In addition to the (real, but somewhat overblown) downturn in tech, the main problem is that hiring is fucked. Both sides are in a scam/fraud arms race.
Getting a job through the front door is basically impossible now - and if you want to try, you will need to lie and do all the dirty tricks your competition does, and even then, your conversion rate will be minuscule.
An alternative is either to go through your network (where people you know can vouch that you are real and not just a monkey slinging ChatGPT'd resumes from a boiler room) or in-person (which is immune to a lot of the boiler-room scams and thus you have more chance your application will actually be considered).
Lol… “technology will save the planet”
Maybe what we needed was a classical and humanities education all along so that people would not abuse available technologies to their worst possible end because more people might have been aware of the outcomes of such behaviour. C’est la vie. Fires have a warm glow, at least.
it's not to late to change education and teach people how to be compassionate and care for others and the world. that's really the most important change. everything else (including fixing climate change) will follow.
I agree. But as I get older, I wonder if the will exists or can yet exist. I’ve seen pockets, at a distance.
And the horror movie moral trope of trauma unaddressed or unidentified begets trauma is all too true, and even if the will exists outside of those pockets the people can be ill equipped to deliver that education without help.
And any effort to install some kind of help is regularly short-circuited by various measures—intentionally or otherwise.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply hopelessness. I mean, I still pull myself in here to comment. But it is the reality for some.
Not my experience (did job hunt a couple of months back).
Standards are quite high, and the economy obviously isn’t great, but it’s not as bad as that.
I have found signal to noise on LinkedIn to be quite bad now but that’s specific to that site IME.
> Not my experience (did job hunt a couple of months back).
Do you think your network and/or having high in-demand skills might have something to do with that?
Wasn’t network. Skillset definitely but it’s nothing niche - typescript, node, react and some relevant domain experience.
"high in-demand skills might have something to do with that?"
Isn't this always the case? If a skill is not in-demand, why would you get paid a good salary for it?
I'm glad you had a relatively good experience but for many mid "average" software engineers, this is absolutely the case.
And by "average" I mean:
- did not go to prestigious college
- do not have 8 years of specialized experience
- have not worked at faang level company
- struggle to do multiple leetcode hards in an interview
- are not cheating with ai tools and/or straight up lying about experience
i can, with full confidence, tell you that the reports of these developers sending out hundreds (if not thousands) of applications without any progress is absolutely the norm at this moment.
You don't need to believe me, just look at the data. There's been hundreds of thousands of software developers laid off in the past years and not enough job openings to make up for it.