Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditions deteriorating.
> Based on analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Janco, news that the IT industry added just 700 jobs following an estimated 262,242 jobs lost amid mass layoffs is shocking, but not surprising.<p>So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that <i>despite the massive layoffs</i> everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.<p>> Currently, there are almost 100K unfilled jobs with over 101K unemployed IT Pros – a skills mismatch.<p>Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job. Additionally, I suspect that a lot of these unfilled positions are either paying too low, or aren't real jobs.
While a vast majority of comments here seem to indicate a lot of jobs being moved offshore, there are massive layoffs (even entities shutting shop in India. Github closed its office here, Twitter reduced its presence dramatically etc. Where I work, there are no back-fills for voluntary attrition or restructuring). Layoffs are a taboo of some kind here too, affected are treated as "non-performers" and recruiters will look down upon you.<p>A lot of hiring here is for low end work or at very junior levels (If you are a 10+ years experienced guy, good luck getting a job. I know a close friend of mine struggling to get one - ready for even a 40pc pay cut)<p>If you apply for a Principal or Staff position (few), be ready to grind out 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard Leetcode problem and doing a System design interview where you do FB with Instagram design reels all at once in 1 hour). Surprisingly when you attend meetups and talk with "Senior" managers who used to hire dozens with shambolic interviews, seem to be opting for getting "good" "resources" with DSA skills from this market (Imagine working in core engineering and then going on to do body shop consulting at an IT provider migrating from Java 4 to Java 17)<p>While the general sense on lot of jobs are going offshore is true, it is possibly very low paying entry level jobs.<p>You can now possibly correlate these to a lot of comments you see, junior folks who (no offense intended) :<p>* Given a spec hack something up and never think of how a customer will use this
* Exceptions (sorry, we code Hail Mary scenarios)
* Monitoring (sorry, that is ProdOps issue not mine)
* Alert Management (this is non critical anyway & maintenance is someone else's job)
* Testing (shambles)<p>Add to this targets such as "automate" with "Gen AI", We paid your co-pilot license where is the productivity increase number (you are an under performer and did not "customer delight" experience)<p>Sure is frustrating (onshore or offshore) & sad to see this where this is. One just thinks we'd have to live with this at-least for now. Hoping that things get better (overall in the world), sanity prevails and we can all have better lives ahead of us
That confirms my anecdotal experience. At times I felt I was losing my mind with all the "record low unemployment" and "soft landing" stories in the press. 2021 and 2022 felt like great years in terms of the job market. 2023 felt horrible.
Yet many still deny there is an issue with jobs and keep asking for more lenient immigration policies. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is/was a shortage of workers who were willing to work for peanuts.
The cognitive dissonance I'm getting from reading the comments here is pretty staggering. Where I live (The Netherlands) me and every IT person I know is getting absolutely hounded by recruiters. As an additional anecdote I'll add that I've just switched jobs to a start-up on very favorable terms and the recruitment process basically amounted to being cold called and asked "hey you wanna work here?".<p>Can anyone here comment on whether this horrible job market is a US specific situation or whether I'm living in some kind of weird bubble?
Elon showed with Twitter how you don't need hordes of engineers to run a company. He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise). More engineers lead to more useless bullshit being created(like at Google). A lean mean team seems the way to go.
I work for Google Cloud on the sales and consulting end.<p>We’re hiring exclusively in Canada and India. We have a handful of US positions open, but leadership wants us to prioritize Toronto. Now we’ve been asked what teams could operate 100% in Toronto without customer being the wiser. I don’t expect we’ll have a functional team that isn’t primarily leadership in the United States by the end of 2025.
For most of my career, I was being hounded by various recruiters virtually every day.<p>For the past few years... <i>crickets</i>.<p>This told me everything I needed to know, regardless of the many whom have been in denial.
Considering 262k were laid off in 2023. Compared with 165k in 2022. The beginning of 2022 also included the over-hiring phase of the COVID Era[0].<p>You can see a clear sign of the worst being over and I would expect 2024 to start a return to normalcy again, maybe people will even start hiring again<p>2022 was not a good time to be entering the industry, but I think for people with 5+ years experience it was not so bad.<p>[0]<a href="https://layoffs.fyi/" rel="nofollow">https://layoffs.fyi/</a>
I’d been dodging layoffs for 20 years until I got laid off for the first time, late last year. My personal situation isn’t bad at all. Meaning my wife has insurance through her job and we have plenty of cushion. I’m spending time on a hardware startup and practicing leetcode. The job market will come back, it always does. Maybe not as hot but we’ll see.<p>Edit; According to Vernor Vinge, real long term tech unemployment could be a signal of the singularity approaching; so we’ll have that going for us (if the job market doesn’t come back) at least.
In the doom an gloom of the article, there was a glimmer of hope however.<p>>But tech hiring over the fourth quarter led to a small net growth in IT jobs for 2023. There were 21,300 IT jobs added in the quarter, a positive signal for increased tech hiring going into 2024, Janco said.<p>Hopefully, the uptick in hiring trend continues and things improve in 2024. The tech jobs market is indeed, pretty bad right now.
So if it wasn't for jobs added in December it would've been negative. On the bright side, given the large number of tech jobs added in December, maybe things are starting to picking up again?<p>(seems a bit odd as usually there's not much hiring going on around the holidays, yet in 2023 December had the highest hiring numbers according to that data)
Every F500 company is Almost There on automating absolutely everything through ServiceNow and that's without AI being in the mix yet.<p>There's always going to be a place for coders who can massage the API links between packages or run an ERP, but you don't need IT when your firm is disposable line staff, institutional knowledge lives in the codebase, and HR has mostly been replaced by Workday.<p>UBI when?
I believe it. I work in the UX space, and I'd be shocked if total employment grew in 2023. I know lots of skilled designers who've been out of work for multiple months, and people in the UX research space are faring even worse.
Honestly, I could feel it. In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been. It was very difficult to get interviews, and even though I managed to get multiple offers, many of these were at companies I'd not normally have accepted offers from. It took a long time to find a job offer I wanted to accept.<p>I do feel that there are signs of recovery now, so good luck to those that are still looking. I know it's very hard -- particularly if you're also supporting a family.
The need for competent IT will only increase, especially in the US. There are so many systems that need upgrades and improvements that it is scary. Some may say that AI will do this, but by the time AI is capable of doing this then all labor of any kind is deprecated as a concept and we'll have transitioned to a different type of economic system anyway. So don't be afraid, there's a lot of work coming.<p>There are hundreds of billions of lines of code that haven't been meaningfully upgraded or maintained and those systems are still profitable and useful and cool to work on. Even though there may be economic downturns when it's harder to find work, and I was affected by this in the last two years so I understand what it's like, the long term trend until labor is irrelevant is that we'll always need IT and software engineers and software developers. The good ones will continue to earn a really great wage because it's difficult to become a really good one and a lot of other shops will want your great devs. It does not matter where you're located on earth - if you're great, a better shop will take you.
Is there any clarity around what constitutes IT? Does it range from installing printer drivers to writing software for self-driving cars? I look at IT as a cost-center focused on keeping the company business running - internally focused (email, finance, ops, sales, etc) - but NOT product development. However I am not sure how the government defines it for these stats.<p>Edit: to simplify my personal definition - if your report to the CIO - IT, if you report to a product group - not IT.
Since a lot of quite large corporations had big layoffs, does this mean the jobs shifted from the big corporations to the smaller ones, or is that too simple?
"IT Employment Grew by Just 700 Jobs in 2023, Down From 267,000 in 2022<p>Despite business and investor hype around generative AI last year, information-technology hiring slumped as companies laid off workers and sought to cut costs<p>The information-technology sector grew by only 700 jobs over 2023, a drastic slowdown from the 267,000 jobs added in 2022, even as artificial intelligence and ChatGPT spawned huge interest from businesses.<p>Job losses in the first half of 2023, including layoffs at technology-driven companies that dominated the period, hurt overall hiring for tech jobs in all industries, said Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of consulting company Janco Associates. The firm bases its findings on data from the U.S. Department of Labor."<p>Once companies see how much they can save by spending less on IT, they might not go back to overspending.
I may be dumb but is the second derivative of a job sector declining that disastrous? Is that not just normal ebb and flow?<p>Also I think the HN title is wrong; IT employment's <i>yearly growth</i> increase by just 700 jobs/year in 2023.
I am utterly shocked it grew at all. I am only seeing layoffs and I haven't been able to secure employment in a year. Product Management seems particularly dead in terms of hiring, especially here across APAC.
Can anyone explain how the 700 number makes any sense?<p>The analysis referenced by the article:
<a href="https://e-janco.com/career/employmentdata.html#p7TP3c2_3" rel="nofollow">https://e-janco.com/career/employmentdata.html#p7TP3c2_3</a><p>The table "Change In IT Job Market Size - December 2023" seems to indicate that 5.5k jobs were added to the 'job market' in 2023, contradicting what's being said. (Which isn't even representative of total employment in the sector, only the open job postings for the sector).
How much of this do you think involves senior programmers using LLM and AI-generated code to do a lot of the grunt work, thereby not needing to either employ, outsource or train? I am amazed how much more productive I have become with the leading LLMs, especially with specialized full-stack tasks that I do not do every day. Many things that I regularly outsourced once a year I now just get an LLM to assist. Could it be that this is more of a factor already than the economic factors indicate?
As still a young dev, I haven't even finished my college, this seems nice to see even though I probably wont be able to find a job. I feel like it's nice to see a great filter since there are a lot of so called programmers that do web dev these days. I find it laughable to think that these are the programmers and all they know how to do is js and html/css. This will better the world and make people learn more, as they should. I am learning absolutely everything there is and right now I could write in any language (except ASM, not quite there yet) even if I have never worked in it. With a few google searches I will learn the basic syntax. With AI, people are losing jobs on a huge rate, which might be sad but this is new tech and every tech changes the world. People probably complained about losing their jobs when computers were made, or diggers when heavy machines were made. It's normal and sooner people understand that the better. I just hope governments are going to recognize these problems. If I can't go to the wild and survive on my own, then provide me with basics for human survival in modern society like it is done in Germany for example.
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I was laid off at the end of last year and at the time I felt pretty bad about it. To land that job I spent the longest period in my entire career applying to jobs and I was extremely worried I'd have to repeat that process. But you know what: there is something fundamentally different about the job market at this point of time, during this time of year. This is only anecdotal but I'm seeing some of the best companies hiring for new positions. I'm seeing new, very promising startups spring up that are managing to raise money in a crushing bear market (I work in FinTech which due to regulation and a serious number of horrible events have sent the industry to its lowest point yet.)<p>If you're currently jobless you have one amazing advantage for you: January is the best possible time of year to find roles. Don't be discouraged when you see jobs with hundreds of applications. Most people just mass spam and aren't even remotely qualified. If you have the experience the best way to get hired is to engage with the job post. Show that you've read it, that you understand the companies mission, that you understand how the company is uniquely positioned and what value they're trying to create compared to everyone else. Then talk about how you can help solve their main challenges to make them successful. I guarantee you will stand out above everyone else who is just spamming generic cover letters. But this means only applying to jobs that also stand out to you.<p>tl; dr: im getting interviews just like every other time when the market was actually healthy. At the very least this is the best time of year to apply. So take advantage of it while you can.