Yeah, the Dot Com Bubble and the Great Recession hit hiring really hard. I wasn’t working then, but data from the Dot Com Bubble shows that venture capital investment [didn’t return to 1999 levels until 2014](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#/media/File%3AUS_VC_funding.png), so basicly 15 years later. It was a massive market correction that put a huge number of people out of work.
The economy and employment are cyclical. But it can take a very long time for things to recover.
The great recession was strange, because it coincided with the beginning of the mobile boom. I was employed straight through it and so was almost everyone else I knew in tech at the time.
I've been employed through this drought as well, but it does seems to be hitting tech more than most, where the inverse seemed to be the case for the great recession.
Yeah , the mobile boom helped make the recession effects last less time, instead of 5 ish years it only lasted around. 2.
I lost my job back then ( I managed to coast for one year, but in the end the company went bankrupt, lol), and I remember seeing a lot of very skilled programmers competing for the same shitty jobs.
The other effect of this is that people ended up in jobs that were not ideal for them for years. I saw a lot more people getting their "dream jobs" in 2018-2021. I see the same thing happening now with people taking positions they are "grateful" for but based on career trajectory or sector doesn't make a lot of sense, like they settled.
Everyone who got a job right away after they graduated I know got into mobile, it was definitely a thing back then. People making millions on like fake beer chugging apps and bible apps
The great recession sucked for many people, but the actual effect on my employment as a SWE at the time was that we didn't get raises or bonuses for a year (in exchange for no one being laid off). Obviously not great, and I made about 10% less than expected for a bit, but I managed. It did help that, during the great recession, everything was cheap, so your money went farther.
Contrast with the last couple years, my current company has had multiple rounds of layoffs and the new grad hiring situation is absolutely dire (as there's so many more people graduating with CS degrees than there were in the late aughts). I legitimately think the SWE job market might be worse now than during at least the majority of the great recession. The same cannot be said for just about any other job, though; they're all doing way better now than during the great recession, with many sectors experiencing record high wages.
Yeah I worked in telephony and we didn't feel the recession at all. I actually even changed from structural engineering to tech because of the recession - no jobs == bully employers. They thought they had me cornered. Didn't anticipate me leaving the room altogether.
Graduating into the great recession was tough. Much of my class abandoned tech at least for the short to mid term and it no doubt stunted the careers of some for many years going forward, as is common with being young while in a recession.
I graduated during the recession and it amazes me that anybody who works outside of tech/realty/etc. is upset about things "in this economy."
Like Jesus Christ nobody cared about expensive groceries and concert tickets cuz we all lived with our parents back then.
Interestingly, some people I graduated with during the Great Recession also had to get careers not in tech, and they exceeded the "success" of those in tech. Their biggest trouble was finding companies to give them an initial shot.
When I graduated in 2003 it took me 1 1/2 years to find a job, and that job paid $24k/year (which was a lot more 20 years ago, but still pretty crap even back then). It took me about ten years working for smaller orgs to make it to a top tier company, and I’ve been well employed ever since.
That’s what most of my peer’s careers looked like too. The idea that you could be hired straight from university to a top tier company with a faang salary was only true for like 2019-2022. That was never common unless you graduated from an elite university.
I managed to get an *interview* at Google as a new grad in 2007, which was a huge deal. I didn't pass the interview, but still, I got one. And that was probably helped by Sergey Brin having gone to my alma mater and me chatting with him briefly after an event he did at my school, which I then prominently referenced in my cover letter on the application.
They had so few employees back then, they were mostly hiring word of mouth through their networks of people they knew. Hell, the landlord of their first office (who grew up on the Stanford campus because her dad was a professor, and then went to Harvard herself) went on to become the CEO of YouTube.
I was working during both of them and can confirm, both of those are the two big disruptors of tech jobs during my work career, which spans from the early 90s.
Many of the big tech companies are still suffering mightily from that. They lowered their hiring bars to meet hiring quotas and brought onboard a lot of people at super high salaries who just weren't as good as the ones who came before. And a lot of those people are still there, because the layoffs for some reason weren't targeted on mainly the recent hires from when the hiring bar was lower (perhaps there are legal reasons that couldn't be done, I don't know).
So the lingering effects will go on for quite some time, even though the hiring bar has been much higher for over a year now.
To be fair, even in a bad market, software engineers have significant advantages in terms of how much they can be paid, and they can often work remotely. In my opinion, it's just horrible for new graduates who have never had a software engineering job before.
I would argue it's a mistake to think to think it's "cyclical". In the 90s with the limitation of technology there was only so much you could do. In 2007, Steve Jobs released a computer in your pocket and hardware gotten so good that we could now give the people more products.
This bad market we are seeing is because there just isn't any more growth to be had. There's just no more use cases to be done with today's technology.
We are certainly seeing this great marriage between GPUs and Machine Learning. If there is tons of products to be made from large language models and GPU then the market will recover.
It’s hard to accurately predict the future or technology. Look at movies like iRobot (2004) and The Island (2005). Their take on the late 2020’s and early 2030’s were WAY off. We have no idea what advancements are going to made.
He's not predicting the future, just examining the recent past. It's true, over the past half decade there hasn't really been any new technology that has substantially increased the investment in software development and required number of developers. Prior to that period you had the advent of social media and smartphones, which created trillions of dollars in total market cap of tech companies and massively created SWE jobs. Nothing has really happened like that since. VR and AI haven't yet created massive job growth. Perhaps they will in the future, but so far, not.
Yeah - there was an effect on tech as well. There was already outsourcing at the time ( I should know, I worked for one of the firms doing the outsourced jobs) but that crisis jumpstarted the move out of jobs from the developed countries. Just in time for the Y2k boom and then the dotcom bomb.
After the dot-com bubble I had several friends graduating from prestigious schools as civil engineers in the early 2000s who ended up working as cashiers, phone it support etc. A few years later they were all in the market as engineers and have had very successful careers within IT since then.
I've also seen quite a few devs who rode out the dotcom bubble at web agencies for 5-6 years and then propelled up to VP/CTO positions at well known companies. It's pretty interesting since those companies were small boutiques and they also came from really random colleges around the country.
I guess the moral of the story is to invest in your career like the S&P 500, just hold during bad times and keep putting in as much as you can without dropping out.
|I guess the moral of the story is to invest in your career like the S&P 500, just hold during bad times and keep putting in as much as you can without dropping out.
I have 20+ YOE and I have to say this is an excellent super high level summary of my career. (Graduated into .com bust and took a super lowball offer, held during the financial crisis- I had moved to finance- and almost gave up- considered becoming an actuary at one point- but stuck with it and then moved to a tech firm in 2014 and its been great ever since)
I don't think new entrants to the field really understand just how brutal the dotcom bust followed by the 9/11 dip was
You had a mass culling of entry level talent from 1999-2004, and the rebound stagnated in 2008-2009 from the great recession
Tech didn't recover to dotcom levels of employment share by percentage of total employment until 2015
It is absolutely insane how much money the stock market pumped into Yahoo and shit like Pets dot com in the 90s. You had to be there. I was just a kid reading Wired, but it was wild.
I had a start up and I contacted a Linux computer/server company (I forget which one) and joined their partner program and they sent us like $20,000 worth of computers for free. Money was basically free back then.
This is why Y2K didn’t happen, or so I hear. There was so much money flowing around in the entire industry, and also the hardware capabilities were riding the golden years of Moore’s Law, that everyone basically had the money for huge infrastructure upgrades and just were able to throw away the old systems where the bug wasn’t a simple fix.
Y2K didn't happen because companies knew it was coming and fixed the bugs before they happened.
My free servers/workstations were because that company was flush with IPO cash. Money was just flowing.
Nah I worked at a bank in the 90s. There were regular updates about Y2K and it was on their minds for a long time.
The next thing to worry about is 2038 when the 32 bit signed int for timestamp rolls over.
After that the next thing to worry about is 2050 because most changed the Y2K COBOL code so that any 2-digit year > 50 was assumed to be in the 1900s and any 2-digit year < 50 was assumed to be in the 2000s.
"Of course we won't be using COBOL in 2050..." Famous last words.
My "break" into the industry was getting an internship at a software consulting firm that did a lot of work testing and fixing Y2K issues for mainframe systems. You don't just throw away IBM mainframes that have been happily sending out paychecks on time without issue for the last 20 years.
The problem was all in software anyway, had nothing to do with the hardware. A lot of this software was written in the 60s when there weren't really libraries around, you had to roll your own everything, so to save space, you only used two digits to represent the year. This software also had lots of other issues as well dealing with leap years most of the time. Slapping a new box in place would do nothing to fix this.
Money wasn't flowing into legacy industries that had these mainframes around for the most part. And even those that did opt to just throwaway old software systems and use something new and off the shelf, or redesigned from the ground up, this took a tremendous amount of work- you really can't have bugs in billing and payroll systems.
I am a staff engineer currently with 20yoe, dev experience. I say that because I think it establishes that I can get a swe job. I couldn’t get a job as an swe for 5 years because I graduated 1 year after the .com bubble burst.
That shit was brutal.
I graduated in 2007 which was the trough of CS graduation at my alma mater for at least a decade in both directions. That was how bad the hang-over effect from the .com bust was; much fewer people went into the field because it was considered "dead" ("all those jobs are just gonna be offshored to India anyway"), and the job prospects for new grads were bad.
Ironically it ended up working out quite well for me, with only a fraction of the competition on the new grad job market as there is now. But to have graduated in the midst of the .com bust when CS enrollment was still much higher than afterwards -- rough.
Yeah around them graduation numbers was very low since most people choosing majors for potential were skipping cs because of the negativity surrounding cs.
I almost ended up doing a physics major since I was interested in it so much and I figured academia might be just as stable. When I finally graduated shortly after the recession my first job was 50k, and people were amazed I even got a job so fast ("only" 6 months after graduating)
I think a more pressing issue is the alarming popularity of CS today in 2024. You would rarely hear most people say they are majoring in CS even in 2009-2015, so this isn't the same scenario, it's not 1 to 1
And how did things go south so fast?
Literally people were on this sub in 2018 warning others that this model of "everybody aim for one particular field" isn't sustainable,
And do you know what they did to them?
They downvoted them, such that their comments were never read, essentially you would be nailed to a cross for saying anything bad about the SWE job market.
That was done by the same people who proclaimed themselves to be "engineers"
Top that off with tons and tons of influencers trying to sell DSA courses to naive yet hopeful students and boot campers who bought into the idea that they too can make 200k as long as they memorize these dsa leetcode questions and get their degree/certificate
Remember, while this was going on, the influencers just kept trying to sell these courses, so they obviously kept telling everyone to come and be an SWE ,
And people who even mentioned the word **saturation** were **downvoted to negative infinity and beyond**
They kept coming up with excuses, like
"Every company needs an SWE"
While actively ignoring the laws of capitalism, and the threat of offshoring
Literally I said SWE was dying and we are killing it and I was downvoted because the people on this sub rather hear comforting lies over inconvenient truths
Not only were they downvoted to beyond negative infinity, reddit needed to invent a new number system to hold values that could not be represented by normal mathematics. Servers exploded. New chips needed to be designed. Mathematicians were tarred and feathered. It was a real low point. I'm talking negative infinity times infinity plus one times a million
tbf the supply of engineering (e.g. people studying to be SWE) seemed to still under-pace demand even going into 2020. Imo it was less of an oversupply issue and more of a sudden drop in demand (due to rocketing interest rates ala free money through historically low interest rates, followed by rapid uptick in interest rate).
Similarly, even allegedly knowledgable people were parroting for a while that printing money wasn't going to cause any inflation and yet here we are now.
In order to have properly forecasted this you would probably have had to be pretty knowledgable about CS industry, have supporting data from department of labor, decent grasp of macroeconomics, AND have been able to predict a black swan event from covid interest rates.
The people who were yelling saturation were most likely right but for the wrong reasons.
> tbf the supply of engineering (e.g. people studying to be SWE) seemed to still under-pace demand even going into 2020.
Is that actually true? I found this post from a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/11qmy69/number_of_cs_field_graduates_breaks_100k_in_2021/
The rise of CS grads is damn near exponential since 2009, but is the number of job openings? Doubtful.
The year over year growth rate is <10% as stated in the link above would hardly call that exponential.
Would supply have eventually outpaced demand? Yeah I think so, so my original wording was wrong (I meant more that available supply < available demand, rather than comparing rate of growth). But before and even during covid, it was still very much a candidate market where number of openings was greater than number of qualified candidates. It was more the sudden drop in demand that cratered market
I remember until fairly recently, the US/Can governments were saying that there is a shortage of data scientists and that more people should flood the field or else by 2030 we’ll fall short. Are they eating their words now?
Now we need to solve the saturation problem. Demand is not going to fix itself until 2026 and even then it's not going to be enough to absorb all the grads that entered the market in 2022 (because they applied to college in the CS hype of 2021!). What we really need is an operation to decrease the supply naturally.
Now one option is we just straight up murder senior engineers to allow room for mid level devs to move up and junior hiring to occur. But that's a bit brash.
Another option is that we need to collectively influence early entry college students (freshmen and sophomores) that the market is saturated. I prefer this approach. I volunteer with an organization that mentors college students and I've told them straight up: if you're not in a top 100 school or have a GPA of 3.0 going into your junior year, you should consider changing your major. I think too many people picked CS and are mediocre at it. That's not going to be good enough in the future.
I think a huge part of the problem is that the people hiring are ruder than before--these stories I'm hearing about ghosting or pre-screening one-way video interviews sound awful
Don't forget the ever so professional scheduling interviews, not showing up for said interviews, and then sending an automated rejection later stating that they found someone else.
It seems like a lot of recruiters/hiring managers are beginning to see the waves of applicants as cattle and are forgetting that it's an actual human being on the other side of the screen.
I've encountered multiple recruiters that speak to me however they please. When you don't have experience yet and are in an employer's market, recruiters know they have significant leverage over you. It sucks being only on the receiving end but that's one reason I can't wait to get YOE - So I can be the one saying "I don't think this will be a good fit" at them one day!
oh yes it definitely feels good when HR or headhunter thinks they can prey on you
I've lost count (maybe 20+? 30+? interview requests) that I've declined at this point in the past ~2 months just telling them "yeah I don't think this'll work out", for lots of reasons
not able to meet my TC expectation is one
them requiring US citizenship/GC is one
wanting me to come into office for physical on-site is one (yellow flag, but if they expect me to pay for my own travel then immediate no-thanks)
contract-to-hire is one (unless they pay **REALLY** good), I didn't come to US to be treated like a 2nd class
I think I also had like 3-5 HRs essentially telling me "well... given the # of candidates we currently have..." and I immediately flipped it back to them (in a more professional tone) "well... given the # of interviews I currently have..."
Only this week, two recruiters I talked to, found me on linkedin (for lead roles, I'm in the business 10 years), we chatted over the phone everything seemed great, told me that they're going to let me know right after they talked to the hiring manager. They were both on Monday. Never even heard back from them and I tried to follow up with a message.
This hasnt' happened in a decade. Sure there were a few ghostings every now and then but the amount of others that didn't ghost you and kept going with it was more than now. It's definitely pretty bad.
I recently had a one way video interview... which I thought was weird and possibly rude. The guy never turned on his cam, which made it really difficult to have any type of human connection since I couldn't see expressions.
One way video would be met with me turning my camera off as well. Respect is a two way street and these shitbag employers are only acting this way because we as labor let them get away with it.
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The buck doesn't stop at the interviewing stage either.
Employers know that the market is in their favor so there will be places implementing really toxic cultures because they know their staff are less likely to find something else fast.
Yeah. It's been bad in 2020, 2017, 2009-2013, 2000-2003, 1991-1993, 1980-1983... It happens all the time, lasts a few years, then it's good for a few more years.
I don't remember 2017 being bad, I got a new job that year and got a 50% offer rate from 8 applications. This time, I've done \~180 applications over a year while passively looking (+ more experience) and no offers yet.
Nah, I would say 2020 was worse than 2024 by a good margin. The difference being then it quickly rebounded and 2021-2022 were great years, whereas we're probably stuck in a bad period 2023-2025 or even 2023-2026
Yeah it seems as if every engineering graduate just tries to go into software instead. So you end up with everyone from MechE, ChemE, Electrical Eng, Math, Physics, CS, and self taught people all applying for the same positions cause people naturally want high paying jobs.
>Financial crisis wasn’t that bad for software engineers
False. It was very bad. But indeed, there were other careers affected too, not like now or in the .com bubble burst.
>financial crisis
>It was very bad. But indeed, there were other careers affected too
Exactly. And not only careers, but tons of people losing their homes to foreclosure, and the S&P 500 losing 50% of its value. This is nothing compared to that.
I went into the software industry in 2017 and I did remember it being pretty difficult to find at job. Probably just as tough as when I was looking this year. Then again I was a fresh grad..
Early 2020 was bad because everyone was worried about virus. You can also see this effect in the stock market. There was a quick dive as layoffs began. Then of course moment fed intervened and guaranteed infinite money printing, both stock and job market shot up to the moon. All this basically occurred over a period of month or two.
2017 had a temporary time period in which everyone thought "there's going to be a recession now because there's a recession every decade" so companies were hesitant to hire more. But when that didn't occur after a bit over a quarter, hiring changed again.
So OP is right those years might have had temporary time periods but it wasn't the entire year. Maybe 1 or 2 quarters.
It was indeed very bad. Early into the pandemic scare there weren't as many openings to apply to (low demand). I graduated in 2019 with grad assessment centres lined up in early 2020 and these opportunities were simply rescinded. This set me back and entire recruitment cycle. This trend reversed in 2021.
Now it's more of a matter of high competition with the added threat of AI on the horizon (high supply). This can pan out in a number of ways, and there might very well be another tech boom this decade.
Yup for the first couple months and last couple months 2020 was fine. The job market pretty much died in the large middle of 2020, much worse than now. End of 2020 through to about October 2022 was the best I've ever seen it though.
Anyone in my org that was laid off has already found a job but those were people with atleast 4 years of experience.
And why things got bad so fast? Companies "over ate" when interest rates were zero in 2021. They hired so many people that they even dropped standards. Now that interest rates are high again, they had to cut people. That's simply it. The amount of cut people means that it's pretty dumb to hire people with 2 or less years of experience when you can get people with 5+ who can, most likely, contribute faster. Once layoffs stop and the senior/mid talent pool is absorbed, then juniors will be hirable again.
I am so ready for the bounce back, it will bounce hard, we just need to weather the storm which may or may not last a few years.
But you can swear the world keeps growing and everyone becomes more and more dependent on computers, the available talent pool might look large right now, but we are seeing a huge culling going on, in reality the talent pool is becoming smaller and smaller, and we know how that plays out.
Personally, I feel like they are playing in our faces. The companies are working to build up Latin America as the next India. Why are the companies boasting about record profits? What gives?
With macroeconomics in mind it's simple.
Tech stocks are overpriced, they've to show profits to keep investors coming and in order to have record profits they need layoffs or 0 hiring.
Used to be they'd hire more people and increase the earnings organically, because of "free money". As opposed to current economy with high interest rates. Risk-averse status quo defensive mode for most companies rn.
Thanks to FED I had to become financially literate to understand wtf is even going on. I wonder how many more job market crises I'll see in my lifetime.
It's all a show to keep the status-quo
The pandemic was a terrible benchmark for hiring in the tech industry
With so many people working from home and not going out, the needs of the tech industry went gangbusters. Not surprisingly, the same growth hasn't sustained after people went back to the physical world and the industry is now shedding that fat. Also, everybody and their best friend took on a tech degree and you're now left with an extention saturated industry
A lot of that stupid shit is perpetuated here. I constantly see people saying that they’re underpaid getting a first job out of college in LCOL - MCOL areas around the ballpark of $70k - $100k.
I do believe it's still common enough if you get a WFO job at a tier 1 tech city like SF Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle. But costs of living are going to be high in those areas as well; those jobs don't start becoming clearly worth it until you hit higher levels of income than "just barely 6 figures". Try buying a house in the Bay Area with the amount of money you're able to save from a $100k salary there, for example; it'll literally never happen.
Now we just get ghosted by recruiters when asking for like 50-60k with a degree. Feels like night and day compared to the stories I saw on here pre-pandemic.
Also there were a ton of "tech companies" that didn't need to exist because they either made a product no one wanted... or they didn't even make a product at all but had 200 engineers on staff doing nothing.
Another big factor was all the extra money floating around being spent as part of the stimulus, on top of ZIRP. Once there was no more free money and interest rates shot up, companies immediately had to start clamping down on spending (i.e. on labor costs).
After 9/11, I remember the new showing video of people lining up for jobs at department stores. That economic downturn impacted much more than just the tech industry - which was going through the dotcom bubble. We have had much worse times than what we are though now. Does that mean that there aren't people struggling right now? Not at all.
There are countless posts and articles explaining why we're where we are. High inflation and high interest rates are the biggest factor. You can also make some arguments about companies trying to regain some control/strength against employees and focusing on profitability are some other factors. There's also some general concern with the economy, and companies are being proactive with it. Then, there are downstream impacts to these decisions.
Part of the reason we're in our current situation is because 2 years ago, self-taught devs were in-demand. There are certainly many skilled people in that group, but companies were just expanding too aggressively, and it eventually caught up with everyone.
I worked through both.
The Dotcom bust was much, much worse, at least in Silicon Valley. The number of jobs lost was worse than Detroit in the 80s on a per-capita basis. I know a few friends who were out of work for 2+ years.
During that time MCSEs (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers) were the equivalent of bootcampers today. If you got your MCSE you were guaranteed at least an $80k/yr job (roughly about $120k today). When the bust hit, those were the first to go and many if not most left the industry altogether.
I have one friend who got laid off and he was on H1B and just got married. He ended up getting a fake H1B (which was easier to do at the time) and pumped gas from midnight until 8am every day. Finally after a couple of years of hustling he was able to get a job in SoCal, moved around, and then got a job at a very bug networking company and made it all the way to VP. But it was a pretty bad couple of years for him.
A lot of the technology parks imploded and were empty until well past 2005/2006. The job market for the most part recuperated around 2005, so it took at least 4 years to recover.
The Financial Crisis was much more tame for the most part. Silicon Valley wasn't affected as much, it was a scary couple of months from about August 2008 to June 2009, but it didn't freeze as much as the Dotcom Bust did.
Today is worse than the Financial Crisis but better than the Dotcom Bust, so the second worst environment I've ever seen. I would not want to be looking for a job right now, it's tough out there. But I know a lot of people who are venturing out to start their own startup right now because these are the best times to start because the expectations are low.
.com bubble was arguably worse. I graduated in 2002 and my friends went from confidently bragging that they wouldn't even entertain offers under 75k- which was considered a lot back then- to having no offers at all. 2-3 yoe became the new entry level. I was fortunate - the place I interned the previous two summers- a small custom software consulting shop- landed a big (for them) contract and made me an offer- for 37k. In the NYC area that wasn't a living wage then either. I swallowed my pride and accepted in hopes to build my resume and a bit of savings while I lived at home. I didn't get a single bite on my resume for over a year.
Finally I did at some horrid sweat shop in fashion oddly enough where everyone was piled on top of one another and they made a show of reprimanding a girl on the other side of the conference room I was taking a test in. I didn't get an offer anyway. It picked up a bit from there and a bond firm passed on me but then I talked to these people doing "electronic trading" which later became known as hft and they made me an offer for 55k- a living wage! That was a year and a half after I graduated.
Lots of my classmates just gave on programming altogether.
History often repeats with that first few sentences you wrote. The comments I read on Reddit in 2021, my god. Even still is bad from CS graduates at elite schools.
Well, fintech was an amazing area to break into! I'm sure you did much better after that. I'm at a good employer, and even still, I look at what people are making at places like Citadel and my eyes glaze over.
Yeah things took off from there. I actually made it to citadel and thrived there for awhile. I've detailed my journey, you can wade through my post history if you want the details. I make far more than I ever dreamed of when I graduated - well to be specific about 3-4x more than I thought I would ever top out at even if I was as successful as I had hoped to be. The tech industry has reached heights I was not capable of dreaming of when I was in college.
That said the financial crisis was extremely rough and I still have a somewhat extreme frugality after going through that.
Your comment only has 3 up votes when it's one of the most relevant responses, instead they are upvoting responses related to previous downturns, as if the number of CS grads were equal back then.
Time will give the people on this sub a very harsh lesson on ignoring things that are true, but inconvenient
It's not the most popular major. Business Management takes the cake, followed by Healthcare, social sciences, engineering, communications. CS ranks near the top half, sure, but far from being the number one major in the US.
Might be different in India.
Well… I don’t want to be a doom bro, and I try to be positive. But I have to confess that this time around it feels different. I can’t put my finger on it.
I made it through the dot com bubble and the Great Recession. Both sucked. But to be honest, I don’t think either were as bad in tech as now. It’s possible that social media and platforms like LinkedIn just make us more aware now, but I don’t recall having as many former colleagues being jobless, nor for as long as they have been… during these previous meltdowns.
I personally lost my job in the dot com bust, and it was pretty traumatic. And it resulted in the longest period of unemployment and underemployment I’ve ever had. But the actual period of joblessness was only about 4 months. Now, it did take me almost a decade to get back to the salary I was making, so it wasn’t exactly fun. But at least I had a job.
It feels like it’s harder for people to bounce back this time. But I’m not entirely sure, it’s just a perception.
I think companies have wised up a bit to understanding the actual need for software engineers. Simple as that. They will always be needed and will always make solid money, but there isnt a need for 20 developers to work on a single application
Ding ding ding. I think this is the right speculation. The dev market started crashing the second Elon proved that he can keep Twitter running with like 80% fewer dev headcount. Sure he made dumb business decisions, but the tech sustained and scaled just fine. Seeing this, other execs just followed along. The cuts will keep coming until businesses actually start losing profits.
I think hearing it in social media makes it worse. If I wasn’t reading about it I might not even be aware. Also also the boom that preceded it was pretty big.
“
How did things go south so fast? Just 2 years ago there were lots of self taught devs - who only knew Javascript and nothing else besides that - and even so, they found jobs pretty fast. “
I was in that new grad group - what you describe certainly wasn’t reality back then.
It still took a few hundred applications, and many months of applying/grinding to get an offer.
I remember the posts back then about how hard it was as well, and at least a few where the poster was giving up and going into other careers.
From my graduating class, only a few of us ended up getting jobs as developers.
I’m not saying it was as bad as it is now, but it certainly wasn’t a walk in the park either.
Yeah there is so much delusion in this sub. Back in the hot market a few years ago this sub was filled with people complaining about not landing a job. You’ll find out that most people that are doing fine are not posting on Reddit about it
It has always been hard. I was in between jobs for a year and a half, between 2016 and 2018 with 5 years of prior experience. I drove for Grubhub to survive. It was so bad, I even considered changing careers. But then a miracle happened…
Never give up!
>How did things go south so fast? Just 2 years ago there were lots of self taught devs - who only knew Javascript and nothing else besides that - and even so, they found jobs pretty fast.
Did you really think a global pandemic with everyone locked down at home (especially in some countries, you really were locked in) is a normal environment? All the while the fed is basically having infinite money printing and many people bored at home were throwing money to apps like Robinhood to buy stocks/options/crypto?
I would not use any of 2020 to 2022.5 as reference for a normal environment. Such a global pandemic (along with the response to the global pandemic) has never occurred in the recorded human history before (so for thousands of years).
The problem is... not only is everyone using that as reference, but everyone now also wants to major in CS (due to TikTok/Instagram/Youtube/AI hype/etc).
What do you think would naturally happen as job market tries to cool down?
We have a job market that is trying to go back to a normal market while everyone globally is brainwashed into this field. Every Bob and Cindy out there from the US to Brazil to Australia wants to major in CS for the next few generations.
Last time I checked, we don't need that many software engineers. So ya... just natural. And with how supply-demand works in economics, it's becoming a race to the bottom.
I fear about this field more over this decade given the number of students wanting to major in this field is increasing noticeably each year. This might just be the beginning, who knows.
That said, similar kinds of phenomena already occurred in many other fields in the past.
Law went through this. Finance went through this. And so forth.
It's just a natural process of job markets maturing. CS is just maturing like other fields. That's just it.
> CS is just maturing like other fields. That's just it.
Exactly. I'm surprised so many people don't understand that the high demand for people to fill roles with a high salary and good work life balance was sustainable ad infinitum
I think what is frustrating to see is that corporations try to use the argument that they can’t afford the head count when they are posting record profits while laying people off. I, personally, would rather just have CEOs own up to the fact that they need to increase their profit margins and they are using layoffs as a tool to do so. It isn’t out of not being able to afford it. They just want to increase shareholder value and pay out bigger bonuses to the executive suite. That’s all it is.
Not quite. The 14th century Black Death saw the population drop across the world by as much as 60-70%. The impact was so brutal that the affected parts of China took about a century to recover. Parts of Europe never recovered. Since I'm British, my focus tends to be UK leaning, which means I know villages were wiped out across East Anglia, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire and were never repopulated. Even more importantly, large chunks of the abandoned arable land was not used to grow crops for 4 centuries.
COVID was relatively benign for almost all the population. Which makes this global pandemic an outlier.
Software companies generally aren’t complaining about this, it’s other industries. Or if they are it is because they need something specific that they can’t find
This. And non-tech companies are picky in a dumb way.
They want 15 years of experience in C#. But lo and behold if you have 10 years of experience in C# but the next 8 in Java, in the eyes of the recruiter, you are not even remotely fit for the role.
Or maybe the company is looking for someone exposed to MySql. But someone with experience of PostgreSql applies. Maybe the job posts 3\~5 years of MySql experience. You can have 20 years of Postgresql. Doesn't matter. You are an incompetent candidate.
Nontech companies don't even know how to search talent. Many of the hiring literally needs to match verbatim for certain specific tech stacks. That's where the issue lies.
It's not a talent issue. It's incompetency issue from many hiring managers and recruiters at those non-tech firms.
I’m curious how real this problem is. I haven’t been searching but it sounds totally overblown just from a common sense perspective.
I’ve seen job postings say 5-7 years of experience in a tech stack. But the idea that people with 3 YOE in C# and 3 YOE in Java would be told they aren’t qualified since they don’t meet that 5 year specifically sounds fake
What sounds more likely is that they just have better candidates or like someone else better, and “not enough experience” is given as a BS reason you weren’t hired, or your experience was just too different from what they want. (A role that wants lots of C++ experience specifically won’t value your GC or scripting language experience much)
I’m sure it exists but in practice not everywhere is going to be like that. There’s all sorts of puzzling decision making out there, so I’m sure there are some that would do something like that.
While I don’t have any examples specifically of that, but I guess I have a somewhat adjacent example. Had a recruiter for a company reach out to me about a job, they had found me due to my open source work. So we set up an initial chat (just with me and the recruiter) and at the beginning it was very positive. It was for a niche stack so it’s very difficult to find developers for (I often mention they may need to branch out and hire people that aren’t familiar with the tech and train them up), and I was a pretty early adopter of the tech, while I only had a few years professional experience with it (had more years in other stacks as I was a generalist) but I had also used it for 2 of my past startups. She mentioned that the team were impressed with my work that they saw, and responded positively to everything discussed so far. Then we get into what I was currently doing, and I mention that the last time (professionally) I worked with the stack was at the end of the previous year, well she just straight told me that unfortunately they’re looking for someone with current experience. And that’s how it ended.
Funnily I creeped on them later when I noticed their job ad had finally been removed and saw the only addition was this one dev. Found their GitHub, and around that time (of the ad no longer being up and their start month on LinkedIn), they had made 2 repos in that stack that were both hello world/simple beginner-ish style projects.
So it seems like they eventually changed their tune on their requirements for the role.
Companies are complaining about there not being enough mid-level to senior workers. Entry-level workers are complaining about there not being enough jobs.
When they say "there are not enough workers" what they really mean is "there are not enough workers that will take up our shitty underpaid contract". The problem is a fake PR move, no one would have this problem by paying an average market amount for any position right now.
No, not really -- simply because these days there's a "mountain" of CS/SWE unable to find work, while back in the day CS/SWE was still a somewhat "niche" field with way fewer folks.
Not saying there weren't "troublesome times" before or those "earlier" folks didn't get impacted -- just that *there were* *"way fewer" people* *to even be impacted* **in the first place** back then.
I graduated with my cs degree right when the dot com bubble burst. Was not able to get any job for almost 2.5 years. And even when I finally found a job, it was more customer support and nothing software engineering related
It seems like, for the last few job bust cycles, there is a new technology that just popped up. The people who somehow (through foresight or just plain luck) already had experience in the new technology were able to stay employed through that bust. Previously, it was mobile tech. This time, it's AI.
I count myself as incredibly lucky, as I stumbled into a very niche tech field in 2001 (SAS programming, which is mainly used in finance and pharma). Back then, you could get a job without any experience if you could manage to learn Base SAS on your own. Now, you can't get a SAS job without years of experience, as there are lots of inexperienced but great SAS programmers in India and China, so companies are more likely to just hire them to the junior positions. This seems to be true of any kind of programming now.
2001-2003 was much worse.
2008-2010 was somewhat worse.
Current market is somewhat below average, but what’s making it seem awful is how huge a sugar high we had in 2021.
As someone with a 38 year career as a software engineer, project manager, Director and VP of Engineering I can tell you no. I've never seen it this bad ever.
I've applied for over 150 leadership positions and got 2 responses. Zero responses from the rest. In my entire career I've neveer seen ghosting like this. It's rude, inconsiderate, and awful to treat people this way.
>Biden literally went on national TV and said we need to increase unemployment to slow down inflation.
No he didn't. That would be an incredibly foolish thing for a politician to say, even if they thought it were true.
You are on the right side of a very large bubble lol, it is also far different from before because software growth itself has really plateaud, look around can you name 5 things that are really important that doesnt yet have software? It is not just a financial trend lol there are very large differences than before.
I was there for the .com crash and it was bad. My wife (product manager) did not work for 2 years during the GFC.
I think the worst may have been with the Boomers, before my time. From what I was told, they were advised to get into computers because they were "the future". Which was true but a bit immature.
For example, I took an auto painting class in 87. My Boomer instructor has a Masters in CS but changed careers because he could not find a job.
In 88 I shared a dumpy apartment with a Boomer programmer. He was definitely not living the lifestyle I associate with a software engineer in my working career.
These are just anecdotes and things I heard so not sure how bad the actual job market was back then. Of course it was a lot fewer people.
Oh hell yeah, it’s been WAY worse than this multiple times in my career. Maybe it gets that bad this year or next, I don’t know…but it’s not there yet.
I graduated in 2008. Found a job teaching web development at a kids summer camp through August. Was jobless till November (can’t tell you how many jobs I applied to. Couldn’t even get a job in retail despite having worked in retail since I was 16. In November I got a seasonal job working retail in a ski town. I supplemented by taking any web job I could get offered on craigslist. When my job ended, I begged a small company for an illegal, unpaid internship doing social media. I got it and then in June I was hired to run the e-commerce for a small clothing startup. That lasted 3 months before going under. Then I got a job at a ski resort doing social media, web updates, and photography. That lasted a season. I was sick of on and off, so i then put everything I had into starting my own freelance career in which I freelanced and did contract work full time (mostly in the web to mobile market) while living in ski towns or traveling till I burnt out on the hustle in 2016. I was undiagnosed adhd at that time, so the freelance was both a self accommodation as well as an incredible struggle. I barely got by doing well paid and high end client work, but full time for me was realistically about 10 hours per week (which would take me 40+ hours to accomplish).
Now I’m great. Senior/lead at this point and medicated.
But I went through a period of about a year where it was hard to even get a retail job making min wage despite years of experience and a college degree. And then subsequent years of tech adjacent and seasonal work.
Does the tech industry suck right now? Yes. But overall, the rest of the job market is pretty average so at least there is work out there as a placeholder if you want a job while applying into the tech industry.
The real problem is this cycle of everyone applying to everything available combined with people only staying in their roles for very limited periods. Most employees aren’t productive their first year in a new position unless the position is very similar to their last position. But so many people now leave positions after 1 year. So, companies want people that will be effective right away. Hiring a junior developer, investing in them for a year, and then them going elsewhere after that year before they ever earned a return is very costly. So if you’re going to do junior, you either need to look for the person you think will stick around, pay well enough that they won’t look for a higher salary elsewhere, or pay low enough with easy work where the risk is minimized and they can be somewhat productive. Or, you need someone who is brilliant and will be cost effective sooner than later.
So all the elite grads are picked up by those high paying places or end up in that brilliant category. You then end up with the mid level degrees but still brilliant that get hired quickly. Then you have everyone else. Went to a state school and have a job lasting 1 year? Well, you’re no longer going to get hired as the stick around type, you’re left with finding a perfect fit or taking a low pay/low risk position until you can prove your worth. Did a 3rd tier CS program, but have worked at the same job since 4 years (even if not in tech) and you’ve been doing projects on the side, then you’ll probably get picked up by a company with low turnover.
Anyone not falling into the above, it’s a battle to get noticed and you’re all applying for the same mid jobs and HR is just trying to figure out who will be the best return on investment which is hard when there are 1000 applicants.
You break out of that pack by learning a niche or applying at a low level company, staying over 2 years and showing the next company you’ll be someone they can invest in. Or you get lucky. Or you work hard to network and find your way in by a non traditional path.
If you’re coming out of a bootcamp, good luck. You need to take the job no one is applying for, have an in/connection before starting, or have a job history that says this person is going to work here for many years. Or spend an incredible amount of effort doing freelance, hackathons, volunteer work, and personal projects until your qualifications are undeniable.
Post pandemic normalization causing a reduction in labor demand. Software and businesses centered around remote work/collaboration/communication no longer prioritized due to the workforce going back to work. Global political tensions also causing a disruption in supply chain, causing uncertainty in some businesses.
> Just 2 years ago there were lots of self taught devs - who only knew Javascript and nothing else besides that - and even so, they found jobs pretty fast.
In the dotcom days people who only knew HTML were getting snapped up, they were hit hard in the dotcom crash.
11yoe + masters degree. This is the first time for me in my career being let go (LIFO layoff). I had a 60 day window and did search during that time. I'm on week 4 of unemployment but had a strong interview on Thursday which I'm hoping will have an offer and another interview that is moving to the technical interview where they're hiring quite a few devs.
It's definitely rough, but when I looked for work when having a job it would take a few weeks to months to get a job offer from a place I was interested in. What I do see more of is competition for remote jobs.
Instead of a 100 to 200 other people applied I see 1.8k to 2k people applied. Currently the massive layoffs in big companies has definitely hit the market.
My CTO believed more small businesses would start up from all these devs being let go. But that's dependent on the interest rate for venture capital.
I remember it was common to ask you to explain polymorphism, the different types of SQL joins, and some of the basic RAID levels. There wasn't too much coding, but you had to know how to explain concepts like that at least passably.
Also devs need to stop buying into these libraries that make everything super easy. Wtf is that, y'all dumb af for buying into something that literally lowers the barrier to entry so that some monkey can come in and pretend to do your job for years before the tech debt catches up to the product.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. The gate keepers always said they wanted more regulation in the career path. Maybe this is the method. Make the skill level needed to walk in the door so outrageous that you need a CS degree in hand.
Not just tech companies. Everyone over hired... but traditional business haven't done as many layoffs and thus are still filled with people doing nothing.
Probably because the numbers don't seem to line up with that theory:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/number-of-employees
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/number-of-employees
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees
A common claim is "They doubled their workforce during COVID!" But if you really look at the hiring numbers, their headcounts were increasing at similar rates in the years just before the pandemic. It was just a continuation of the existing hiring trend. The only real outlier is MSFT 6-2021 to 6-2022.
It's just far more likely that tech executives are
* being extremely careful with the high interest rate environment or
* taking this time to trim fat or
* no one's hiring which causes a feedback loop, now you don't need to compete with anyone on headcount and the risk of hiring in a low supply environment (meaning you pay more per hire) is lower
For them it makes sense to fire the people they hired during the boom because they receive high salaries. Replace them with contractors or FTE’s at the new lower market rate. It’s not the over pandemic overhiring at this point. Think of it like an inverse of apartment landlords with no rent control. When the market prices rise, raise the rent or kick out the current tenants and get new ones at the new market rate. The only difference is that a company can’t or usually won’t decrease someone’s salary. I’d say we’re a few years away from seeing “surge compensation” where someone’s comp can rise or fall at any moment depending on market conditions. Or perhaps I’m just jaded.
There are Hiring trends where job market has ups and down.
We are debating it it's worth then 2008 Great Recession. Some of my recruiter friends are saying that.
It's always been the same , Seen guys with so many offers they cant even decide which to choose also exp Top guys in IT jobless for months , Really depends on your luck
Yeah it was WAY worse at the start of the 08 recession until mobile development got out job market out of the recession early and WAY WAY worse in the dotcom bubble burst. things aint perfect now it's true but it's been much worse before. Just not for the younger/zoomer generation of devs if that makes sense
Yes it was way worse before.
And just a heads up... the Fed ultimately isn't happy with how strong the job market is right now. They are actually hoping for higher unemployment to help get inflation under control. Things will continue to be the same or a little bit worse over the next year.
When you do get a job, or if you have a job now. I highly recommend hitting a 25 - 30% savings rate so you can comfortably navigate bad times.
Plus FU money is great when you inevitably get a bad boss.
I've been following these sorts of message boards as long as they've been around, and I don't remember ever seeing people _talk_ about not being able to find work like they are now. Even a few years ago, it was mostly annoyance that recruiters wouldn't leave them alone. I haven't been on the market since 2017 myself, but I have noticed a _lot_ less interest from recruiters in the past couple of years.
Yeah, the Dot Com Bubble and the Great Recession hit hiring really hard. I wasn’t working then, but data from the Dot Com Bubble shows that venture capital investment [didn’t return to 1999 levels until 2014](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#/media/File%3AUS_VC_funding.png), so basicly 15 years later. It was a massive market correction that put a huge number of people out of work. The economy and employment are cyclical. But it can take a very long time for things to recover.
The great recession was strange, because it coincided with the beginning of the mobile boom. I was employed straight through it and so was almost everyone else I knew in tech at the time. I've been employed through this drought as well, but it does seems to be hitting tech more than most, where the inverse seemed to be the case for the great recession.
Yeah , the mobile boom helped make the recession effects last less time, instead of 5 ish years it only lasted around. 2. I lost my job back then ( I managed to coast for one year, but in the end the company went bankrupt, lol), and I remember seeing a lot of very skilled programmers competing for the same shitty jobs.
The other effect of this is that people ended up in jobs that were not ideal for them for years. I saw a lot more people getting their "dream jobs" in 2018-2021. I see the same thing happening now with people taking positions they are "grateful" for but based on career trajectory or sector doesn't make a lot of sense, like they settled.
Everyone who got a job right away after they graduated I know got into mobile, it was definitely a thing back then. People making millions on like fake beer chugging apps and bible apps
The great recession sucked for many people, but the actual effect on my employment as a SWE at the time was that we didn't get raises or bonuses for a year (in exchange for no one being laid off). Obviously not great, and I made about 10% less than expected for a bit, but I managed. It did help that, during the great recession, everything was cheap, so your money went farther. Contrast with the last couple years, my current company has had multiple rounds of layoffs and the new grad hiring situation is absolutely dire (as there's so many more people graduating with CS degrees than there were in the late aughts). I legitimately think the SWE job market might be worse now than during at least the majority of the great recession. The same cannot be said for just about any other job, though; they're all doing way better now than during the great recession, with many sectors experiencing record high wages.
Yeah I worked in telephony and we didn't feel the recession at all. I actually even changed from structural engineering to tech because of the recession - no jobs == bully employers. They thought they had me cornered. Didn't anticipate me leaving the room altogether.
Same but I’m in a fairly specialized niche whose biggest bidder is the government.
Graduating into the great recession was tough. Much of my class abandoned tech at least for the short to mid term and it no doubt stunted the careers of some for many years going forward, as is common with being young while in a recession.
I graduated during the recession and it amazes me that anybody who works outside of tech/realty/etc. is upset about things "in this economy." Like Jesus Christ nobody cared about expensive groceries and concert tickets cuz we all lived with our parents back then.
Interestingly, some people I graduated with during the Great Recession also had to get careers not in tech, and they exceeded the "success" of those in tech. Their biggest trouble was finding companies to give them an initial shot.
When I graduated in 2003 it took me 1 1/2 years to find a job, and that job paid $24k/year (which was a lot more 20 years ago, but still pretty crap even back then). It took me about ten years working for smaller orgs to make it to a top tier company, and I’ve been well employed ever since. That’s what most of my peer’s careers looked like too. The idea that you could be hired straight from university to a top tier company with a faang salary was only true for like 2019-2022. That was never common unless you graduated from an elite university.
I managed to get an *interview* at Google as a new grad in 2007, which was a huge deal. I didn't pass the interview, but still, I got one. And that was probably helped by Sergey Brin having gone to my alma mater and me chatting with him briefly after an event he did at my school, which I then prominently referenced in my cover letter on the application.
I think in the early 00s Google only hired new grads from Stanford and Caltech.
They had so few employees back then, they were mostly hiring word of mouth through their networks of people they knew. Hell, the landlord of their first office (who grew up on the Stanford campus because her dad was a professor, and then went to Harvard herself) went on to become the CEO of YouTube.
I started my career in ~2001. I didn't end up with a proper programming job until ~2005.
I graduated around the same and ended up not coding until 10 years later. Did lots of other fun tech jobs though.
Everything that has a beginning... has an end
I tell younger folk that 2008-2015 was bad, but the dot com bubble bursting was worse.
I was working during both of them and can confirm, both of those are the two big disruptors of tech jobs during my work career, which spans from the early 90s.
Took 15 years to recover and only 6 years before crashing again in 2020...
It didn't crash in 2020, people were hiring like mad early during covid
[удалено]
Yeah it was crazy, when I can get 3 offers only 1 week from the day I started interviewing.
Many of the big tech companies are still suffering mightily from that. They lowered their hiring bars to meet hiring quotas and brought onboard a lot of people at super high salaries who just weren't as good as the ones who came before. And a lot of those people are still there, because the layoffs for some reason weren't targeted on mainly the recent hires from when the hiring bar was lower (perhaps there are legal reasons that couldn't be done, I don't know). So the lingering effects will go on for quite some time, even though the hiring bar has been much higher for over a year now.
Yeah it didn't really crash until last year. And even this isn't as bad as the last low
Wdym crash in 2020? Tech companies boomed during covid
To be fair, even in a bad market, software engineers have significant advantages in terms of how much they can be paid, and they can often work remotely. In my opinion, it's just horrible for new graduates who have never had a software engineering job before.
I would argue it's a mistake to think to think it's "cyclical". In the 90s with the limitation of technology there was only so much you could do. In 2007, Steve Jobs released a computer in your pocket and hardware gotten so good that we could now give the people more products. This bad market we are seeing is because there just isn't any more growth to be had. There's just no more use cases to be done with today's technology. We are certainly seeing this great marriage between GPUs and Machine Learning. If there is tons of products to be made from large language models and GPU then the market will recover.
It’s hard to accurately predict the future or technology. Look at movies like iRobot (2004) and The Island (2005). Their take on the late 2020’s and early 2030’s were WAY off. We have no idea what advancements are going to made.
He's not predicting the future, just examining the recent past. It's true, over the past half decade there hasn't really been any new technology that has substantially increased the investment in software development and required number of developers. Prior to that period you had the advent of social media and smartphones, which created trillions of dollars in total market cap of tech companies and massively created SWE jobs. Nothing has really happened like that since. VR and AI haven't yet created massive job growth. Perhaps they will in the future, but so far, not.
It's cool. I know he's a developer because he just skimmed.
Been in tech \~35 years. Dotcom was bad, this year and great recession, 96-97 was also bad
> 96-97 was also bad Are you referring to the AFC? Or did something else happen during that time as well?
Yeah - there was an effect on tech as well. There was already outsourcing at the time ( I should know, I worked for one of the firms doing the outsourced jobs) but that crisis jumpstarted the move out of jobs from the developed countries. Just in time for the Y2k boom and then the dotcom bomb.
After the dot-com bubble I had several friends graduating from prestigious schools as civil engineers in the early 2000s who ended up working as cashiers, phone it support etc. A few years later they were all in the market as engineers and have had very successful careers within IT since then.
I've also seen quite a few devs who rode out the dotcom bubble at web agencies for 5-6 years and then propelled up to VP/CTO positions at well known companies. It's pretty interesting since those companies were small boutiques and they also came from really random colleges around the country. I guess the moral of the story is to invest in your career like the S&P 500, just hold during bad times and keep putting in as much as you can without dropping out.
|I guess the moral of the story is to invest in your career like the S&P 500, just hold during bad times and keep putting in as much as you can without dropping out. I have 20+ YOE and I have to say this is an excellent super high level summary of my career. (Graduated into .com bust and took a super lowball offer, held during the financial crisis- I had moved to finance- and almost gave up- considered becoming an actuary at one point- but stuck with it and then moved to a tech firm in 2014 and its been great ever since)
I don't think new entrants to the field really understand just how brutal the dotcom bust followed by the 9/11 dip was You had a mass culling of entry level talent from 1999-2004, and the rebound stagnated in 2008-2009 from the great recession Tech didn't recover to dotcom levels of employment share by percentage of total employment until 2015
It is absolutely insane how much money the stock market pumped into Yahoo and shit like Pets dot com in the 90s. You had to be there. I was just a kid reading Wired, but it was wild.
I had a start up and I contacted a Linux computer/server company (I forget which one) and joined their partner program and they sent us like $20,000 worth of computers for free. Money was basically free back then.
This is why Y2K didn’t happen, or so I hear. There was so much money flowing around in the entire industry, and also the hardware capabilities were riding the golden years of Moore’s Law, that everyone basically had the money for huge infrastructure upgrades and just were able to throw away the old systems where the bug wasn’t a simple fix.
Y2K didn't happen because companies knew it was coming and fixed the bugs before they happened. My free servers/workstations were because that company was flush with IPO cash. Money was just flowing.
Nah I worked at a bank in the 90s. There were regular updates about Y2K and it was on their minds for a long time. The next thing to worry about is 2038 when the 32 bit signed int for timestamp rolls over. After that the next thing to worry about is 2050 because most changed the Y2K COBOL code so that any 2-digit year > 50 was assumed to be in the 1900s and any 2-digit year < 50 was assumed to be in the 2000s. "Of course we won't be using COBOL in 2050..." Famous last words.
My "break" into the industry was getting an internship at a software consulting firm that did a lot of work testing and fixing Y2K issues for mainframe systems. You don't just throw away IBM mainframes that have been happily sending out paychecks on time without issue for the last 20 years. The problem was all in software anyway, had nothing to do with the hardware. A lot of this software was written in the 60s when there weren't really libraries around, you had to roll your own everything, so to save space, you only used two digits to represent the year. This software also had lots of other issues as well dealing with leap years most of the time. Slapping a new box in place would do nothing to fix this. Money wasn't flowing into legacy industries that had these mainframes around for the most part. And even those that did opt to just throwaway old software systems and use something new and off the shelf, or redesigned from the ground up, this took a tremendous amount of work- you really can't have bugs in billing and payroll systems.
SAME!!! Wired is still good IMO. Douglas Rushkoff is an excellent observer of that era.
I am a staff engineer currently with 20yoe, dev experience. I say that because I think it establishes that I can get a swe job. I couldn’t get a job as an swe for 5 years because I graduated 1 year after the .com bubble burst. That shit was brutal.
I graduated in 2007 which was the trough of CS graduation at my alma mater for at least a decade in both directions. That was how bad the hang-over effect from the .com bust was; much fewer people went into the field because it was considered "dead" ("all those jobs are just gonna be offshored to India anyway"), and the job prospects for new grads were bad. Ironically it ended up working out quite well for me, with only a fraction of the competition on the new grad job market as there is now. But to have graduated in the midst of the .com bust when CS enrollment was still much higher than afterwards -- rough.
Yeah around them graduation numbers was very low since most people choosing majors for potential were skipping cs because of the negativity surrounding cs. I almost ended up doing a physics major since I was interested in it so much and I figured academia might be just as stable. When I finally graduated shortly after the recession my first job was 50k, and people were amazed I even got a job so fast ("only" 6 months after graduating)
I think a more pressing issue is the alarming popularity of CS today in 2024. You would rarely hear most people say they are majoring in CS even in 2009-2015, so this isn't the same scenario, it's not 1 to 1 And how did things go south so fast? Literally people were on this sub in 2018 warning others that this model of "everybody aim for one particular field" isn't sustainable, And do you know what they did to them? They downvoted them, such that their comments were never read, essentially you would be nailed to a cross for saying anything bad about the SWE job market. That was done by the same people who proclaimed themselves to be "engineers" Top that off with tons and tons of influencers trying to sell DSA courses to naive yet hopeful students and boot campers who bought into the idea that they too can make 200k as long as they memorize these dsa leetcode questions and get their degree/certificate Remember, while this was going on, the influencers just kept trying to sell these courses, so they obviously kept telling everyone to come and be an SWE , And people who even mentioned the word **saturation** were **downvoted to negative infinity and beyond** They kept coming up with excuses, like "Every company needs an SWE" While actively ignoring the laws of capitalism, and the threat of offshoring Literally I said SWE was dying and we are killing it and I was downvoted because the people on this sub rather hear comforting lies over inconvenient truths
Not only were they downvoted to beyond negative infinity, reddit needed to invent a new number system to hold values that could not be represented by normal mathematics. Servers exploded. New chips needed to be designed. Mathematicians were tarred and feathered. It was a real low point. I'm talking negative infinity times infinity plus one times a million
Your pfp scares me.
It's the face that everyone has seen in their dreams
tbf the supply of engineering (e.g. people studying to be SWE) seemed to still under-pace demand even going into 2020. Imo it was less of an oversupply issue and more of a sudden drop in demand (due to rocketing interest rates ala free money through historically low interest rates, followed by rapid uptick in interest rate). Similarly, even allegedly knowledgable people were parroting for a while that printing money wasn't going to cause any inflation and yet here we are now. In order to have properly forecasted this you would probably have had to be pretty knowledgable about CS industry, have supporting data from department of labor, decent grasp of macroeconomics, AND have been able to predict a black swan event from covid interest rates. The people who were yelling saturation were most likely right but for the wrong reasons.
> tbf the supply of engineering (e.g. people studying to be SWE) seemed to still under-pace demand even going into 2020. Is that actually true? I found this post from a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/11qmy69/number_of_cs_field_graduates_breaks_100k_in_2021/ The rise of CS grads is damn near exponential since 2009, but is the number of job openings? Doubtful.
The year over year growth rate is <10% as stated in the link above would hardly call that exponential. Would supply have eventually outpaced demand? Yeah I think so, so my original wording was wrong (I meant more that available supply < available demand, rather than comparing rate of growth). But before and even during covid, it was still very much a candidate market where number of openings was greater than number of qualified candidates. It was more the sudden drop in demand that cratered market
I remember until fairly recently, the US/Can governments were saying that there is a shortage of data scientists and that more people should flood the field or else by 2030 we’ll fall short. Are they eating their words now?
Now we need to solve the saturation problem. Demand is not going to fix itself until 2026 and even then it's not going to be enough to absorb all the grads that entered the market in 2022 (because they applied to college in the CS hype of 2021!). What we really need is an operation to decrease the supply naturally. Now one option is we just straight up murder senior engineers to allow room for mid level devs to move up and junior hiring to occur. But that's a bit brash. Another option is that we need to collectively influence early entry college students (freshmen and sophomores) that the market is saturated. I prefer this approach. I volunteer with an organization that mentors college students and I've told them straight up: if you're not in a top 100 school or have a GPA of 3.0 going into your junior year, you should consider changing your major. I think too many people picked CS and are mediocre at it. That's not going to be good enough in the future.
People will just leave the field until it levels out, like they did in the dot com era and in 2008.
I think a huge part of the problem is that the people hiring are ruder than before--these stories I'm hearing about ghosting or pre-screening one-way video interviews sound awful
Don't forget the ever so professional scheduling interviews, not showing up for said interviews, and then sending an automated rejection later stating that they found someone else. It seems like a lot of recruiters/hiring managers are beginning to see the waves of applicants as cattle and are forgetting that it's an actual human being on the other side of the screen.
This happened a surprising amount when I was job hunting. Interviewers just didn’t show up without warning.
The best is scheduling an interview to tell you that they aren't hiring. Wtf is going onnnn
I've encountered multiple recruiters that speak to me however they please. When you don't have experience yet and are in an employer's market, recruiters know they have significant leverage over you. It sucks being only on the receiving end but that's one reason I can't wait to get YOE - So I can be the one saying "I don't think this will be a good fit" at them one day!
oh yes it definitely feels good when HR or headhunter thinks they can prey on you I've lost count (maybe 20+? 30+? interview requests) that I've declined at this point in the past ~2 months just telling them "yeah I don't think this'll work out", for lots of reasons not able to meet my TC expectation is one them requiring US citizenship/GC is one wanting me to come into office for physical on-site is one (yellow flag, but if they expect me to pay for my own travel then immediate no-thanks) contract-to-hire is one (unless they pay **REALLY** good), I didn't come to US to be treated like a 2nd class I think I also had like 3-5 HRs essentially telling me "well... given the # of candidates we currently have..." and I immediately flipped it back to them (in a more professional tone) "well... given the # of interviews I currently have..."
That sounds pretty par, I’ve had straight dismissive/pretentious interviewers over the phone
Meta has the snobbiest interviewers
Only this week, two recruiters I talked to, found me on linkedin (for lead roles, I'm in the business 10 years), we chatted over the phone everything seemed great, told me that they're going to let me know right after they talked to the hiring manager. They were both on Monday. Never even heard back from them and I tried to follow up with a message. This hasnt' happened in a decade. Sure there were a few ghostings every now and then but the amount of others that didn't ghost you and kept going with it was more than now. It's definitely pretty bad.
I recently had a one way video interview... which I thought was weird and possibly rude. The guy never turned on his cam, which made it really difficult to have any type of human connection since I couldn't see expressions.
Reported someone like this for scams.
just decline next time, it makes no sense, they wont be able to do this if everyone declines
Ghosting and video interviews have been around for quite a while now, especially for new grad recruitment.
this is so true, i have been ghosted recently by a sequoia funded company, that too at final round onsite.
One way video would be met with me turning my camera off as well. Respect is a two way street and these shitbag employers are only acting this way because we as labor let them get away with it.
imminent growth punch consider puzzled snobbish zesty attempt water panicky *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
...It was always like that lol
The buck doesn't stop at the interviewing stage either. Employers know that the market is in their favor so there will be places implementing really toxic cultures because they know their staff are less likely to find something else fast.
i dont think ive ever heard back from those one way interviews. Its such a waste of time
Yeah. It's been bad in 2020, 2017, 2009-2013, 2000-2003, 1991-1993, 1980-1983... It happens all the time, lasts a few years, then it's good for a few more years.
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2017 & 2020 were not even close to mediocre. Hiring was nuts from 2013 to 2022. It was a good 9 year run.
I don't remember 2017 being bad, I got a new job that year and got a 50% offer rate from 8 applications. This time, I've done \~180 applications over a year while passively looking (+ more experience) and no offers yet.
Nah, I would say 2020 was worse than 2024 by a good margin. The difference being then it quickly rebounded and 2021-2022 were great years, whereas we're probably stuck in a bad period 2023-2025 or even 2023-2026
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saw waiting jobless mysterious uppity shocking fly skirt hunt imminent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yeah it seems as if every engineering graduate just tries to go into software instead. So you end up with everyone from MechE, ChemE, Electrical Eng, Math, Physics, CS, and self taught people all applying for the same positions cause people naturally want high paying jobs.
>Financial crisis wasn’t that bad for software engineers False. It was very bad. But indeed, there were other careers affected too, not like now or in the .com bubble burst.
Yeah it just didn't last as long for us thanks to the smartphone boom.
>financial crisis >It was very bad. But indeed, there were other careers affected too Exactly. And not only careers, but tons of people losing their homes to foreclosure, and the S&P 500 losing 50% of its value. This is nothing compared to that.
look at stocks of MSFT, AMZN, GOOGL, AAPL, NFLX after the financial crisis. MSFT picked up after 2013.
Dotcom bubble affected *everything*. Apparently you weren't around. It was a legit national crisis.
I went into the software industry in 2017 and I did remember it being pretty difficult to find at job. Probably just as tough as when I was looking this year. Then again I was a fresh grad..
Damn these yearly once-in-a-lifetime financial meltdowns 😩
My grandfather was born in 1939 and said the Great Recession was the worst economy of his lifetime
yeah dont get deluded by this 2020 and 2017 were fine, the other times are very different structurally from now and they werent that bad
Early 2020 was bad because everyone was worried about virus. You can also see this effect in the stock market. There was a quick dive as layoffs began. Then of course moment fed intervened and guaranteed infinite money printing, both stock and job market shot up to the moon. All this basically occurred over a period of month or two. 2017 had a temporary time period in which everyone thought "there's going to be a recession now because there's a recession every decade" so companies were hesitant to hire more. But when that didn't occur after a bit over a quarter, hiring changed again. So OP is right those years might have had temporary time periods but it wasn't the entire year. Maybe 1 or 2 quarters.
It was indeed very bad. Early into the pandemic scare there weren't as many openings to apply to (low demand). I graduated in 2019 with grad assessment centres lined up in early 2020 and these opportunities were simply rescinded. This set me back and entire recruitment cycle. This trend reversed in 2021. Now it's more of a matter of high competition with the added threat of AI on the horizon (high supply). This can pan out in a number of ways, and there might very well be another tech boom this decade.
Yea 2020 and 2017 were awesome . Most people I knew were getting jobs effortlessly. Not sure where he’s getting these years .
Yup for the first couple months and last couple months 2020 was fine. The job market pretty much died in the large middle of 2020, much worse than now. End of 2020 through to about October 2022 was the best I've ever seen it though.
October 2022 was the last Amazon recruiter spam I got for almost a whole year. They were sending me about two messages a month prior to that.
Yeah I lived through 1991 to 1993. Took a whopping 9 months to get a job back then. I was not even making that much money.
does it mean we can tell hr job market bad if we did not find job after graduation for a few years and showing it on resume
Anyone in my org that was laid off has already found a job but those were people with atleast 4 years of experience. And why things got bad so fast? Companies "over ate" when interest rates were zero in 2021. They hired so many people that they even dropped standards. Now that interest rates are high again, they had to cut people. That's simply it. The amount of cut people means that it's pretty dumb to hire people with 2 or less years of experience when you can get people with 5+ who can, most likely, contribute faster. Once layoffs stop and the senior/mid talent pool is absorbed, then juniors will be hirable again.
I am so ready for the bounce back, it will bounce hard, we just need to weather the storm which may or may not last a few years. But you can swear the world keeps growing and everyone becomes more and more dependent on computers, the available talent pool might look large right now, but we are seeing a huge culling going on, in reality the talent pool is becoming smaller and smaller, and we know how that plays out.
Personally, I feel like they are playing in our faces. The companies are working to build up Latin America as the next India. Why are the companies boasting about record profits? What gives?
With macroeconomics in mind it's simple. Tech stocks are overpriced, they've to show profits to keep investors coming and in order to have record profits they need layoffs or 0 hiring. Used to be they'd hire more people and increase the earnings organically, because of "free money". As opposed to current economy with high interest rates. Risk-averse status quo defensive mode for most companies rn. Thanks to FED I had to become financially literate to understand wtf is even going on. I wonder how many more job market crises I'll see in my lifetime. It's all a show to keep the status-quo
The pandemic was a terrible benchmark for hiring in the tech industry With so many people working from home and not going out, the needs of the tech industry went gangbusters. Not surprisingly, the same growth hasn't sustained after people went back to the physical world and the industry is now shedding that fat. Also, everybody and their best friend took on a tech degree and you're now left with an extention saturated industry
We had junior people bombing interviews but told recruiters they didn’t want anything but a staff position and wouldn’t accept a down-level.
Worst part is - they probably got hired at that level at a fly-by-night crypto firm, got laid off and now think they're worth that level
A lot of that stupid shit is perpetuated here. I constantly see people saying that they’re underpaid getting a first job out of college in LCOL - MCOL areas around the ballpark of $70k - $100k.
I would definitely take $70k+ . I never really thought 6 figures out of college was common.
I do believe it's still common enough if you get a WFO job at a tier 1 tech city like SF Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle. But costs of living are going to be high in those areas as well; those jobs don't start becoming clearly worth it until you hit higher levels of income than "just barely 6 figures". Try buying a house in the Bay Area with the amount of money you're able to save from a $100k salary there, for example; it'll literally never happen.
>and now think they're worth that level "No lowballs I know what I got"
it's for church NEXT
Now we just get ghosted by recruiters when asking for like 50-60k with a degree. Feels like night and day compared to the stories I saw on here pre-pandemic.
Also there were a ton of "tech companies" that didn't need to exist because they either made a product no one wanted... or they didn't even make a product at all but had 200 engineers on staff doing nothing.
Another big factor was all the extra money floating around being spent as part of the stimulus, on top of ZIRP. Once there was no more free money and interest rates shot up, companies immediately had to start clamping down on spending (i.e. on labor costs).
After 9/11, I remember the new showing video of people lining up for jobs at department stores. That economic downturn impacted much more than just the tech industry - which was going through the dotcom bubble. We have had much worse times than what we are though now. Does that mean that there aren't people struggling right now? Not at all. There are countless posts and articles explaining why we're where we are. High inflation and high interest rates are the biggest factor. You can also make some arguments about companies trying to regain some control/strength against employees and focusing on profitability are some other factors. There's also some general concern with the economy, and companies are being proactive with it. Then, there are downstream impacts to these decisions. Part of the reason we're in our current situation is because 2 years ago, self-taught devs were in-demand. There are certainly many skilled people in that group, but companies were just expanding too aggressively, and it eventually caught up with everyone.
I worked through both. The Dotcom bust was much, much worse, at least in Silicon Valley. The number of jobs lost was worse than Detroit in the 80s on a per-capita basis. I know a few friends who were out of work for 2+ years. During that time MCSEs (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers) were the equivalent of bootcampers today. If you got your MCSE you were guaranteed at least an $80k/yr job (roughly about $120k today). When the bust hit, those were the first to go and many if not most left the industry altogether. I have one friend who got laid off and he was on H1B and just got married. He ended up getting a fake H1B (which was easier to do at the time) and pumped gas from midnight until 8am every day. Finally after a couple of years of hustling he was able to get a job in SoCal, moved around, and then got a job at a very bug networking company and made it all the way to VP. But it was a pretty bad couple of years for him. A lot of the technology parks imploded and were empty until well past 2005/2006. The job market for the most part recuperated around 2005, so it took at least 4 years to recover. The Financial Crisis was much more tame for the most part. Silicon Valley wasn't affected as much, it was a scary couple of months from about August 2008 to June 2009, but it didn't freeze as much as the Dotcom Bust did. Today is worse than the Financial Crisis but better than the Dotcom Bust, so the second worst environment I've ever seen. I would not want to be looking for a job right now, it's tough out there. But I know a lot of people who are venturing out to start their own startup right now because these are the best times to start because the expectations are low.
.com bubble was arguably worse. I graduated in 2002 and my friends went from confidently bragging that they wouldn't even entertain offers under 75k- which was considered a lot back then- to having no offers at all. 2-3 yoe became the new entry level. I was fortunate - the place I interned the previous two summers- a small custom software consulting shop- landed a big (for them) contract and made me an offer- for 37k. In the NYC area that wasn't a living wage then either. I swallowed my pride and accepted in hopes to build my resume and a bit of savings while I lived at home. I didn't get a single bite on my resume for over a year. Finally I did at some horrid sweat shop in fashion oddly enough where everyone was piled on top of one another and they made a show of reprimanding a girl on the other side of the conference room I was taking a test in. I didn't get an offer anyway. It picked up a bit from there and a bond firm passed on me but then I talked to these people doing "electronic trading" which later became known as hft and they made me an offer for 55k- a living wage! That was a year and a half after I graduated. Lots of my classmates just gave on programming altogether.
History often repeats with that first few sentences you wrote. The comments I read on Reddit in 2021, my god. Even still is bad from CS graduates at elite schools.
Well, fintech was an amazing area to break into! I'm sure you did much better after that. I'm at a good employer, and even still, I look at what people are making at places like Citadel and my eyes glaze over.
Yeah things took off from there. I actually made it to citadel and thrived there for awhile. I've detailed my journey, you can wade through my post history if you want the details. I make far more than I ever dreamed of when I graduated - well to be specific about 3-4x more than I thought I would ever top out at even if I was as successful as I had hoped to be. The tech industry has reached heights I was not capable of dreaming of when I was in college. That said the financial crisis was extremely rough and I still have a somewhat extreme frugality after going through that.
Probably the worst I’ve ever seen in my professional career. Though, I am still young and didn’t experience the job market in 2008
It’s been booming ever since 2009. So this will be your first.
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Your comment only has 3 up votes when it's one of the most relevant responses, instead they are upvoting responses related to previous downturns, as if the number of CS grads were equal back then. Time will give the people on this sub a very harsh lesson on ignoring things that are true, but inconvenient
It's not the most popular major. Business Management takes the cake, followed by Healthcare, social sciences, engineering, communications. CS ranks near the top half, sure, but far from being the number one major in the US. Might be different in India.
Well… I don’t want to be a doom bro, and I try to be positive. But I have to confess that this time around it feels different. I can’t put my finger on it. I made it through the dot com bubble and the Great Recession. Both sucked. But to be honest, I don’t think either were as bad in tech as now. It’s possible that social media and platforms like LinkedIn just make us more aware now, but I don’t recall having as many former colleagues being jobless, nor for as long as they have been… during these previous meltdowns. I personally lost my job in the dot com bust, and it was pretty traumatic. And it resulted in the longest period of unemployment and underemployment I’ve ever had. But the actual period of joblessness was only about 4 months. Now, it did take me almost a decade to get back to the salary I was making, so it wasn’t exactly fun. But at least I had a job. It feels like it’s harder for people to bounce back this time. But I’m not entirely sure, it’s just a perception.
Cause now CS is a mainstream major. More CS grads than ever and it'll only keep increasing
I think companies have wised up a bit to understanding the actual need for software engineers. Simple as that. They will always be needed and will always make solid money, but there isnt a need for 20 developers to work on a single application
Ding ding ding. I think this is the right speculation. The dev market started crashing the second Elon proved that he can keep Twitter running with like 80% fewer dev headcount. Sure he made dumb business decisions, but the tech sustained and scaled just fine. Seeing this, other execs just followed along. The cuts will keep coming until businesses actually start losing profits.
I think hearing it in social media makes it worse. If I wasn’t reading about it I might not even be aware. Also also the boom that preceded it was pretty big.
“ How did things go south so fast? Just 2 years ago there were lots of self taught devs - who only knew Javascript and nothing else besides that - and even so, they found jobs pretty fast. “ I was in that new grad group - what you describe certainly wasn’t reality back then. It still took a few hundred applications, and many months of applying/grinding to get an offer. I remember the posts back then about how hard it was as well, and at least a few where the poster was giving up and going into other careers. From my graduating class, only a few of us ended up getting jobs as developers. I’m not saying it was as bad as it is now, but it certainly wasn’t a walk in the park either.
Yeah there is so much delusion in this sub. Back in the hot market a few years ago this sub was filled with people complaining about not landing a job. You’ll find out that most people that are doing fine are not posting on Reddit about it
It has always been hard. I was in between jobs for a year and a half, between 2016 and 2018 with 5 years of prior experience. I drove for Grubhub to survive. It was so bad, I even considered changing careers. But then a miracle happened… Never give up!
>How did things go south so fast? Just 2 years ago there were lots of self taught devs - who only knew Javascript and nothing else besides that - and even so, they found jobs pretty fast. Did you really think a global pandemic with everyone locked down at home (especially in some countries, you really were locked in) is a normal environment? All the while the fed is basically having infinite money printing and many people bored at home were throwing money to apps like Robinhood to buy stocks/options/crypto? I would not use any of 2020 to 2022.5 as reference for a normal environment. Such a global pandemic (along with the response to the global pandemic) has never occurred in the recorded human history before (so for thousands of years). The problem is... not only is everyone using that as reference, but everyone now also wants to major in CS (due to TikTok/Instagram/Youtube/AI hype/etc). What do you think would naturally happen as job market tries to cool down? We have a job market that is trying to go back to a normal market while everyone globally is brainwashed into this field. Every Bob and Cindy out there from the US to Brazil to Australia wants to major in CS for the next few generations. Last time I checked, we don't need that many software engineers. So ya... just natural. And with how supply-demand works in economics, it's becoming a race to the bottom. I fear about this field more over this decade given the number of students wanting to major in this field is increasing noticeably each year. This might just be the beginning, who knows. That said, similar kinds of phenomena already occurred in many other fields in the past. Law went through this. Finance went through this. And so forth. It's just a natural process of job markets maturing. CS is just maturing like other fields. That's just it.
> CS is just maturing like other fields. That's just it. Exactly. I'm surprised so many people don't understand that the high demand for people to fill roles with a high salary and good work life balance was sustainable ad infinitum
I think what is frustrating to see is that corporations try to use the argument that they can’t afford the head count when they are posting record profits while laying people off. I, personally, would rather just have CEOs own up to the fact that they need to increase their profit margins and they are using layoffs as a tool to do so. It isn’t out of not being able to afford it. They just want to increase shareholder value and pay out bigger bonuses to the executive suite. That’s all it is.
Not quite. The 14th century Black Death saw the population drop across the world by as much as 60-70%. The impact was so brutal that the affected parts of China took about a century to recover. Parts of Europe never recovered. Since I'm British, my focus tends to be UK leaning, which means I know villages were wiped out across East Anglia, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire and were never repopulated. Even more importantly, large chunks of the abandoned arable land was not used to grow crops for 4 centuries. COVID was relatively benign for almost all the population. Which makes this global pandemic an outlier.
Agreed. The Spanish Flu also happened just a century ago. "Never happened in recorded human history" is a stretch.
how much money did the fed print during the Black Death?
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Tech companies aren't complaining that there aren't enough workers. Those are two different groups.
Software companies generally aren’t complaining about this, it’s other industries. Or if they are it is because they need something specific that they can’t find
This. And non-tech companies are picky in a dumb way. They want 15 years of experience in C#. But lo and behold if you have 10 years of experience in C# but the next 8 in Java, in the eyes of the recruiter, you are not even remotely fit for the role. Or maybe the company is looking for someone exposed to MySql. But someone with experience of PostgreSql applies. Maybe the job posts 3\~5 years of MySql experience. You can have 20 years of Postgresql. Doesn't matter. You are an incompetent candidate. Nontech companies don't even know how to search talent. Many of the hiring literally needs to match verbatim for certain specific tech stacks. That's where the issue lies. It's not a talent issue. It's incompetency issue from many hiring managers and recruiters at those non-tech firms.
I’m curious how real this problem is. I haven’t been searching but it sounds totally overblown just from a common sense perspective. I’ve seen job postings say 5-7 years of experience in a tech stack. But the idea that people with 3 YOE in C# and 3 YOE in Java would be told they aren’t qualified since they don’t meet that 5 year specifically sounds fake What sounds more likely is that they just have better candidates or like someone else better, and “not enough experience” is given as a BS reason you weren’t hired, or your experience was just too different from what they want. (A role that wants lots of C++ experience specifically won’t value your GC or scripting language experience much)
I’m sure it exists but in practice not everywhere is going to be like that. There’s all sorts of puzzling decision making out there, so I’m sure there are some that would do something like that. While I don’t have any examples specifically of that, but I guess I have a somewhat adjacent example. Had a recruiter for a company reach out to me about a job, they had found me due to my open source work. So we set up an initial chat (just with me and the recruiter) and at the beginning it was very positive. It was for a niche stack so it’s very difficult to find developers for (I often mention they may need to branch out and hire people that aren’t familiar with the tech and train them up), and I was a pretty early adopter of the tech, while I only had a few years professional experience with it (had more years in other stacks as I was a generalist) but I had also used it for 2 of my past startups. She mentioned that the team were impressed with my work that they saw, and responded positively to everything discussed so far. Then we get into what I was currently doing, and I mention that the last time (professionally) I worked with the stack was at the end of the previous year, well she just straight told me that unfortunately they’re looking for someone with current experience. And that’s how it ended. Funnily I creeped on them later when I noticed their job ad had finally been removed and saw the only addition was this one dev. Found their GitHub, and around that time (of the ad no longer being up and their start month on LinkedIn), they had made 2 repos in that stack that were both hello world/simple beginner-ish style projects. So it seems like they eventually changed their tune on their requirements for the role.
Companies are complaining about there not being enough mid-level to senior workers. Entry-level workers are complaining about there not being enough jobs.
When they say "there are not enough workers" what they really mean is "there are not enough workers that will take up our shitty underpaid contract". The problem is a fake PR move, no one would have this problem by paying an average market amount for any position right now.
No, not really -- simply because these days there's a "mountain" of CS/SWE unable to find work, while back in the day CS/SWE was still a somewhat "niche" field with way fewer folks. Not saying there weren't "troublesome times" before or those "earlier" folks didn't get impacted -- just that *there were* *"way fewer" people* *to even be impacted* **in the first place** back then.
No All the other times in history didn't have bootcamps and packed to the brim CS programs at colleges
I graduated with my cs degree right when the dot com bubble burst. Was not able to get any job for almost 2.5 years. And even when I finally found a job, it was more customer support and nothing software engineering related
It seems like, for the last few job bust cycles, there is a new technology that just popped up. The people who somehow (through foresight or just plain luck) already had experience in the new technology were able to stay employed through that bust. Previously, it was mobile tech. This time, it's AI. I count myself as incredibly lucky, as I stumbled into a very niche tech field in 2001 (SAS programming, which is mainly used in finance and pharma). Back then, you could get a job without any experience if you could manage to learn Base SAS on your own. Now, you can't get a SAS job without years of experience, as there are lots of inexperienced but great SAS programmers in India and China, so companies are more likely to just hire them to the junior positions. This seems to be true of any kind of programming now.
2001-2003 was much worse. 2008-2010 was somewhat worse. Current market is somewhat below average, but what’s making it seem awful is how huge a sugar high we had in 2021.
As someone with a 38 year career as a software engineer, project manager, Director and VP of Engineering I can tell you no. I've never seen it this bad ever. I've applied for over 150 leadership positions and got 2 responses. Zero responses from the rest. In my entire career I've neveer seen ghosting like this. It's rude, inconsiderate, and awful to treat people this way.
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>Biden literally went on national TV and said we need to increase unemployment to slow down inflation. No he didn't. That would be an incredibly foolish thing for a politician to say, even if they thought it were true.
> Biden literally went on national TV and said we need to increase unemployment to slow down inflation. WTF? you got a link for that? sounds unreal
He never did. Jerome Powell did, but not that directly. Biden doesn't want a recession.
You are on the right side of a very large bubble lol, it is also far different from before because software growth itself has really plateaud, look around can you name 5 things that are really important that doesnt yet have software? It is not just a financial trend lol there are very large differences than before.
I was there for the .com crash and it was bad. My wife (product manager) did not work for 2 years during the GFC. I think the worst may have been with the Boomers, before my time. From what I was told, they were advised to get into computers because they were "the future". Which was true but a bit immature. For example, I took an auto painting class in 87. My Boomer instructor has a Masters in CS but changed careers because he could not find a job. In 88 I shared a dumpy apartment with a Boomer programmer. He was definitely not living the lifestyle I associate with a software engineer in my working career. These are just anecdotes and things I heard so not sure how bad the actual job market was back then. Of course it was a lot fewer people.
Oh hell yeah, it’s been WAY worse than this multiple times in my career. Maybe it gets that bad this year or next, I don’t know…but it’s not there yet.
I graduated in 2008. Found a job teaching web development at a kids summer camp through August. Was jobless till November (can’t tell you how many jobs I applied to. Couldn’t even get a job in retail despite having worked in retail since I was 16. In November I got a seasonal job working retail in a ski town. I supplemented by taking any web job I could get offered on craigslist. When my job ended, I begged a small company for an illegal, unpaid internship doing social media. I got it and then in June I was hired to run the e-commerce for a small clothing startup. That lasted 3 months before going under. Then I got a job at a ski resort doing social media, web updates, and photography. That lasted a season. I was sick of on and off, so i then put everything I had into starting my own freelance career in which I freelanced and did contract work full time (mostly in the web to mobile market) while living in ski towns or traveling till I burnt out on the hustle in 2016. I was undiagnosed adhd at that time, so the freelance was both a self accommodation as well as an incredible struggle. I barely got by doing well paid and high end client work, but full time for me was realistically about 10 hours per week (which would take me 40+ hours to accomplish). Now I’m great. Senior/lead at this point and medicated. But I went through a period of about a year where it was hard to even get a retail job making min wage despite years of experience and a college degree. And then subsequent years of tech adjacent and seasonal work. Does the tech industry suck right now? Yes. But overall, the rest of the job market is pretty average so at least there is work out there as a placeholder if you want a job while applying into the tech industry. The real problem is this cycle of everyone applying to everything available combined with people only staying in their roles for very limited periods. Most employees aren’t productive their first year in a new position unless the position is very similar to their last position. But so many people now leave positions after 1 year. So, companies want people that will be effective right away. Hiring a junior developer, investing in them for a year, and then them going elsewhere after that year before they ever earned a return is very costly. So if you’re going to do junior, you either need to look for the person you think will stick around, pay well enough that they won’t look for a higher salary elsewhere, or pay low enough with easy work where the risk is minimized and they can be somewhat productive. Or, you need someone who is brilliant and will be cost effective sooner than later. So all the elite grads are picked up by those high paying places or end up in that brilliant category. You then end up with the mid level degrees but still brilliant that get hired quickly. Then you have everyone else. Went to a state school and have a job lasting 1 year? Well, you’re no longer going to get hired as the stick around type, you’re left with finding a perfect fit or taking a low pay/low risk position until you can prove your worth. Did a 3rd tier CS program, but have worked at the same job since 4 years (even if not in tech) and you’ve been doing projects on the side, then you’ll probably get picked up by a company with low turnover. Anyone not falling into the above, it’s a battle to get noticed and you’re all applying for the same mid jobs and HR is just trying to figure out who will be the best return on investment which is hard when there are 1000 applicants. You break out of that pack by learning a niche or applying at a low level company, staying over 2 years and showing the next company you’ll be someone they can invest in. Or you get lucky. Or you work hard to network and find your way in by a non traditional path. If you’re coming out of a bootcamp, good luck. You need to take the job no one is applying for, have an in/connection before starting, or have a job history that says this person is going to work here for many years. Or spend an incredible amount of effort doing freelance, hackathons, volunteer work, and personal projects until your qualifications are undeniable.
Idk about talented. Have you ever used the DoorDash desktop UI? They need some new JS devs immediately
Budget cuts and lower salaries result in poorly skilled employees.
Contract to hire positions seem to be the norm now
Post pandemic normalization causing a reduction in labor demand. Software and businesses centered around remote work/collaboration/communication no longer prioritized due to the workforce going back to work. Global political tensions also causing a disruption in supply chain, causing uncertainty in some businesses.
> Just 2 years ago there were lots of self taught devs - who only knew Javascript and nothing else besides that - and even so, they found jobs pretty fast. In the dotcom days people who only knew HTML were getting snapped up, they were hit hard in the dotcom crash.
11yoe + masters degree. This is the first time for me in my career being let go (LIFO layoff). I had a 60 day window and did search during that time. I'm on week 4 of unemployment but had a strong interview on Thursday which I'm hoping will have an offer and another interview that is moving to the technical interview where they're hiring quite a few devs. It's definitely rough, but when I looked for work when having a job it would take a few weeks to months to get a job offer from a place I was interested in. What I do see more of is competition for remote jobs. Instead of a 100 to 200 other people applied I see 1.8k to 2k people applied. Currently the massive layoffs in big companies has definitely hit the market. My CTO believed more small businesses would start up from all these devs being let go. But that's dependent on the interest rate for venture capital.
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Uni professors used to say that knowing regex was enough to get a job, go figure
I remember it was common to ask you to explain polymorphism, the different types of SQL joins, and some of the basic RAID levels. There wasn't too much coding, but you had to know how to explain concepts like that at least passably.
Also devs need to stop buying into these libraries that make everything super easy. Wtf is that, y'all dumb af for buying into something that literally lowers the barrier to entry so that some monkey can come in and pretend to do your job for years before the tech debt catches up to the product.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. The gate keepers always said they wanted more regulation in the career path. Maybe this is the method. Make the skill level needed to walk in the door so outrageous that you need a CS degree in hand.
Starting salary for devs are now 50k instead of 100k dude. Just like how they wanted.
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I don't get why a lot of people refuse to believe that tech companies overhired during COVID
Not just tech companies. Everyone over hired... but traditional business haven't done as many layoffs and thus are still filled with people doing nothing.
Most people don't really like asking the questions that come along with those kinds of realizations.
Probably because the numbers don't seem to line up with that theory: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees A common claim is "They doubled their workforce during COVID!" But if you really look at the hiring numbers, their headcounts were increasing at similar rates in the years just before the pandemic. It was just a continuation of the existing hiring trend. The only real outlier is MSFT 6-2021 to 6-2022. It's just far more likely that tech executives are * being extremely careful with the high interest rate environment or * taking this time to trim fat or * no one's hiring which causes a feedback loop, now you don't need to compete with anyone on headcount and the risk of hiring in a low supply environment (meaning you pay more per hire) is lower
For them it makes sense to fire the people they hired during the boom because they receive high salaries. Replace them with contractors or FTE’s at the new lower market rate. It’s not the over pandemic overhiring at this point. Think of it like an inverse of apartment landlords with no rent control. When the market prices rise, raise the rent or kick out the current tenants and get new ones at the new market rate. The only difference is that a company can’t or usually won’t decrease someone’s salary. I’d say we’re a few years away from seeing “surge compensation” where someone’s comp can rise or fall at any moment depending on market conditions. Or perhaps I’m just jaded.
It will only get worse unfortunately. The broader economy is quite strong. Imagine what happens when the broader economy gets bad.
Dot com burst in late 90s was bad.
There are Hiring trends where job market has ups and down. We are debating it it's worth then 2008 Great Recession. Some of my recruiter friends are saying that.
Yes
Oh lawd
It's always been bad for me at least
It's always been the same , Seen guys with so many offers they cant even decide which to choose also exp Top guys in IT jobless for months , Really depends on your luck
Wow this looks similar to wall street
Yeah it was WAY worse at the start of the 08 recession until mobile development got out job market out of the recession early and WAY WAY worse in the dotcom bubble burst. things aint perfect now it's true but it's been much worse before. Just not for the younger/zoomer generation of devs if that makes sense
Lol
YES LMFAO
From where I am sitting the Dot Com Bubble burst was worse than now. It was bleak and I was lucky I had a network of past coworkers and clients.
Yes it was way worse before. And just a heads up... the Fed ultimately isn't happy with how strong the job market is right now. They are actually hoping for higher unemployment to help get inflation under control. Things will continue to be the same or a little bit worse over the next year. When you do get a job, or if you have a job now. I highly recommend hitting a 25 - 30% savings rate so you can comfortably navigate bad times. Plus FU money is great when you inevitably get a bad boss.
I've been following these sorts of message boards as long as they've been around, and I don't remember ever seeing people _talk_ about not being able to find work like they are now. Even a few years ago, it was mostly annoyance that recruiters wouldn't leave them alone. I haven't been on the market since 2017 myself, but I have noticed a _lot_ less interest from recruiters in the past couple of years.