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Ask HN: What do you guys think of the current job market in tech?

by kapitanjakc on 7/23/24, 5:30 AM with 91 comments

• by nopelynopington on 7/23/24, 6:56 AM

  I'm in the EU, I just picked up a new job as a senior dev. I had been a team lead / manager but struggled to find another role as I only have two years experience in management. Picking up a dev role was easier.

  Things I've learned in the process (and from being on interview panels myself)

  1) I tend to stay in a job a long time (5 years plus) and this is highly valued by interviewers

  2) in tech interviews you need to constantly remind yourself that you are not really coding, you are demonstrating knowledge. Talk through every thing you do, explain why you did it, or what an alternative way could be.

  3) referrals really help. I've gotten interviews from referrals when there wasn't a position advertised yet

  4) every place out there is doing something with AI. Put a bit of python on your CV and play with ChatGPT, ask them about it, work in into conversation that you're learning it.

  5) I put side projects on my CV and I get asked a lot about them. If you have something semi serious, employers will listen.

• by Andaith on 7/23/24, 6:47 AM

  It's pretty brutal here in Australia.

  Higher interest rates mean companies are aggressively reducing headcount.

  Insanely high immigration means statistically for every 1 job being created we're importing 1.4 workers.

  Job vacancies across the economy are down 16.4% yearly change according to ABS.

  Also according to ABS, Job vacancies, change from February 2020 to May 2024, for IT is an increase of just 1.8%.

  In summary, jobs market is getting ugly out there, triply so for IT.

  The simple solution to this & the housing crisis is to restrict immigration, but instead we have record immigration because without it we'd be in recession(our economy grew 0.1% last quarter, GDP per capita went down).

• by olivierduval on 7/23/24, 6:59 AM

  5-9 years is a "bad" spot for developers: devs are too skilled to be cheap or to accept "junior" job & pay, and have not enough experience to be a "jack of all trade"

  Here, in France, the job market is really slowing. More than before, companies are looking for cheap people... so they let go people with some experience and try to recruit engineer out-of-school to replace them. Obviously it doesn't work really well... neither for the juniors (too much pressure/expectation) nor for the rest of the team (knowledges & experience loss, need to teach the basics of the company to the new...)

  ChatGPT is sometimes a bit used by junior to help them "day to day"... but not really more than "google / stack overflow" 20 or 30 years ago.

• by physicsguy on 7/23/24, 6:40 AM

  There was a deleted comment saying that it helps if you learn your domain and bring skills/knowledge aside from just programming. I agree, although I think it also helps if you have a non-CS background relevant to this sort of thing, as it implies some base level of knowledge too. I've met people that have been in one domain for a long time but still don't understand it, so it's not a given.

  My background is in Physics but I've worked on software in the Engineering industry now for 10 years nearly. My most recent project at work drew on maths I used in my doctorate (various bits of Fourier analysis applied to mechanical systems). Not that someone who hadn't got my background couldn't do it but I could jump on that project and finish it in 2 months and I doubt anyone else in my team could have picked it up and done it in less than 6-9 months just because of the research and needing to understand the maths + algorithms.

  I regularly get contacted by companies working in the same or adjacent domains, whereas some of my more 'pure' software friends are hearing nothing at the moment.

• by a_t48 on 7/23/24, 6:22 AM

  After I quit my last job, I ended up starting my own thing - wasn't ready to go through the hassle of interviewing again.

• by sakopov on 7/23/24, 7:10 AM

  I'm in the US and It's bad. Really bad. I feel terrible for anyone without a job trying to find something new. It seems like the only option is to go hunt for recruiters or ask someone to make a recommendation for you at the company you're interested in. Otherwise your resume is probably never looked at. In my experience I tend to see more jobs available in Midwest than anywhere else right now. The pay is pretty average but it isn't terribly low. We're definitely nowhere near the salaries we had a couple years back.

• by tetris11 on 7/23/24, 5:58 AM

  I thought my greatest asset was being a coder. AI has shown me that it isn't. Recruiters are dropping their interest on that front similarly.

  I now have to learn other talents to make me relevant. Not entirely sure what that is yet, but I feel a sense of urgency

• by crooked-v on 7/23/24, 6:51 AM

  I feel like at least part of the problem is that tech hiring as a whole just hasn't adapted to remote work. Companies are still using the same hiring pipelines from when everyone was naturally filtered by being within X miles of the office (or motivated enough to relocate), so they get bajillions of applications they're unable to handle properly, which leads to devs who would previously stand out also having to apply anywhere and everywhere to get noticed at all, which exacerbates the problem even more, and the entire process slows to a crawl for everyone because of the sheer mass of applications on every side of the equation.

• by n_ary on 7/23/24, 7:25 AM

  /u/kapitanjakc, are your friends in US or EU or APAC?

  The market is reacting to global events, as we live in an uncertain time after a full and half decade of unprecendented innovation and prosperity. If I understood my parents correctly, this is just the economic cycle. However, the massive global scale pandemic, immediately followed by mass inflation, wars, rapid rise in living cost, anticipation of a massive generation retiring soon etc.. makes everything a bit slower to recover.

  Also, due to money suddenly becoming expensive and eternal global downturn as well as political turmoil made businesses clamp down and make-do with whatever they have now until this storm has passed. It will take some time before demands will rise again. Until then, need to find something to continue, like working at a local business or that uncool startup which can't pay SV money and doesn't use the most fancy tech.

  Also, there is lack of investment despite apparent(according to new media reportings I read) massive generational wealth transfer. Unlike PG/Elon era, people now use inheritance or windfall towards luxury(instagram) lifestyle instead of investing in ventures.

  That all being said, I don't see a lot of problems in my corner of EU. While, my linkedin inbox has been unspammed since 3-6 months now, I haven't heard anything from my circle, except some of my friends looking slowly or taking that desired timeoff/break after their employer dissolved due to lack of funding/runway.

• by PhilipRoman on 7/23/24, 7:15 AM

  Latvia here, the company I work at is actively looking to hire for embedded but so far haven't had any luck. We don't even have any hard constraints for applicants like degree requirements, etc. It's surprising how many developers don't know what a syscall is.

  I would recommend expanding your field of view and learning a bit of everything. It's become a trope nowadays that one cannot understand the entire stack from top to bottom but that really isn't true.

• by alias_neo on 7/23/24, 7:05 AM

  We just advertised a role, that typically get's 2-5 applications (we'r e a small org), and had over 80 applicants. There seem to be a lot of people looking for roles at the moment.

• by trod123 on 7/24/24, 6:28 PM

  Its pretty brutal here in the US.

  Tons of fake job postings, bad actors, and real opportunities are not differentiable from the fake. I've easily submitted several 1000's of CVs over the past two years and only gotten a handful of callbacks, this with 10 years of experience in IT Operations; I've seen a lot of entry level people giving up and retraining into other professions; HVAC and other trades. I've seriously considered it myself.

  You have to go where the jobs are available, if there are no jobs there are no jobs; doesn't matter what they claim in the reports if there are no positions actually hiring.

  Currently, there is overall less than a 0.01% rate of conversion to phone interview. Many of the posting platforms also do not remove known bad actors. PatternedAI being a very prominent one on LinkedIn (where they simply collect your information and never have a position, recycling their postings every 3 months). There are quite a lot of companies like this.

• by prisenco on 7/23/24, 7:27 AM

  I'm getting 3-4 recruiter emails a week, which is much less than a few years ago. I've noticed an uptick recently. There certainly was a period where I didn't get any for weeks on end.

  I'm a generalist with 25+ years experience. I'm on the more employable end but I can't command as much salary as a specialist.

  I've been moving back into contract work though, which is different than the salary world.

• by 748 on 7/24/24, 9:54 AM

  I am one of the people looking for a full-time job for 6+ months. I have a side project that keeps me afloat and the job search hasn't been my "main" goal, but I am now becoming increasingly concerned about the relatively long period that I am technically "unemployed". I usually don't advertise myself as much and I don't have a linkedin or any socials. Do you think it makes sense to make a linkedin to improve my chances? I usually just monitor platforms and apply to positions that fit me. I do realize that there is a subset of potential employers not really advertising positions anywhere but instead using linkedin to find potential candidates. Also, how long do you think this situation will persist? Some of the comments mentioned a "rebound", so is it likely to slowly start recovering, or is it accurate to say that it will persist for another year or so?

• by spacejogger on 7/23/24, 7:16 AM

  In London.

  My sense is that there are plenty of junior level opportunities still out there, although fewer than before.

  But senior level positions which pay a decent salary (which i define as £200k+/year in London) are especially hard to find and get nowadays, compared to years prior.

• by red-iron-pine on 7/23/24, 1:08 PM

  Lotta openings, but no one seems to be biting.

  Meanwhile I know a lot of folks who can't find people. In most cases it looks like they're searching for a hyper-specific candidate.

  At this point I don't know whether to blame new HR tools which seem to suck even more, HR putting out a lot of bunko posts to get data and look like they're hiring, or a Post-COVID job market that's absolutely flooded with marginal candidates, all of whom want remote.

• by nicbou on 7/24/24, 12:34 PM

  I was in tech and now I work in immigration in Germany. All the relocation consultants in the industry report a massive drop in clients, meaning that companies are hiring fewer foreigners. Some talk about their worst year in a while.

  Companies require German speakers more and more, because there are enough German speaking candidates.

• by dakiol on 7/23/24, 9:25 PM

  > Many of my friends with varying range of experience 5-9 years

  > I thought it was bad only for freshers, but it looks like that everyone is struggling.

  It's better for people with 10+ years of experience. For everyone else is harder than in previous years.

• by realusername on 7/23/24, 6:31 AM

  I'm based in the EU as a fullstack developer and nothing changed much, I'm hearing that there's a crisis on the US market but it's not reaching the EU yet or it's so small that it's not visible to me.

• by mx_2000 on 7/23/24, 6:26 AM

  Which country are you from? And how old are your friends? I heard a lot of this from the US but from my impression it's quite different in the EU (or maybe just in my bubble?)

• by StickyRibbs on 7/23/24, 6:28 AM

  What market are you in? We can only speculate based on presumptions.

• by geor9e on 7/23/24, 6:39 AM

  Do they have CS degrees?

• by throwawaysleep on 7/23/24, 5:53 AM

  Software developer who is Overemployed here.

  No issues landing offers fairly regularly. I never stop interviewing as I don’t want to be out of practice so I get about 1 offer a month.

  Definitely slower, but far from dead.

• by epolanski on 7/23/24, 6:45 AM

  The market feels crap compared to the years before.

  I used to be spammed few times a week, if not per day in previous years, now I get contacted like once a month at best.

• by rndaom on 7/23/24, 5:42 PM

  Market is in the gutter.

  Many job ads are fake and only there to confuse shareholders about the company health.

  Interviewers are looking for the tiniest bit of excuse to fail you along the process while quite often they are looking for lesser engineers than themselves as this buys them job security.

  Offers, when they come, are much worse (terms + money) than what they were 2 years ago.

  Most of the companies don't want to invest even a day on you so you have to have the exact package they're looking for.

  It is fully a (job) sellers market. OTOH if you are a company and you find it hard to find people in this market then you're doing something really wrong.

  EU-Greece here.

  Good luck.

• by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 7/23/24, 5:55 AM

  Are programmers being replaced by ChatGPT finally?