Is it just me, or does the job market for IT seem bad today?

In the late 90s, early 00s I would submit 5 resumes, get interviews from 4, get offers from 3. The whole process would take a few hours - no studying, no projects, no indefinite rounds of interviews. I could actually talk to the hiring manager and get a sense for my odds of getting the job before putting the effort in.

Now it's like submit 1000 resumes, get interviews from 4, spend 20+ hours preparing and doing interviews, get ghosted at the end.

I have a friend who works for local government. They have an open GIS programmer position. I've done GIS programming for government (as a contractor), and it's not hard stuff. She says they received many 100s of resumes and are currently interviewing 30 people. They had so many people apply that they required each applicant to submit a very involved project beforehand just to weed people out. So, there are literally 30 people out there right now, putting in 20+ hours to complete a project just to get a job that pays probably $110k / year.

It is indeed, judging by the HN Who Is Hiring / Wants To Be Hired comment ratio [1].

[1]: https://github.com/bilbof/whoishiring-ratio

It took me getting referred to by a former coworker. I was laid off in November (what an awful time to fire someone honestly) got hired last month. Anyway, always add coworkers on LinkedIn, and keep in touch with them now and then. I send former coworkers links to tools I think they'd love to learn about, and just talk to them in general. Then when I'm looking for new work, I reach out to them. You might be able to find a lot of them on LinkedIn still. Many are likely in new companies.

November of 2022 is when the Facebook and Amazon had their big layoffs, and Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce etc. followed in the two months after.

I haven't had a recruiter contact me on Linkedin for over a year, in 2022 and before I was being contacted by recruiters on Linkedin all the time.

Companies have different modes - mass layoffs, small layoffs, no hires, only hiring replacements, a few new slots open, many slots open. In early-mid 2022 we were in the last category and it's moved to one of the other modes for most companies, except for LLM hires.

There are different sources of information, I found this helpful ( https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred... ) from a company with some insights into tech hiring.

This doesn’t seem shocking. We just had a year or two of rolling layoffs across major tech companies, interest rates are high, the market is fluctuating, and all of that is affecting hiring pipelines.

There's been a lot of redundancies. Games industry hit particularly badly. I'm not sure how much of it is "real" and how much is sentiment; personally, I think profitable companies having layoffs is always "sentiment".

The interest rate rises were intended to contract the economy and reduce wage inflation pressure by increasing unemployment, and they seem to have had that effect.

The AI bubble is also causing a lot of companies to believe in the idea of replacing their staff with AI.

What interests me is if this is a natural dip that will be followed by an upturn, or if something fundamentally has changed, and it will remain lower demand. Perhaps the AI boom will decrease the demand from now on. Waiting for better times may be futile?

It's not a feeling, the IT job market is dead relative to how it was in the recent past and is unlikely to recover imo.

Were I to guess, 20 years ago you were in niche group of weirdos who enjoyed writing computer code in their free time which just so happened align with the 90s-00s internet revolution and 10s smart phone revolution.

For a couple of decades there just hasn't been enough nerds to build all apps and websites companies wanted built, and therefore competition for these jobs was extremely high. If you wanted to win the best IT talent you had to pay 6 figures and offer endless perks.

Today every government in the world is trying to push kids to code in an attempt to win a share of economic success that companies like Google and Apple have had. But with more people now going into software, more outsourcing and with cloud software like Shopify allowing those without a technical background to build and ship websites and products on their own, the demand for engineers relative to the number of engineers is now decreasing for the first time.

Going forward I'd bet on AI continuing to erode the relative demand for software engineers.

I'd also argue it's less that the IT market today is bad, but that it's adjusting to be more comparable to other skilled labour jobs which are more competitive and less favourably compensated than IT.

Clearly going forward the shortage is likely to be in jobs that have geographical restrictions and require hard skills. You can't outsource a roofer and use Gen AI to generate you a roof, and it's a profession that takes years to master therefore you can't just hire anyone to do it, and yet no one wants to do these manual labour jobs anymore. Were I in my teens today, this is where I'd be looking for career security. As it stands I'm not going to complain after lucking massively over the last ~15 years – there really was no better time to be a computer nerd.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

SE job listings have returned to the levels they were at before the huge ramp up in hype a few years ago. Unfortunately FRED data only goes out a few years here.

Question, are you looking for remote work or are you located in a tier 1 or 2 city? I am not having too many issues with interviews but I am in San Francisco. One of the first filter questions I get from recruiters is location.

As a native mobile developer I just noticed a new trend called fullstack mobile developer (web and mobile), it seems most companies prefers cross-platform frameworks nowadays. One company wants me to develop their mobile app on iOS and Android while also help manage their AWS backend.

I’m not looking for new mobile dev jobs soon but the market for native looks like shit.

Looking for a job with 20 years of experience is not like looking for a job with 2 years experience.

You want to be paid like you have 20 years. The experience should make you worth that. That is, you should be more productive than someone with 2 years of experience.

But not every company understands that. And even, of the companies that do understand, not every one of them needs that. Some just need a junior that they can plug in.

And, of the ones that are looking for someone of your level, most of them understand that this is a hire that is somewhat more important to get right.

The net result is that this is a slower process than it was for you 20 years ago. You need to adjust your expectations. But jobs are still there - they just take longer to find.

I feel like it is pretty bad, although I do noticed that there is a lot off interest in people who can manage self-hosted software using kamal and hetzner for example.

guys from 37 signals are really pushing the post vercel era.

It's definitely rather bad at the moment. Probably a tiny bit better than last year/the beginning of this one, since I've had a lot more interview calls than I did then, but still really bad compared to previous years.

Now it seems like 80% of open positions are for senior developers/engineers, the list of required technologies for these roles is higher than ever, and you're competing with hundreds if not thousands of other candidates too. If you ever want to feel depressed about the market, one look at LinkedIn's candidate numbers for any role is probably gonna do it.

As for why this seems to be the case... the best I've heard is that the end of the pandemic shook multiple industries to their cores.

Interest rates were good (for these companies) during that time period, so they had money to throw around on hiring developers en masse. And with everyone locked inside, internet based businesses were booming, whether it was online tools like Zoom, media companies like Netflix or gaming companies as a whole.

Unfortunately for them, when the pandemic ended, all this went away. People went back to normal life, and in many cases, actually spent far more time offline than ever before. So the stats went down, the beancounters and CEOs panicked, and we've seen the effects ever since.

All those companies either shut down, laid off a bunch of staff or outsourced the work to some cheaper locale, and said staff flooded the market. So now it's an employer's market where they can be ultra choosy about who they hire, and where the requirements to get hired are higher than ever.

Yes, it is bad. The first reason is because of the many layoffs that started after Twitter laid off more than 50%. Many companies over hired during covid and CEOs felt it's OK to lay off 10-20%. So now the market has a lot of developers looking for jobs.

The second reason is AI. The biggest use case for LLMs is writing. They are really good at writing, including writing code. Developer are more productive as a result and companies can do more with less people.

You can see from this graph that IT peaked at the end of 2022, and has stabilized at about 80k less positions since then. That means there are roughly 80k people around that could still be looking for IT jobs. Some of them probably have switched to other fields, but it still a lot of people sloshing around and jumping at job openings.

I don't think there's an end in sight for that issue, and it likely could get worse if the AI surge alleviates (or pops entirely!). It sucks, but I'd look in non-traditional IT places (government, universities, non-tech companies) as many of them are still growing quickly!

Graph: https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/US-employm...

I wouldn't say it is bad or getting bad.

But for a long time it had been really really good to a point that even people which fairly lacking qualifications could often easily get a job in a very short time frame (through also with some common biases/discrimination e.g. against age, and some positions, like very very well paying ones are still not easy to get).

And I would say that times are about to be over soon.

Honestly what has me worried the most is that nonsensical bias against age often found, as if having experience for 5,10 years is good but dear you have 20 years of experience in server development not its bad .... wtf. Especially given that I don't buy many of the argument people in favor of it often push. Sure the tech landscape is constantly changing but a lot of the base principle aren't really changing that much only the tooling and how you apply them, even with LLM supported programming that is still true. Similar arguments like older people being less willing to work overtime as IMHO misleading as every time I have seen companies (mostly with young people) do a lot of overtime the results where quite subpar in quality to a point that it created some huge issues often just one or two month down the line (or well days later, in some cases). And sure some people really get stuck up with certain approaches with age (but not all), but as far as I can tell that as less of a risk then blindly following the newest trends (e.g. framework) without a deep understanding of the things it implies mid to long term (which is what I have often seen with younger people).

I mean I'm not old yet, but if the industries doesn't fix its mess that will be a problem for me in 10-15 years. (Generally we also need to fix teaching and sustainability of a lot of software development. But that is a different topic, one which has gotten worse through LLMs as they allow keeping unsustainable approaches for a longer time).

Not in LCoL countries. I am a developer with 20+ years experience, I'm starting a new job in September and I only interviewed with this company, plus another one who emailed me halfway through the process. The trick is that I'm living in Warsaw, Poland.

It's interesting that finally US techies begin to understand what the job market is like for the average person since the 2009 recession.

And I mean the desirable, well-paying jobs, not the $20/hr service/food jobs that anyone can get.

I think conditions for older employees are getting worse. Teams are outsourced, either to younger people who work from home, or to other countries, making older remaining employees seem like an unnecessarily high cost.

Im not in US but I work for a well known company based in SF. We had a position open for almost six months, with a simple take home test. The position was fully remote. The number of resumes was very low and no one passed the test even remotely close to be considered a potential hire.It wasn’t a dev role but rather something along the lines of devops/sysadmin, but anyway. Oh, and the test was a couple of leetcode style tasks, easy level (or maybe just a little above easy).

The position is now closed and we’re hiring internally instead.

I keep seeing reporting claiming a big chunk of job postings are fake.

It seems to be very bad right now. Check out this data from Indeed:

https://data.indeed.com/#/postings

Select the "Sector" tab, and check the "IT Operations & Helpdesk" and "Software Development" options under the "Sector" dropdown.

I'd wage it's the post-mania return to median. This is how job markets tend to look outside of our comfy tech bubble.

Even assuming rates will start to drop H2 this year and cost of capital will be lower, some of the new-found productivity demand will be consumed by maturing AI tools.

tl;dr this looks like the new normal.

IT market is weird right now.

Skilled talent with a good network can find a job fast. I know multiple people who have gotten new jobs within weeks of getting laid off this year.

But I also know people who are absolutely struggling to get a job despite being quite good and putting out lots and lots of applications.

I've been looking for a few months and it's very difficult to get any bites.

I've only heard back from three companies but I've probably applied to over 100 (5+ yoe).

Oh boi let me tell you a fresh anecdata from right this Monday:

> I receive screening call in a bad moment.

> Me: "Right now it's a bit difficult for me. Can we do this at another time, like maybe in 30 minutes?"

> Them: "Sorry, I have another interview at that moment. We'll call you tomorrow."

Of course "tomorrow" is euphemism for "never", and I knew it, so I wasn't even disappointed when I didn't get the call next day.

So yeah my guess is that with so many applicants, interviewers are looking for the absolute tiniest reason to reject anyone.

Maybe it got even more worse in these last few months compared to the beginning of the year, or maybe it's specific to the company, or maybe both.

Because earlier this year I got a call early while I was still sleeping (went to sleep late the previous day) but they were chill and even laughed, saying "no worries, is it fine at [some hour]?".

I wonder why US voters don’t call for banning outsourcing. Their jobs are shipped overseas, for the benefit of investors and managers.

Also, some of the migration is to lower the business costs. That too could be addressed.

Yeah, same for me. H1B hires should not be approved under these conditions. That was allowed because there was a shortage of eligible citizens with these skills. There's now a glut and people with these skills are needing to take jobs they are overqualified for if they're lucky.

Things have been generally bad except for a small group of AI/ML people. If you are in your mid forties and above and lose your job, tough luck.

SPY trajectory is misleading as it is dominated by a small set of companies.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fed-chair-powell-admits-bi...

Far more a general trend. We have a major transition right now.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/interest-rate

Most businesses never operate from an operational budget but rather debt. When rates go high, the businesses have to cut the fat. Which generally means the job market tightens.

This is but 1 factor in why the governments should be obligated by constitution to balance the budget.