Tech Recruiters: Have you noticed that more people are applying for the same roles?
Do you have less roles to recruit for than before?
How intense is the competition presently for roles?
Without going into too much detail, I’m about to enter the job market, and I’m terrified
HN is very in touch with a segment of the tech sector that has seen a huge downturn. If you’re asking about positions where you’ll be making 300k in 5 years as a software engineer, I would say you’ve come to the right place and you’re probably right that those positions are even harder to come by than they were before the downturn. (I don’t really know, though. I’m just a code monkey at a normal company.)
Regarding putting food on the table and living an extremely comfortable life as a software engineer, don’t worry lol. I’d imagine the average hired competent programmer is starting at the same thing as they were before the downturn (that is to say Amazon, Meta, Twitter, etc. haven’t had a statistically significant effect on the job market). Anecdotally, my fintech company is ramping up hiring tech right now. Take a deep breath and relax, you’re in a very safe industry. (Unless you’ll only be satisfied by 300k and up, in which case I have no idea what’s going on and can’t really relate anyway.) Most if not every company has software to build; you might not be the core value generation, but the pay is still way above what new hires are making outside of software.
You're getting a highly biased view of what is really going on in the job market because some high profile Tech companies laid off people. Their leaders are not liked so everybody has an opinion about it.
I've been at companies in the past that had huge layoffs, but they were boring companies that nobody cares to talk about on HN or Social Media. If Cisco, Oracle, Siemens, Coca-Cola and a bunch of boring companies laid off 50K+ people over the course of a year the news would not care and nobody would realize a ton of people just landed in the job market.
Is the job market worse than Jan 2022? Sure. Is it bad? I don't think so.
There's a lot of panic in the job market because everyone follows what happens FAANG + Twitter, and a disproportionate amount of engineers want to work in the top 10 tech companies. You will always find work in the top 500 companies in my opinion.
Here in EU, my employer is struggling since early this year to recruit enough talents, as no one will accept an offer without full-remote or at least 95% remote contract, even if the pay is pretty good(adjusted recently with inflation) and they just live next door to office. Times like these are probably safe in non-sexy non-unicorn corporations and ancient businesses which are not into hip online businesses. :]
First things first, take a deep breath and realize it will all work out one way or another. The worst thing you can do right now is lock up, so put together a plan and just put one foot in front of the other.
Right now, start talking to everyone you can, leverage your personal network and hit up everyone you can to see if they have open gigs. That guy that you worked with 10 years back, hit them up. Ask them if they know anyone who is hiring and if they can intro you to them. The person you met at a conference last year, hit them up too.
If you are getting laid off, just think of your new job as finding something new, gaining new skills to be more marketable and connecting with as many people as you can.
As someone who is looking at the moment, straight up, it isn’t a great time to be looking for something new, but you will find something eventually, even if it’s just a placeholder until the market comes back around.
> Have you noticed that more people are applying for the same roles?
Seeing a slight increase in qualified candidates, not much of a change in unqualified candidates. By unqualified, I mean, as an example, a fresh bootcamp grad applying to a Staff level position.
> Do you have less roles to recruit for than before?
Have the same amount. Had a hiring plan, still have it, still working on finishing it up for the year.
> How intense is the competition presently for roles?
Not very. We're on a glide path to meet our hiring plan for the year without the pipeline being dry or being over-full. We're able to consider candidates individually without needing to hire anyone just to make the numbers, or reject people simply because we have too many applicants. If you're a good fit we make an offer.
I have a few inferences here. There's a lot of talent in the pool right now, but A. They're being scooped up by more attractive companies B. They're not feeling desperate enough to work at a boring company. Both of those would indicate that people are still hiring, and they're hiring for desirable roles.
There's a lot of gloom and doom at the big tech companies right now, but it doesn't appear to reflect the state of the entire industry.
I graduated into the Great Recession. This is nothing like that. You’ll probably be able to get in at the entry level for whatever you’re going into professionally (or better).
[1] https://ira.asee.org/national-benchmark-reports/workforce201...
If you look at the larger trend, unemployment is really low and current trend of bringing back manufacturing from abroad guaranty that there will be jobs to fill in the near future. Things should also get better next year. Results will have been published and the energy market should get back to normal. Don’t worry too much.
In summary, +200k jobs are scarce (FAANG companies), 75~100k and 50~74.9k have steadily job supply.