Tech Talent Is Flooding the Job Market(hbr.org)
hbr.org
Tech Talent Is Flooding the Job Market
https://hbr.org/2022/11/tech-talent-is-flooding-the-job-market
29 comments
The problem is downstream effects. If tons of employers pause hiring because they're hoping to get FAANG alumni for cheap, maybe because they read articles like this one, that will cause disruptions in the market. It may eventually work out but eventually can be a long time to people who really need a job.
Pieces like this are trying to accomplish just that.
It's the whole "people think there's gonna be a recession, which causes a recession" thing all over again.
Although in this case tech talent is still a supply issue in the US. I don't think 10k (albeit exceptional) software engineers on the market will sway it when there are 4 million positions in total, and the market grew by 100k in the past year alone. Just my 2c.
It's the whole "people think there's gonna be a recession, which causes a recession" thing all over again.
Although in this case tech talent is still a supply issue in the US. I don't think 10k (albeit exceptional) software engineers on the market will sway it when there are 4 million positions in total, and the market grew by 100k in the past year alone. Just my 2c.
A mental model for disaster here is tenure-track hiring in academia. Almost every school down to your least prestigious 4-year state university hires its faculty from the same top 50 or so places. All the graduates from the thousands of other schools have to leave academia or work as adjuncts or postdocs. It's possible that these layoffs are the equivalent of releasing all of the graduates from the top schools into the market, locking everyone else out or pushing them into lower tiers of jobs.
The questions I suppose are whether there are enough jobs to absorb the newly laid off workers with minimal disruption and whether mechanisms exist to move the workers into those jobs. Your 4 million includes irrelevant positions like IT help desk at a doctor's office in Omaha, which would be a bad match on both sides and even if it weren't would be hugely disruptive to the employee and others.
The questions I suppose are whether there are enough jobs to absorb the newly laid off workers with minimal disruption and whether mechanisms exist to move the workers into those jobs. Your 4 million includes irrelevant positions like IT help desk at a doctor's office in Omaha, which would be a bad match on both sides and even if it weren't would be hugely disruptive to the employee and others.
No data to back up the headline? Anecdotally, sure there are a lot of layoffs, but what percentage of the total tech workforce is it? And how does the number of laid-off people compare to the number of existing open positions for devs?
According to this[1], there are 3.85mm tech jobs and 193,900 jobs added this year, so overall the industry grew. It reminds me of the people expecting house prices to fall 30% because interest rates went up a little -- there is still a ton of demand compared to the slightly increased supply on the market, so prices won't shift that much.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3542681/how-many-jobs-...
According to this[1], there are 3.85mm tech jobs and 193,900 jobs added this year, so overall the industry grew. It reminds me of the people expecting house prices to fall 30% because interest rates went up a little -- there is still a ton of demand compared to the slightly increased supply on the market, so prices won't shift that much.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3542681/how-many-jobs-...
For moral reasons, I don't want to hire someone who worked at Facebook. For business reasons, I don't want to hire someone who was one of the worst performers at Facebook.
I expect many of these candidates will be laughed out of the room during the negotiating stage for asking for $300k total comp. The good times are over!
I expect many of these candidates will be laughed out of the room during the negotiating stage for asking for $300k total comp. The good times are over!
That's a two way street. I equally wouldn't want to work with someone who makes sweeping generalizations.
> For moral reasons, I don't want to hire someone who worked at Facebook.
That's quite a hostile and closed minded take, but an understandable cope for someone who could never hire a FAANG engineer in the first place.
> For moral reasons, I don't want to hire someone who worked at Facebook.
That's quite a hostile and closed minded take, but an understandable cope for someone who could never hire a FAANG engineer in the first place.
Agree. Sounds like a very biased hiring manager. And they seem to have fantasies about laughing prospective employees out of the room. Doesn't sound like a great place to work - doubt anybody good would be interested to work there in the first place.
Of course it's biased, that's the point: to be biased against people who worked at Facebook.
>I don't want to hire someone who was one of the worst performers at Facebook.
I get what you are saying, but the worst performer at Facebook is most likely going to be a MUCH better engineer/programmer than a mid-level or low-level technician at YOUR company. Maybe it is true that they don't measure up any more at Facebook, but they might not measure up by 1 or 2% so they got cut. But that is still WAY better than anyone at someone else's company. The workers that get cut are the "A-" GPA employees. The ones with a 4.0 stay.
What is going to happen is that the high-end "A-" employees at the "A" companies are pushed down to the "B" level companies, and the "B" level employees will now be pushed down to "C" level companies. And the "C" level people are going to be pushed out the door. The lowest level workers are going to have the toughest time overall and especially "C" level new hires most of all.
As the saying goes, shit flows downhill, and "C" level employees and new hires are always at the bottom of the totem pole.
I get what you are saying, but the worst performer at Facebook is most likely going to be a MUCH better engineer/programmer than a mid-level or low-level technician at YOUR company. Maybe it is true that they don't measure up any more at Facebook, but they might not measure up by 1 or 2% so they got cut. But that is still WAY better than anyone at someone else's company. The workers that get cut are the "A-" GPA employees. The ones with a 4.0 stay.
What is going to happen is that the high-end "A-" employees at the "A" companies are pushed down to the "B" level companies, and the "B" level employees will now be pushed down to "C" level companies. And the "C" level people are going to be pushed out the door. The lowest level workers are going to have the toughest time overall and especially "C" level new hires most of all.
As the saying goes, shit flows downhill, and "C" level employees and new hires are always at the bottom of the totem pole.
lol people will be lining up to offer them jobs so I think they'll be just fine
I’m not sure why you’re celebrating that high paying jobs for workers are over.
Because they never really existed in the first place, except for at a few major corporations that basically monopolized the labor market and forced a choice between morality or high pay.
Meanwhile, the workers who took those jobs deluded themselves into thinking they deserved those salaries based purely on merit, and that their salary would keep increasing throughout their career.
Meanwhile, the workers who took those jobs deluded themselves into thinking they deserved those salaries based purely on merit, and that their salary would keep increasing throughout their career.
This statement is patently false. Go look at the top paying companies on Levels.fyi for the last 2-3 years. A good portion are not major corporations but rather VC-backed startups. For a while there, Roblox and Robinhood were the ones offering insane compensations and much of FAANG (expecially AA, excluding N) were falling behind.
This also says nothing of the (what I would consider) tier 2/3 companies still offering over $300k TC for senior (5+ yr experience) technical talent. There are _even more_ more well-funded, semi-unicorn startups offering base salary $200k+ plus equity in their startups. In my last job search alone I found 3 of these companies which you've probably never heard of.
The competition for _technical_ talent is fierce.
This also says nothing of the (what I would consider) tier 2/3 companies still offering over $300k TC for senior (5+ yr experience) technical talent. There are _even more_ more well-funded, semi-unicorn startups offering base salary $200k+ plus equity in their startups. In my last job search alone I found 3 of these companies which you've probably never heard of.
The competition for _technical_ talent is fierce.
My own experience is that employers are picky. See my recent discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33596779. Lots of divergent experiences there but the general consensus seemed to be that the market is great for talent with a strong network or relevant domain knowledge. Unfortunately for the people recently laid off from FAANG, they're competing with people with the same network and domain knowledge. There's also the question of whether VC investment will remain strong when the big companies are laying people off.
The biggest corporations in America that hired millions of people? You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Software engineers looking for a job should consider the chip industry, which is not just about hardware engineers. Plenty of software engineer openings https://semiengineering.com/jobs/ and many are remote
Are you speaking from experience? Almost all of the jobs at the page you linked are either not in the U.S. or require hardware education or experience. Most are not remote. Could you please describe the actual steps and timeline for, say, a frontend or backend web developer without an engineering degree to transition into one of those jobs?
Do you have strong CS fundamentals (generally acquired through university education) ? Because that stuff really matters if you want to work on stuff related to hardware
Most of the listings require past experience with hardware stuff, not just CS fundamentals. I'm seeing very little interest in hiring someone like an experienced React developer who just got laid off from FAANG. There's a big difference between being theoretically capable of doing a job, and having any reasonable chance of getting hired for that job.
eh if you were a senior at FB people will give you the benefit of the doubt in a lot of cases. If you're interested you should apply
why did you say CS fundamentals when it's clear that it should be computer architecture and instruction sets and compiler engineering, which are a very narrow and specific parts of CS and in fact are never the parts that people refer to (DS & algo) when they say CS fundamentals.
They're pretty closely tied together. If you have a strong background in algorithms you should be able to understand ISA's and compilers more easily. In the end its just algorithms all the way down
Software engineering in the chip industry always seemed like a completely and totally different thing to me. Knowledge of physics and nanoscale architecture and calculus and all kinds of stuff that I don't need to know just to create an online form on my webiste for people to fill out.
I don't know, maybe I have the wrong view, but it always seemed like that to me. I just do business software development because all it has is addition, subtraction, division, and muliplication, and percentages every once in a while. No way could I create a program for a hardcore physics app. Because you have to know physics. To some extent, anyways. Anything more than basic math, forget it. And I think most people at organizations like facebook, netflix, etc are more like me. Maybe I'm wrong, but that would be my bet.
I don't know, maybe I have the wrong view, but it always seemed like that to me. I just do business software development because all it has is addition, subtraction, division, and muliplication, and percentages every once in a while. No way could I create a program for a hardcore physics app. Because you have to know physics. To some extent, anyways. Anything more than basic math, forget it. And I think most people at organizations like facebook, netflix, etc are more like me. Maybe I'm wrong, but that would be my bet.
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Seems like some companies are hoping to get great talent on the cheap (and pieces like this are trying to fan the flame of reduced employee costs), but I don't believe most of these layoffs affected large numbers of software engineers.
Would love for some numbers regarding this, but until I see stats on number of now-available software engineers I don't see any reason to believe this piece.