Comment by rhinoceraptor 3 days ago
From my experience, it's grim at the moment for software developer jobs. I got laid off in August and it's been rough. I'm in my early 30s so I can't compare it to 2008, but I've been laid off before and I've never seen it this bad.
I gotta tell you man, if you can find someone in charge at the backend of the Home Depot and let them hire you as a systems uptime troubleshooter you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.
I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke
I've worked with a vendor listing products in their IDM (Item Data Management) System. IIRC, it's from https://www.stibosystems.com/ . From a SMB vendor supplying one type of product it's frustrating to work with, with a lot of back and forth and workflows for verifying all manner of compliance with data quality, global regulations, and laws. From their internal perspective, it's probably the bee's knees, supporting a wide variety of taxonomies, considering the variety of products they sell & support, some rather dangerous and hazardous.
From looking over the shoulders of the staff, some aspects of the system that I've seen as a supplier are directly visible to them too.
>you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.
>I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week
And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".
I am at 10 different supply stores too, Lowes, Ashby, Truitt and I get a shit ton of stuff delivered.
Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.
I think it's still a mostly correct conclusion. Pretty much everywhere you look across services, they've been cooked to their bones. Have you noticed that supermarkets seem to have, like, 1/5th the employees they did before? Since when is 1 open lane on a Saturday night and a 30 minute wait acceptable?
Well, since we've accepted it. Everything kind of sucks and barely works, but it doesn't matter, because we ultimately put up with it.
~~~Problems on purpose because they don't spend the time to fix it IE not going to hire anyone to fix shit because they still make billions this broken way~~~~
I wonder if it has anything to do with all of the 10-200% taxes we've levied on random things.
By "200% tax" surely you're talking about the fact that my boss just paid (as he was compelled by law to) a licensed plumber a 3-digit sum to tee the coffee machine into the water line for the fridge ice maker...
Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992.
Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”
The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.
Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.
Offshoring affects the pipeline. That means once people leave the workforce or get promoted there are no locals who’ve the acumen to take over as those roles are overseas. Now you have to hire them H1Bs because you don’t have locals with the requisite experience. Of course managers wonder why there aren’t Americans with experience to fill those roles …
Construction, trades, and basically physical-world stuff that AI cannot do are still hiring.
People will roll out the trades whenever employment is mentioned, but do you have tradies in your family? Do you have friends who are tradies? It's not easy to get in, it takes a long time to make journeyman, and work can have seriously spotty periods no matter who you are. Fact of the matter is, it's not really an alternative to anything except other types of bluecollar work.
It's easy to get a foot in the door to any of the trades but you're gonna slog out 5+yr of doing "bitch work" before you even have a chance to make real money because that's the nature of the licensing systems that these trades have that are enshrined by various degrees of law.
About the same amount of time most people spend in college and at least you're making a little money.
Like anything, it's important to spend time networking and building a reputation for doing high quality work. This gets noticed as it does in any job and will get you better opportunities and better customers.
Trades have a higher percentage of people at the bottom tiers who have trouble showing up for work on time and sober. Avoid being associated with that and you can rise fairly quickly.
The problem is, for construction, trades and what remains of agriculture the competition is brutal. It's a low-skill job in terms of prior required education which means there is a looooot of people without degrees flooding into that market already, and then comes immigration that's further driving the wages down because (again) it's work that doesn't require much education or language skills.
I've done a stint in construction (I think y'all call it "civil engineering", aka digging trenches and moving soil) myself, it was rare to find Germans - most of my colleagues came from Eastern Europe.
Believe it or not, I've been in construction/remodeling for 35 years. We currently have 3 home remodels going on at the moment with more down the road. I've never experienced a slow down. Even during COVID.
I'm not your typical HN member I don't think. I've been a computer nerd since I was 14 years old. I come here to stimulate my inner nerd.
> I've never experienced a slow down
You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?
How did you get into construction/remodeling, and how would someone best reach out to this community? I have been thinking about some construction related ideas (mostly around prefab automation and sales) and haven't the slightest idea how to reach these types of people.
I am always curious about people who are strongly oriented towards one thing (computing) but somehow wind up in another area, such as construction.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I worked part time for my neighbor who was a master electrician. I learned the basics with him. My parents divorced when I was 17 and we were forced to move away. My mother was an assistant manager at the apartments we lived at. I turned 18 and just so happened the complex she worked at was hiring someone to do make readies, (painting and repairs on vacant units before new move-ins).
The management company my mother and I worked for sent me to various classes over the next several years (electrical, plumbing, HVAC and pool maintenance) and my supervisor was an old HVAC tech. I learned a ton from him. By the time I was 22 or so, I was promoted to maintenance director.
I got bored with apartments and wanted more. I started doing side work and met a lady that owned lots of rental property. That opened doors and she introduced me to other investors. Eventually, I was able to leave the apartment industry and do my own thing. It just kind of blew up from there.
As far as your construction related ideas, just put yourself out there. Meet people in the industry. Go to local industry related events. See if the city you live in has real estate investor clubs. DFW has a few and it's a great opportunity to meet people. This is also a great way to pick up work. Rent houses are always needing things repaired or replaced.
I know Mueller metal buildings is always looking for sales people. They were even looking for an IT person not too long ago too. In the rural area of Texas I'm in, we finish out lots of them and seem to becoming more and more popular in recent years.
I'd posit a potential reason that these fields are currently hiring is a combination of that it destroys your body without recourse and many of these positions require certifications that take a long time to achieve (either through apprenticeships or training programs). You will also generally not get any kind of meaningful benefits from these jobs, and your body will disintigreate before your very eyes as you work yourself to bone for a pittance. The compensation for these roles is poor in comparison to white collar work despite the perceived demand for them, there is no safety net in many cases (401k, pension, reasonable health insurance, etc. outside of union shops, which are rare outside of say welders and pipefitters (and getting rarer every day!)).
And frankly the work is miserable. I've crawled through suspended ductwork to run conduit and wiring in antifreeze recycling plants that were filled with god-knows-what reagents covering everything in dust thick enough to paint a clown. PPE be damned, my skin burned for days. It was hot, loud, cramped, wet with chemicals, uncomfortable, dangerous, and unpleasant. These jobsites are the bread and butter of blue collar anything; awful and dangerous conditions outside of your control, but required by your contract because not doing it means not getting paid.
Sure, an agent isn't going to be replacing the poor bastard who has to do that, but is our only response the the deliberate and systematic murder of the white collar job market "you can suffer for less money so you'll be fine"? That's a pathetic whimpering way to just accept the very loud and public murder of class mobility.
> there is no safety net in many cases (401k, pension, reasonable health insurance, etc. outside of union shops
Residential construction is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It is trades equivalent of webdev monkeys flinging javascript poo at the web. You get benefits by not sucking and getting out of residential and into something else.
I became a USPS mail carrier instead.
Certainly less pay but I love being outside and walking.
And no Jira, changing the color of that button, or steeping myself in Frank’s eldritch horror code.
>No Jira
If I was trying to attract intelligent applicants looking for work outside of software engineering, that would be in the headline.
Besides like trello asana redmine or the millions of less-complicated competitors? You literally have developers work on their own modules directly from the spec or work directly with the product owner. You track their work by looking at their commits. You check their progress by looking at how the preview build / staging looks. No overhead of having developers flesh out an entire issue/story (plus sub-issues) and then move it column-to-column across the entire Kanban board. Tracking sub-issues is like counting half-pennies instead of rounding up.
What about also excluding "Scrum Masters" and then "Fibonacci Numbers" and two week "sprints"?
Just dropping by to say how much I passionately hate documentation that uses fib() as an example.
Tried that here in EU - no chance so far: Even things I could do easily like office administration/management or whatever projectmanagement - no luck.
It’s a 1 hour application online.
Fingerprints, background checks, references, and drug testing.
It’s the CIA. But good benefits.
I would definitely try this if the vehicles in Phoenix ran cleaner. The old ones have such bad smelling exhaust and you are always breathing it because of the semi-open cab.
My wife and I have a running joke about her giving up accounting and working for USPS instead. Some days I think she’s serious.
It's funny how everyone wants to get into deliveries as they get older, my dad who's been an engineer for decades talks about it a lot. Something about walking around and doing things really appeals to people as they reach the end of their engineering career
You'll have to give some context. What did hella mean? How many months of your current spend rate do you have in the bank?
First off, the pay for a tenured mail carrier is plenty for me, and I feel like I have a full life.
I take martial arts classes, yoga classes, have nice apartment, eat what I want, have a decent car, etc.
I really don’t want anything, except ridiculous things no one can afford, like sure I’d be up for buying a Cathedral and converting it to a $20m house.
——
Liquid 3 years (savings plus liquid investments). 2 years in IRA. Set to inherit somewhere between 20-40 years worth.
I just have to work to make ends meet, let my investments mature, and eventually inherit.
It feels weird because I love my parents, but it’s something to plan around nonetheless.
I continue a tech career making 200k+ a year and you try to sell me making 100k or less probably for the next 20 years as a win? Nah I love money to much and hella money is like 10m+ where I would chose something that in the next decades would make me so much less. Also no trajectory in career path. I'm happy it works for you but I wouldn't like that. On the other hand I have my big corpo wageslave job and my little own company and almost no free time sadly. I hope to have made enough money and can retire early at some point until then I grind.
I’m on track to retire at 45. I don’t have to do a job I hate until then.
I walk around all the time anyway, to any destination within the city. I have a car and still do this.
To each their own.
Same story here. I work in games so it's always been boom or bust. It's real bad now.
- out of college it took 3 months to find work. It sucked, took over 100 apps, but I found a nice project.
- after that project ended, 3 more months (but less stressful because I had more than one role I was interviewing with).
- Then layoffs, another 3 months in 2022 where it was very competitive (I was in at least 4-5 interview pipelines before my first choice accepted my offer).
- Then that studio quickly shuttered and I haven't found anything full time in 2.5 years. Freelancing kept me up until that wasn't enough, and then I found some non-tech part time work.
working harder than ever with 2 jobs + more portfolio work to prepare for interviews despite having 9 years of experience now. This feels worse than the horror stories I'd hear when finding my first job.
I can hire you if you decent and don’t expect high salary ports-spatial5c@icloud.com
It is all due to outsourcing. AI/H1B isn't taking that much job. Unless government put penalties on outsourcing market isn't going to improve.
I'm seeing like 80% of software dev applications at my company are H1B/OPT, like thousands of candidates - and they're getting hired just because of the sheer numbers they drown everyone else out. So yes, they are 100% taking jobs. A lot of them. I can't comprehend how there are so many.
Yep, they are 100% doing that and it’s working. The people only applying selectively are being drowned out.
The market is K shaped.
The peope will wealth are doing well, the rest of the market is not.
There are only so many apps and goods that can be made for rich people/small subset of consumers.
I bet you will find that people working on investment ideas and finance tools which focus on wealth accumulation will be hiring.
There was talk of it. I believe the H.I.R.E. Act that’s been proposed is supposed to add a 25% fee to outsourcing overseas.
The range difference really depends on where you are too. Unless you're chopping wood, you still need competent people with the right skill set and ability to communicate. When controlling for that I find it's much closer unless you're in SV/Austin/NY.
I think it's largely industry dependent. Robotics/embedded/etc is actually doing quite well, lots of hiring in space and other fields. More big-data focused fields aren't hiring as much, and it's going to be even harder if you're applying for more senior/VP roles
It's grim everywhere, for everything, all at once. I haven't been able to find work as a graphic designer, motion designer, web designer, web developer, software developer, and a large variety of retail jobs. Been on the job hunt since May, all I've been able to find is a part time position at The Home Depot.