- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
Published earlier this year, but still relevant.
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So, i’ve been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I’m glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it’s not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
The miners thing is insane; as if we dont still need fucking minerals.
and trades are usually only employing a specific demographic and they have
Correct, and the other problem is that if you live in a house with 6-8 other people, and don’t even have anywhere to park a vehicle (as in, not even on the road outside) then it’s never going to work. I imagine what it’d be like if I did a trade, but I couldn’t get to work in the morning because another tenant decided to sleep-in and block my vehicle from leaving the drive. Just ridiculous.
Also trades have boom and busts too
Plus the ones making really good money take a good amount of time to get there and really good money means starting your own business but either way, you won’t escape long hard hours and weekends until probably at least your 40s, that’s if you manage to scale up the business enough with numerous staffed work vehicles. Like a 22 year old software developer can be making what a master plumber does in their first year out of college. Not super common but the $130k+ a year plumber is the top small percent of the field too
Well yeah, when the tech industry went through multiple waves of massive layoffs, that’s going to be the case in the short term as things shake out.
And everyone and their dog is trying to get into tech. The industry is bound to get saturated eventually…
I’d it’s already saturated if we’re looking at high unemployment in the sector.
Not necessarily, it might mean it I’d an industry easy to get into, but hard to master. If I was short on people, and inexperienced person might actually make mistakes that require even more work to fix.
Everyone thinks they are Mr Robot after they let ChatGPT create a simple HTML page. No, they are not, and they won’t even pass as a junior. Surprise surprise, you have to know the basics.
Yup. We’re hiring, but the candidate pool is a minefield of utter trash, so it takes a while to hire despite having hundreds of applicants. We don’t expect much beyond basic competency, but apparently that’s too much to ask sometimes.
Same here. It’s popular to rag on leetcode-style technical interviews, and yet it’s astonishing how many CS grads with 3 years experience we get in who can’t seem to get through even the most basic “reverse this array”, “find the longest substring” type questions in the language they claim to be strongest in.
People sign up for CS degrees because they see high salaries, but don’t realize those salaries are for the high achievers who have been coding since the age of 10 and are writing code for fun in the evenings as well. Then they flood the market, only to discover that no companies have need of someone who cheesed their way through college, have never written more than a few hundred lines of code their whole life, and have no useful skills to offer.
What you are describing is a constant. Everything is scaled up. I don’t believe for a second that it’s difficult to hire unless you’re talking about these idiots who say things like “Don’t I deserve to hire the best candidate for the job?”
It’s really not. Hiring was much easier 3-4 years ago as the pandemic nonsense was ending and people were bailing on companies forcing people to be back in office 5x/week. The competent devs knew they could do better, while the less competent devs held on to what they had.
Now with a bunch of layoffs, the candidate pool is completely flooded, and since we’re not a big flashy tech company, we seem to get a ton of drive-by applicants who aren’t qualified at all.
It is not hard to hire someone, it is hard to hire someone who doesn’t give you more work than they solve. I am not against hiring juniors, but they have to show initiative that they are passionate and able to improve. I don’t want a person who will be junior for the rest of their career, because juniors usually require babysitting and that that away work and attention from competent people (the chads who actually build the core features and have to attend business meetings on why it is so good for customers to see additional offers during checking out).
It is a combination - incompetent HR, incompetent candidates, or bad hiring process. I am yet to apply to a company with a hiring process I’d call pleasant on all angles.
And most importantly a lack of companies willing to train their employees. They’re all pointing fingers at every other company to do the training for them, then wondering why they can’t find anyone with the training they want. Whodathunkit
To the tech people listening… I was high up in many areas for a few decades but I left it all behind. There is still a massive talent-acquisition problem, not just in tech but every industry, that is just waiting to be solved. The departments and staff tasked with hiring are not competent, nor capable of connecting qualified applicants to jobs. The entire hiring system is broken as fuck, and the “job boards” and apps didn’t fix it, they made it far, far worse for everybody on all sides.
Exactly. Our recruiters aren’t tech recruiters, they handle recruitment for the entire company (and we’re not a tech company). As a result, a lot of our candidates have flashy resumes, but no actual skill. As in, I asked someone to write code in whatever language they wanted and they couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t some difficult assignment, this was a first round weeder task. The candidate straight up lied about having any development experience whatsoever. I even had an Information Systems background candidate say straight up that they’re not interested in a dev role, which they were explicitly applying for.
And that’s unfortunately far more common than not. People think that because they paid for a bootcamp that they’re now competent enough to write code professionally, but it turns out, a lot of them didn’t apply themselves at all.
There are good candidates in that mix, it’s just hard to find them. We’re happy to train a promising candidate, and we’ve hired interns that we’ve offered full-time positions to. We don’t even particularly care about age, we had someone internally decide to transition to tech from a blue collar background, so we funded their education and now they write code for production on the side of their main job (they’re our support person for our blue collar users, and they’re really good at it).
If you’re not a big flashy tech company, you’re not going to get as much attention from qualified candidates, and you’ll get a bunch of trash applicants who are looking for easy marks on the job boards.
The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.
The numbers aren’t too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.
It’s important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field. It is not unusual that there’s no overarching long term plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next.
I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn’t find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.
I find it hard to believe the true numbers are this low. Every job posting gets many hundreds or even thousands of applicants. It’s a shame so much talent is wasted by so many people being unemployed and doing “unproductive” things like spending months applying to jobs.
the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes
They kinda do, but only the part where they increase program sizes after demand exists and only wind down when the market is saturated. They can’t really work too far ahead if they don’t know ow something will be in demand and they don’t want to tell students to not do something they offer just because there are too many graduates. Add the four or five years to graduation and you get a system that lags behind reality even if the planning was better.
But a well designed post secondary education means graduates can go into similar or related fields, they aren’t limited to what is on their diploma except in their own minds.
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/ does track this a bit, but I don’t know if universities use the info or if the site is intended for individuals instead.
I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question.
You are looking at Universities^0 all wrong. Predicting the markets are not their job or role in society.
The primary purpose of a University is research. That research output comes from three primary sources: the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Naturally undergrads don’t tend to come into the University knowing how to do proper research, so there is a teaching component involved to bring them up to the necessary standards so they can contribute to research — but ultimately, that’s what they exist for.
What a University is not is a job training centre. That’s not its purpose, nor should it be. A University education is the gold standard in our society so many corporations and individuals will either prefer or require University training in exchange for employment — but that’s not the Universities that are enforcing that requirement. That’s all on private enterprise to decide what they want. All the University ultimately cares about is research output.
Hence, if there is valuable research output to be made (and inputs in the form of grants) in the field of “Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” (yes, I’m making that up!), and they have access to faculty to lead suitable research AND they have students that want to study it, they’ll run it as a programme. It makes no difference whether or not there is any industry demand for “ Philosophy of Digital Thanatology” — if it results in grants and attracts researchers and students, a University could decide to offer it as a degree programme.
We have a LOT of degree programmes with more graduates than jobs available. Personally, I’m glad for that. If I have some great interest in a subject, why shouldn’t I be allowed to study it? Why should I be forced to take it if and only if there is industry demand for that field? If that were the case, we’d have nearly no English language or Philosophy students — and likely a lot fewer Math and Theoretical Physics students as well. But that’s not the point of a University. It never has been, and it never should be.
I’ve been an undergraduate, a graduate, and a University instructor in Computer Science. I’ve seen some argue in the past that the faculty should teach XYZ because it’s what industry needs at a given moment — but that’s not its purpose or its role. If industry needs a specific skill, it either needs to teach it itself, or rely on more practical community colleges and apprenticeship programmes which are designed around training for work.
[0] — I’m going to use the Canadian terminology here, which differentiates between “Universities” and “Colleges”, with the former being centres of research education that grant degrees and the latter referring to schools that are often primarily trade and skill focussed that offer more diploma programmes. American common parlance tends to throw all of the above into the bucket of “College” in one way or another which makes differentiating between them more complicated.
What you describe might be true for Canada, but it doesn’t apply to all universities. Many universities have two primary tasks: research and education. These are two separate tasks with overlap.
I do find it understandable if publicly funded universities place restrictions on how many students they accept per program as it’s their duty to give back go society.
That’s not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I’m not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That’s why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I’d have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won’t catch me claiming they’re professional training factories.
Speaking for the US, major universities may be there for research, but they are a small portion of the mass of schools across the country.
People have mostly been getting degrees to get a good job since at least shortly after WW2. It’s silly to pretend people are going massively in debt without the expectation of a return on that investment.
Nothing against people learning for the joy of learning, but I absolutely hold schools accountable for not making job prospects clear when most of the students are both young and ignorant of the world.
they don’t want to scare people away form an impacted majors, they probably lose money if they arnt butts in the seat, if people arnt willing to pay for a major with no jobs the uni lose money and they probably have to shut that program down. it seems state uni around here on care about putting as much butts in seats of undergrads as possible so they can have thier cash cow, they dont care what happens to those 3-4years in, just push them through like they are in high school.
biotech is another one i bring up on other forums, its one of those it looks likes in demand, but they really arnt keen on hiring people. its gatekeeped at the scientist level, unless a student is aware that labs exists in thier universities they are out of luck. and state unis here do a good job of not telling or hiding the labs under an obscure category. Professors are very reluctant to even talk about thier labs at all; some have an ego issue(they dont want students to ruin thier reputation, eventhough we arnt even a threat thier field, as we arnt in grad school, i had a professor like this) and labs are usually filled up, so theres very little chance to get into lab if your lucky. CCs dont have labs. that is the part that universities dont warn students about, if you had labs in your unis all this time, isnt ir prudent to look for these labs, although i suspect they dont want the PIs to get inundated with students requesting to get into thier labs, thats why they are very hush hush about it.
i also think bio unemployment is skewed towards health too, because a significant amount of them are held by women, who are likely to be employed in the field over men, first its likely they are going into NURSING, dieticians, PHYSICAL therapy where all the jobs are, plus CLS which is a niche grad job. on the research side its the same for women ive only seen a majority are in the labs volunteering(apparently at my uni some of them only wanted women because lab manager/PI was being a creep), otherwise the biotech side have a pretty large unemployment, but its lumped in with all bio majors.
So coding trade schools need to be created.
It’s not honestly a job more complex than many trades. Treating it as different is a relict from the time when most programmers came from backgrounds in some cutting edge defense research or fundamental science. And honestly not all of them did, some learned it as a trade when it was a new thing, and advanced is like a trade, and themselves treated it like a trade, and wrote books about it like about a trade. Unfortunately later there was that hype over tech and Silicon Valley and crap.
Today’s programmers sometimes have problems with deep enough understanding of algorithms and data structures they use, while this is about similar in complexity to the knowledge an electrician possesses.
In USSR there was a program of “programming being the second literacy”, with Pascal and C being studied in schools and schools getting computers (probably the most expensive things in there), PDP-11 clones looking like PCs, and a few other kinds of machines. Unfortunately, the USSR itself was on the path to collapse. Honestly if only it existed for a bit longer, and reformed and liberalized more gently, maybe that program would have brought fruit (I mean, it did, just for other countries where people would emigrate).
BTW, Soviet trade schools (“primary technical school” that was called) prepared programmers among other things. University degrees related to cybernetics were more about architecture of mass service systems, of program systems, of production lines, industrial optimization, - all things that people deciding on those learning programs could imagine as being useful. Writing code wasn’t considered that important. And honestly that was right, except the Internet blew up, and with it - the completely unregulated and scams and bubbles driven tech industry.
Honestly the longer I live, the more nostalgic I become for that country which failed 5 years before I was born. Yeah, people remembering it also remember that feeling of “we can live like this no longer”, and that nothing was real or functional, but perhaps they misjudged and didn’t see the parts which were real and functional, treating them as given. It was indeed a catastrophe, not a liberation.
Coding trade schools effectively exist already — diploma granting Community Colleges exist for this reason. Here’s one, for example.
But that’s not a University. We shouldn’t change the role of a University to match that of a diploma-awarding Community College. Challenging employers to see such students as being as useful hires compared to a University educated developer is likely a different story, however.
The grass coming from less rigorous 4 year programs are already lacking. Computer programming is complex enough that I would be very reluctant to learn from a trade school that took less than four years.
An electrician’s work or a plumber’s work are also complex. Or carpenter’s.
Come on. This is not about complex theory being used, this is about messed up instruments, where layers upon layers of bullshit are laid to deliver upon hype.
People writing compilers and operating systems and cryptography libraries are those who need real education. People who make websites or Android apps on the framework of the day - need knowledge that is a thing in itself with no fundamental value.
This should be common knowledge. I recall in the 1990s there was a huge push for truck drivers. Everywhere you went “Be a truck driver! Own your own business! Make six figures!” And only a decade later, employed drivers struggle to make ends meet.
If you see a huge push for a particular job - you better plan your exit.
Nursing in the early 2000s, CS in 2010s. I’m guessing whatever University of Phoenix is pushing, stay the fuck away from.
One eight hundred, five five one, eight nine hundred. Diesel Driving Academy!
It’s also just a general pattern that when a skill is in high demand, the jobs pay great. Everyone wants great pay, so the flood the schools to acquire that skill. Eventually things reach a saturation point.
And also there are always charlatan programs that take your money to hand out worthless certifications. As time goes by, these “educations” mean less and less, a lot of people just nab them online because they want to make better money fast, and there are fewer and fewer real jobs unfilled. Until we arrive at a point like this.
It’s a supply and demand issue.
The way college works is a scam in itself. You don’t need that much liberal art education. Four years and tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) just to see if you can hack it in a job in your field? That’s insane.
Most jobs should be accessible right after high school in the form of paid internships. Programming is a trade, and most of the skills should be taught in high school. Not everyone needs to be a “computer scientist”, just like not every plumber needs to be a hydraulic engineer.
I’ve worked in a lot of programming jobs and zero of the people were what I would have called computer scientists. They were just coders who could write a conditional statement and a
forloop. That gets the job done 99% of the time. (Obviously I’m greatly oversimplifying. My point is there’s no “computer science” involved.)After a job in programming for a couple years, if you want to start working on the Linux kernel and write compilers, go ahead and go to school then and become a computer scientist. That’s so few people.
And then when there are no jobs hiring internships and computer science, you know not to focus on that. Do aomething else.
But big business hates this. They want everyone to prove in a gauntlet that you can work under super high pressure and tight deadlines that are totally arbitrary.
This explains why people gave me a hard time for getting an anthropology degree…
its like psych degree, i heard people complaining in person about thier psych, yea you arnt going anywhere without a GRADuate degree for these majors, PSY-D/ PHD are the only options for that field, i assume thats what thier saying to you? anthropology might be more difficult, i assume your only going to be teaching at a university witha grad degree, but faculty positions are super-competitive asf, especially if its not a really in-demand degree.
Undergrad psych degree is pretty popular with social workers.
There’s a lot of jobs in the private and public sector for people with anthropology degrees. In the US, anthropology is taught as a four field approach encompassing Biological Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Linguistic Anthropology, and Archaeology.
Each of the subfields have different levels of hireability based on a bachelor’s degree.
I personally only have a bachelor’s and live well. I have a home and live comfortably. But, to your point, I have essentially capped out my earnings. I can’t make more without obtaining a graduate degree.
that last part is probably what makes these degree unattractive, and i doubt they are in demand?
Industry vulnerable to lack of investor money does badly when there is no investor money
In the 1970s companies started “Stack Ranking” all their employees and firing the bottom 10% in order to replace them or simply using their wages to pay CEOs more.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
Now the media will jump past all this to blame anything but the CEOs and failure of Government to reign in the wage gap via the force of law.
they are using the right wing blaming strategy: blames the student for choosing a “useless” degree, and not having ‘CONNECTIONS’/networking, these basically are a form of Nepotism to be honest, not many people can get connections like that, and its based on “knowing a person of a person with said company that is friendly with a HR manager” i guessed correctly in another forum(indeed) that its around half when they decide if they want to hire you.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
… There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.
One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.
Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.
That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.
The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.
I graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Washington in 2020, during the height of Covid.
After over 3000 handcrafted applications (and many more AI-written ones), I have never been offered a job in the field.
I know of multiple CS graduates who have killed themselves, and so many who are living with their parents and working service/retail.
I think the software engineering rush of the early 2000s will be looked back upon like the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
be willing to move
you’re offering salt in the middle of the Pacific
I fled from the Midwest because there were no good jobs outside of the oil and gas industry, and ended up in the Seattle area. Saving up and moving cost 2 years of my life, Im not sure I could do it again.
…and I did apply to some jobs on the west coast, although most of my apps were around Seattle.
But please tell me, where should I have went instead of Seattle?
yea that’s understandable
Honestly Seattle is a pretty good place for tech jobs, it’s just that the cost of living isn’t much better than California or other big tech hubs.
I as in a similar boat. Graduated right around the housing crash. If my wife didnt work at the time, we would have been in a terrible spot. It look a good 6 months to get my first job. After that, I haven’t had any issues popping into jobs.
Sounds like you got a raw deal. Our industry has many highs and lows when it comes to jobs and work available.
My buddy graduated and took a gap year. That year happened to be the dot com crash. So he kept backpacking for another year then started looking for work. 😁
For me, even graduating in 2022 with an MSc, 6 months is a short time to find a job
2008 was a very difficult job market for sure. Even around 2017 when I graduated it was quite difficult from now. Entry level positions have evaporated in the last 6-7 years
What CS subfield? I think it really depends if you were able to specialize somewhat. At least systems programming and lower level coding seems to be somewhat in demand once you get into the field. Even given the current economy we aren’t really getting much interest from students.
…the San Francisco gold rush in 1949.
Classic CS major, making an off-by-one(hundred years) error ;)
2020s was probably the worst time to graduate or even attend a 4-year university. they were starting to lock down, and they were laying people off and hiring freezing everywhere, that dint stop till maybe mid 2022, the effect was pretty devasting, i was still working a chain store and many people from IT to electrical engineer just got freshly laid off. and then the '23 massive tech layoffs began too i dont see this going to reverse for CS majors anythime soon, since CS has been having issues like since early 2010s of getting hired.
on students who were attending universities for the first time, or halfway through thier degree in the 2020s, i looked at reviews of my universities, most of them said they dint learn anything at all, so it puts them at disadvantage already, especially if its all only ONLINE courses. if you been in a regular course where the professors only uses powerpoint , you arnt learning anything a professor did this with BIOchem(for life science students, which is allegedly easier than the other biochem for scientists) and then when exam times came, they were almost as tough as my CC chem classes.
There was even a class action suit against UW for their negligence during covid. I guess the case is already settled, so I’m looking forward to my meager restitution check.
And I actually feel lucky that most of my serious classes were complete before Covid lockdown, bc the quality of education during covid was absolutely pathetic.
my school the same, it was a state uni, communter school and everyone said it was terrible(based on the reviews, and personally prior the pandemic too. there was one that stuck with me, a woman said she transferred to another university ucla because she dint find herself getting any opportunities at the school, or furthering her career track and she saw her fellow classmate struggle to get a career after they graduated.
I’d be happy to review your resume and code samples and provide feedback if you want.
A degree in CS is valueless for actual working jobs. You need to write software and show that you know what you’re doing. And if you can do that, you may not even need a job from anyone else. The time when companies would just overstaff and have paid interns is long over.
3000? That’s hyperbole right?
It sounds like the same amount of effort that it would take to make a really good open source project, or contribute to an existing one.
I find it hard to believe you wouldn’t get a job with something like that under your belt. Also 3000 applications is probably a bit shotgun rather than targeted and HR would be able to pick up on it
You’re right that my time was wasted, and knowing the outcome, I wish I could go back and do more project work before trying to enter the job market.
But I don’t think that is a financial possibility for most Americans. Going to school drained my savings, when I graduated I had almost nothing except for school debt, medical debt, and high rent. Saying “I’m gonna take off and work for free for a year” never really seemed like a possibility.
And as for my apps, the 3000 were not shotgun, they were all personalized, custom cover letters, keywords, etc. It only averaged out to 3/day. I did not track the apps where I used AI to submit them- the AI ones were definitely shotgun.
It’s not your fault, but it sounds like you and probably a lot of other people were misled about what having a degree actually does.
The most important thing someone looks at when you apply for a job is that you are interested in the thing and capable of doing it. The degree doesn’t really do that but the personal projects do. The degree might be a nice to have on top and helps to convince some people, but you always end up working with people without one anyway.
I’m not sure I was misled, what you said was explicitly taught to us at University. I think my degree is the #1 thing on my resume, but of course I also had projects, a few certificates, and multiple attempts at more specific fields.
Back when I was applying, my GitHub activity was pretty solid green.
It’s weird because everywhere I’ve ever worked routinely hires people who don’t even know how to make a commit, or anything at all really.
For some reason even those people are somehow jumping ahead of competent people like you in the queue. It’s also annoying for us because we have to deal with the bad ones that HR delivers.
Oh god someone that actually knows how to create an issue, do a PR, submit PR, them merge all in that order is a smaller amount of people then we care to admit. I’ve had to teach many many people over the years with coding experience how to use git… Or github like interface. Change management is hard when devs don’t know how to work in s team setting.
Well believe it gramps, most of the open source projects contributors now either just do content creation as a side hustle or are permanently looking for work, at least in my experience
“most” open source project contributors are looking for work? Lol ok bud
Yeah. Broken economy, broken world, etc etc. it’s like a bad dream that won’t end. IRL is the doomscroll now.
I don’t blame you, just be thankful you’re so out of touch you find it hard to believe.
Well to see it from the perspective from the inside: we always have hundreds of openings, and I’ve seen openings for months and years without suitable candidates. Sometimes lots of bad applicants and sometimes no applicants at all.
That’s for the niche openings. For regular graduate stuff new people start every single day.
It’s hard to match up that with the fact that some people apparently aren’t getting a single application progressed.
IDK about most. But, I’ve seen many OS contributors say they’re looking for work. Seen one recently saying he won’t be contributing much to the project anymore because he’s housing-insecure. Seen maintainers for popular projects get laid off and are now looking for work. Seen people with 10+ and 20+ years of experience not being able to find a job after many months.
the 2020-23 isnt exactly a time they were hiring at all, they froze for like 2 years. and students were barely learning at all since the classes were all online, and there was no way to find volunteering work. if you go back to look at your university reviews on yelp(yea they have it for universities) its pretty dismal out there.
he said he handcrafted alot of them, so it was pretty targeted.
I have twenty years experience and it took me 300+ applications to get my current job.
Times are changing.
No I have a spreadsheet with 3200 lines of submitted applications, which includes both entry level positions and internships. Many with customized cover letters.
When you do the math its not even a strong pace, only about 3/day over 3 years. On a good day I was submitting 12-15.
I even applied to some famous ones, like the time Microsoft opened up 30 entry level positions and received 100,000 applications in 24 hours. It is rumored thet they realized they cannot process 100k apps, so they threw them all away and hired internally.
Whether they actually threw them out or not, that one always sticks with me. Submitting 100k apps is literally a lifetime of human work. All of that wasted effort is a form of social murder in my opinion.
LMAO I THOUGHT YOU MEANT CODE APPLICATIONS. Like you developed 3000 apps. I was like no way…
I thought that at first too and I wasn’t gonna say anything but I was thinking to myself “bro is definitely writing some really shitty code”
It’s called an oversaturated market. And capitalist fucks replacing people with AI
I don’t think this is even the big effect we’ll be seeing from AI. think that’ll occur over the next 12-24 months, as LLM operationalization occurs and matures the implementations.
This.
At my jobs, AI is just scratching the surface. But they’re slowly implementing entire coding bot swarms, so a Product person can report a bug, it gets reviewed by an agent, assessed by an agent, fixed by an agent, and tested by another agent - then PR’d for a dev to review.
This hurts the junior level.
Hurts everyone except the very top
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech. Used to be full of other people like me and I really liked it. Now it’s full of people who are equally as enthused about it as they would be to become lawyers or doctors.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech.
I started my undergrad in the early 90’s, and ran into multiple students who had never even used a computer, but had heard from someone that there was a lot of money to be made in computers so they decided to make that their major.
Mind you, those students tended not to do terribly well and often changed major after the first two years — but this phenomenon certainly isn’t anything particularly new. Having been both a student and a University instructor (teaching primarily 3rd and 4th year Comp.Sci subjects) I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
By way of advice to any new or upcoming graduates who may be reading this from an old guy who has been around for a long time, used to be a University instructor, and is currently a development manager for a big software company — if you’re looking to get a leg-up on your competition while you look for work, start or contribute to an Open Source project that you are passionate about. Create software you love purely for the love of creating software.
It’s got my foot in the door for several jobs I’ve had — both directly (i.e.: “we want to use your software and are hiring you to help us integrate it as our expert”; IBM even once offered a re-badged version to their customers) and indirectly (one Director I worked under once told me the reason they hired me was because of my knowledge and passion talking about my OSS project). And now as a manager who has to do hiring myself it’s also something that I look for in candidates (mind you, I also look for people who use Linux at home — we use a LOT of Linux in our cloud environments, and one of my easiest filters is to take out candidates who show no curiosity or interest in software outside whatever came installed on their PC or what they had to work with at school).
My own experience (being probably around your age) is that “Software development being fashionable” and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.
I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as “a good career choice” as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).
Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn’t fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world’s, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn’t a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.
Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn’t that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don’t do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.
I think that what we’re seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people “at the coalface” are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI “coding” has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.
As for how you chose devs, I would say it’s really just anchored on the eternal rule that “toolmakers make much better devs than tool users” - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who “solve their own problems” and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.
I’m going to amend your timeline slightly, but only to note that Y2K masked what likely would have been a bit of a slump in the late 90s. Hiring around Y2K was crazy — but once the crisis date passed (with little fanfare due to the tremendous amount of work and money poured into remedying the issue), we definitely hit a slump as many of those extra hires weren’t really needed in a post-Y2K world.
…at least until we get to Y2K+38 in a few years. And maybe Y2K+40 two years after that 😛
I guess that anyone who managed to make the effort to join Lemmy is already on the right track.
If anyone is interested in APL programming send me your resume.
Looking for good software engineers; curious folks.
Hell. I’ll echo that but for senor operations types. Your who im looking for if you can function in 3+ different operating systems, understand (and can implement) dnssec, and design gitops workflows. Bonus points if you can explain SMTP to me.
Not directly related, but do you use an actual APL keyboard or use something with an APL input method, like emacs?
I actually do have apl printed Keycaps because they’re cool :D
Given enough time most people develop a memory. There are different methods of entry, separate layers, backtick input, other macros.
You can try it here https://tryapl.org/
They have some shortcuts in lieu of a full keymap.
APL, now thats something I havent heard about in a while.
Similar issues at work with COBOL. Sure I know it but im literally working to get everything out of it.
Oh that’s cool. That’s one of those languages I saw myself working in when I was younger - it’s a powerful language for mathematical stuff, and not terribly difficult.
Felt more like creating circuitry to do software stuff rather than programming.
It’s finally happening, tech jobs are suffering the same unemployment that the trades had been suffering for years if not decades, only this time around it’s probably self-inflicted by the AI bubble.
biotech is like this too, bio itself is such a saturated major in most uni, unless your going into health with good marks (you need grad school) , research side you likely wont find jobs if you arnt a good student going to grad school. biochem, o-chem, physics, gen chem, gen bio all will wreak havoc on your GPa.
AI hasn’t really taken much, if any tech jobs so far. If anything demand for building and using AI has taken up a good share of the job market in tech.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very, if any, few fresh graduates.
It’s short term thinking that’s going to fuck the industry in a generation when all the old school guys die or retire, the senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers move up to fill their roles and you don’t have enough Jr engineers to become the seniors, leads and managers. They’ll be trying to manage entire teams from overseas, trying to replace people with AI, which will never be a true replacement, and they’ll suddenly see the value in hiring new graduates, but there won’t be enough by then because they made the major useless. The few that exist will probably make bank straight out of school, though, as companies become desperate for them.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for “entry” level jobs because they simply won’t pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It’s also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the “grunt work”, for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they’ll get it done faster and more reliably. You’ll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very few, if any, fresh graduates.
Again that thing with union pressure and outsourcing, the latter exists because the former in practice doesn’t.
Everything would work better with unions. Unions-unions-unions.
Socialism was intended as a solution to a real problem. Some its parts turned out to be deadly poison, but that’s about those making immobile hierarchies and using force. Unions and associations and artels, - all these are a system of tools solving some problems, and the best part about them is that they are not hurting market mechanisms, just adding better response times and organization to their sides.
That’s what happens when everyone rushes to do the same qualification - you get too many people for that area of work. More graduates doesn’t magically make more jobs - it just makes more people applying for the same amount of jobs.
And most of them are shit at their jobs because they just do it for money. No care for the skill.
When you like your profession, your job you still do for money. Otherwise you’d be playing with similar things at home to much more satisfaction.
So here I won’t agree and say that tech needs unions. Union pressure would solve the problem of labor organization and on-job education, so that they wouldn’t be shit at their jobs.
Skill and such things are practically important for scientists, maybe.
Shades of dotcom days. Everyone hopped on the bandwagon. Most lured by the high salaries and gold-rush mentality. Nowadays, just having a CS degree isn’t enough. You want portfolio pieces to set you apart. Start by having a damn portfolio. You can set one up for free on GH Pages or CloudFlare. Or pay a few bucks and set one up on Wordpress. If you can’t figure out how, that CS degree was wasted.
You want stories that show you bring value. Show that you can build things beyond school projects. Even if you do school projects, document them and push them out. Show why they’re cool and what you can do. Throw up screenshots, diagrams, or animations. No walls of text.
Also, learn to sell yourself. Not in the oily LinkedIn way. Just be out there. Contribute back. Educate others and have a voice. Blog, newsletter, social media, book, or video channel. They’re dead-easy to set up and free so there’s no gatekeepers to go through, other than your ideas.
If in a big city, go to Meetups or demo days. Meet people and ASK WHAT THEY DO. Help connect them to others. Anyone just sitting there cranking out resumes is going to get filtered by the LLM screener. Might as well pin up your resume above the urinal at the pub.
Finally: everyone can low-code or vibecode. Those are table stakes now. You want to do better.
Yeah, no. Once I saw this kind of bullshit was needed for programming jobs I just pivoted to IT and cybersec.
These days the pay is just as good, and chances to find a job are even better, the environment is much lower pressure and this gross techbro exploited/exploiting attitude that somehow programming is special and not just a modern day 9-5 factory job is non-existent. With dev jobs, the goal posts are ever shifting. No I’m not doing a portfolio, no I’m not doing your “take home assessment”, no I’m not doing a live coding exercise for your £20k ass minimum wage job where “we measure work by effort, not time” and I’ll somehow end up on call. I love programming, but not enough to let myself get fucked by corpos every which way.
You do have to deal with corpo boomers though, but if you’re lucky they mostly realize they’re just cogs that got lost and they better not make too much noise or they’ll be let go.
I appreciate your perspective here. There is an element of whining and negativity among job-seekers lately. I’ve seen some people buckle down and hustle, and I’ve seen others give up in frustration. The truth of this is that there are going to be a lot of people who never even get to use their CS degrees, and there will be people who “win” and get jobs like this without one. It boils down to what you can do and whether or not a company in your area finds value in it.
It’s not fair. It’s just what we have to deal with.
I take it there are not going to be many autistic new devs in the coming decades over there, with such requirements.
As an undiagnosed autistic dev, I am starting to realize there are not many good non autistic devs. I wonder what is the reason.
In the 90s everyone was getting “web certified”
In the 90s “web” was about knowing FTP, HTTP and HTML. Should have stayed this way. Scripts in browsers were a mistake.
I blame social media and this perverse need to display notifications instantly. Technically very interesting problem to work on, but basically useless to a customer.
We had a button for that, on demand - it was called F5
I remember that those were used for games like Travian (displaying time and resources), dynamic content (like blasting music on a webpage) and web chat (that’s what I blame the most, because it was in demand).
Well, they didn’t do that, but I can imagine another “standard and convenient” way could have been taken to add realtime notifications to a webpage - a set of tags for displaying messages of an IRC channel, sending a message to an IRC channel, and so on, with maybe associating actions (going to an URL? or maybe updating part of DOM, but without full agility of JS, just add/remove/replace tag by id) with events. Like refreshing a page on a message in the channel, but no more frequent than N seconds.
Combined with iframes (I’ll admit I consider iframes a good thing, burn me at the stake), this could give you a pretty dynamic experience.
IRC is, of course, not secure, but maybe if such functionality were present and if it became popular, IRC over SSL would become normal earlier too.
Or maybe something like WS could have been standardized far earlier. For pushing events to client.
I agree about F5, but the effect of realtime changes was psychologically very strong.
Great advice. Also make a PR to an open source project, have some public discussion of trade offs you considered, and get it merged. That’s an awesome differentiator. I’ve seen thousands of developer resumes without this. It shows you can work effectively and productively on good code and with a team.
I’d love to hear your experience around this and what sector or jobs this assisted, because more data is great.
But in my experience across 25+ jobs ranging from startups to fortune 500/250/100…I have never encountered a hiring process that would care about this.
I would love to be proven wrong though.
We do look at GH history and activity - can’t say, out of about 50 candidates in the past two months that I reviewed, have any meaningful activity on GH.
Not saying I am proving you wrong, but finding a candidate that has anything to show publicly is hard. Hell, even I, having a very well paying job, have much to show off publicly. I can, however, share my personal stuff. I’ve got tons of opened issues tho 🤣
Where I am and due to its greater practicality, nursing is more popular as a college course than compsci.
I once started as compsci, but instead got a job fixing PCs. Also self-learned basic carpentry and plumbing. Looking at raising livestock in the near future.
Nursing is huuuuge. My nurse friend with a doctorate just landed a $250k base job with 10 weeks paid vacation and a slew of other benefits. Wild.
Plumbing is huge too. If I ever need one, they’re booked out like 3+ months unless you want to pay an emergency fee which is like double or triple.
I, too, am raising some livestock. We’ll see where it goes. But at least to me it feels more connected and real.
if people are willing to deal with patients, then maybe.
True. And blood. Frankly not sure I could handle either, so I’ll stick to my desk job
also patients excrement, fecal matter, urine.
HERE AS well, nursing is popular because you can make bank as a travelling NURSE, over being staffed a hospital. im guessing thats what a guy i met as aco-worker in retail once mentioned, i thought he was kidding at first.
only if you have the personality, and tolerates belligerent patients, or work with human waste products from time to time. i suspect the nursing shortages you hear, and the abuse is mostly from rural areas and red states that have a massive shortage of health professionals including MDs.
I lookd into CLS which is in line with my cmb degree, but its a very competitive for not being a grad degree program, its a grad certification require grad level clinical/lab classes, apparently universities in the usa that have the cls program is quite few, so they all try to come to the west coast, only 9 schools teach this program so you can see the competiveness of the program in the west coast. when indeed forum was around they had whole sections dedicated to cls.
I set my mind on comp sci like 6 years ago because it was said to be one of the most in demand fields (maybe still is) and pays well (I was looking at SWE). Nowadays I have set my mind on a job that involves me working away in a server room. Hopefully that pans out.
3-5 years ago my answer would’ve been different. I could trip and find a job offer. I was getting job offers by email essentially without interviewing.
About a year ago that completely dried up. I can’t even remember the last email I got that was more than recruiter spam. My friend who used to also trip into jobs (7 at peak) has been hunting for 3 months now with no luck.
But…servers and data centers and stuff, you’re probably onto something. Wishing you the best.
I’ve been looking t fulltime for a long time now, and from what I’ve seen there are a tonne of jobs out there, it’s just that are that many more qualified devs than their were just a few years ago.
The way I see it, the hiring bubble that exploded during the pandemic let a lot of people gain proficiency, then followed by the waves of layoffs and you’ve got a lot of talented folks looking.
I wanted to become a dev 12 years ago, when it was still cool.
Needless to say that I haven’t, even if doctors I talked to refused to diagnose me with ADHD, my ASD and BAD and anxiety from many things kinda make it not a very good direction.
So - now I could probably become a dev, with the experience gained. But it’s really not the time when this is a good choice LOL.
Have you seen a psychiatrist or were you talking to a GP? I got diagnosed with ADHD 3 different times in a 15 year period without a problem. Only stuck with the meds the last time about 4 years ago, and it was a game changer.
The fairness meter at the bottom of the article is absurd. “Unfair left leaning” like yes, how dare the libtards use statistics to show how broken our economy is
Brave goggles has a similar concept. Search “vaccines” with “from the right”, get a bunch of disinformation antivaxxer crap.
Just call it what it is: “Unfair truth leaning”, “Unfair fake leaning”.
“Bullshit Discriminatory” and “Bullshit Tolerant”
If you are speaking of the needle position on the dial thingy, I believe it’s just the default until you vote, not meant to indicate anything (though it’s misleading). You have to vote to see actual results.
Ah, ok. What a strange default. Almost makes me think they chose that as the default to be rage bait
There’s no real entity auditing it so it could be the site itself fishing for a reaction. Kinda like reddit votes nowadays ;).
