All Principal/Staff positions or laptop repair.

Canada's latest economic report had a net positive of only 100 jobs in the entirety of the labor market.

There's only so much Maple syrup to harvest!

With a massive growth of people.

Isn't Canada still hiring loads of Filipino nurses, physical therapists, and caregivers?

I don't know why Filipino would be a necessary qualifier, even if that's been a pretty common demographic, but yes there's a lot of health care stuff still.

How many of those 100K unfilled jobs are real?

Way closer to 0 than to 100k

> So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.

Were it not for December hiring (which is usually pretty low in most years, but was the highest for any month last year according to the data) it would've been negative. That could mean that things are improving in the tech job market - have to see if the trend continues into January, February this year.

> Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job.

Gotta love capitalism. CEO sees some shiny new thing and all the sudden some poor shlub's entire livelihood is fucked.

I am realising that this is what taxes pays for in Denmark. I have a masters in computer science (5 year, postgraduate + thesis, Aarhus University which is top 100 and even higher for PL + semantics, which is my thesis subject) that I received tuition free and I am continuing with a professional degree in business at a reasonable tuition at 10k USD for the entire degree.

It appears like continual learning should be a tax as it is non-negotiable for people living in a modern world. Just like roads, hospitals, military, etc.

(Maybe it is just my European midnset that speaks here)

it depends what skills you're talking about. when i see people complaining about always having to learn new things, it's related to new libraries, frameworks, technologies (e.g. now i have to learn graphql, now i have to learn to make things cloud-native, now i have to learn go because it's cooler than java).

this stuff in my experience is either taught badly or not at all in universities, and i don't even mind that. the institution can stick to fundamentals applicable across the given hot tech on any day

personally i don't agree with the sentiment. constant learning is something i love about the industry. for one it's interesting, but it also means there are always opportunities to prove yourself by being interested in learning

None of its "new", its simply repackaged and slightly different, not really any better. Its just constant churn of frameworks, languages, and libraries.

That would be OK if they actually let you learn while doing, which is my preferred way of learning. But they ask you to give ironclad estimates for how long it's going to take to implement <insert completely unclear requirement in one sentence> in <technology nobody has heard of so far>.

They can go do whatever they want to themselves. Either tell me what cool new tech you want me to try out and what problems we might want to solve soonish and I'll see which of those and how it might be applicable to or you tell me you want to build <whatever it is> in whatever tech I think will get me there best and fastest. If you know so much, do it yourself. Oh you can't? Well then STFU (not you you but that proverbial manager type above you that seems to know so much)

I don't necessarily think it needs to be government run. The best schools in America are private. Ironically government support (the federal student loan system) is imo largely responsible for crazy high tuition in the U.S.

Maybe there is just less demand in Denmark? But I feel like demand surged here, and with easy access to capital it drove prices to absurd levels.

The last part is the biggest factor. When all the easy, soft VC capital dried up, so did the jaw-dropping salaries.

Direct education funding has been going down though.

This is and interesting, and very American, point of view.

In Europe all countries have tuition free universities, in Denmark people even get a government stipend of ~1000 USD/month by the government. And yet, there is availability on most programmes (like computer science)

It seems like the market powers do not apply for American universities? When tuition (demand) surges, it should be profitable to expand supply (new unis, added seats on programmes, hire more staff).

Regardless, the supply seems quite inflexible?

Though it is convenient to blame the government for supporting the ones most in need (young people starting their careers) it seems to be more appropriate to blame structural issues that inhibit the creation of supply – which is also very anti-American.

>In Europe all countries have tuition free universities

The UK doesn't (and didn't before Brexit either).

Sorry my statement should have been moderated: "In EU most countries have institutions with insignificant tuition costs"

Classic American mentality. "If we don't have it here, it can't work anywhere else."

Pour one out for the buggy whip manufacturers . . .

slap ~~crypto~~ generative AI on it

It's 700 net, but that's generally how numbers are reported. When we get the national BLS numbers of "178,000 jobs created in October" that number is always net. In reality, most months you'll see a few million jobs created and a few million terminated.

Yeah but over 100,000 people graduate in CS/IT per year. 700 net jobs is rough. (I should know - several of those graduates are old friends of mine who struggled massively to find jobs.)

How many retire/quit/die each year

Relatively young industry, the population pyramid of workers would have more people at the bottom. So gaining only 700 jobs isn’t that fun. That being said, I feel bad for newgrads, since it feels like nobody wants to train them anymore. Any job posting I’ve seen is mostly 2-3 year minimum experience at a professional level.

I have genuinely never seen an in-house training program in the software industry. Maybe some bullshit industry certs that amount to a single exam. But nothing like an apprenticeship style program where over a year you are taught and mentored.

Even university doesn't teach you how to work in the industry. It's a very DIY career, we should probably change that.

Training in CS is giving some new-grad a job, instead of not. Plenty of companies hire senior-only.

I agree we should be doing at least that. But we could do better too. Apprenticeships are a much better transfer of practical knowledge than university, and has been a concept in use for centuries.

There was a tech company in the UK who was doing it (irritatingly, I can't remember their name atm) with Oxford and Cambridge humanities grads. Just googled it and couldn't find it. If anybody remembers what I'm talking about, please reply below because now it's bugging me.

Lots of UK companies do it - google Software Engineer Apprenticeships. Vodafone, BAE, Softwire, BT, Rolls-Royce, the BBC, HMRC, tonnes do.

At my previous company there was an in-house training, where the first three months were dedicated to the training of a new employee. The training consisted of both the tech stack and the development and business processes used by the company.

As a result everyone knew how things worked and everyone by far exceeded the minimum level of knowledge needed to meaningfully contribute. It was a great department to work in and I miss it still.

Sadly, the company had that insane policy of only 3-4% annual raise irregardless of performance, so most people, including me, would leave after a few years.

Think of internship programs, streamlined hiring of new grads and etc. My previous companies had both, now I don’t see that on their website. Obviously not a real statistic, but a bit disheartening.

No one wanted to hire new grads when I first started working in 2000... Except startups. And it was very slim pickings until you had 3 years under your belt. This isn't a new phenomenon.

Well, that would mean we’re just rolling back to 2000s era? I did finish a pretty decent university to be fair, but had options right after grad even in mid-sized companies. So did my peers.

I’m not sure that’s changed at all. I graduated in 93 and I remember having conversations with friends where we complained that all the jobs seemed to expect 2-3 years experience.

Or become unhireable because of age discrimination

Not enough, obviously

not enough for what? you'd have to show numbers of either unemployed new grads or retiring tech folks over the last few years to be able to say anything at all.

Probably more relevant is how many over 40 give up coding because they're bored and/or employers dont want them any more. (I'm over 50 and finding it much harder to get piad compared to when I was younger despite kids moved out and I have lots of time to dedicate to working)

Ageism is one of the bad things about our industry. It's the last accepted form of discrimination. The irony is that when you're young and starting a family, you feel guilty about working crazy hours because you're not spending time with your wife and kids. Then when the nest is empty you've got plenty of free time to work hard and even learn some new things, languages, frameworks, &c. but at that point a lot of closed-minded companies think you're too old for software development.

not to nit pick but there are still many accepted forms of discrimination after ageism.

My sample set is definitely biased. I see plenty of very conservative (doesn't want to learn, will only work in one technology) junior engineers, folks who are going to stall out. For senior folks I don't see many. This could be because older folks have jobs or are self filtering to the tech they like or maybe their resumes don't make it to my desktop. Of the folks I can recall that were going for a jr position with many years of experience had some pretty obvious personality issues. Everyone else I interview that's been in industry over 12 years is trying for Lead/Staff/PE. I'd definitely want to know why someone with 20+ years of experience in development is applying for a SDE2 job.

"Just needs a job" and "moved into software" are good reasons. But I'd be really worried about "just needs a job" person getting mad/frustrated if they were that experienced and banging heads with manages that didn't know how to leverage their skills.

When I was younger (~2005) I worked as a peer with one of the dads of a kid who was one year older than me in highschool. He actually became a good friend and mentor. I also worked with a guy who had been a CTO of a 500 person dev shop for years and went back to being a dev. He relished not making decisions or dealing with politics. They were both great mentors. It was a 2 way mentorship as I had a bit more core CS than they did and was more willing to experiment on new tech. They were great with doing whatever they needed to to get the job done. And they'd been in many techs stacks, that helped me break my single language bias and my "not my job" quickly.

I think these days my bias would come from everyone I work with that's older is also quite senior, level wise. On the engineering side they're people who are also constantly trying new things and really leveraging their experience. They're all very introspective. You can call into question pretty much anything with them and you'll get a good discussion.

Companies I've worked with definitely expect engineers to at least reach the lead position for the most part. Up or out in some ways. But the megaco I worked at definitely has really solid non-lead, non-entry-level engineers who have been there forever, esp in critical systems, ignoring their up-or-out guidelines. The main risk there was a new manager being biased and just assuming a 15 year tenure L5 engineer should be managed out. As a contradicting factor there was general consensus anyone over 10 years "really knows some shit" as the default assumption.

Thanks, this is a really valuable answer and makes sense to me. The only follow-up I would have would be if that dev with 10-20 years of experience applying for SDE2 did tell you in an interview that they didn't want to move "up or out" and their goal was to be a productive dev for as long as possible instead of applying internally for management roles, would you accept that answer?

So lead (3) isn't manager...

I'm in one of those systems where after lead you have staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier. You never have to be a manager in those. In that style system you can stop at lead (L1/L2/L3 lead/PE/sr PE/de). At those you can stop at L3. It would be very hard to explicitly stop at L2 there. You would have to opt out of hiring, peer reviews, and doing architecture and just do assigned tasks on jira.

We had one engineer who wanted this, they had a ton of stock and we're kinda set, had been there forever. Their super power was ops. You just let em go at a system and it just becomes more and more stable and better documented quietly over time. They had a manager explicitly protecting them that they didn't really grok was happening. They actually left after moving to a new product team and the new manager kept trying to uplevel them. But again they basically just retired at that point.

For me I always worry about people who just do what others tell them. I need feedback and have had projects go sideways when I didn't get it. "Wait you realized 3 months ago this wasn't going to work and you didn't mention it?" "Your the boss/lead I do what you say".

Another way to say it is I think small team lead is the minimum viable dev in places I've worked. That doesn't mean you cant step into a support role and rotate who's lead or work as a team but you need to be capable of doing it.

"staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier"

wow people do love their titles )))

There are definitely many more forms of discrimination. Think about neurodiverse people, e.g. with autism. Reardless of skill, knowledge, degree, age etc. it may be much harder to acquire a job for social reasons.

This feels like the dot-com bust. The job market sucked around 2000/2001.

One of the stranger victory laps I've ever seen

> So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.

^ This guy reads.

Oof, tough crowd.

I wonder how many “unfilled” roles are ghost jobs. I keep seeing the same roles re-posted or just never filled.

I'm an unemployed staff/sr level software engineer who's been unemployed for 4 months. The only interview I got in the past 3 months was due to an internal referral. I'm seeing a lot of similar re-posts.

Basically my story, but with a longer timescale.

I was getting rejected from jobs that seemed a perfect fit for my resume. End up getting a job I wasn’t qualified for on paper via referral.

And some of those jobs that rejected me are still reposting the same damn job monthly.

"Skill mismatch" could also mean experience mismatch. I would imagine a mismatch is more often about a company wanting someone with 10 years experience in a particular domaine than about a Java developer needing to learn python.

You can't take an online course or build a couple side projects and be qualified to run a 1M+ qps distributed system.

it can also be a sign of company looking for graduates to hire for cheap, so they're looking for inexperienced only.

Yes, this "statistic" makes no sense. No fucking way was there a net addition of jobs.