No, it is not.<p>For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.<p>1. Your best bet to get a job is your network. If you were a clock puncher, if you didn't go above and beyond, if you aren't the person who is gonna make the co-worker who vouches for you look good... you are not gonna get much help in your network.<p>2. The next best bet is to either a) start your own company or b) find someone who wants to start their own company. You know what got us out of the 2000 crash? Web 2.0 was the sexy name but it was ad tech that put money in the bank. Pop unders for Netflix, free iPods, and mortage sign ups... all sorts of nonsense... Today it's much easier to get something small going that pays the bills nothing is stopping you other than you.<p>3. If neither of these things are for you, and you want to be in tech then you might have to suffer. Job at the liquor store checking out drunks while you do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game.<p>Every one I know who survived not having a job when the 2000 bubble burst fit in one of these buckets. The rest left tech for good.
This person seems to be sharing anecdotes about the Data Science job market. That field, which exploded over the last decade, has experienced a rapid contraction. Data teams have shrunk and contain far fewer traditional “Data Scientists” and lean more heavily on engineers who orchestrate and plumb data around.<p>Data Scientists have become the “HTML programmers” of the tech bubble.<p>My advice: take a pay cut and pivot to becoming a business analyst or something.
> In fact, a recent survey of 1,500 job candidates by the staffing firm Aerotek found 70% of people find their current job search more difficult than the last, even though people are more qualified than before.<p>I wonder how much survivorship bias is in there?<p>If the job market is strong, then people who are candidates now are only those left who have a harder time finding a job?<p>Or simpler: you'd expect the reported difficulties of the average person who's currently out of a job to stay roughly constant; a really good economy will shrink that population of people. (Ie people as a whole are better off on average, but the average of that specific, and shifting sub-group won't change much.)
Every time Americans in tech mention applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs to get any position, Europeans are typically incredulous. This does not appear to be an issue on the other side of the ocean.<p>The problem is that the American hiring culture is uniquely toxic, and this is not at all limited to tech. I read stories of people who are desperately hiring but outsource the application and screening process, only to find the outsourcers put decent candidates in the bin for being from the wrong college, or merely having adjacent (and highly relevant!) experience but not exact experience. In other words, they will only accept a purple squirrel.<p>I once applied to a maintenance job at a facility where a relative works. No dice. I asked my relative. "Yeah they keep hiring construction contractors who quit immediately because they aren't paying enough, but I already talked to the manager and he would love to have you." Didn't matter, I couldn't get past the gatekeepers in HR. So because the "talent experts" didn't want to hire someone without carpentry experience to change air filters, or pay the carpenters they hired the $20/hour they wanted, they instead hired outside contractors for $150/hour.<p>In no other country would any of the above be tolerated. Even during the "job boom" of 2021, it was not as easy as it is in Europe to land a medicore position at a mediocre wage. We have a serious cultural issue with hiring and a high degree of arrogance on the part of those doing the hiring. I have no idea how this problem can even be tackled, except if maybe the federal reserve let the economy run hot for several years and forced employers to lower their absurd expectations.
Probably the most inhumane thing ever is having to make a recorded video of yourself answering personal life questions (presumably to be reviewed by a human from HR) only to actually be processed by an algorithm.
Where I work we stopped posting jobs publicly and stopped promoting them on job sites. We now get candidates in 4 ways:<p>• Internal referral – Sometimes a complete miss, sometimes a quick hire.<p>• External recruiter (rarely) – For some roles their network has been beneficial and we’ve negotiated down to as little as 8% of yearly salary in exchange for a case study or something.<p>• Direct Targeted LinkedIn Outreach – So much cheaper to pay for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite and reach out to promising candidates. I get a near 100% response rate and it’s been so much faster than twiddling my thumbs waiting and hoping for good applicants.<p>• Inbound queries through our careers page - We rewrote this to be honest about what it’s generally like to work with us, including what we like and what other people have disliked. Anybody who writes to us directly after reading it is guaranteed a 30-minute conversation to see if they’re a good fit for either now or in the future. I’ve been surprised how many people have found this page and read it.<p>This has cut our cost to hire for most roles by nearly 70% (also factoring in time cost) compared to promoted posts on job sites. Our time to hire is much faster as well.<p>Part of the trick is realizing you don’t really need The Best People. Find somebody who you’ve got reasonable confidence can do the job well and make them an offer.
My sense is, there is less movement. It's like musical chairs. When more people are changing more often those that have been waiting on the side lines have a greater chance of jumping in and getting a seat. Now that the tempo has slowed down, more people are left standing longer.<p>Some big name layoffs aside, the market feels to be roughly the same size. What's missing is the churn.
It's been said over and over for the past number of months, but fewer companies have a lot of use for a person whose sole talent is "sling code" and you just need to start bringing more to the table, or be a top 1% leetcode nerd.<p>I'm seeing some self-taught quant/econ guys getting real software jobs without a ton of formal CS coursework, but a lot of practical experience. Turns out the employers <i>love</i> that shit.... go figure?? ;)
I can't speak for US but in Europe there is significantly less working options but old rusty corporates like insurance companies or banks are always hiring because their rusty boring old systems need mainteance and constant rewriting. At least thats my bet. Wait through bad times here. You can get easily starting point of six figures per year. Heh.
It is not much but it's honest work.
I know that some companies are developing AI-based interview products. In a video conference, the AI asks questions and then evaluates the candidate's answers, giving a score. This can save a lot of time for the interviewer. Such a world is quite scary.
It's not a great tech job market generally. (Was talking to someone knowledgable yesterday and we basically agreed it's not dot-bomb nuclear winter but more like 2008, although different.)<p>However, the scenario described in the post (that's somewhat backed in some of the comments here) is that it's become easy enough to apply to hundreds or even a thousand or more jobs that companies are forced to apply very simple heuristics or "AI" filters (which is pretty much the same thing) to deal with the volume. This means that, for a given job, you have a near-zero chance of winning the lottery to even talk to a person.<p>Therefore, your only chance is pretty much to have a direct path to a human (but, because it's not a great market, that's far from a guarantee either).
I was laid off in January due to my job being outsourced overseas after I built the product. My job search has been terrible. Unfortunately my network is very small since I was in my first job after switching from a previous career in accounting. It feels crazy being able to provide results but not have any options. The market is incredibly conservative.<p>I’ve ended up deciding to attend recurse center in the meantime and see where things are in a few months.
There seems to be some survivorship bias in the advice people are giving. I think it is very possible that we will never see that tight of a labor in tech ever again - even without AI.<p>On the economic side it's more difficult to control inflation than it was in previous downturns so there isn't the option of dropping interest rates to the floor. There isn't much room to lower reserve requirements for banks either. I think stimulus measures will be largely ineffectual and the inflation produced increasingly unpopular. So it looks like the pending recession will not have the cushioning that we've had in the past and may be longer and more painful as a result.
Is there a route for high skilled engineer for going through this mess?<p>Say, I am happy and confident to do all your leetcode/homework assignments + 8h interviews, but I want to be also top candidate as result.
Despite all the noise claiming the contrary, the market is shitty, and I think it will remain that way for the rest of the year. It's election year and it would look really bad on the incumbent for numbers to be "down", so ghost jobs and layoffs will continue (only way to prop stocks up)
She brings an example of a person who after sending 75 applications considers changing fields. On Reddit people are sending more than 1000 applications to get a job.
Dying? It's been dead. I haven't been able to find a job in a year+. And that's with almost 20 years of product leadership experience. Bunch of interviews for company that at the end laid off another 20% of people rather than hire me etc etc. Tons of war stories, ghost job postings and recruiter bullshit. But no job.
The job market is normalizing, not dying. It's hard to get a job in tech? No shit, that's how it should be. Sleepwalking into a $300K-500K/yr job with no effort and no expectation to perform was the anomaly, and that's over now.
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