The most important subtext. There are engineer friends of mine laid off from remote companies that, almost 5 months later, cannot get work. These aren't braindead seatwarmers either. The software engineer market has shifted under our feet DRAMATICALLY. Any software engineer with a position should try to keep it for as long as they possible can.
Yeah, this is all anecdotal, but I'll add my 2c - been in the business for something like 15 years and was looking for work in May. It has never felt deader, remote or onsite. Usually recruiters are beating down your door. This time not even friends could get me any interviews.
The way I got a job was by writing some technical articles and establishing a relationship with a very energetic VC person. I asked him if he could introduce me to his portfolio companies and day later I had a few conversations lined up. I think I found what is probably the most interesting job I have ever had. I am usually nobody to hustle or advocate for it, but it sure paid back.
Got a decent position after ~4 months of looking. ~120 applications, ~10 interviews.
It was nuts, my resume and skillset have never been stronger but this was my hardest search by a huge margin. Referrals were not working, bulk applications were getting no response. What finally worked was just persistence and trying to add a lot of character to my cover letter. I had way more replies when I:
A. complimented what they were doing
B. Included a few little quips/jokes.
The huge number of fake applicants and AI generated cover letters/resumes is making recruiters jobs a nightmare, I think a few jokes and compliments can make it clear you are an actual person. One recruiter told me he had ~3000 applications for a pretty low paying remote position.
I've been in the business for almost 20 years. I've been hired for positions where I don't even code in the required language, and the employer depends on me to learn it on the go. Until recently I've never had trouble securing a job. But I've been on the market now for about 2 years. I often can't even score an interview, even for jobs that exactly match my qualifications.
I'm over 40, so I must assume ageism is a factor, but even in light of that, this tech job market feels like a desert.
I was about to consider an interview coach or just somebody to look at who I am, my resume, online presence and all that and give me very honest feedback. I thought that what I am lacking is a good idea of who I am and I how I present myself. Have you tried anything like that?
I have not yet employed an interview coach, but I suspect it would be helpful to have a frank evaluation. I have a pretty large online presence, perhaps it is negatively affecting my opportunities in ways that I do not see. Hmm.
I was worried about the same actually. I have an old crappy website that I have not updated in years and I was wondering if it's acting as my business card, which wouldn't be good. My doxed online presence is minimal otherwise.
Participate in local user groups. In every single group I attend, people are looking to hire.
However, these people are local. They almost certainly want you in-person at least some amount of the time.
And, while I can't say that ageism isn't a factor, I can tell you that the users groups tend to be weighted toward the greybeards.
I do think that the "remote work" thing is a bit of disadvantage for we greybeards. The value of having someone around who is experienced is having a colleague that you can interact with in casual context.
Same. Although, I have also noticed there is nothing 100% remote. Many of the messages even highlight "100% on-site." Best I've seen recently is a 3 day hybrid.
How do I get myself out there to make these connections? I can make connections with coworkers, but I don’t know how to expand beyond my circle (like meeting VC folk)
I cannot give much advice on this, because my experience is minimal. I would say pick a domain and learn to stand out in it. I stood out just a little by doing technical research and writing about it, then posting it in chats/social media. Actually, having twitter was essential. We pretty much met over twitter. On twitter every person is equally accessible to you, be they a celebrity or your cousin Bob.
I've heard of ghost jobs so I'm starting to actually really doubt some of this, I've literally seen the same job on the market for over a year now with a new chain of recruits contacting me about it every 3 months. I understand there aren't a lot of perhaps qualified people for that role but come on a year with it open? The repeat open positions are disappointing to say the least. At least change the description! I think a lot of employers are just stacking up resumes and waiting to use them in the future.
This is what crash of 2000 was like for me. Multiple calls a day from recruiters.
Sometime around June or so, the calls Stopped. Just stopped. Six months later I was working at RadioShack.
Along with a number of engineers with 10-20 years experience.
I was an idiot and held out for too long. I’ve been out of work for a very long time, much longer than six months. I never experienced a market like this, even when I was trying to enter the market as a teenager with no real experience it took me three months. Now I have six years of experience apparently worth nothing. I should have taken a on site role a long time ago, but I was trying to avoid moving. I figured my luck would turn around for the better at some point. Idiotic optimism.
Now my lease is up and I’m fucked. My savings have been beaten from month and months of attrition and emergency expenses, including somehow owing money on my taxes this year. The rental market is so bad where I am, with people asking more money for fucking rooms than some of the apartments out here, I assume because most of the apartments have 6+ month waiting lists.
I support remote work, but moving out to a rural area is putting yourself at risk if you expect to get high software engineer pay.
There’s a lot more competition for remote jobs and you’re also competing with highly qualified candidates in lower cost of living places outside the US.
Flipside: Staying in an expensive metro area puts you at risk to maintain your quality of life and pay mortgage/taxes/insurance on everything, when a lot of hybrid jobs don't pay enough to cover those expenses, and are also at risk of layoffs, which can be catastrophic when you have a high cost of living. If you're remote/rural, you don't need to make nearly as much just to skate by if something goes south. I moved out of the Bay Area, and I cannot imagine ever going back. Too much risk. I don't care if the pool of jobs is smaller and the pay is lower.
When it comes to your quality of life, there are a lot of factors besides the cost of living - social circle, weather, job opportunities, hobbies, cultural compatibility etc. For a lot of people, expensive metro areas can also be the only places where they have friends & family or where they can pursue their hobbies. As an immigrant of color, I simply cannot see myself living happily in rural Ohio even if that could be a wonderful place for someone else.
I agree. But there are a lot of places in the US that check 90% of those boxes at a fraction of the cost of the Bay Area. There are a lot of great second-tier cities that are very welcoming to people of color.
I think the key part of moving elsewhere is that you have much less access to the in-person segment, assuming moving represents a significant hurdle to you.
One big problem with blind is that it trends very junior. Much of what’s on there is of little used to people who are older. I actually find most of the comments to be less informed than, say, fuckedcompany.com was back in the day.
Im not sure why this is even getting downvoted. Top pay of market has significantly shifted to hybrid. Even once a week in office means you can't live anywhere in the country you'd like. Though i'm not sure if the original article counts hybrid as remote in this case
There are plenty of fully remote openings for senior software engineers looking for $100k TC right now. Every person can make their own calculation
Honestly, I'd take 100k TC for a position to keep remote. One caveat, I will be working at 20% of my actual mental capacity. Frequent vacations, using sick time as often as possible, etc. I would not take on anything resembling pagerduty and I wouldn't try to lead anything. Then I'll leave for any job with higher TC. Malicious compliance is the best kind of compliance and is the only way to respond to a lop-sided negotiation.
Companies are exploiting the rift in labor due to inflation, COVID, etc right now. For 2 years the power was in the hands of employees. This left a very bad taste in the mouths of management. What companies want is top-tier labor for bottom-tier pricing. It won't happen. If it does, you'll have a bunch of people with 1.5 feet out the door coasting at work.
you can do this in office / hybrid too. It wasn't uncommon when FAANG hiring was ebbing and flowing or people would leave to come back at those places (some FAANGs have weird policies on promoting internally vs externally. It was sometimes easier to leave and comeback)
I worked somewhere where we always had a dozen boomerang FAANG engineers, the practice stopped when everyone realized they were coasting often and getting way to close to deadlines, had poorer than expected engineering output etc.
For me personally, the question is how long I hold out for a job that will pay the bills. E.g., without my kids needing to take out big college loans.
For one thing, I don't want to screw over an employer by taking a job that I know I'll leave as soon as something better-paying becomes available. Hopefully I'll find a decent job before I get that desparate.
Salaries with Canadian companies pale in comparison to U.S. salaries, with perhaps a few exceptions.
When the market was piping hot in early 2022 I was fielding a few offers and the highest a Canadian company got me (as someone with 8-9 YoE at the time) was 95K (USD). U.S. companies were offering in the range of 120K-150K.
Although I made a huge mistake and took a counteroffer at a lower salary from the company I already worked with, which came with a significant retention bonus (and verbal promise of stock + additional bonuses which never materialized). Now I'm making about 70K USD as a lead.
Which is probably more than I'd get from a Canada-based company right now to be fair.
To be clear, I'm not complaining about FAANG/finance comp rates. Anyone taking a bigger paycheck instead of that money going to capital is doing god's work (plus, building a foundation for future capital innovation, if you want the pro-capitalism slant on it—more people with investable capital and more people with cushion to try to build a business is very good). You should absolutely take every dollar you can wring out. They wanna spend stupid-money, see if they'll give you "stupid + $1". All day long.
Just putting things in perspective. "Bad" developer pay is still really good.
(of course, there's a worse tier of pay for developers and sysadmins under that one, but I don't think there's a lot of remote work in that tier that isn't also offshored work—in-person, though, yes)
> it isnt “easier” to get an offer at lower ranges, those companies think they are taking a risk with their comp ranges too
The trick is not to job-shop in bad markets. "Expensive" and "risky" to a startup in, I dunno, Billings, is "holy shit, what a bargain!" in a lot of cities—and not even the top markets, but tier two and three cities. Or to established, larger companies.
Be wary of small companies scraping by in cheap cities. If the pay's non-shit, they'll expect you to be a literal wizard, performing actual supernatural feats, for pay that's still probably on the low side.
It is significantly easier to get a $100k offer than a $600k one as a senior software engineer. Companies who offer lower pay fully understand they aren't poaching anyone from Meta or Netflix any time soon, and lower their bar in terms of how hard the interview is
In other words getting an offer for "tech in a non-tech company" is pretty easy. Getting the Meta offer in 1-shot of 6 back to back interviews, not so much
~200K, inflation adjusted, is historically the salary of a competent senior software developer in the US. Give or take depending on location, so you can expect around this for remote (which doesn't suffer the same labor shortage pressure of some regions).
A friend of mine told me he joined Microsoft right out of college in 1998 for 35K/year + 10% bonus. This is around 70K-80K today. As a Senior II Software Engineer at Microsoft in 2014, I made around 180K total comp, which is around 230K today.
In the past 3-5 years we've seen incredibly distorted job markets. 500K is a salary you often see for CEOs and Directors of "normal companies". It's an incredible salary that puts you in the top 1% income in many states.
I'm not saying software engineers don't deserve a lot of money, and by all means, let's try to get as much as we can, but I'm just saying that the past few years have been abnormal and we're seeing the correction now.
i mean the low paying jobs he refers to only pay like 100k, if your paying sr engineers and leads 100-150k you are being cheap when you consider how much value we provide.
if you think engineers only provide maybe 200k dollars of value then sure pay 100k but i find that hard to believe
Also have in mind that there are "Seniors" and "Seniors". 200K is a normal salary for a true Senior in a company that is either tech-focused or very reliant on tech.
Companies outside the tech hubs, or companies where custom tech only provides incremental value to their business, will certainly pay less, and salaries closer to 100K are actually not that uncommon. They often don't even have the ability to accurately evaluate the skill set of a Senior Software Engineer. So what you call Senior and what they call Senior isn't the same thing.
I'm not saying that you should accept 100K, simply that the market is very diverse and we are past the excesses of the past.
Yes, wages are high relative to other industries but the large tech companies are immensely profitable. Wages can be even higher without market manipulation.
So yes, it's a market but a really really bad one in ways we value markets to be good.
> The hiring market is a market. Prices in a market are set by supply and demand.
Demand for software engineers is partially explained by the value software engineers generate.
The value a job creates is obviously a factor. Imagine a job that creates absolutely no value but has a limited supply of qualified people. It wont even exist let alone pay anything.
> Compensation isn't proportional to the value you produce.
Contrast that with product/service pricing where the business advice is to capture as big a slice of the end value produced as possible.
Compensation is proportional to the value produced, and is also constrained by factors like, how close the position is to the income stream, if the dept you're working for is considered a cost or profit center. But basically different companies, industries, and situations have different typical proportional factors.
What kills me is seeing ads for boot camps talking about “tech jobs are booming in [your area]”. Yet I’ve had the fewest number of recruiter contact in my career ever, including when I was trying to break into the industry.
Not that I don’t expect the industry to be full of liars at this point, but it still losses me off when I see them.
yeah sure its a market, the money is there though to get. that doesn't change companies are being cheap. nothing wrong trying to extract as much as you can. companies that pay low are signaling they don't value their workers.
Edit: it's not good to stealth-edit your comments after the fact, especially when doing so deprives replies of their original meaning. If you're going to make an edit that affects conversation in this way, please do it append-only (as I've done here) with an "Edit:" prefix or similar.
Development is global as opposed to, say, cab driving. So, tech companies from other parts of the world will applaud your decision. Keep pushing new regulations, we'll reap the benefits.
Cool, so you can be worked into the ground by abusive landlords who add no value. We'll pool our skills and create organizations of engineers who want better for themselves and the world.
This needs to happen as soon as possible. Not only to protect ourselves against the destructive race to the bottom and offshoring, but to put guard rails in place against these people who want to use technology to extract value at the expense of everything else. They're nothing without the engineers and product designers that actually create the value.
To any immigrants reading, remember that unions were instrumental in foreigners finding it hard to move to the US. Here are some opinions on you from HN users:
> Given that it is much more expensive to gain skill when you are a native, the government somewhat pulled the rug from underneath the locals who spend a lot of money to go to uni etc and were hoping to have a decent return on their investment in education.
"Getting rid" of you will be considered a good idea
Lots of libertarians support unions, not sure where you get your info. The libertarian argument has the most subtlety about how and why to support or oppose certain unions. So yes, they do oppose some unions.
> Salary has never been about the value you provide. It's about the cost to replace you. Companies will never pay you more than you cost to replace.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. To some extent, the value you bring is whats behind the cost to replace you.
And I dont mean in some proportional relationship to revenue or profit or something. I just mean software engineers create more value than someone who can juggle chairs, who is incredibly hard to replace.
Of course if there were 4 billion software engineers tomorrow, wages would go down. We agree on that. But business value is a factor.
Cost of labor bounded above by the value of the activity. Businesses that are not FAANG scale cannot afford FAANG-level talent even if it would be necessary for something they want to do. They just can't do the thing. Or try to do the closest analogue they can with the people they can afford. Maybe hire heavy-hitting consultants for a short time to put them on the right track.
people don't send me an offer after remote interviews
people do send me an offer after in person interviews
I have no problem getting callbacks and multiple rounds of interviews and busy work take home challenges
just in case anyone else is having a similar experience, also interview at hybrid roles or offer to do an in person one
I never hear anything back about remote roles after the first round. In many cases a recruiter even has perfect roles that they say they submit me for but I never hear from them again.
On-site stuff tends to progress further, but usually they want one to move to a more expensive location, which I was desperately trying to avoid.
What are you talking about without data? We know most of the big tech companies laid off tens of thousands of software engineers in the past year. The biggest market players went from net positive on jobs to net negative.
> You don't need a double-blind placebo study to observe the shifting market.
Is your data based on just a few of your friends? How is that considered a "shifting market"? My friends and I do not experience what you are arguing. In fact, we experience the opposite of what you are saying.
Considering that literally hundreds of thousands of qualified people have been laid off this year alone, many of them devs, and plenty of anecdotes on this and other tech forums/chat groups about how the job market has shifted to favor employers, I think it isn't wildly irrational to believe the person you're responding to.
Sure, "the plural of anecdote isn't data" and all that, but talk to recruiters and you'll hear much the same. Yes, even in this market it's possible to get outstanding offers but I'm fairly confident in asserting that that's much rarer right now than it was, say, a year or two ago.
> Considering that literally hundreds of thousands of qualified people have been laid off this year alone
Those layoffs were to appease shareholders. Did you forget that the market already needed a massive amount of programmer talent? That hasn't changed, my experience hasn't changed. I can get a high paying ($300k) job at literally any point anywhere.
> Considering that literally hundreds of thousands of qualified people have been laid off this year alone, many of them devs, and plenty of anecdotes on this and other tech forums/chat groups about how the job market has shifted to favor employers, I think it isn't wildly irrational to believe the person you're responding to.
"In 2023, the software engineering industry faces a record-breaking shortage of professionals. This skills crisis has resulted in an astonishing 1 million tech job vacancies that still need to be fulfilled. Reports suggest that the number of US job vacancies, due to a lack of talent, will reach 85.2 million by 2030."
> Sure, "the plural of anecdote isn't data" and all that, but talk to recruiters and you'll hear much the same. Yes, even in this market it's possible to get outstanding offers but I'm fairly confident in asserting that that's much rarer right now than it was, say, a year or two ago.
All of these are anecdotes and nothing more. If you have data that would support that I would like to see it and then I can agree with you.
> In 2023, the software engineering industry faces a record-breaking shortage of professionals. This skills crisis has resulted in an astonishing 1 million tech job vacancies that still need to be fulfilled. Reports suggest that the number of US job vacancies, due to a lack of talent, will reach 85.2 million by 2030.
This doesn't disprove any of what's been shared earlier in this thread. Because of the layoffs and uncertainty around the future effects of interest rates on the wider economy, many companies have laid off thousands and are being much pickier about their hiring.
So even though there's vacancies, that doesn't mean the experience of seeking a job is as easy as it used to be - just the opposite, in fact. This is what many mean by "the market has shifted".
I don't know if there's studies out there conclusively proving that it's gotten harder to find a job (longer to land an offer, lower salaries on offer on average, # of remote jobs available, # of applicants applying to them etc), but I think we might never find such to begin with because these specific metrics might not be as keenly tracked.
Are you a junior developer or support IT tech? I would agree that for these kind of jobs market is probably oversaturated. But for real senior software engineers (by real i mean not someone that worked on some easy CRUD app for 10 years straight doing exactly the same thing and doesn't know how to do anything else) market is very good. As for me and my friends, I'm constantly rejecting offers that have higher payout than before.
The most important subtext. There are engineer friends of mine laid off from remote companies that, almost 5 months later, cannot get work. These aren't braindead seatwarmers either. The software engineer market has shifted under our feet DRAMATICALLY. Any software engineer with a position should try to keep it for as long as they possible can.