It’s been this way for at least 2 years.
I suspect that WSJ held back such topics until after the election…
The people I know that lose their job spend at least 1 year looking for a job. Usually at a significantly lower salary. With the current rate of inflation it’s a 1-2 punch that requires a big step down in lifestyle.
I don’t really see these conditions changing until there is a AI bubble pop or something. Facebook is no longer trying to poach FANG general SWE’s so there is no more pricing pressure in the market. Their recruiting departments have gone dark and their staff was eliminated.
There are a bunch of usual suspects for the current situation, some that are temporary but others that are very worrisome long term (for the US at least):
1. There was massive over-hiring at many tech companies during the pandemic boom. That hangover is still taking time to wring out.
2. The era of easy money is over. Lots and lots of speculative investments that make sense when interest rates are essentially 0 don't make sense at all when rates are 5+ percent.
3. Outsourcing has exploded since the pandemic, and this is a long term change that is definitely not going away. The remote work trend is a double edged sword. I've worked with lots of great developers in Latin America and Europe (both Eastern and Western Europe) whose salaries are much less than American software developers, and there is plenty of time zone overlap to get lots of collaboration time in.
4. Companies are realizing they can get by with a lot fewer people. Elon may have gone off the deep end with laying off 75% of Twitter, but a lot of places are realizing they can lay off ~20% with no loss of effectiveness, including future bets. In fact, I've seen some business leaders argue (and I agree with them) that the post pandemic downturn has actually provided an opportunity for better focus and less bureaucratic meetings. I.e. cutting some people has allowed them to move faster.
5. AI is having a big impact on at least some roles. Washington Post did an article shortly after ChatGPT came out about how a bunch of copywriters were being replaced by AI. I think AI is generally over hyped, but for roles like marketing, copywriting, recruiting, etc. it's definitely having an impact on jobs.
I think #s 3, 4 and 5 are long term trends that are here to stay.
> 3. Outsourcing has exploded since the pandemic, and this is a long term change that is definitely not going away. The remote work trend is a double edged sword.
I have been warning about this over and over and over since the beginning.
If your job can be done remotely, you are effectively unessential in the grand scheme of your company.
Those who went back to the office understood the political landscape well.
Longer than this: certainly in the UK things were not in a good state before the pandemic started in early 2019.
I know at least one person who was a software dev who was worked very little over the last 5 years.
For myself, over that period I noticed almost all work except for government and financial dried up - lucky for me that was my most recent experience.
This was not my experience. Many of the high paying tech companies were actively hiring senior/staff in London for most of 2022. OK, maybe not Google. This very suddenly changed late in the year.
>I suspect that WSJ held back such topics until after the election…
Why?
The current administration's poor messaging on inflation and the economic problems faced by many Americans was a significant contributing factor to their loss of the election. (https://www.barrons.com/articles/economy-2024-election-why-h...)
The WSJ and other major publications have a vested interest in brokering access by tailoring their coverage to be friendly to those in power. They are largely responsible for setting the agenda and tone of issues during an election.
(https://archive.pagecentertraining.psu.edu/public-relations-...)
Given these two factual statements... The stated stance of the current administration was to downplay the impact and scale of economic hardship, and the role of major media outlets during an election is to set out the agenda and issues to be debated during an election period...
I think it clearly follows that the WSJ had a vested interest in providing one perspective on the economy before and during the election, and now that this period is over, they can provide a different perspective more aligned with the perspective of the working class, and less aligned with the perspective of the incumbent administration.
>The WSJ and other major publications have a vested interest in brokering access by tailoring their coverage to be friendly to those in power
Are you thinking of the Washington Post? You realize that the WSJ has been described as "right-centrist"[1]? It's unclear why they'd want to support a Democratic administration. Even the "friendly to those in power" excuse doesn't work too well. For most of the election Trump was leading in election models, and near the end it was a coin toss. Being anti-Biden and pro-Trump would be the rational choice, even if they were apolitical and just wanted to be "friendly to those in power"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal#Editor...
The earth has also been described as flat.
You see how your wording is not very convincing (and Wikipedia is heavily left biased, in case you thought your citation has any weight).
While I can see how "the WSJ has been described as "right-centrist"", the Overton window has shifted so much so rapidly that the WSJ is now comfortably slightly left leaning based on the "old" political spectrum (and by "old" I mean pre-2020 or so).
(But that's just, like, my opinion man.)
To my ears, this is like my 10 year old nephew explaining why his favorite pro wrestler would never be a heel. "Also", he asks, "what's a heel?"
For the benefit of people who doesn't watch wrestling, do you mind explaining why the WSJ would support an administration at the end of its term and was likely to lose? Or for that matter, why "major publications" like the new york times have no problem with making anti-incumbent endorsements[1], despite the claim that "The WSJ and other major publications have a vested interest in brokering access by tailoring their coverage to be friendly to those in power"? Whatever you said about "heels" sounds like a "heads I win, tails you loose" sort of proposition, where you can excuse any sort of counter-evidence as part of a greater ruse or whatever, making your theory basically unfalsifiable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
A simple translation on the transactional relationship: because they know who butters their bread, and they know they can waffle into the next administration or current thing as long as they stay in the general good graces of the intelligence apparatus. It's wet behind the ears view a major news agency as anything other than an extension of the intelligence apparatus. Whatever supposed political leaning is symbolic and minuscule in the overall influence of direction and probably tied to useful wetness of ear of the hosts ego and not the overall apparatus. The heel comment could be likened to a hammer and anvil, with one party playing each role and the roles alternate over time but an overarching direction is being achieved by higher level thinkers.
It feels like FAANG needs to employ lots of people so they don't all go out and build competing services.
If skilled people are without work and their savings and lifestyle supports it, they should consider building startups.
That’s what they did for years. I suspect there are some “nice” macroeconomic trends helping them avoid this. Like regulatory capture and the general regulatory fragmentation of the global tech sector. And that new AI tech is prohibitively expensive.
I agree, something has changed.
Also good look any small business trying to buy Nvidia hardware to compete in the AI space. Best they can do is get gouged renting compute time.
Trying to do more with less would be one strategy - coming up with more efficient inference that takes less compute and energy. This seems to be what's driving companies in China like Deepseek. Whether one could be profitable with this strategy is another story, probably the best to hope for would be getting bought by one of the FAANGs (if you were able to show good results).
It's also possible that the first movers are doing all of the expensive and risky research and utterly failing to build a moat for themselves. It doesn't look like there's any particularly lock-in for any category of AI model, and open source is following closely behind.
Compute will get cheaper and open models will proliferate.
Doing that was a lot easier before though, with funding being more available, and big-tech has been happy to let others take the risk/dump VC funding into subsidizing their business models/... and then gobble up or copy the successful ones.
Also some of the big tech companies have been quite ruthless with firing people even when they could afford not to, which doesn't match that theory.
I can definitely attest to this statistic. Got thrown overboard at my last job for not wanting to sign my name to things we weren't doing (no I'm not telling the IRS we encrypt our data at rest when we don't!)
Finally got brought on a week ago at a PC repair shop of all things. It's not glamorous but it's the only "IT related" thing I could find. In Seattle of all places!
The FAANG's doing their massive layoffs caused an absolute knock-on effect downstream across the entire corporate world ("well if Amazon thinks they should, we should too!") and everything I apply for now LinkedIn gleefully tells me there were "over 500 applicants" already
Even the public sector seems to be impossible to get into. Despite the requirement of US citizenship and the incoming administration (along with Elon's threats) even getting an interview in that sector is a challenge now
I think we (tech workers) have seen this for a while. The tech bubble was real - surely we all noticed this at the time - and it stands to reason that a correction is well past due.
But now, there are anecdotes of other sectors being hit as well.
Note that all of this is "working as intended." The way the fed manages inflation generates unemployment to knock out high salary workers and keep wages down. The target unemployment rate is not zero.
How can what you're saying be true if Elon Musk says we need more H1Bs because there is a labor shortage?
Tesla laid off 14,500 folks in April 2024 and then they received 2,405 H1Bs in 2024.
"Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay."
https://electrek.co/2024/12/30/tesla-replaced-laid-off-us-wo...
One of the biggest issues with H1Bs is the fact that it reduces the employee's ability to change jobs and thus reduces their bargaining power for wages and thus depresses the wages across the board over time. That seems to be the main driving force for Musk behind the bluster around labor shortages.
I've worked with a few folks on H1Bs and they've all been paid significantly less than I have in the exact same role. Less base and less RSUs.
There's a lack of dirt cheap highly educated labor.
It dovetails nicely into their desire to slash education for Americans
Once we deport all the "illegal" immigrants, the MAGA folk can pick fruit in Florida while the H1B's work at Amazon for pennies on the dollar I suppose
The same labour shortage was all over the news in Germany. Meanwhile people were mocking the salaries and conditions offered by those industries. Immigration is only means to acquire labour at below market rate.
Well there two reasons here in the Netherlands.
Some jobs are unworthy for Dutch people. Your Dutch nationality protects you from slavery. For this there are immigrants.
The second reason is that we have a lot of people doing bullshit jobs in climate controlled offices but nobody wants to do physical labour.
Maybe they should list typical daily active calorie expenditure for job positions ? We need an uber for mixing sedentary and physical jobs.
Lower turnover too with H1Bs
Illegals don't pick fruit.
This is a falsehood and scare tactic reliant on stereotypes, perpetuated by those curiously opposed to actually enforcing immigration laws.
Migrant farm workers are largely in the US on agricultural work visas. There is an entire framework in place to support them and their work. They will be unaffected by deportation of gang members and other unwelcome criminals.
Georgia HB 87 (2011) and its unintended consequences say otherwise. While the H-2A is indeed popular, there are still a staggering number of people working these jobs who are here illegally.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/05/27/136718112...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/georgia...
https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/ga-immigrant-crackdow...
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/jul/07/immigration-...
Indeed, in my country, and despite scaremongering about boats, 95% of illegal immigrants are illegals because of visa overstay, and I'd bet the US numbers are around that.
There are a massive amount of overstays on H2A & H4 visas. They didn’t arrive here illegally, but their current status is very often illegal as they can’t switch jobs or extend beyond a season without a cumbersome renewal process, often which requires leaving the country for at least 3 months.
sounds like an early career Elon Musk.
did you forget to put a /s at the end of that?
Maybe because Musk mixes a lot of BS into his sayings?
wasn't this implied by him already? (/s)
My observations for the last two years:
Employers are hyper hyper selective
There are a lot a lot of fake job postings
The bar has gone way way up
It is in general very difficult and gruelling to get a job
If engineering roles are hard to find, product is 10-100x worse
If you have a job, be thankful, don't rock the ship
OBVIOUSLY there will be statements to the contrary, but this is really more in the spirit of - if you're having a hard time out there, you are not alone, and at least one person out there (who has been working for the last 10 years or so) finds it much much harder. I would say reminscent closer to 2014-2015 than anything like 2020-2021.
The change was quite shocking. For 25 years, to get a new job I’d send out 5 resumes, get 4 interviews, and 3 offers. This time around, I sent 200+ resumes, got 2 interviews, and ghosted on both.
I have gone through something similar where I won’t feel motivated to even pursue the interview properly because I’ve been burnt so many times already. Yes you just need one yes (ideally more for negotiating leverage) but those 1-2 offers are damn hard to come by these days
I think employers are bracing for another employee sided market and trying to juice their hand as long as they have it. My belief is a lot of F500 companies are running on skeleton crew H1B which might be a crumbly foundation. They will neg-neg-neg until the clock runs out.
They will just expand immigration visa programs (something Musk, who is in favor of such programs, says he will go to “war” over) or outsource.
I don’t see any evidence for an employee favored job market. This is not 2020/21 anymore. The large corporations are firmly in power in tech.
Landing a white collar job now is akin to winning the lottery. My wife's been looking since October '23 when she was laid off from one of the big banks. She doesn't want to give up quite yet, but taking social security is probably going to be something she decides to do soon. Similar for the cohort of people laid off with her (the whole office was shut down, about 250 people) - very few of the ones she's staid in contact with have landed something and if they have it's at a lower pay point.
It might be a lasting trend for employers to hold off as long as they can until the right candidate comes along to not affect the culture or other things.
The cost and impact of a bad hire can be really bad.
It's just a whole lot harder to find good employment now. And if you are employed, it's just difficult to understand the pain it is to get re-employed.
Read the story about the guy who used to sell a bag of dicks and made $100k in like 10 days for years ago. That wasn't just a lightning in a bottle idea, that's because normal people had $20 to send anonymous bags of dicks to each other for funsies. I see those people at the food bank, now.
Tech market is rough. I think BigTech currently thinks that there's a better ROI spending $300k on compute (training an LLM) than $300k on an employee. All the startups I've interviewed with are HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low.
> HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low
Does this strategy work?
I think it's going to blow up given the number of broken libraries and products out there. Management does not care until things really break. In 3-4 years, there will be a serious shortage of software developers and maintenance of the stack will be as expensive as ever.
This, plus in several years we will observe many MVPs generated (partially) by LLMs that will require fixing and further development. LLMs barely produce 1k lines of coherent code, riddled with bugs. Benchmarks are improving, but there is no breakthrough in handling real, large codebases. I have no idea about the future job market, but the quality of the "material" we work with will be quite poor.
I don't think these companies are generating MVPs using LLMs. They're just using LLMs to assist in coding. A human reviewers is there. And in a few years, LLMs might be so good that they can fix mistakes by 2024 LLMs.
To clarify, LLMs will lower the entry barrier for non-programmers to test new ideas (which is good). Later, those successful projects will require development by professional developers. I suspect that many of these projects will have lower quality than regular proof-of-concept projects today.
>I suspect that many of these projects will have lower quality than regular proof-of-concept projects today.
Exactly. It will be way worse than a hacky PoC because you might able to reason about the structure or logic based on the human author and their intent which is impossible in the case of an LLM author. Further, assuming the human author isn't hit by a bus or whatever, you can query them directly if anything is unclear. Good fuckin luck asking an LLM for a reason why it did something in the PoC.
Not even close
> HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low.
Absolutely make believe FUD
I got my first programming job in 2008, seemingly right before the wave of hiring freezes. I dodged the bullet back then, but I wish I could compare that time to the past two years. That said, it feels very rough out there. Just last week, one of my LinkedIn connections shared a Venmo link, asking for help to pay bills after being laid off, struggling to find another job, and running out of savings. Be thankful if you have a job.
I've been in the same boat for the past 4 months since graduating from a master's program and I have friends that has been laid off for almost 10 months. WSJ hits close to home today: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavinqu/
It's kind of odd that the tech sector has so many talented people desperate for any job, yet companies aren't taking them on. Those same companies continue to pay their existing staff such exorbitantly high compensation. You'd think things would equalize out a bit as companies take advantage of this situation to get cheaper talent.
It’s because they’re working those people to death and don’t want them to leave. Better to pay one person $225k per year than two people $150k per year.
Alternatively, employees aren't fungible cogs, and experience in the specific company, with their specific technologies and management culture, counts more than new hires who need guidance.
It could be an extreme reaction to the large number of new hires in the 2022 era.
I've been unemployed from the finance world for ~18 months now. I've applied to over 1000 jobs (per my LinkedIn), though lots of those jobs just seem to be evergreen reposts on LinkedIn & not actual jobs. It's absolutely demoralizing.
The answer is obviously more H1B’s.
H1B's are guaranteed workforce for a number of years with low turnover.
I was thinking about it the other day, but it may be it's own form of japanese salaryman, except its for positions not many would work in that arrangement.
Maybe it helps companies that couldn't be sustainable, be that way (artificially).
The high end of tech work certainly feels more extreme than what this news report is discussing, which says it's now 6 months from 5 months during the most recent boom. To add only 1 month from the boom time doesn't jive with my own experience.
Prior to 2022 I was advance quitting if a job wasn't good enough, didn't treat me (workers in general) right, etc. Now, I expect a year long search if I am forced out.
The startup I was at previously laid most people off in early 2021. I spent 2 days applying to a bunch of jobs that seemed interesting and spent the following 3 weeks with a pretty full schedule of interviews. Received several offers and was able to pick my favorite.
I have been feeling out the market the last couple months, applying mainly for jobs that match my exact experience, and have had exactly 1 phone screen. In the past I have been told I interview very well and haven't received many rejections after getting to talk to a person. But things are definitely different now.
If current job has to do big layoffs, which feels like it could happen in the next year or two, it's going to be rough.
There is much more noise in the market.
Positions that we typically could close in 1-3 months now take 3-6 if we do not lower our hiring bar.
We literally are using the same interview playbook as we did in the past. For some reason, the candidates in the pipeline have huge variance.
It seems that a lot of people pivoted their career in Covid leading to this mess.
Set up a job fair so applicants can show up face to face?
Take physical resumes at your physical office?
Sponsor your local meetups and user groups?
All of these are useful, but equally time consuming. So the candidate experience will still be degraded (spending 1 year interviewing while unemployed)
I don't concur that the experience would be degraded for either side.
The pool is going to be much smaller and faster to wade through for both sides. And, once you wade through it, you actually have a match that is much more likely for both sides.
Look, this is the exact same problem as online dating and has all the same failure modes. You break the failure modes in exactly the same ways.
People have forgotten that in person was the way we used to do it. We had job fairs, companies would come to colleges in person, etc. It did work. It was just expensive from the point of view of the company.
Companies gave in person up because online was cheaper. Well, it isn't cheaper anymore now that both employers and employees have pissed in the online well. Whoops.
Ghost jobs doesn't help things any. Posting fake jobs should be considered wage theft. Multiply the number of applications for a fake job by the average time to apply and then by the hourly rate (or salaried rate calculated down to the hour). Charge those responsible for theft of that figure, which easily will push it into felony territory. Bet the ghost job phenomenon disappears overnight.
This reminds me of a thread posted on HN last week. Someone used LLMs to write cover letters and post on job sites for them. He was able to spam out hundreds of job apps [1].
To me that sounds like a perfectly rational response to fake job apps. When there exists the possibility of 0% chance of a response for a given application, the only rational move is to minimize the investment of all submissions and maximize the number of submissions.
Recruiters and hiring managers spun it as a problem being inflicted on them because of AI tools and the attitude of people applying, with one commentator writing
> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max… The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews.
On the other side of your argument you have people who see no problem posting ghost jobs, and think it’s a harmless way to boost company morale and increase investor confidence. They see hundreds of “low effort” applications being submitted to them, believe it is a cost being imposed on them, and think it’s 100% a problem caused by the applicants. They see no connection between their behavior and the response they get back from the environment and would see your proposal as absolutely ridiculous.
I don't know I want to spam my personal details with impunity. It's not the freeby it might seem.
Without the ghost job they're unable to prove due diligence locally. That's not just thievery but fraud.
Due diligence is so fucking dumb though. Here's my understanding of how getting a GC works:
1) Company applies on behalf of employee.
2) Company advertises for employees job.
3) Company interviews local suitors
3a) If local suitor aces it do they get the would be immigrants job? No and also no GC for immigrant.
3b) No local suitor found then immigrant gets GC.
H1B should die. Exceptional immigrants can come here and be an American after some determinant amount of time (not in a hundred plus year backlog or some nonsense). My problem is that I can't work with an underclass, their is no joining the cultures because we are pitted against each other.
That has some merit.
At the same time falsifying skills or misrepresenting them should be just as bad.
How do you quantify skill falsification?
1. The field got oversaturated. Everyone signed up for coding classes, not everyone has graduated from coding classes.
2. Lack of information transparency: everyone involved has huge incentives to lie, so it's extremely difficult for a company to say "we are a good company wanting to hire a good dev" and someone to respond "I am a good dev looking for a good job". Same problem as dating.
3. Moving jobs to cheaper countries: the flipside of work-from-home is having companies realize that they don't need to have butts in chairs is San Francisco, they can have butts in chairs in India, 75% of performance for half the price.
This is probably going to be the new normal until:
1. The IT education scales down and juniors give up, so that there's less competition.
2. Someone comes up with a interviewing process that is significantly more difficult to game.
3. The society at large switches back from "just essentials only" to "one bag of glitter poop please" so that lots of silly businesses can stay afloat, at least for some time.
> Moving jobs to cheaper countries: the flipside of work-from-home is having companies realize that they don't need to have butts in chairs is San Francisco, they can have butts in chairs in India, 75% of performance for half the price.
They had to be brain-dead to only consider that as an option now. What was keeping them from figuring it out sometime post-Reagan?
False moralizing arguments only have to feel true for a split second until you discard the stream of thought.
[dead]
In our industry, they key to getting a job is simple:
1. Work on two meaningful projects using the tech you want a job in. Update your resume with the work that was done, without embellishment.
2. Open your profile on LinkedIn. Close it when you get five interviews. Learn from each failing interview.
I don't think most people are getting meaningful job offers by simply having an open profile on LinkedIn right now. This isn't 2021.
Doesn't that overlook step #1 that I noted?
No. I have worked on meaningful projects, and I don't get any legitimate unsolicited recruiter contacts anymore.
People with experience likely are. Lots of recruiters doing their hunting silently.
This was great advice 15 years ago. Something has changed in the last two years.
I can’t put my finger on it, but I’ve observed a trend where new hires have massively fraudulent experience on their resumes. Likewise an engineer who passed leetcode rounds suddenly doesn’t know what a variable is.
At the very least, we have a problem with people using AI to game the job interview process.
I currently work remotely and was talking to my wife that if I loose this job we will have to relocate, no more remote jobs, I don't want to play the rat race. I participated in hiring (reviewing people's exercices) and all are gaming the system, none could explain simple things in the tech challenge they put together, some are prepared to answer some questions but it takes minutes to realize this person didn't do any of that.
No offense but this is outdated as giving advice like “did you walk in and talk to the manager? Be sure to give him a firm handshake and look him in the eye.”
These days your personal network matters most. If you don’t have one start working on one. Your resume might never see human eyes otherwise. Nobody cares about your GitHub sadly.
I think some places do in fact care about githubs
You're stuck in a time warp. This is pre-pandemic advice.
Highly skilled engineers aren't being fought over anymore. It's become a buyer's market.
If you lose your job, you might be looking for a new one for a long time.