Is the Job Market Dying? (opens in new tab)

This is an important reality check for many people.

I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash. At that time software engineers got paid well, but not insane. Additionally, every software engineer I met was passionate about writing code.

Honestly, around 2019 I was really missing those days. The field has become flooded with people looking for a high paying job with essentially no interest in software or computer science beyond the paycheck it provides. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I do miss virtually everyone in the industry being genuinely fascinated with software and programming.

The good news is, if you're the kind of person who would write code even if it paid minimum wage, you'll survive this. People whose book shelves are filled with CS books, who find themselves working on coding problems at night because it's fun, who can't help hacking around with new ideas on the weeked, will very likely continue to work in software. You'll likely make less money, but you'll also have more fun.

Unsurprisingly, in this current market I'm getting paid less but having more fun at work than I've had in nearly a decade.

Worst day in that job when I was trying to crawl out of bankruptcy was meeting a few of my ex-colleagues while wearing the crappy purple uniform. I was putting food on the table and they looked like I was a joke.

I still put food on the table, the job market always wants people who can just code. Networking is hard and requires longitudinal effort. But the jackpot remains elusive.

Keep trying

I’d especially add that this can be good for people without extensive personal networks or who are worried about discrimination. If you’re on, say, https://usajobs.gov they are going to be a lot more fastidious about equal opportunity laws than many private companies and won’t think twice about hiring a middle-aged person with cubicle bod who has to go home at 5pm to pick up their kids rather than grabbing beers after work.

The trick in a bad market is to understand that mostly the cool perks are gone, and for a time you need to lower your expectations. I think that is going to be very difficult in this cycle.

Just as we saw in 2001, the market is worst for (a) recent graduates who have not yet established a professional network and (b) people who had poured into fungible commoditized job roles during the boom and were a dime a dozen when the bust came. (b) is roughly "programmer/analyst" in 2001, "Java developer" in 2008, and "data scientist" today. It's not that some people working under those titles don't have non-fungible skills, but that there are so many others with that job on their resume, that it's hard to differentiate. My advice is, _don't go looking for those jobs._ The opening anecdote in the article describes how terrible it is to try to get hired as a data scientist right now. And no wonder. The job market is flooded with low-quality data scientists.

My experience working with data scientists has drastically lowered my expectations: you get a mediocre Python programmer (you must be willing to accept Pandas + Jupyter notebooks as their work output), combined with a mediocre statistician (can do linear regression and ANOVA, but don't expect them to do it right), combined with a mediocre SQL programmer (probably SELECT, maybe JOIN if you're lucky), and a mediocre machine learning specialist (has a list of preferred sklearn functions in random priority order depending on training, plus maybe one other random library that stops working in the middle of the project due to an API change). They made up for their cheap salaries by spending lots of money on AWS.

Maybe I just got unlucky. Didn't know how to hire well. I'm sure there are good Data Scientists out there, but it's so easy to hire bad ones that it's no wonder people are reluctant to do it. If you're one of the good ones, and if you're in any way qualified for a job with a higher barrier to entry, or even just a job with a more unusual title than Data Scientist, go for that instead of trying to stand out in a sea of mediocrity.

I don’t think the next best thing is to start a company however. Because the people who didn’t get jobs from their network are more likely to be the people who won’t necessarily excel at this. Plus there are so many variables here.

Next best thing in my view is to grind the heck out of Hacker Rank problems and get a job out of pure spite from brute forcing software challenges. Not fun or interesting, but can work really well to land someone a high paying job without having to think about starting a company.

Next best thing, or parallel best thing if this is your preference, is probably to get a more local dev job. There are surprisingly many local companies who don’t post remote roles, don’t post roles on HN, pay less than FAANG market, but are comfortable, in person roles with medium expectations. This is way better than being a liquor store clerk.

Regarding this...I was the guy on both ends of the spectrum. The Rockstar that goes above and beyond and the guy who was punching the clock (sometimes a little too early). It made no appreciable difference in the quality of my network - it is still essentially non-existent, since none of my peers or ex-peers have much influence over hiring decisions.

My best shot at networking into a job is through a personal friend who works in a non-tech sector at a high level position. He's probably the only person who can actually get my resume seen by hiring people out of several hundred that I have met over my lifetime.

Ha ha so true!

I entered tech in 2000, right as everything was going down. Hey, it was fun for the 8 months I worked for what we now call a startup in Miami. They closed abruptly, and luckily I was able to get another job within about 4 months.

The market in tech is definitely worse than 2020 (I don't know why some here say those were the days of wine and roses) and I was always able to find work during the financial crisis, though it could take a couple of months. So, I'd say that the job market for tech is not as bad as the dot com crash but worse than 2009 or 2020.

1. There was a massive amount of tech hiring not just over the pandemic, but really in the whole period from the end of the Great Recession until the latter half of 2022.

2. Many of those jobs were not just unsustainable pandemic hiring, but they were really just speculative hiring enabled by the ZIRP era, where more companies were worried about being left behind than overspending. Some examples: during the "Big Data Boom" there was an explosion of "data scientists" and "data analysts". I put those titles in scare quotes not because they're invalid jobs or something, but just that there was so much of a "just throw bodies at the problem" attitude that many of these roles were poorly defined at companies. Similarly, lots of companies staffed up massive user research teams. Turns out a lot of that low hanging fruit has been picked, and many companies have realized they can get by with much smaller, more targeted user research.

3. We are now undergoing a massive job restructuring, I would argue even stronger than what happened post dot com bubble, for a bunch of reasons: (1) the end of the ZIRP era coinciding with the end of pandemic-specific overhiring, (2) I've heard it said "Elon Musk showed with Twitter that you can run tech companies with a lot smaller teams" - while I strongly disagree (I'm always thinking, have you actually even used the complete garbage cesspool X has become, even more than before???), I think there is a valid point that a lot of companies just had way too many people than they needed, and (3) Gen AI really is having an impact on specific roles, e.g. copywriting roles and low-level data analyst roles.

It's simply a game of musical chairs where a ton of chairs were taken away all at once. Yes, the job application process is painful, AI-assisted ATS tools can feel like a labyrinth, and there are a lot more scams. But that is not the root cause. There are just a ton more people looking for jobs than there are roles available.

But is the job market actually shitty? I still get plenty of recruiter spam on LinkedIn.

We spent the lion’s share of the 20th century building a vast “sovereign wealth fund” of technology via effective partnerships between the public and private sectors (substantially though not exclusively under “defense” budgets of one kind or another): everything from the transistor to the laser to the packet-switched Internet to Unix, the list goes on and on.

Then, somewhat abruptly in the scheme of things, a few things happened around the same time: “Dutch” Reagan was sharp enough to realize that he was a fucking movie star not a policy person, and needed some academic and intellectual heft to round out a serious presidential bid. The exact causal structure remains unclear to this day, it seems mostly to be related to cashing in on a Cold War that was winding down but good for one last corruption orgy, but somehow he and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan all got together and sold the public on a bunch of policies that were and remain disasters (Greenspan has since grudgingly admitted that he was wrong about pretty much everything in the kind of tortured language people like that use when they’re wrong about everything), Lewis Ranieri realized that in his words “Mortgages are math” and began a disastrous trend of extreme complexity financialization that created modern K Street (basically figured out how to buy up the commons for pennies on the dollar by gutting any remaining taboos against flagrant bribery of elected officials) and smoothly pivoted all of this into the Clinton Administration while codifying “Goldman Sachs is where we source finance people” in the form of Robert Rubin and his heirs, and the piece de resistance: brought Larry Summers into the mix, whose biography reads like the prelude to impeachment proceedings: everything the guy has ever touched has been illegal, icky, stupid, racist, misogynistic, kleptocratic, corrupt, or all of the above.

The last person to put up a serious fight was Brooksley Born, who was in the middle of preventing both the 2001 and 2008 financial meltdowns (and therefore almost certainly preventing the rise of reactionary populism in the Western World) when the cabal of incompetent Randian fuckups knee-capped her (using gender discrimination as a lever) and basically started running the “build a technology-denominated sovereign wealth fund” process in reverse: it’s been game on regarding raiding that cookie jar if you have the right “network” ever since.

The Department of Justice was taking time out of its typical day chasing around terrorists and human traffickers and what not to try to police stuff like trivial collusion and flagrant wage fixing in technology as recently as like 2011-2012, but seems to have kind of given up: it’s a losing battle. The last major legal action around big cap tech wage fixing wound down with a 400MM parking ticket in ~2011.

Three guesses where Summers is putting his greasy thumbs (the rest of that clique is dead or retired) on the scale now and who is the heir apparent to this nightmare.

1. My entire network is struggling, even the ones who have jobs are worried. Despite being universally acclaimed and vouched for by my past coworkers, it seems to have no impact. Companies don't trust their own employees references right now.

2. Maybe this is changing, but it seems like entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. Nobody has ideas, everyone just wants to go to sleep at a comfy 9-to-5. Maybe bootstrapping a company is so outside of people's comfort zone that they can't even fathom it.

Perhaps not a 100% guaranteed one. Some interviewers just do a bad job.

For example, in some of my recent interviews, the (always young) interviewer posed brainteaser questions that have approximately nothing to do with the skillset and knowledge that the job requires.

I'm sure those questions are good for identifying candidates with very high IQ and/or familiarity with that particular puzzle. But as a very experienced developer, it really pisses me off to be passed over because I didn't answer those to the interviewer's satisfaction.

Long story short: interviewing well is a skill, and as a candidate you can't guarantee a good interviewer.

One time around 2008 I was at a horrible conference put on by Blackberry (even then it was clear they were going to die), and I wound up talking to a guy for an hour about this and that, and it ended with an offer for a job at his firm.

Essentially you just need more hustle. When the standard situation is mass applications that are ignored, you need to try something novel and higher-effort.

1. Leads and cold messages from recruiters are for roles that tend to pay a significant amount less than my current role. Easily 20%-50% less. This tells me that companies are still looking to play arbitrage and sell (fire/layoff) high, buy low. That's a losing game for me. No thanks.

2. I like my team and the work. There are quirks like any company. There's nothing that's motivating me to look for a new job other than occasional boredom or frustration that passes.

3. A fear I have is joining a new company, then getting laid off. Until the layoff trend subsides a job change is not appealing.

4. New hires need to contribute to profitability, not just growth. It's just plain harder to justify hiring and get reqs opened in the current business climate. Part of that is board and exec group think. Another part is higher interest rates and cost of capital. Not being able to depreciate software dev expenses anymore hurts too.

Churn is indeed down.

If you have less churn, you have better efficiency and perhaps can get more done with fewer engineers.

Also interviewing and onboarding people takes a lot of time and effort from other employees, if it is being done right.

I don’t know to what degree this is happening but people staying in roles longer definitely helps. Even better if they are happy in those roles and not held hostage by a tougher job market.

This has very much not been my experience.

(I imagine we're both drawing from personal experience, so I guess what we really want is some solid data.)

was metaphorically flirting with another group where the leadership were people I used to work for too, kept poking them to keep in touch, sounded like there may be some options. we'll see if they score more funding though; if not, they may not be able to offer roles or pay, but they keep talking like it'll happen...

Meanwhile on places like r/itcareerquestions and r/cscareerquestions it sounds like there are a lot of noobs and juniors fighting for a handful of roles.

For the last 10 years, every data team I've been adjacent to has had a near infinite budget, hired more people than the rest of the company combined, had an abundance of "scientists" for whom any sort of data process, version control, scientific method, or cost controls were never part of the equation. It really doesn't surprise me that companies have decided they're not throwing good money after bad.

There's absolutely good work to be done in Data, but it requires people who know what they're doing, and not just "here's 10 years of postgresql databases. I dunno, find us 10% profit somewhere in it". There's not many companies that really have the data or personnel to make it happen.

The young grad with 2 years of job experience looking on the west coast vs the 45 year old with 20 years of boring enterprise crud on the east coast see very different things when markets are loose or tight.

Critically people experience each job market differently as they move between buckets. This happens even if not that much time passed. The guy who retired early at 45 then got bored and starts looking at 50 is just in a wildly different position.

The groups will be 25% each, ie .25 EH, .25 EE, etc., if you track only people who start looking for a job during the first month of their search. In the second month it will be 50% EH and 50% HH. So a total of 3/8 EH, 3/8 HH, 1/8 HE, 1/8 EE. Or 3/8 bad, 1/2 same, 1/8 better.

Right, the whole industry seems to focus on Hunger Games winners, when most of the jobs can be done by normal people, the the superstars are likely to leave at the drop of a hat anyway.

I just got calls back from two jobs I applied for in November and December of last year. Interviewed, got offers for both, had the luxury of being able to choose.

Found it interesting that both places pretty much knew they had their guy pretty quickly and said they were glad to finally talk to someone who knew what they were doing.

I'm not sure if they were getting tricked by AI-generated resumes and cover letters, then finding the applicants didn't quite have the knowledge expected. Nothing fancy either, mid-level networking, Linux, programming...