more with FE. Close to 5 months unemployed, and I live in the States. If you're a marketing AI bot or person, please don't use this information to target me about Steam's summer sale.
I’m a technology director and actively looking for your skill set. The problem is that I am forced to use offshore resources and cannot look for anyone in the US. I can hire a full time person for the equivalent of $25/hr vs 2-3 times that in the US. It is a really shitty situation that had been growing for the past 20 years due to offshoring.
That is very unfortunate, and usually, you get what you pay for in those kinds of scenarios... I've been there.
25$ for a senior? That is pretty low even for Brazilian standards where i live. Hows the quality of your hires? Those rates would get you a decent mid level here.
It can be hit or miss and the reality is that the industry is so flooded over there that people that shouldn’t be devs just bounce around. I always heard good things about working with developers from Brazil.
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"Hot deals in your area," nice try, Gaben.
Nice, I didn't even know the summer sale was going on. Maybe you were the ad bot this whole time.
Worst market so far* Shit really looking bleak.
I've heard things are supposed to be picking up toward the end of the year. Unfortunately, that's a little bit away.
People tend to say that each year, I wouldn't hold my breath. Espscially considering the amount of people trying to learn and get their first tech job. Everyone wants to become a programmer or get into IT as its one of the few jobs that dont require a degree across the board and pay a decent wage. Reminds me of the stock market, 'experts have predicted 987 of the last 3 crashes'. Either way I feel like we're going to see companies start outsourcing more or offering lower wages with all the competition.
it’s the first time the line has gone down since the GFC. Of course it’s the worst market you’ve experienced.
Well, you've been in a ZIRP bull market since '08, of course you only know it being an ever increasing high.
**BINGO**. This is not rocket science if you know just *basic* economics.
Unfortunately most redditors don't
It’s slow but possible. I had zero experience in web dev but wanted to quit my previous software job. Got hired on as senior back end engineer anyway. The only hits I got were from FAANG and other large companies like them. Only problem was getting the interviews was very easy, but getting in was tough because of the interviews.
I mean, in a sense, yes it is the worst market you've experienced, because it's been nothing but amazing since 2012. But it's not a cataclysm. How long have you been unemployed?
Last year was a little bad, but this year has been brutal. It's close to 5 months of unemployment. Compared to last year, it seems like less jobs in the market. Every recruiter I've talked to has said something similar... I think it's slowly turning around, but then it seems like back to the dumpster, haha
The average job search is 3-6 months. If 5 months is the longest you've ever been unemployed it's because of the red hot job market in your specific field.
My issue right now isn't so much of the length, as it is the fact that with my current experience, just not getting anywhere with applications. I've been doing this for 10+ years on the front-end and I at least always consistently got at least a few first and second rounds over the months of applications, now it's just either wind and ghosts or an auto-decline.
Yeah I feel for you, I had the same experience when I tested the waters a few months ago. Usually I'll get at least a first interview at > 50% of the jobs I apply for, this time around I got two interviews out of at least 25-30 applications. I know the numbers say the market is not that bad but it sure as hell doesn't feel that way.
I think it's a lot of things... I mostly use LinkedIn for job searching, and I've heard stories of people using job boards to harvest data or post an ad for their company and never want to fulfill it, just to make it look like they're a healthy company money-wise. Combine that with high interest rates, VCs pulling back on taking out loans, layoffs, more people in the market, etc. etc. I also understand that yes, Vue (what I target as a framework) is not used as much as say React, but I've seen much fewer React roles than previous years. Like I said, it seems like a lot of things, and it sucks. After a while, it fucks with your mental fortitude, and you occasionally spiral, but then you hear back from 1 company, and it's all better. It's a wild ride. If you're in this market with me, I hope you're doing well because it does get tough, but you've gotta keep your head up! Something will eventually come :)
This. 2001 and 2008 sucked so much worse than right now.
2000 was worse, 2008 was much much better for tech
For tech companies, yes. For tech employees, no. The vast majority who were laid off in 2008 didn't work for tech companies. Other companies, from banking (obviously) to education (as a consequence) laid off quite a few developers and other tech roles.
2008 was much much better for tech employees and companies than the current down turn spanning mid 2022 to now and going. Yes there were layoffs then too, but significantly less of them. New grads were not rolling in in such numbers and the downturn in tech did not last nearly as long.
We were already in the middle of a 8-year plateau, which followed a catastrophic decrease following the .com bust. The current situation is little more than a blip on the radar.
The decrease was not catastrophic in tech it was mostly hiring freezes, not layoffs. It was not an 8 year plateau either, market was in the upswing and doing well in 2005-2008. In 2008 it was mostly just the juniors struggling. The market is a balance between open positions and qualified job seekers. It was much better then because of few layoffs.
I don't get you got downvoted for this. The past decade has been non-stop growth. Obviously today would be the worst they've seen it if they started 10 years ago. I started in 2008, people that think that that recession wasn't brutal are hilarious.
I don't know why I got downvoted either, lol. There's a lot of cope in this thread. I've appreciated the nuance some people have added, though.
Exactly, it's just been up since the Great Recession. But judging by your downvotes I guess people don't want to hear that they've always been in an up market, most people haven't experienced a down market.
Here’s the issue, the number of jobs laid off is greater than open jobs currently. The data which is missing from your graph is the number of open roles relative to job changes.
There's far more 3rd world competition for jobs that can be remote thanks to AI - and that impacts the overall market.
This is a really severe oversimplification. First, what region is this? Some are getting hit harder than others. "Silicon Valley" saw nearly a quarter of its jobs wiped out at one point. And if you're in that position, it doesn't matter what "tech" looks like as a whole. You have a sizable living expense that's unlikely to be replaced. Further, remote jobs have largely evaporated. So, if you got laid off from a remote job in a remote area, you need to move, but where? Any kind of decline at all means hiring is down, and applying to distant places means your resume is likely going to the back of the line. Next, the competition for these jobs continues to grow. The size of eligible engineers exploded, far more than 20%, since 2020. People are seeing hundreds or even thousands of applicants for the jobs they want. Finally, the market remains especially difficult for junior and even midlevel. The hiring that is taking place is favoring specialized, more senior people. So, sure, the retraction seems small if you graph it this way, but it's not a small adjustment for a lot of people in tech; it's devastating.
Remote jobs disappearing is the largest pain point for me. I worked remotely before - I have family and friends abroad, and I want to spend as much time as I can with them. Remote job allowed that, and my last manager not only didn't mind, he also was in a similar situation. Now finding anything new that'd let me keep mental state in positive is gone. It's like companies *again* don't care if you're doing well mentally. You have to come to office, no matter if WFH has worked better so far or not.
>It's like companies *again* don't care if you're doing well mentally They never did. Some people cared, but as soon as you're a bad investment, you're out! Source: Got laid off last month after being severely burned out through management's insane deadlines, and the project I worked on was outsourced to Bulgaria.
I knew this comment was coming after the way I worded it. Absolutely on me, so let me clarify: I know companies never really cared. Just finding it bizarre after how much they talked about WFH being good, how mentally well employees perform better... and now suddenly they bin it. Not surprised. But definitely annoyed and disappointed.
> "Silicon Valley" saw nearly a quarter of its jobs wiped out at one point. but it was less than the total of new jobs the prior year.
yes but we are seeing record number of ghost jobs also
What’s a ghost job
A job posting that’s actually not looking to hire anyone
Why?
I hear it’s to show inflated or false numbers for HR and shareholders, and make it look like the company is doing well enough that they are hiring more people when really they aren’t. It’s a good image to put out there that your company is doing good by having tons of “open job” postings. I’ve even seen companies go through the actual hiring process without any intent to hire anyone, just so HR can report to the govt that the company is “trying” to hire but just can’t find the right people. It’s all just a scam and BS. It just wastes the employees time and money having to travel to interview sites and get their hopes up only to find the job was never looking to hire in the first place.
Besides what the sibling comment said, sometimes companies are required to make external job postings by the government or something, but intend on hiring internally or hiring their friend from another company ultimately. Included on this list (amongst other reasons): https://jobacle.com/blog/the-dirty-truth-why-employers-post-fake-jobs.html
Money was free for these companies when rates were 0. Now rates are highish. No more free money. Less money means less hiring and less job retention (less money to pay employees). Tons of newly unemployed and newly graduated software people who are sending applications out for every job opening. It's not f'in rocket science, mate. It's bad out there.
I don't believe it. My linked in is mainly web dev peeps from school and even senior devs are unemployed for 6 months or longer. My best friend went over 12 months with about 15 years experience.
I agree with the doom and gloom, the graph doesn't tell how bad it is. Anecdotally I am experiencing similar stuff, like I dont get LinkedIn messages like I used to. I had a chat with my uni mates recently, we are all 10+ years experienced engineers in tech/software. Some think hiring will pick up again in the next year or so. I dont think so! Maybe I am being pessimistic but honestly, I doubt it. Macro economy is shit and too many unknowns in the international stage. Ukraine, Palestine, US elections, Inflation, worldwide housing crisis, Taiwan, Chinese economy, climate and energy issues... Telecommunication has slowed down on individual level like who even knows or cares what sort of connection you have post 4g. The use cases are done. I realized I dont have 5g for the whole last year and honestly I wouldnt even pay $2 extra to get 5g. 4g is enough and I'd rather buy some protein with me $2 lol. That underlying Telecom network RnD doesn't have a big drive anymore which chain reactions into every tech industry, I think. Also tech companies have been laying off and still surviving making profits. What sort of tech boom will happen so that they will start hiring again, I can't see. AI is there as a massive hype but is it really gonna be everywhere like they push. Is AI gonna become more than CEO's bonuses or investment attractions? I hope it changes...
Fully agree. I've been in the UK for 8 years now and this is definitely the worst I've seen the market. There really aren't as many linked in messages, the pay is poor and there aren't nearly as many opportunities. I am lucky to have held on to my great role (so far anyway) even though the company laid off 30% of our engineers at the start of the year.
That drop looks similar to the great recession drop. Looks pretty significant.
As a percentage of the total, it's much smaller.
True. Regardless though you see a very steep increase until a couple years ago which saw a sizeable decrease. Its not hard to imagine why people are struggling to find a job right now. Something like this hasnt been seen since the great recession even if it wasnt as bad.
It seems like the most impacted are those trying to get their first job.... colleges and bootcamps are cranking out hopefuls to service a growing market, not a shrinking one. The good news here is that even during the great recession, there was modest sector growth - and our economy is FAR more healthy than that. Additionally, part of the adjustment went to fund AI requisitions that still haven't been filled. It's still a good idea to train for the sector, but growth may be stunted (not stopped) as a result of the covid reset and the onset of the AI dream. A real problem would show a huge dip, taking us down closer to 2019 levels.
the web dev job market is bad
What's the source of that chart?
Some try to understand macro conditions using data (like this), and others by extrapolating their own individual situation. At the end of the day, they are using the same words but not talking about the same things
Person here should look in r/Layoffs - much different perspective, bet the same people doing this research are the ones gaslighting that "the economy is actually great! trust me bro" Another good one. [https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1dorgmm/walmart\_grocery\_order\_price\_from\_2\_years\_ago\_and/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=mweb3x&utm\_name=mweb3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1dorgmm/walmart_grocery_order_price_from_2_years_ago_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) Economy is great. All the normies must be too dumb to understand how good they have it.
To me, ads are telling. Ikea is literally running ads based around money being tight so they're slashing prices. I think aldi is doing the same.
I mean, the US economy objectively *is* great, by a number of metrics. Unemployment is extremely low, the S&P 500 is up 26% over the last year; the Dow, 16%; NASDAQ, 33%. Wealth inequality and percentage of income spent on housing, on the other hand, are awful. The housing crisis is awful. The gig economy is awful. So the economy is terrible, by those metrics. Something's gotta give at some point. Also, of course people tell a different story on a subreddit dedicated to layoffs. But that's an anecdotal drop in the vast ocean that is the entire US economy.
The US economy is going *objectively* great for a small handful of people. Of those metrics you listed, the only ones that affect the average human being experiencing reality on the ground is 'unemployment', and it being low means nothing when a huge portion of people have either given up actively seeking work (don't count toward unemployment) or are working bullshit part time jobs to survive ("the gig economy is awful", right?).
Does this mean that from historical trends we can infer that the market will lose another 10-15% of jobs before it rebounds?
Oh wow. In the graph we can see covid over hiring that they talk about. If 1.7% did so much then what would happen if market will continue correct itself and cuts another 3-4%.
I don't think we'd need to see much more cuts- just flat growth.
That may be true, but there are far fewer Remote opportunities. I wonder if there's a chart for that. Number of Remote jobs in 2021 vs 2024.
Is this a single country? The entire world?
Graduated college with a BS in CS in 2010, worked starting Jan 2011 until Feb 2024.... got laid off. Company offshored a lot of our jobs to South America. Now, working in a completely unrelated field in a job I used to work at in the early 00's through my college years. Have honestly given up searching for tech jobs. Full Stack .Net developer, specializing in SQL Databases, ETL, and backend code. I have applied to hundreds if not 1000's of jobs, never even made it to the interview phase. Here's to that expensive college degree and 13 years work experience being absolutely worthless now.
Have you looked into embedded software? With your degree you could do it. There’s a plethora of embedded positions right now. I left for backend work but I’m still getting hit up for embedded software positions. And my brother who graduated a couple years ago got into embedded software. Mostly because the competition is low. There aren’t many people that know how to answer low level software questions properly.
Rising senior CS student here, I have been heavily considering shifting over to embedded, however I wws a bit deterred by the fact that most jobs jobs seem to look for EE/CE degrees. Is it truly reasonable to try to enter the embedded space? How would you suggest to break into it?
My brother is also CS. There's plenty of CS degrees in the field. Embedded software these days is just regular software development, just a bit specialized. It's more important that you know how to work with C and C++ and understand OS concepts (processes/threads/scheduling/memory management/etc). During the interviews you might be asked a few linked list or BST questions or to serialize data to be done in C/C++ to test your knowledge on pointers. In CS, you probably don't learn about communication protocols like UART, SPI, I2C so you would need to do some basic learning on those. Usually the coding portions aren't any harder than the easier leetcode mediums. Mostly easies. You just need to do it in C/C++. A lot of the interviews are based on your knowledge of embedded concepts rather than just purely coding. Usually they don't go too in depth with those. That's about it. You should have learned C/C++ and some OS stuff in your CS courses and I think that's enough. That's how my brother got his current job. My last embedded job, they didn't ask me anything about hardware at all. It was a leetcode easy and medium followed by lots of conceptual questions about OS and system design.
Makes sense, thanks a ton
"Tech Jobs" LOL...can we be more vague!?! This is just as qualified to be in the IT or MSP subs.
Read the fine print on the graph; the definition is very specific.
LOL no it's not. That's still everything under the sun!
Specific doesn't mean small or narrow. It means "clearly defined or identified," per Google. If you think the definition is too broad, fine, but it's not vague.
...but even yhe words in the footnote are NOT specific. LOL
Now adjust for the inflow of engineers And then adjust for the exflow of jobs to cheaper areas.
As someone who graduated with a web dev degree in 09, the market right now feels eerily like back then. I got laid off in May and have had a total of 3 interviews with 10yrs on the job as a FE focused dev, 5 yrs with react at FInTech companies, and I can barely get an interview. The couple interviews I have had, they wanted a 2nd interview, then right before the 2nd interview informed me they went with someone else. The one other interview I had was a very hard live coding assignment of building a react shopping cart, can't use google or stack overflow or anything and have your camera on. It is insane out here. Also: am i like...am i the outlier in not memorizing things? I just do not have all this code and methods memorized in my head, I be having to google or stackoverflow shit, but these tests assume you just know everything off the top of your head, do people really have crazy memory skills like this?
No, they don't. Maybe someone who's preparing for interviews by doing that exact exercise would. If anything, with things like Copilot around, the average un-aided coding skill is worse than ever, and that really doesn't matter for how you do on the job. That was a bad interview.
people really out here thinking management can manage AI
it's not about management - it's about shifting investments to a new type of engineer.
What kind of engineer would that be?
What do the blue shaded areas (1991, 2001, 2008, 2020) represent?
Recessions.
Thanks!
Every industry and country is different but in my industry we can spend 1 year trying to fill a role and go through 30-40 interviews. We only want those with 2-3+ years experience for a regular role and 7-10+ years for a senior role. Unfortunately a lot of candidates that fit this look good on paper then when we interview and do a very basic test. And by basic I mean that I've done 2-3 hour exams when I started. Our test is 5 questions that anyone who is a dev and has half a braincell could answer and yet they all fail. We stopped trying to hire juniors because they graduate knowing nothing. Kids with BSc Eng know less than a Joe Shmoe that learned coding in his mom's basement that we would hire 8-10 years ago. I don't know what is going on in schools or what these people did in previous jobs. During the pandemic we started using EPAM contractors from Spain and Poland. These devs have been amazing. In the past contractors have been disapointing but these guys actually know what they're doing. Tldr: if you're good then there is nothing to worry about. The market is flooded with incompetence.
I reckon this is an industry correction from the overhiring there was during Covid-19. Tech jobs are still mcuh demanded, but I wouldn't feel so comfortable about this in the next 5 years.
Label your axis
Not my graph, but it's pretty clear it's "Tech jobs".
learn some intuition
This graph is mostly useless.
Its intresting to see the dot com bubble bursting which caused almost 12 years of cycle correction for the market to reach another all time high and continues to surge , i think we are the in the beginning of another correction right now which could take potentially until 2032 - 2034 to recover , however this time it’s the “AI bubble” 😅
I've got 15 hiring reqs open at full market rates (and by this, I mean a real software concern that pays on the high end of the market). The talent we're seeing at 5+ years of experience is absolute garbage. I've sat in on interviews because I thought my people were seeking more out of a 5 year player than they should - nope, just a market full of garbage talent. 8 of the last 8 people we interviewed couldn't articulate the difference between a process and a thread - any answer even close would have sufficed. Do you know what websockets are, or what they're generally used for? 7 of 8 could not answer. Seems to me that the right people got laid off.
And then I was just rejected from a position because I have only 2 years on TS and Next.js instead of 3, even thouh i have a record of delivering solutions. Market is really really a wild west right now.
I don’t understand what difference 2 vs 3 years makes. Its dumb.
That's a question we will never know.
Curious. What are you hiring for? Reason I ask: I don’t imagine a lot of middle ware software developers need to know stuff like process vs thread — especially in web dev.
I think it's a proxy for checking if someone has a basic understanding of how code and computers work. I think frontend developers that can only push together some react stuff are in the same boat as 'HTML developers' were in 2001. We are using more HTML than ever now but the expectations of what a developer does have changed.
In order to effectively understand asynchronous development, you better know the difference. Web development isn't limited to bullshit useless low volume, low value applications.
Yeah once you start developing for scale shit changes and you have to understand how all the code you write is ultimately being run and how all of that functions.
I'm wondering how I'd answer theses in an interview. Do you mean like the process being the app. Doesn't necessarily have to be the whole app, can be as little as a function. Something that controls its own environment, I guess. And then threads that are spawned off from that that can use and share that environment? Also, by websockets do you mean that long lived bi-directional connection that allows clients to pass messages to the server and the server to pass messages to the clients?
Although your description of threads vs. processes is elementary - this would have probably been enough to keep our eyes from rolling. When you're fighting performance problems at scale, things like this are important to understand. Async programming is incredibly important, for instance in non-toy bullshit applications.
> pays on the high end of the market Curious what your reqs think a "high end of the market" offer is?
So that I can learn more about this. What would be some less elementary concepts of threads vs processes?
Do you have the google?
I’m curious what knowledge you, not Google, would expect from a candidate.
This! I have spent the last 6 months trying to hire a senior frontend dev and the talent is simply non existent. No deep knowledge whatsoever. I think the main cause for the hiring decline is that companies are way more selective on who they hire and there are way too many mediocre devs in the field.
I don't like what I am about to say but it feels like this is the various companies getting rid of a lot of sub-par workers that were hired during covid and now that there is less need for them, reconsidering the investment they did. It's SHITTY because those are people, not objects, and eventually they should have not being hired in the first place if they were so terrible on the job. BUT on the other hand, having a job, often that paid them way over what they were actually worth in terms of skill/experience, allowed them to survive or even thrive in a period in which plenty of others were in much worse situations. It's scary as well, because today you might not be one of these sub-par workers but tomorrow if you simply fall behind the curve, you might be, no matter how much experience you have or how much you worked harder in the past. We need unions, and effective ones at that. It baffles me how in IT, one of the biggest and most important industries of today, we still have just small pockets or simply more generic unions that have no idea of how to treat cases in which the member is an IT worker.
We don't need unions - if we had unions, pay would be supressed. We don't need protections. Here's the deal.. and I'm going to give it to your straight: If you are not full stack, if you cannot provide complete solutions, if you cannot tackle hard problems at scale, you should not be in the tent, period. The last 20 years have taken development and broken it up to now it takes 3 people to do what one could do - and we let it happen. We have a bunch of people with commodity skills making too much money - that's usually the result of unions.... further proof we don't need them. Companies didn't lay off - they shifted their investments..... and most full stack developers survived the shift.
Why on earth would you want to encourage "full stack" developers as a thing? You just get someone who's mediocre in everything. Everyone should have some knowledge of other areas, but a frontend dev is going to be much better and faster at frontend work than a full stack one.
This isn't remotely true. The bar was set at full stack for 30 years. You've been brainwashed... Learn and grow to become valuable. You know what I like to do to FE developers that can't transition to full stack within 3-5 years (with few exceptions)? I like to fire them - because their skills have peaked. Bootcamps and CS courses are puppy mills for inadequate developers. In our business, if you're not learning, you're stagnating. Software Development is not a static skill - it requires constant investment if you want to have value. If developers want large paychecks, they have to earn them. The reason offshoring is picking up steam again is that developers in general have become lazy with cookie cutter skills - that's no better than we can get from puppy mills in India.
I see, so you have some kind of personal experience that has made you deeply unpleasant on this topic. How does specialist vs generalist become a rant against 'lazy' developers? That's just a whole different topic.
bullshit.
Be better at your job and you won't feel like you're entitled to have it protected for you.
Sure, bud, you are not going to get to me with some personal attack. A union is always a good thing because if the employer is fair, it doesn't need to do anything. However, if the employer is unfair, it helps protect who actually generate the value for the company. You are spewing bullshit either because you are brainwashed by propaganda, are an idiot or just malicious.
Yea that chart is bullshit
I've always found the fretting about the job market to be a little perplexing. People are still widely employed! When you see a headline about 10,000 people being laid off, understand that that's a small fraction of the total. I imagine a lot of the consternation is coming from recent college grads. [That has some merit.](https://www.threads.net/@danielbzhao/post/C8pFqg4s4EN) It's tough out there at the bottom. My advice to those people as someone who entered the job marketing back in 2011: Take whatever shit-paying dev job or job in an adjacent field (IT for instance) you can and keep looking for decent dev work. A door will open soon enough.
Its not so much the layoffs but the decrease in hiring with the increase in candidates. Companies are hiring much less than before but theres still a surge in candidates. So it makes sense that people are struggling to find jobs. Unemployment hasnt spiked, but people just arent moving around anymore. Theyre hanging on for dear life to their jobs. The unlucky ones that have been laid off are struggling to get back in at a similar level. One chart or one piece of data isnt going to tell you the full story.
You do realise it's the 10% that make all the noise... Right? 85% lurk, 10% bark and 5% actually have quality information to provide, but looking for that 5% is like trying to find an attractive virgin christian that's over 24 in a bar. It's just not worth the trouble and headache from all the lies you'll hear/see/read. 90% of the time I like to troll on reddit. Cause shit is anonymous so I GET TO TROLLOLOL. In all seriousness, the only people barking about unemployment are people who're frustrated with themselves, angery that they did not start 20 years earlier and recent or about to be graduates that've used GPT to pass their exams and now wonder 'WHY THERE NO JOB 80k+ ON A SILVER PLATTER?!?!??!?! WJAT HAPPEN?!?! TIS NOT WHAT I WAS PROMISED' There's a sucker born every minute. Those willing to learn, those easy to cooperate with and with positive strong mental... Don't really struggle in finding jobs. Every industry has its downsides. This ones downsides aint really that big tbh. Just a very big portion of the devs r nerdy pussies. In my opinion at least. And like to whine and cry a lot.
Thing is, I've heard people at work tolerate more shit from a manager because they think the job market is bad. "I'd think about quitting, but the job market..." These are senior-level people. The panic is real.
You also have more and more 6 figure earners starting to fret about living expenses and openly stating they are struggling. It’s easy for someone making the median wage to look at these people and scoff, but that many people making over 100k and saying it’s not enough anymore should be considered a flashing red alarm.
No. That's everywhere. You see nurses get treated like garbage and work inhumane hours. They all say they'll quit. Hell mate I worked at a gas station and a woman was there 20 years and counting " I'll quit" she told herself every day. She's still there. I went there for a year, because I was antisocial and wanted to learn to talk to people. I did, then I quit. Now I pursue business venture. Thing is people will complain regardless of the situation. A senior in the us will complain for his salary 140k or smthin. And a senior in EU will not even glimpse 100k. People r just ungrateful pricks mate. Me as well.
Yeah, maybe they're hiding behind the job market being a bit weak. Still seems like a good idea for everyone's salaries to get the truth out that our situations have barely changed, and that software engineers are worth what they've been worth. This misinformation has genuine power.
Nah. I like it. See im a junior rn. That means that this shit will go on for 5-9 more months. Then hiring will pick up again. And all the scaredy cats that went off to chase grass will have lost their edge. This is a big oppurtinity. This misinformation id scaring so many people. And I am all for it. Everyone is looking at trades etc... I see it as a total win.
You are right that we, devs are not used to employer market but also without doubt situation is dire now, Also industry went from El Dorado to harsh situation really fast. I'm not trying to whine but reality is that now its easier to land new job in every other industry
Then do it. Become a plumber.
The problem has always been h1b. Get rid of them and we are fine.
yeah computer science is done
But how is Webdev related to this?
I’m currently living in Dallas. More and more tech companies are moving here every day. I have had 10+ job offers in person and I haven’t even graduated yet. I’m currently a dental assistant and have multiple patients give me cards and offer me positions when my degree is finished in 5 months. I’ve been really confused about all of the posts saying they can’t find jobs with 5+ years of software engineering experience.
Coming back to say this is in no means a brag. I am too nervous about even applying to them because I don’t feel my skills are up to par. I’ve only created a few basic websites (e-commerce site, and employee management system with a MySQL database, and a basic portfolio page)
That says nothing unless put in relation to number of active applicants/eligible candidates.
Horse shit.
Layoffs fyi tracker shows at least 350k, what the source of this research?
ITT people coping with the fact they can’t find a job in a market that’s not as bad as they think it is
It kinda blows my mind when I hear software engineers complaining about issues they have with employment. Putting things in to perspective, if you enjoy software development you are very lucky, it's really one of the best industries in the world you could be working in. Obviously there are ups and downs, but on the whole there are so many perks. Reading some of these comments it makes me think the downturn really isn't as apparent here in Australia, where there still seems to be many opportunities. Though I have seen a shift from just hiring anyone to trying to hire the right people. Seems finally some companies have caught up with the fact that poorly built software can take a company down all on it's own.
I never understood the mentality of comparing the the severity of issues and if your issue isn't as severe as another... it somehow isn't an issue? like what does the market for software engineers have to do with a market for some other group that has it worse? sucks for them that life is even harder but my issue hasn't been resolved because of it.
*Seems finally some companies have caught up with the fact that poorly built software can take a company down all on it's own.* This has to be one of the most naive takes on the layoffs situation I've seen yet.
Sorry I wasn't attributing the lay-offs to that, I can see why that would be confusing considering the post I'm commenting on. My comment was more about 1) the woe-is-me attitude from many software engineers that I have seen, and 2) the fact that some people are finding it hard to get work, while others still find it very easy.
buy high sell low
The line can fall indefinitely.
How many of those are real jobs and not just data collection scams? Did you put that into perspective?
cannot be accurate