Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare | WIRED::Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 people in the last two years. Competition for the jobs that remain is getting more and more desperate.
I’ve worked in the SaaS world for nearly a decade. I’ve never had an issue getting a new job every couple of years. The best path for promotions and salary increases in this world. I was unfortunately part of a layoff back in the summer, and I have never had such a hard time finding work in my life.
Every time I go to apply to a job that’s fairly new, I can see there are already a couple thousand applicants. Suddenly my decade of experience isn’t enough to land an interview, much less a job.
It. Sucks.
Im so scared to get a layoff. I have no college experience but have been at my job for 7 years + 5 years at my prior tech job. and now I get to do consulting and coding I love my job. We’re also a new team (specific for API projects) and if we can’t prove our worth quickly I see layoffs in my future. I have no idea what I’ll do if that happens.
I wish you the best of luck with finding something. It’s even harder with some of these big companies dropping work from home. My current job is 100% remote
Best of luck to you too. I also just had my first child and moved across the country. Timing could not have been worse. I haven’t been to an office since the day they sent us home for “2 weeks” while covid calms down. I’ve started applying to local jobs, willing to give up remote work. Never thought I’d be willing to give that up.
Keep a healthy emergency fund to soften any transition you might go through.
I wish I could. In a situation where I’m basically paying for 2 houses on top of my family.
I was speaking to a recruiter about this today. They hate it. Their entire lives are now sifting through a thousand shit resumes. He said, and I quote, “it’s a hot mess. I feel like I’m panning for gold”.
Try otta.com. it’s less trash than LinkedIn.
It honestly feels like it’s by design. They didn’t like that anyone in the working class was even remotely comfortable.
Not buying it. The companies that I know of that are hiring still can’t find people. And I still remember all the doom and gloom articles when google and meta were laying people off, while at the same time anyone with a pulse could get hired. Heck I got a 40% raise by taking a new job during the layoffs, and I am not that talented, nor was I really under paid. Just can’t trust media owned by billionaires. They will say anything to try and keep the working people thinking they are lucky to have a job.
The companies that I know of that are hiring still can’t find people.
It’s quite possible for hiring to be terrible for both employers and candidates at the same time. It doesn’t have to be easy-peasy for one and terrible for the other.
Programmers are not interchangeable parts, and neither are programming projects. Some people really do much better on one sort of project than another. But the way hiring works – keyword scanning, resume review by people who don’t know the project, etc. – does most of the “search work” in a way that pretends that both programmers and roles are manufactured objects with a single easily measurable quality metric.
Quite a lot of tech hiring doctrine tells the candidate, “It’s your job to look like you’re good at everything, so you don’t get passed-over on a webdev role in favor of someone who wrote their own BIOS once” and tells the employer, “It’s your job to hire only the best, so you don’t get stuck with dweebs who can’t FizzBuzz or who give up on a production problem once the network stack is involved.”
Both of these are dopey.
Right there with you. Not that great in my field. Got headhunted, 50% raise, company is only able to hire talented people (and they need them) by out-paying competitors. All contractors, vendors, partners are the same. We are definitely high-tech. Been hearing about this “recession” for nearly two years now. Just smells like media trying to create one.
What region are you in? Do you use Blind? Lots of folks on there complaining about the tough market. I know some that have been out of work for 6 months now.
I think it varies by seniority. We had layoffs, and all of our lead and principal engineers were able to land a new position in 4-6 weeks. But the junior, mid, and even some senior level engineers had a far rougher time. And managers/directors are having a really difficult go of it right now.
I think that’s the point, so you don’t unionize. When you finally get a job, you’re not going to rock the boat. Well, except for meta and x, they’re trainwrecks all by themselves.
As much as I feel for the people hit hard right now, I think this is an economic indicator that‘s going to cause many downstream consequences if it continues.
On top of the downward trends by the tech titans, venture capital funding is plummeting. That’s because the VC investors can see that the likelihood of a big successful buyout is decreasing, mostly because the big fish are tightening their belts and facing higher borrowing costs (interest rates).
Many big companies have effectively outsourced R&D, waiting until a startup creates something worth buying instead. Then the VC employees either got a nice payout or employment with the big company (or both).
These often massive transactions were the source of serious economic growth. Those people had stability to spend in a way that many others wish. In the face of crappy outlooks and flat wages in tons of other fields, tech has long been the outlier making plenty of middle income people shoot up in wealth. And it did bring along others for the ride.
That growth drying up is not good for anyone. Well, unless you’re waiting on a market crash.
I know in my city the entire economy is basically kept afloat by tech workers blowing their money. I’m very concerned about the downstream too
Yeah, and I have no idea where you are, but this goes far beyond the suspect cities like San Francisco. Not only are many of these workers spread out in tons of cities across the US (and world), it will also hurt wherever their funds were flowing to and the supply chains associated with them. Travel, electronics, food/dining, home furnishings, hobbies of all sorts, etc.
Another big difference is that a lot of these are “new money” people. And I’m not using that in a derogatory sense. It just means that their spending is likely to be much higher than “old money” individuals hitting the same payday.
If you’ve always had $10 million, you don’t go out and start buying shit like crazy even if you make another $2 m. But if it’s your first $2 m, you’re likely to go spend A LOT of it.
And that’s real economic growth. It’s the opposite of trickle-down economics (which just causes more hoarding of wealth and slowing of money exchanging hands).
This is probably more of a localized situational matter than most of us realize. The US (and the world for that matter) is a big place of extreme diversity.
Was about to say, the article quotes numbers around layoffs worldwide and then continues to discuss US only companies. Even though Wired thinks the US is the only country in the world with tech companies, the majority of the world’s population doesn’t live or work in the US.
I’ve been unemployed for 14 months and I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. I left with plenty of savings and moved to a country where I spend less than $1000 a month but I’m running out soon. It’s kinda scary and I’ve contemplated some dark shit
deleted by creator
Doesn’t match my experience in Toronto area having worked in tech for 15 years. We struggle to fill vacancies yet we have more perks, benefits, and fully unionized. I switched roles this year and was looking at job postings in the area, saw postings that had been up for months.
Pay is the missing piece. Tech pay is way down because everyone competed with FAANG for talent. Now that they had layoffs and cut pay, tech workers are looking for similar pay to what they had in the past but it’s not there anymore.
We offer that pay though, like we make above average, 35 hour weeks, a lot of benefits for a tech job, and we still have postings that sit up for months.
-
Companies will leave listings up for ‘openings’ that they have no intention of actually filling. Mostly just to keep resumes coming in so they can keep tabs on the market and to give HR something to do.
-
There may only be openings for junior & senior positions. At least here in the US there has been an industry-wide neglect of training entry-level for over a decade. As the workforce aged, there’s become an experience gap. There’s a shrinking pool of people with on-the-job experience, tons of people with degrees but no real experience, and no systems or will to onboard them.
- is slightly incorrect. You are right they are not meant to be filled. We always called them evergreen rolls. We didn’t have a specific role in mind but we left reqs open to keep a flow of resumes to make sure we were not missing a top talent candidate that might be available and we don’t want to miss out due to timing of filling roles.
Most of our open postings are entry level because they’re backfills and there’s a lot of training and investment in new employees.
-
