Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

So, as a 56yo who&#x27;s been programming professionally since 2004, currently having trouble finding enough contract work, a bit of perspective:<p>When there are more openings than qualified people, even when you reduce qualifications to what is actually necessary, it seems like there&#x27;s &quot;nobody&quot; available. Now, when the shoe is on the other foot, it seems like &quot;nobody&quot; is hiring. It&#x27;s harsh, but it also doesn&#x27;t take that much of a shift in the supply and&#x2F;or demand to go from &gt;1 to &lt;1, even though the effect you feel is large.<p>There is no kind way to put this: a lot of stupid stuff got done with a lot of smart programmers in the last ten years. Meanwhile, boring old stuff like manufacturing was starved for programmers, and eventually gave up trying to get them. Now that it is possible, it takes some time for all the companies who couldn&#x27;t get (or couldn&#x27;t keep) programmers before, to realize that it is once again possible. However, anecdotally, I see it happening, albeit slowly.<p>Programming that actually accomplishes something useful in the world, is still a productive thing, and positions will get created. However, large sectors of the economy take time to pivot, and so it is best to find a way to make ends meet in the meantime, and also do something useful (even if unpaid) with your programming skills, to keep your mind in practice.

I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a &quot;software engineer shortage.&quot;<p>I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of companies that needed software engineers wanted cheaper labor and that I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success.<p>If H1B&#x27;s were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire&#x2F;layoff their H1B&#x27;s first. I am pretty liberal, but market dynamics are market dynamics, and I am surprised I haven&#x27;t seen more anti H1B sentiment to bring scarcity (and therefore leverage) back into the labor market.<p>A lot of the history of racial atrocity has been a direct result of desperate (and therefore exploitable) foreign labor de-valuing incumbent labor and the following retribution to the weaker vulnerable foreign laborers, rather than the harder work of solidarity and demanding a fair share via things like trade unions&#x2F;guilds.

I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup.<p>However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n&#x2F;5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!)<p>I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450&#x2F;hr. We just weren’t on the same page.<p>I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.

My observation is that companies are getting much more precise on their needs. The days of “you’re smart and have a technical background” have given way to “there’s a dozen people in the market who have the exact experience we need, so we will limit our pool to them.”<p>This is especially painful for college grads, who don’t have specific experience to fall back on.

And we&#x27;re having a hard time finding experienced and skilled engineers... trying to hire for a senior nodejs role, over a thousand applicants (most people just hit apply without reading the description, over half are disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements), dozens interviewed, and we&#x27;ve only managed to hire 1 person that seemed close to being qualified, and he quit after 2 months of barely working. We&#x27;re around a ~600 person company.

I have ~11 yoe and have near 100% callback rate(50% for remote). All positions from 200-450. Friends have similar rates. And ~70% offer rates. Always confused reading these. But I&#x27;m also a low level developer, and only ask for ~250-3 salary&#x2F;bonus. It feels like the people complaining are either really bad, have poor resume&#x27;s, or have visa requirements. I tweaked my resume after not getting many callbacks and now have the near 100% callback rate.

There&#x27;s something to this.<p>I’m a senior dev in NYC with ~7 years experience working across the stack (NextJS&#x2F;ReactJS, Node, Python, Postgres, SQL Server, etc). I’m also not half bad at design.<p>I haven’t been able to get a response much less an interview.

Not all experience is equal, but people expect to be compensated for the &quot;experience&quot; (time since entering the workforce) they bring to the table regardless. That&#x27;s the issue here. There is plenty of software that needs engineering, but we can&#x27;t make a market.<p>This specific person has 17 years of experience. Are they a staff level engineer, critical to their group? 17 years is more than enough time to become more competent than &gt;99% of software engineers, if they have the aptitude for it. It seems unlikely that a company would layoff someone keeping all the juniors unblocked, unless management is totally incompetent.<p>Or are they a senior with a decade of negotiated raises, who hasn&#x27;t learned anything meaningfully new in that same time? They have something like 7 years of real learning, and the company is paying for 17. This is an obvious choice for a layoff.<p>I haven&#x27;t seen any signs that smart people who can write software are valued any less. They are just as hard to find, and are getting paid just as much as ever.

Actually I think that one of the specific problem of IT is that experience is not really &quot;usefull&quot; because - from outside of IT (management, HR) - there&#x27;s always new tools&#x2F;technology&#x2F;buzzwords that SEEM to replace old technologies...<p>So why pay more to hire an experienced IT man that will not know the latest techno-fad when all you need is a junior that knows them a little bit and is waaaayy cheaper.<p>Moreover - from a management &amp; HR point of view - there&#x27;s always IT problems. You know: nobody notice when everything run smoothly (and it&#x27;s a signal to let go some people) but everybody notice when there&#x27;s an IT problem!<p>So let&#x27;s take the cheapest...<p>BTW I&#x27;m 52 in France and notice this too here. And I don&#x27;t know how to explain why experience matters... :-(

Having been on the hiring end over the last few years, it’s not surprising. Other than there being a glut of applicants, there is also a HUGE variation in what people consider to be “experienced”. The signal to noise ratio is pretty bad when sifting through applicants, so I can certainly see how it’s hard for qualified people to make it through. Especially since there are a lot of people who oversell their capabilities and experience, so it’s even harder to distinguish an actually-experienced, actually-qualified applicant from a skilled bullshitter. It doesn’t help that the industry has totally destroyed the meaning of terms like “senior”, so it’s hard to even use someone’s past history to make an educated guess at their actual experience level. As a result, experienced and qualified people get lost in the sea of suboptimal applicants. At this point the best hires I’ve made over that last few years are ones that came via networking &#x2F; trusted references.

Do we have any empirical study of tax section 174&#x27;s effect on how software companies are operating and if they have changed staffing plans because of it?<p>January S174 discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38957651">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38957651</a>

One year ago I was looking. I applied to a 3 places, they rushed me through interviews and I got offers from every one. One was over 500k with 9 years of experience.<p>I chose to stay at my old job then left a few months ago. Took 3 months to get an interview and I&#x27;ve seen such shitty behavior. Company hiring for nonexistent positions. Ghosting after bad interviews. Heel dragging and super long interview turnaround times. I strongly suspect I&#x27;m going to take a pay cut when I do get an offer. My feeling is just that employers can be picky now, so they are. I hope things turn around soon

Unsurprising. Experienced engineers in this market are like Oracle or IBM post-peak, overly complacent and not used to fight for a job.<p>The kind of people posting on Youtube or making courses about How Everyone Should Code because everyone can get a job coding and no matter how many people join the workforce jobs will always abound.<p>The kind of engineer talking to non-tech people about how they should always negotiate and never settle for a low salary. To jump early and often.<p>The kind of engineer that badmouths recruiters, has no LinkedIn or hasn&#x27;t maintained one in ages because they can&#x27;t be bothered with it.<p>Yes, it&#x27;s stereotypical. But we all know someone who has one or more of these traits.<p>Just like companies struggling to hire were simply not optimising for it (higher salaries, regular salary reviews and raises, smooth and quick recruitment processes, employee-centric work culture, etc), the same happens now to employees. They are unwilling to consider a slight decrease in their salary, lack of remote options, slightly worse work culture, boring companies (no Big N, FAANG or even tech sector companies), legacy codebases, boring tech stacks, less than ideal development processes, etc.<p>You have seen those engineers in reddit. You seen them in LinkedIn. In Tech Conferences. In Youtube. And even here, in HN.<p>The reality is that most of these devs are trying to get a role with perks similar to their previous one and that&#x27;s not gonna happen for quite a while. The struggle in getting hired is basically the devs going through multi-stage reality check.<p>If you have a job and haven&#x27;t been served a notice, you can be picky and play the waiting game. If you are about to lose your job or you have already, all that matters is getting ANY job that covers your expenses.

This is a topic thats hard to discuss without macro level data. We don’t know this person’s preferences, location, background, etc.

Market is the worst it has ever been, at least in the last 10 years but even before because now supply significantly outnumbers demand. Most people on LinkedIn have a green badge. The economy is doomed. Keep rising interest rates to the sky.

I will admit that a few positions I&#x27;ve applied for have suddenly changed parameters to exclude me, but most of my recent job search difficulty is because all my network is also looking, so getting an anchor in a good place is much more challenging.<p>But the number of new businesses gobbling up these laid off folks is really crazy. There&#x27;s been a huge diaspora and in a couple years I&#x27;m hoping everyone I know will have really good positions.

11 years experience. took me 4 months to get a new job, the longest its ever taken since I became a dev.

It feels like having niche skills like Rust or Transformers makes it much easier. I found a new job very quickly after being laid off.

well just last week I heard on NPR, may be Marketplace. They were saying there are these huge tech layoffs happening but unemployment claims haven&#x27;t gone up that much because people are getting new jobs quickly. So basically I don&#x27;t know what&#x2F;who to believe.

I got laid off around age 50 in the 2000&#x2F;2001 dot com bust and wrote up my experience on medium:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@davenixon_44904&#x2F;how-to-find-a-job-when-you-are-laid-off-over-50-c40b426be3b4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@davenixon_44904&#x2F;how-to-find-a-job-when-y...</a><p>TLDR: Work on personal&#x2F;OS project to learn in demand skills and maybe to create some value or residual income. Startups are often the least picky in hiring and provide a stepping stone to a large more stable company that may be a better fit for an older engineer.

This hasn&#x27;t been my experience in embedded.

For the past year the most common topic whenever I go to any conference or meetup has always been that the economy sucks and that economists have no idea what they&#x27;re talking about. I hardly know anyone under 65 who is particularly well; certainly not in comparison to even 2 years ago. Many people who used to be financially secure are in much more precarious situations now.<p>It&#x27;s not just anecdotal. I see it at a large scale too. I&#x27;m at a top-ranked university and I see it in our students. 2 years ago, they were choosing between multiple job offers and hardly had to apply anywhere. Now, students with CS undergrads or Master&#x27;s degrees from a university whose name everyone knows where virtually everyone used to get FAANG offers are now having trouble getting reasonable jobs.<p>As a scientist I find the attitude of my colleagues in the economics department totally insane. They claim that we&#x27;re all wrong and that the economy is amazing. They say that to me and to students who literally apply for dozens of jobs; they say it to our faces. In my neck of the scientific woods we would be publishing papers about how our metrics are totally wrong and we need to reform our science because we&#x27;re disconnected from reality. In economics it seems like they publish papers about how stupid the public are. It&#x27;s just crazy.<p>All of this doesn&#x27;t bode well for the election. I can&#x27;t describe the lack of enthusiasm students have for Biden when they&#x27;re literally hurting financially and he&#x27;s doing a victory lap on how great the economy is.

The quoted tweet mentions medical leave for burnout. I&#x27;ve noticed quite a lot of these stories begin with the laid-off employee taking extended time off for one reason or another.

There are lots of engineers that aren&#x27;t programmers. I feel like the community on this site forgets that sometimes. I know it&#x27;s a &quot;hacker&quot; focused site, but thought I&#x27;d bring a bit of perspective I guess.

I see hundreds of new job adverts on Linkedin everyday. How much of it is genuine?

The application process is insane amongst other things&#x2F;task

Easier if you’re a South American

Multiple causes have led to this.<p>- A glut of people entering the field with no experience.<p>- A more recent glut of people laid off who now expect or need inflated salaries to maintain their lifestyle and status.<p>- Excessive focus by employers on very specific &quot;skills&quot; that don&#x27;t necessarily translate to productivity or contributing to a team and project.<p>- Employers not willing to train or mentor new hires, and expecting to hire only the &quot;best&quot; or the top X% of candidates.<p>- Investors and shareholders demanding revenue or at least market share growth rather than quality, consistency, cultivating employees, or even producing anything of real value.<p>- Meaningless titles, people with very little actual experience or talent called (or calling themselves) &quot;senior.&quot;<p>- Employers conflating university degrees with talent and ability, and then requiring experience the candidates can&#x27;t acquire in school.<p>- Programming education degraded to &quot;boot camps&quot; and other superficial and shallow &quot;skills&quot; training. Comp Sci has little to do with the vast majority of programming work.<p>- Mistaking unnecessary complexity for technical excellence, at both the management and programmer level.<p>- New programmers ignorant or dismissive of actual opportunities because they focus on the latest fads and fashion they read about, and only look at the FAANG companies and hip startups.<p>- Managers who can&#x27;t manage software development projects or programmers, don&#x27;t know how to evaluate candidates, don&#x27;t use metrics, and jump from one nonsense pop psychology or social media inspired craze to another.<p>- No useful way to measure ability to perform in the job, and relying on poor proxies such as resume keywords and leetcode and whiteboard performance.<p>- A paralyzing fear of making a mistake, or choosing the wrong job or candidate, that afflicts programmers, hiring managers, HR departments.<p>- Fake it until you make it ethos, and the flip side we call imposter syndrome.<p>- The idea that a job must provide self-fulfillment, &quot;follow your passion,&quot; etc. And the parallel inflated requirements employers dream up pretending they will have problems of scale or will work on novel and difficult technical problems.<p>- Actual talent and aptitude for programming in the sense of solving real business problems remains rare.<p>I have worked over 40 years as a professional programmer so I&#x27;ve seen all of these things happen over time. Employers and candidates both have unrealistic expectations and terrible processes for matching with each other. And I can&#x27;t think of a nice way to put this, but the programming field (or &quot;software engineering&quot; as some like to fancy themselves) looks like a long-term clinical study of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Programmers delude themselves about their abilities and value in the job market, and employers delude themselves about their needs and requirements.

I think experienced engineers are probably &quot;spoiled&quot; by super-high salaries. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe try asking for less than 200k?