Ask HN: What do you guys think of the current job market in tech?

I'm in the EU, I just picked up a new job as a senior dev. I had been a team lead / manager but struggled to find another role as I only have two years experience in management. Picking up a dev role was easier.

Things I've learned in the process (and from being on interview panels myself)

1) I tend to stay in a job a long time (5 years plus) and this is highly valued by interviewers

2) in tech interviews you need to constantly remind yourself that you are not really coding, you are demonstrating knowledge. Talk through every thing you do, explain why you did it, or what an alternative way could be.

3) referrals really help. I've gotten interviews from referrals when there wasn't a position advertised yet

4) every place out there is doing something with AI. Put a bit of python on your CV and play with ChatGPT, ask them about it, work in into conversation that you're learning it.

5) I put side projects on my CV and I get asked a lot about them. If you have something semi serious, employers will listen.

n_ary · a year ago

> 1) I tend to stay in a job a long time (5 years plus) and this is highly valued by interviewers

I believe this is an EU thing for us. I had informal discussion with friends from US/CA, and there, it is somehow seen as stagnation and something something about pay not improving.

kyriakos · a year ago

Company loyalty is valued way more in Europe than across the Atlantic.

rndaom · a year ago

Comparing EU to US job market in IT is a bitter joke (for EU). IMO "Loyalty" and similar traits that you usually would use for describing romantic relationships is a sign of how immature the EU market is.

dakiol · a year ago

Also, the job market in EU is healthier I believe. I also picked up a new job this year. Having less than 5 years definitely makes it very hard. Between 5 and 10, is not impossible, but hard. 10+ is good.

kapitanjakc · a year ago

Good insights, thanks, I'll pass these on.

It's pretty brutal here in Australia.

Higher interest rates mean companies are aggressively reducing headcount.

Insanely high immigration means statistically for every 1 job being created we're importing 1.4 workers.

Job vacancies across the economy are down 16.4% yearly change according to ABS.

Also according to ABS, Job vacancies, change from February 2020 to May 2024, for IT is an increase of just 1.8%.

In summary, jobs market is getting ugly out there, triply so for IT.

The simple solution to this & the housing crisis is to restrict immigration, but instead we have record immigration because without it we'd be in recession(our economy grew 0.1% last quarter, GDP per capita went down).

nopelynopington · a year ago

This seems like a highly politicised answer

Australia has 1/3rd the population of the UK on a literal continent.

In Ireland we also have a housing crisis, because ironically all of our young construction workers have emigrated to Australia because there's a huge construction boom there. If you restricted immigration you'd have a bigger housing crisis

spacebanana7 · a year ago

Ireland also has some of the strictest planning laws in the world.

See the case study of a housing development of 52 flats that was prohibited because it’d harm the view out of a pub garden.

https://m.independent.ie/business/irish/smithfield-eight-sto...

akmarinov · a year ago

Not only that, but Australia has about as much population as Romania (26 vs 20 million)

Dead Comment

darkwizard42 · a year ago

The solution to a housing crisis is to limit immigration? Wouldn’t it be to build more dense housing (thereby spurring economic activity and lowering a primary expense of households)???

nvy · a year ago

Here in Canada we literally cannot build housing fast enough. The government is targeting half a million immigrants annually, and we recently set an all-time housing starts record of only about half that number.

Sometimes it actually is immigration that is causing problems.

renewiltord · a year ago

Amusingly, this is one of those cases where it’s obviously correct and people jump through all sorts of hoops to not accept it.

shiroiushi · a year ago

>Wouldn’t it be to build more dense housing

No, because the NIMBYs don't want that, and if the local government has power over whether dense housing is built or not, the NIMBYs will be sure to get their local legislators to prevent it.

elzbardico · a year ago

Sorry for interrupting your religious moment. But in the real world you need capital for that. There’s absolutely no fucking reason to consider immigration a human right.

Andaith · a year ago

olivierduval · a year ago

5-9 years is a "bad" spot for developers: devs are too skilled to be cheap or to accept "junior" job & pay, and have not enough experience to be a "jack of all trade"

Here, in France, the job market is really slowing. More than before, companies are looking for cheap people... so they let go people with some experience and try to recruit engineer out-of-school to replace them. Obviously it doesn't work really well... neither for the juniors (too much pressure/expectation) nor for the rest of the team (knowledges & experience loss, need to teach the basics of the company to the new...)

ChatGPT is sometimes a bit used by junior to help them "day to day"... but not really more than "google / stack overflow" 20 or 30 years ago.

Kallocain · a year ago

Interesting. I have the exact opposite experience. Being a Junior developper in france is hard right now. The profession got a lot of traction from the average french guy and not only nerds. In 2020 - 2022 Many training centers were teaching coding to people who were out of work because their industry was affected by covid (in France, studies are often free of charge and, in many cases, are even paid for by the government if you're working on your employability, so there's virtually no risk). This has led to an overload of junior developers on the market who aren't needed. I've given training courses for Dev-web-mobile and concepteur and I can tell you that out of 50 people, 5 have found a job. I also know a lot of masters students who want to find an alternance (work-study program) and can't find anything. Meanwhile, I have 10 years' experience and am called 3 times a week by headhunters when I upload my updated CV to a job search platform.

I do agree that they want cheap people though. They rarely offer me more than 43k (which is ok in france in the region I live in but really not stunning either). I have friends that earn 70k-80k (really good in france) and they get called by headhunters for similar position but for 40k, its silly.

angrydingo · a year ago

Is this before or after tax?????

physicsguy · a year ago

There was a deleted comment saying that it helps if you learn your domain and bring skills/knowledge aside from just programming. I agree, although I think it also helps if you have a non-CS background relevant to this sort of thing, as it implies some base level of knowledge too. I've met people that have been in one domain for a long time but still don't understand it, so it's not a given.

My background is in Physics but I've worked on software in the Engineering industry now for 10 years nearly. My most recent project at work drew on maths I used in my doctorate (various bits of Fourier analysis applied to mechanical systems). Not that someone who hadn't got my background couldn't do it but I could jump on that project and finish it in 2 months and I doubt anyone else in my team could have picked it up and done it in less than 6-9 months just because of the research and needing to understand the maths + algorithms.

I regularly get contacted by companies working in the same or adjacent domains, whereas some of my more 'pure' software friends are hearing nothing at the moment.

I have been on several hiring panels in my current job and I always looked for people with non-tech skills. We had a coder who was twenty years in finance and then did a boot camp, she was better than many mids because she could talk to people and understand requirements better, had understandings of office policies, meeting etiquette, and was great at making relationships with other devs and building a network so when she didn't know something she knew exactly who to ask.

I'm sure down the road that time in finance will probably give her a leg up in finance related tech too. Non tech experience can definitely be a boon

a_t48 · a year ago

After I quit my last job, I ended up starting my own thing - wasn't ready to go through the hassle of interviewing again.

ilrwbwrkhv · a year ago

This is the way. Software devs can make so much money and have so much more control over their lives, instead of grinding FAANG.

It doesn't always work out like that. A lot of people out there who take a run at doing their own thing and can't make it profitable.

It's fun to reduce a job to "the grind" but sometimes dependable income and benefits are better than freedom and risk

That's great, how's that working out ? Is it more or less the same ? Or are there major differences ?

It’s very different. Love not having to deal with others’ stresses, hate that I internalize a bunch more stress of my own instead

furk · a year ago

How’s that going? Do you see yourself going back to a 9-5 job in near future?

Getting to choose what I work on is great. Chasing down VC leads is not so great but I’m growing into it. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I run out of savings and support - I suppose I’ll look for a job with enough flexibility to let me keep building part time. Maybe contract work.

Good luck!

what did you do? Consulting or your own product/startup?

Thanks! I'm building a new robotics framework, a competitor to ROS - https://www.basisrobotics.tech/

sakopov · a year ago

I'm in the US and It's bad. Really bad. I feel terrible for anyone without a job trying to find something new. It seems like the only option is to go hunt for recruiters or ask someone to make a recommendation for you at the company you're interested in. Otherwise your resume is probably never looked at. In my experience I tend to see more jobs available in Midwest than anywhere else right now. The pay is pretty average but it isn't terribly low. We're definitely nowhere near the salaries we had a couple years back.

tetris11 · a year ago

I thought my greatest asset was being a coder. AI has shown me that it isn't. Recruiters are dropping their interest on that front similarly.

I now have to learn other talents to make me relevant. Not entirely sure what that is yet, but I feel a sense of urgency

crooked-v · a year ago

I feel like at least part of the problem is that tech hiring as a whole just hasn't adapted to remote work. Companies are still using the same hiring pipelines from when everyone was naturally filtered by being within X miles of the office (or motivated enough to relocate), so they get bajillions of applications they're unable to handle properly, which leads to devs who would previously stand out also having to apply anywhere and everywhere to get noticed at all, which exacerbates the problem even more, and the entire process slows to a crawl for everyone because of the sheer mass of applications on every side of the equation.

For all of those candidates remote is a taboo word, if they even mention remote work, any potential interview gets blown.

Companies are treating it as a crime to ask for remote work.

I only look for remote jobs, I don't try and convince non remote jobs to be remote.

nradov · a year ago

That's essentially the same issue that applicants to selective colleges have faced for decades.