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Ask HN: Is the Job Market That Bad?
72 points by warkanlock 4 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 76 comments
I haven’t been job hunting in a while, but I’ve noticed many of my friends and family struggling just to land interviews. Most are well-qualified and can easily pass initial phone screenings, yet they face challenges in progressing further or even securing a first meeting.

Previously, my LinkedIn profile used to be flooded with job offers, but now it’s nearly silent. It seems this trend isn’t limited to software jobs alone.

What are your thoughts on this?




Been looking for a year and a half for something full-time and permanent. No luck so far. Chopped about fifteen years off my resume, and that seemed to help get more interviews, but I think that backfired because then they were surprised by my wrinkles and bald spot and figured if I was lying about my experience, I was lying about other things too.

One thing that does not help was a string of startups I worked for which all eventually ran out of funding, so I have like four companies in four years. Also, no thanks to Patreon, who hired me to do one thing, went through a bunch of managers and could never get the ball rolling, then laid off a bunch of people nine months later. really hard to explain to a hiring manager without sounding like I'm mad and resentful. Because I'm mad and resentful.

Picking up odd jobs here and there. Small part time gigs, some substitute teaching, bar-backing and construction work.


> Small part time gigs, some substitute teaching, bar-backing and construction work.

Was in the same boat.Did the audio-to-text transcribing gig on amazon mturk. It was a tossup between that & odd jobs at Walmart at that time. Recessions in usa is pretty brutal.

If you are so inclined, I suggest getting a cert & then hitting the shady indian outfits. They always have jobs so long as you have a recent cert. Can be anything - cert in GCP, or AWS or some cloud infra work will do. You have to study...but you have the time.


> If you are so inclined, I suggest getting a cert & then hitting the shady indian outfits.

Large companies outsourced to Indian companies like TCS, WIPRO, Infosys, CTS, etc. The latter wants to fill some positions onsite; here, TCS, et al source resumes from these 'shady Indian outfits'.

Also another phenomenon I observed: companies want presence during the US day time, so they outsourced to companies in Brazil and other South American countries. A friend's been out of job for a year, and reached out to an ex-manager at a tech company owned by a PE firm. The manager is willing hire him through the outsourcing company but for South American wages: this company pays $60 per hour to the outsourcing partner, who takes 30% cut. So, that is about $42 per hour on 1099, without any benefits. And this contract gig may last for four months.

Welcome to the new world, where we see three classes of techies: (a) those who work for FAANG and other elite companies/firms (b) those who work for non-elite companies (c) contract work force, whose contracts last for three to six months.


>> Chopped about fifteen years off my resume

Just a suggestion. It may instead be preferable to put a `Other Work Experience` section with a bullet point highlighting either tech skills or domain or a mix with the duration.

``` Java, J2EE, .NET

Various Companies

mm/dd/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy

Enterprise app development

- Design and implement various travel, finance applications/modules ```

edit: formatting


Not the OP, but I'm also old, and this is a fantastic suggestion. Thank you!


Get set up and start fishing for c2c and 1099 gigs. You will be surprised how much they pay. A lot of people are billing two clients and everyone is happy.


Probably you are better off putting some or all of the fifteen years back on, but abbreviate those positions down to a one sentence/line summary.

Also, work on your narrative for those startups / patreon... "I learnt a lot in a short time" or "they were having financial troubles so they had to lay off some of their best people", or something not mad and resentful.


As someone involved in hiring, there are a few factors going on:

1. There's no available headcount. No one is leaving since there are no opportunities elsewhere. Especially those on visas.

2. When we do have headcount, we get 1000 resumes within an hour or two. We also have a stack of referrals to get through first. A lot of these resumes are experienced folks with backgrounds in FAANG.

3. Supply remains high (100k CS undergrads every year including global supply) whereas innovation is low.


As someone who has recently hired within a FAANG, another problem is internal transfers and downsizing. The external hire process for a big company takes minimum 6 weeks. Within 24 hours of posting a job opening, I've got 20 internal transfers interested, all highly qualified, all familiar with our internal systems and processes, and all desperate to avoid being actually laid off from their team that is disappearing. My last two positions went to a returning ex-employee (who don't have to re-interview if they come back within 2 years) and to a transfer. I wanted to hire externally because I know there are good candidates out there, but it's impossible to justify waiting 6 weeks for the pipeline to close when you know that good internal candidates will get laid off if you don't take them, and the headcount likely will disappear anyway if it's not filled.


background in FAANG means nothing


depends whatchu did at said FAANG and who is doing the hiring. but generally agree.

places like the GOOG are so far out there in terms of tooling and approaches (and size, and bureaucracy, etc.) that you end up with a hire who is damn good at whatever unique internal tooling and job sets are, but can't handle anything else.

they'll expect 250k at minimum, get surly when they don't get it, constantly look to jump or climb, and won't jive with the culture, esp. once that's still using a lot of the more basic approaches that are more common in larger, non-STEM enterprise orgs.

inevitably these guys jump in 1.5 years or less, and achieve nothing of note in that time, except harping on how great tool X is at Meta, or how we did Y at the GOOG and everyone else should. or some sort of PTSD from working at Amazon.

after a couple rounds of getting burned by people with amazing resumes we are now weary of the FAANG pedigree.


Means something if those doing the hiring think it means something.


Means a lot actually. For example, expensive and not great at innovation. But with 3 years of enshittification experience.


It's getting better, but it's still dire.

Anecdotally I've gotten a fair few more job interviews in the last month or so than I did when still at my previous company, and seems recruiters are reaching out a bit more than they did back then as well.

But it's still really bad for anyone that's not a senior, especially anyone who hasn't been a senior at a large tech company. I often look on LinkedIn and Glassdoor and other such sites for jobs, and whenever I end up on the home page feed, there's always at least a few very popular posts from people lamenting how bad the market/search is. Those posts are filled with comments from people saying it's been weeks/months of effort to get anything, including from those in the tech industry.

And heck, I've even seen depressing stories pop up all the time outside of job boards and related sites too. Twitter, Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon... they've all got a lot of people who seem to be in serious trouble right now, and in pretty much every industry under the sun.

It definitely feels bad, especially when people I know with a lot of experience are struggling to even get interviews. We're talking senior devs, team leads, managers, etc. All people that I feel should be getting offers left, right and centre, yet are struggling to get anywhere.

Makes me rather worried as someone who is by default unlikely to have much of a personal network, and who has basically negative charisma.


Yes/No. It's probably the worst it's been in a decade, but it's my understanding it's nothing even resembling the 2008 crash or the dotcom bubble (I wasn't working during those times). With that said, it feels worse than it is because the 2021-2022 period was uniquely euphoric.

Key driving factors are people who have been laid off working to find positions against the backdrop of many tech companies not adding headcount right now. Additionally the decade+ long messaging campaigns of "CS is going to be the most in-demand major forever etc etc" have now materialized into a steady supply of CS grads every year.

I'm fortunate to be interviewing for a role at a big tech company right now (arguably the most desirable tech employer rn outside of MANGA) and the recruiters have told me that they get almost 1000 applications for every role posted and are basically exclusively hiring from referrals. I imagine this is exacerbated by people using llm scraping bots to automatically submit applications.

With all that said, anecdotally I'm seeing cold approaches from recruiters tick up. 6 months ago my linkedin/email were radio silent, but I've had ~10 people reach out in the last 2 months or so.


Your understand is wrong. 2008 was not a bad time for tech at all.


bad time to be a construction project manager, but IT was humming along just fine.

maybe they were talking about the dot-com crash several years earlier?


This “It's probably the worst it's been in a decade, but it's my understanding it's nothing even resembling the 2008 crash or the dotcom bubble”

The worst of 2008 started in October of that year though … tick tock ?


> Previously, my LinkedIn profile used to be flooded with job offers, but now it’s nearly silent

Can confirm. I nowadays receive mostly messages from people who are looking for a job and curious if our team is hiring. Though it is mostly entry-level candidates (fresh grads, people who have completed bootcamps, etc.), which probably tells something about the job market.

HRs occasionally reach out to me but only to try to sell devs. So it looks like nobody's hiring and everyone is desperately looking for a job. Or maybe it's just LinkedIn is dead and people use other channels to find opportunities.


linkedin is mostly garbage and is hitting the same social media enshittification that is taking place on other major platforms.

only reason i still have it is essentially as a social proof to any HR person looking me up.


I graduated recently and have been looking ever since. It’s abysmal. No replies at all. Compared to co-op where I was interviewing a dozen times a week and getting half a dozen offers, it’s post-apocalyptic.

No one’s interested in taking on anyone at recent grad / entry-level. Not sure what to do.


Have you talked to any startups? Young hungry folks were historically valued at startups, especially ones who have some OGs who can spare bandwidth to onboard / grow new hires, though maybe the game has changed.


Startups today are interested in profits, not in valuation.

This means they now need to crank out a working product as quickly as possible, and that means hiring only seasoned seniors with an impressive track record.

Previously, they could have gotten away with having no product at all (all while hiring as no tomorrow, just to pump up their valuation). But those days are gone with the low interest rates.


That is not entirely true though, our team at doshare.me hired a lot of young graduates and we are building and iterating through product lifecycle quickly.

In my experience, seasoned seniors are expensive to get and bring unnecessary conflicts and issues to startups lifecycle.

Until startup has started to actually scale they definitely shouldn't hire seniors with a lot of experience.


A lot of the ones I’ve seen were leaning too heavily towards equity-only compensation.

I’m sorry founders, but equity isn’t going to pay off my student loans!


What I find paradoxical is that despite the fact there's a lot of people "on the market" (or so many say), I'm having a hard time finding software engineers to fill a few open positions.

Granted, I work for a small company doing things that may be considered boring and maybe people are looking elsewhere.

I would be curious to know if that feels like the case for other companies too.


Is comp below market?

There are many people "on the market" who are either A) employed but looking for something better or B) not interested in taking a lower salary than their previous job.

Salaries skyrocketed in 2021 (along with prices for houses, groceries, etc), and there are going to be a lot of potential candidates who are anchoring on those wages as their expectation for next role.


Yep. I've had a few recruiters contact me about interesting roles. I tell them I'm a passive job seeker, so the comp needs to be somewhat enticing. Then they reveal they're paying 30% below my current salary...


Maybe describe your company and tech stack here and leave an email address people could reach you? It seems like there are people looking in this thread.


I get recruiter and "join my startup" messages once or twice a week now, up from it being completely dead a year ago.

It's definitely still a tough market, but I don't know anyone good who was laid off and then stayed unemployed.


Potentially related to ground truth shared in what was posted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493049

https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1fbhap7/sec...


You know what would be funny? If there was a free labor market for the C suite. There's probably some talented disgruntled folks with financial runway right now, who would do CEO for minimum wage just for the lolz.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/technology/ai-chief-execu...

https://archive.today/Y9gBv


It's real, I got so much disappointed by this market that I started up on my own product. Also, somehow got few people to join me and we're shipping this month.


Yes - 20 years of tech experience at major players and not able to find a single full time role in over a year- looking remote anywhere or in person in Seattle

Have been doing contract work - currently doing AI engineering


> Have been doing contract work - currently doing AI engineering

You're good, then. FTE is way worse than that.


Why is everyone searching for these FTE spots? That paradigm is dying.


Could you elaborate?


The FTE slot has become a really bad deal. I have worked alongside people who were making less than half what I was. The company treated us slightly different in that employees time was sucked down with meetings, performance reviews, mandatory certification and team building. Lump on some more hours and demands and you have a complete shit show. Companies also have to do a song and dance about how great it is to be an employee (elitism) and to thank the gods they arent one of the lowly contractors that they "manage."

- Easier to get a job as a contractor (college degrees and certification standards are relaxed) - Pays a lot more - Skips all the happy horseshit - Treated like an adult

Sometimes FTE can be good but by default it is a bad deal for most.


Contract work is much harder to come by and requires a significant network. Most of the time I interacted with people doing contract work, it was because they used to be FTE at the boss’s previous company.

As far as pay goes, I don’t find many are making much more than faang pay. Most are making okay money but spending a lot of unpaid time on networking. I feel like the people I know who speak the most about contract work are those who are actually running contracting firms (not doing any work themselves), were underpaid and are now getting at market rate comparable to other FTE, and people not in the US where contract work is more typical.


I have known several people who would get contracts from those random Indian recruiter emails. If you get them coming in (like who does this on purpose,right?) and automatically filter them you can start getting good leads.

One guy I know runs two contracts at once. One of them ends...no big deal.


I've never heard of contractors getting paid in stock, which is arguably one of the best parts of being in tech, you can ride the price up, and if the price crashes, you can switch jobs.

I believe you that the contractor rate can pay substantially more than salaries but does it make up for the 100k, 200k, or more in stock each year a FTE might get at a really good tech company?


Getting paid in stock might be a benefit at big tech, but in the startup world the median value of granted stock has to be zero or close to it. Most startups fail before going public or being acquired.


Side bar: I've been back in the UK for a longer spell for the first time in years, and the number of adverts for "blue collar" jobs I've seen just walking around is unreal.

So many places looking for kitchen staff, waiters, carers etc. Might just be that I've been in smaller towns with leaner recruitment pools, but it's been striking.


Yes, I’m in the UK too and there’s a massive shortage in that sector. But, of course, the pay is terrible so no one wants to do it.


Probably related to Brexit right?


Not a terrible hypothesis


Anecdotally, I see the market picking up again. Fewer good candidates coming across the recruiting desks and hearing stories of the friends of our new grad engineers finally landing jobs.


Yes. I'm the CEO of Google and I can't even get an internship at Google

But tbh yes, it seems job postings for software jobs are the lowest in 4 years, almost as low as the dip that occurred just after the pandemic. The COVID job boom was clearly temporary and is now being massively offset by AI

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&he...

It's over. Best alpha for people who aren't being flooded rn is to just start their own company while applying in the background via AI so it doesn't waste their time. All their applications are being culled via AI anyway so it's fair.


What is the evidence it is being offset by AI? I haven't really seen that. I think it is mostly two factors:

- Companies over-hired during the COVID boom and don't need to hire as much because they still have those people. It's like they did all of their hiring for a few years ahead of time.

- Interest rates are still the highest in a long time. Tech hiring is disproportionately affected by this.

You can throw in offshoring of jobs if you'd like (I would still put that ahead of any impact AI has had).


My opinion there are five things going on:

1) Tech hasn't really innovated since the smart phone era. VR and web3 didn't work out. All the covid B2C subscription stuff didn't work out. Big data and SaaS only partially worked out. AI is pretty transparently a pump and not many people are investing in headcount for it.

2) Interest rates raise the risk-free rate of return so there's less impetus to dump money into speculative investments in chase of yield. This affects startups but less so established companies who don't need to raise.

3) There's a massive offshoring push right now. Bigger than I've seen since the early 2000s. Lots of organizations are making it basically impossible to open a req in a western office while also actively moving roles offshore.

4) There's a big push from the ownership/investor class for labor discipline. There's a feeling that industry workers got too comfortable during the Covid boom and started making demands.

5) People actually getting displaced by AI is marginal to non-existent as far as I've seen, but I've seen plenty of managers using it as an excuse for workforce reduction "we're going to fire 10 percent of you because you should all be using AI to be more productive."


As a long time JavaScript developer your first bullet point is wrong. Yes, tech stopped innovating but not because of empty marketing gimmicks like Web3.

Tech stopped innovating because they stopped training developers. They attempted to turn developers into plug and play commodities via open source and large frameworks. It spectacularly backfired over the course of about 15 years.

So you have a fleet of developers utterly reliant on colossal tech stacks that cannot pivot and otherwise cannot program. Not only do the people cost more over time but the products became insanely large slow never ending debt machines.

Now the game is to off set those super expensive shitty developers with AI. It’s probably going to work because the code is was so bad and AI is already doing a better job with the framework nonsense. The problem there is that it will be bots writing bad software, possibly better than the people but still bad, talk to other bots.


> Tech stopped innovating because they stopped training developers. They attempted to turn developers into plug and play commodities via open source and large frameworks. It spectacularly backfired over the course of about 15 years.

Most of the previous innovators and wannabes of 15 years ago (HN users) are still alive and should be eager to innovate now that the market and audience is so much bigger. But we all got too domesticated by big tech. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta revenue is money lost by millions of developers.


Agreed with 1 and 4 the most. Almost everything that needs to be built digitally, has been built. Could stuff be improved? Of course, but many big companies, their growth will come from product and marketing, not technical improvements/new features, etc. Additionally, I think executives may be realizing that smaller, tighter, focused teams often outperform massive headcounts - i.e. "nine women, 1 month" staffing

As far as "too comfortable," absolutely. Those "follow me for my day at X" videos drive everyone insane. Workers insisting on remote. Multiple remote jobs. The fact that people who had it pretty good weren't satisfied and insisted on posting all of this publicly, embarrassing their employers, making work look more like a spa or daycare -- all you can say to them is, you did this to yourself.


> 3) There's a massive offshoring push right now. Bigger than I've seen since the early 2000s. Lots of organizations are making it basically impossible to open a req in a western office while also actively moving roles offshore.

This is it, basically. COVID showed the world that a whole lotta things could be remote. Industries that might have balked at the idea 5 years ago are now onboard.

Automation and AI aren't helping, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to 120k new CS grads a year -- on top of outsourcing.


Doubt AI is reducing the need for developers very much, if at all, but the perception of AI very well could be causing some companies and managers to reduce hiring as they believe the hype that LLMs will obsolete most developers.


Then they are going to realize they need more devs for the AI integrations. Tons of work. Most people still think you have to shell out to big tech and ship your data to a third party for an AI integration. My boss, a very sharp architect, had no idea you could run an LLM locally and modify pre trained models etc until I shoved it in the whole groups' face with a chat post of me answering questions on company data with a local LLM. It lit a fire under his ass, that's for sure. Our entire business is based on creating documents and providing interfaces for people to navigate them. Clients were asking for AI and everyone dropped the ball. Something had to be done.

Multiply this happening all over the entirety of industry right now.


> It's over

Is there a good phrase for people that make sweeping definitive statements like this with fairly tepid evidence?


Probably the same phrase applies to people who say this:

> Almost everything that needs to be built digitally, has been built


Tht'z true too, it just hasn't been marketed perfectly


Yes, it's really that bad. Even trying to change teams internally at my company is the hardest it's ever been in over a decade of experience.


One promising anecdotal is that I've seen a big uptick in the last 8 weeks of people leaving my current place (not FAANG but you've heard of it) with work secured whereas that wasn't the case much for the last 2 years.


Well, at least I don't feel so alone now. Same situation here: LinkedIn is silent, or I'm getting really bad offers. My experience being mostly in Clojure certainly doesn't help either.

Plus, interviews have become really intense. I recently had an interview (the first one, "HR") that consisted of me talking about myself and my experience for 10 minutes, without any questions from the interviewer, and then it went straight into a coding challenge (a change-making problem, which I couldn’t finish in time).


You mention that Clojure doesn't help but I would assume that knowing Clojure puts a leg up due to the buzz I see about Clojure on this site all the time. Do you think sinking years into Clojure was a net negative for you?

Note: I really like Clojure and looking to invest time in it but I am scared it will not make me attractive to employers.


hackernews is not representative of the real world, you can pretty much round to zero % the amount of companies in the world using Clojure compared to main stream languages


you can also round to zero the amount of developers that are proficient in Clojure so this means nothing.

If 0.01% of the tech jobs use clojure and 0.005% of developers are looking for a clojure job that would still be a great position for the few thousands of clojure programmers.


I'm still getting LinkedIn recruiter spam, just nothing interesting.

The only two software people I know who lost jobs this year are now employed again.


Same. There has not been any interesting LinkedIn recruiter spam in months. And any interesting looking jobs on there are showing 100+ applicants. Doesn't seem like a good time to be looking for a job.


LinkedIn is now silent for me besides spam.


So it’s weird. I was unemployed for 6 months last year after being laid off. That long 6 month span was largely self inflicted. As a JavaScript developer I got tired of the hyper insecurity of nobody knowing to program in that language so I waited until I found something else to do.


What did you change career to?


“Profile was flooded with job offers”? Do you mean job interviews?

I was on the market a few months ago. It was fine. Worse than 2021 but better than 2020 and 2019 (I had the same level on my resume in 2020 and 2021).


Very rough out there. Response rates are almost zero.


Yes quite bad clearly worst since 2008 if not worse.


Anecdotally I just got a new job and a massive raise from my last position but my friends who are new grads or have less experience/weird educational backgrounds are still struggling to land roles. Definitely a much better market than a year ago but the floor still dropped out from under us and it took the new grads and bootcamp devs with it.


Yes




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