You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.

    You will have to interview for jobs where you will use a language you despise. Maybe even Java. Definitely Javascript.

    You might need to commute to the office again. Perhaps every day!

Commuting though, oh no...

I met someone who was a "systems engineer" at a job orientation about a year ago. I thought that they did lower level programming or something, apparently they didn't know how to program at all

Companies love having more dev's they just dont like paying them. In the tech underclass (admins,systems, ect)you keep your mouth shut if you know how to do more than your job unless you want more unpaid jobs. "Sorry that stuff goes way over my head... aww shucks wish I was smarter"

I wonder what percentage of those cut job posts were actually needed by the company versus being vanity job posts or a “we’re always looking for random superstars that may apply, but we don’t really need anyone right now” posts.

Obviously some slack has been removed from the market, but I don’t really get the sense that a lot of postings in the “hot hiring market” were serious about filling the position with a market clearing candidate (i.e., the quality of applicant that would work with that specific company at the offered salary).

There is no crunch right now if you have a degree and can program. Companies are tightening their belts and recruiters are not aggressively spamming you. This does not mean jobs aren't there. The only thing an environment like this changes for me is all extra expenses are cut hastily and I begin hoarding money.

Companies with infinite VC money are certainly slowing down hiring. FAANGs are slowing down hiring because they used PPP money to overhire and are now trimming down the fat. There are PLENTY of companies that fit in neither of these categories. The work may not be pretty, but it'll keep you fed and insured. I have friends in outsourcing jobs and they have have gone gangbusters the last two years. If there's one thing I fear it's not this alleged "slow down" it's that every job is slowly being filled by foreigners working for pennies on the dollar.

The article gets their data from Indeed. I do not use such a site, and I know of no one who uses such a site. I generally only take jobs through my network of friends I've made and only after that exhausts do I begin the process of asking recruiters whats up. I don't believe job-farm sites are a good proxy for actual industry jobs.

Do you have any evidence that any FAANGs took PPP money to overhire? I searched the PPP loan datasets (using fairly terrible online tools) and couldn't find any instances that would be aligned with your claim above. Did I miss some?

That’s not to say there isn’t value in having a degree, like every component of a resume, it’s part of someone’s story on how they got to now. When I am hiring for tech roles, I staunchly cut back almost all requirements, limiting entry level SWE roles to something so basic as “Comfortable working with (almost) any programming language.”

People can learn the basics of Python in a weekend, but even senior engineers take some non-trivial time to onboard to how a sufficiently complicated and interconnected system works, team works style and dynamics, and repo/project layout and organization.

I wish that was always the case, but not the way you initially read it. I WISH they wouldn't look at me if they cared that much.

I've had 4 interviews at places with "degree required" but been told to ignore it by the people recommending me. I explicitly state I don't have one in my resume, to the initial recruiter screen, and anyone else that will listen.

Only one of them actually mentioned it at the initial screen and said they were firm on it.

The rest of them have ended during negotiations, with someone in HR saying something like "oh you don't have a degree?" and all communication instantly being dropped.

Tech skillsets are in demand because there's a huge backlog of unfilled positions at non-tech companies (take a look at US DOL JOLTS reports for November). Non tech CEOS talk about talent shortages and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers. The tech worker shortage is really hitting the bottom line for many non-tech companies who can't bring product to market, can't complete integrations or can't keep up with business demands (the problems at Southwest Airlines are what happens when you understaf IT for an extended time). If the DOL's numbers can be believed, barring GPT-4 making tech workers obsolete, you are still in a market where even with layoffs, demand will remain high for skilled tech workers (and not just SWEs).

All businesses are becoming tech companies, or are dependent on tech and looking for talent to move them from on-prem to the cloud, looking for talent to integrate SaaS tools with their existing systems and in many cases, looking to launch new tech enabled products. Most companies hire slowly (my company makes software to fix that), and so yes, if you get laid off, the average company will take 43 days to go from "Hi" to "Offer", so expect it to take at least a few months or more... but the prospects of a .com era style labor market collapse are minimal because the labor market is actually shrinking while demand for workers is growing (US DOL says this will be the case until 2045).

This is the crux of the problem for many younger job seekers, is that they see "tech-first" / FAANG as the only career path.

But every Fortune 1,000 company today is fundamentally "tech-first". And it could be argued that "advertising-first" companies no longer offer the cutting edge tech opportunities of say, Financial Services or Transportation, who have all shifted to Cloud/GPS/AI in recent years.

A big problem is that most of these non-tech companies are offering far less pay for a much worse working environment, and then wondering why they can't hire people. Even if they could hire, the aren't structured to let software engineering be involved with the product closely enough to actually have a reasonable ROI on their investments. I live in a medium sized city in the Midwest, and anecdotally the medium and large non-tech companies here are capping out at compensation far below even the cash part of the offer you could get at many series A tech companies working remotely. I know more than a few people working at non-FAANG companies whose stock price have taken a beating in the last few years who still have a TC roughly 10x the absolute top of market for these non-tech companies. Even if they can get close on comp, they still tend to use outdated tech, offer very little individual autonomy, and be highly bureaucratic environments.

All in all, I think that if working for companies like this is the fallback position for software engineers right now, it would count as being a fairly dire situation for the job market whether or not there are theoretically jobs to be had.

In my experience, there has never been a shortage. Some legacy businesses have wildly out of touch expectations and a cargo cult mentality regarding tech.

In the end, they typically end up with contractors because they simply can't operate the culture shift requires to have good engineering (or get pushed out of the market by real tech companies).

> and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers

I assume by having California-style non-compete, top 5 universities and a world class VC ecosystem? Else what are they doing?

Labor stats don't agree. The reason technworker pay has soared is scarcity.

It's something of a catch-all term I think. When I had that title at an investment management firm many years ago I was mostly setting up external data feeds with bash and Perl to be loaded into a database and republished as datasets (in SAS) for consumption by portfolio managers and research so it did involve programming in that instance; probably closer to what a "Data Engineer" does today.

i don't understand why this term is so foreign as i literally all the time.

Did you work with a recruiter?