It's the Hottest Job Market in 20 Years for Tech Workers (bostonherald.com) 56
Tribune News Services says we're now experiencing the "hottest job market for tech workers since dot-com era"
There's an air of desperation among tech employers this summer. Software talent, it seems, is in such high demand that companies are morphing how they hire. And workers are the ones with the power. Good and experienced tech workers are being treated like local celebrities — hounded by recruiters, courted by managers and bestowed a bevy of options before choosing their next boss...
The demand has been attributed to all sorts of things. During the pandemic, businesses that had been slow to adopt enterprise software began rapidly catching up. A tidal wave of productivity software, conferencing and collaboration tools, and e-commerce tech flooded the world. The same was true for consumer tech, with video game development, entertainment tech and social platforms booming. Many of these jobs are going unfilled, as competition for new hires ramps up. Simultaneously, remote work became the status quo in the tech industry. Suddenly, software talent could pick and choose from a massive pool of job opportunities...
To win a bid on a quality engineer, companies are offering things like flexible hours, sign-on bonuses and permanent remote work, the last of which has become a requirement for much of the workforce. Dice, a website and staffing firm that focuses on tech talent, published a report in June that found only 17% of technologists wanted to work in an office full time, while 59% wanted remote and hybrid approaches.
The demand has been attributed to all sorts of things. During the pandemic, businesses that had been slow to adopt enterprise software began rapidly catching up. A tidal wave of productivity software, conferencing and collaboration tools, and e-commerce tech flooded the world. The same was true for consumer tech, with video game development, entertainment tech and social platforms booming. Many of these jobs are going unfilled, as competition for new hires ramps up. Simultaneously, remote work became the status quo in the tech industry. Suddenly, software talent could pick and choose from a massive pool of job opportunities...
To win a bid on a quality engineer, companies are offering things like flexible hours, sign-on bonuses and permanent remote work, the last of which has become a requirement for much of the workforce. Dice, a website and staffing firm that focuses on tech talent, published a report in June that found only 17% of technologists wanted to work in an office full time, while 59% wanted remote and hybrid approaches.
And the flip side is (Score:5, Insightful)
During the pandemic, businesses that had been slow to adopt enterprise software began rapidly catching up. [...] Suddenly, software talent could pick and choose from a massive pool of job opportunities...
And in two years time, when the stay-at-home software / social media surge is dealt with and the market is ultra-saturated again, they'll all be out of a job.
Worse: by then universities will typically start churning out freshly-minted new IT graduates with zero experience and zero appeal to recruiters, 2 to 5 years after whatever was hot 2 to 5 years before isn't anymore.
Enjoy it while it lasts - and if you're new to the job market, use the opportunity to start building a resume for when the going gets tough.
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... and the market is ultra-saturated again
When was the market for tech talent ever ultra-saturated?
Re:And the flip side is (Score:5, Insightful)
Just wait until the current bubble bursts and you'll find out. Like the one before it. And the one before that one...
I got my big break on the job market before the 2000 bubble burst. And then I could stay employed because I had a few years of experience in big name companies. And then I was immune from unemployment because my resume was fat and diverse enough. I hope for the sake of young engineers today that they'll have the same chance I had in the mid 90's when stuff was starting to heat up, because newcomers will find it tough to get a job after college in 2 or 3 years.
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There seems to be a lot of job openings in the field of fake news and misinformation [wikipedia.org] lately. But I wouldn't apply if I were you: you're a little too obvious as trolls go.
Please don't dismiss this because it is (-1). (Score:1)
In my experience, those people are neither necessarily stupid, nor crazy, nor evil or having the intention of hurting anyone.
And they are most definitely not writing it to derail threads with floods of replies. (That's the actual definition of "trolling", dear kids.)
They are simply *afraid*. And they *actually believe* that stuff. To a level where a lie detector would not mark it as a lie.
Because it is their comforting delusion for coping with a situation that seems not only scary but completely *overwhelmi
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The technology behind the vaccines had been worked out at least 10 years prior to them being introduced. The funding started at least as far back as the GW Bush Administration and continued apace since then.
Now, are there any other wild fantasies you wish us to consider?
We found the cat on /. ! (Score:2)
When half the nation's population drops dead from Antibody Dependant Enhancement (ADE) induced by these poorly tested vaccines, there will be no end of job openings available in every single industry.
Okay, I found out who was the cat pretending to be a person on /. ! (*)
Sorry breaking out the bad news to you, Mr. Puss, but the market for Perl coder has been dwindling... (**)
--
(*): The joke is that with coronaviruses, ADE have been described in cats (e.g.: FIP), but never yet in humans. So if the poster is afraid of ADE in a coronavirus, they must be a cat.
(**): Do I really need to explain that one?
Re:And the flip side is (Score:5, Informative)
When the dot-com bubble bust, you couldn't throw a dead cat over your shoulder without hitting an unemployed web designer.
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I did not kill the cat for throwing it at developers, you monster!
It's the one half of Schrödinger's clowder that didn't make it.
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"When was the market for tech talent ever ultra-saturated?"
Not in a very very long time. In the US, demand has been extremely hot post the dot-com bubble burst. However, well heeled folks with the right "connections" have paid off their politician friends to allow for an influx of significantly cheaper labor. But the jobs ARE there. Perhaps not at a market level of comp when one is constrained to live in one of the pricey hubs of hiring, but that is clearly changing due to remote work.
And which companie
Re:And the flip side is (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you can be simply discarded and replaced by someone else without a second thought for your experience and domain knowledge then yeah, maybe you have a problem. But that's at the level of Excel monkey and the guy who blows crumbs out of "broken" keyboards.
People with actual skills and useful knowledge tend to be retained because they aren't a commodity item, and they will keep working from home or move on to somewhere else.
Re:And the flip side is (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, did the red guy downstairs already complain about the temperature? Because we agree on something. :)
In all seriousness, though, this usually only applies to people who do something because they like doing it. A lot of people just chase whatever it is that is currently in high demand and thus well paid, and they do that. Medicine, law, information security, whatever promises money, they will do it.
And they will fail.
Because they miss a crucial detail: The money is in being good at it. And being good requires being passionate about something. If you want to do what you do, you will be good at it.
So instead of hunting money, do what you're passionate about. Because money is something that comes with being good at something, and being good at something is something you'll only be if you really want to do it and don't treat it like a 9-to-5 nuisance to get out of your way.
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Sounds like someone who has never experienced ageism. Companies do it all the time, and it's nice to believe it will never happen to them because they're not an "excel monkey" or don't "blow crumbs out of broken keyboards". Yea sure kid till you start costing your employer too much money then you're no longer special.
How much is really ageism though... (Score:2)
I've not seen a lot of ageism in the professional developer world, working as a consultant from large to small companies...
What I have seen happen way more often is older workers who don't put in the time to update skills, or even just try new directions.
It's very easy to just be doing the same thing over and over for years and never take the time to keep updated on where even the language or systems you work on are goin in the future, then you can start to struggle even with what you are doing...
People jus
Re:How much is really ageism though... (Score:4, Informative)
The first time I saw ageism (against me) was when I was 35. Some fresh-out-of-college students thought my skill was good, but I "lacked energy." The whole situation was rather humorous to me, because I can code faster than them even without "energy" as they put it, because my "energy" is focused. I think before I type.
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yea and those people are not working IT they have either moved up or moved on. those who are left are the doof's walking around for an "android cable" and reconfiguring routers every 6 weeks while having to be walked though it over the phone
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new IT graduates with zero experience and zero appeal to recruiters
I don't think so, there's always appeal for hiring the cheapest workers.
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I don't think so, there's always appeal for hiring the cheapest workers.
In my experience, software is one of those areas where hiring the cheapest workers is one of the most expensive decisions you could make.
You think you're getting programmers for cheap, but 12 months later you realize that you'll never be able to ship the "product" those programmers bodged together for you, and now you'll need to start over from scratch. That's 12 months of (cheap) salaries down the drain, but worse, you're now 12 months further behind your competition and you still need to hire some softwa
Remote working in a collabrative environment (Score:3)
I've enjoyed working from home and found situations where remote collaboration is more productive than in-person meetings.
The one thing I think I have missed is the ability to drop in on a co-worker for those five minute brainstorming sessions. Trying to remotely find an open slot between back to back meetings is difficult.
I also feel less in tune with the general happening with my co-workers. In the office I could catch fragments of conversations about the status of different projects, schedule changes, and general problems that gave me a better situational awareness of things happening.
That said, I would not want to go back to five days a week in the office anymore. I feel more productive working from home with less distractions.
Re:Remote working in a collabrative environment (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm working 4-1. Four days WFH, one day at the office. The one day in the office has a meeting in the morning, a company BBQ for lunch, and some collaborative coding in the afternoon.
4-1 works for me. It is a good balance. The only downside is I can't move out of the SFBA. But my house is paid for and my taxes are prop-13ed, so that isn't a big deal.
Re: Remote working in a collabrative environment (Score:2)
The only downside is I can't move out of the SFBA.
If you can save enough on living expenses, you can commute one day a week. The local airport does a pretty brisk commuter business to and from the bay area. There are also a number of people who own their own planes for that purpose. Consider contracting so you can write that off. But please don't do like the helicopter guy and fly over my house to your job in Seattle all the time.
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Re:Remote working in a collabrative environment (Score:5, Interesting)
You've got it backwards. When you're isolated in a WFH environment, it becomes blatantly obvious who is actually capable and productive, and who was just skimming ideas off the herd back when everyone was in the office.
WFH is a boon for productive introverts. It's a huge hinderance for extrovert smooth talkers.
Re: Remote working in a collabrative environment (Score:4, Interesting)
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I just message them. If they're free, great; if not, they'll say so and get back to me later with the answer at which point I ask a follow-up question. I don't need to be physically near them or see their faces.
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I've found I have become more intune with the general happening with co-workers - I've gotten to see inside their houses, when video backgrounds aren't in use.
Most people dropped those after a few months. Of course, now the "blurred" real background is all the rage.
But I got so see colleagues partners, their kids, pets, gardens, pet projects they had been working on - "Look, I'm building a stand-up desk!"
As for meetings, it is only really Team leads and upward, where I work, that endure too many of these.
Ev
Dice (Score:2)
Is the "Dice" company mentioned in the article the same one that owned this site at some point in the past?
I blame the "Tech Exodus". (Score:4, Funny)
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That's pretty much what I had to do [slashdot.org], except I wasn't a junior.
Still not a healthy market for workers. (Score:1, Interesting)
No matter how much they court you... If you're the one looking for a job, you're still taking the role of the beggar.
Stop looking for a job. Start looking for *clients*. ... It's such a small change, but it turns you into the chooser. And then you decide your income and your standing. Because you are the one who gets to say "no". Or at least make it look like it, as those "employers" in TFS do now.
Bonus: If you want to become rich too, you need to find 3 clients/employees: One with the money. One with the w
The hottest job market in every field (Score:2)
There is not a business in America that doesn't have a Help Wanted sign up.
It's an employee's job market right now.
Re: The hottest job market in every field (Score:2, Insightful)
Only because the idiots in Congress keep extending COVID unemployment benefits. If you typically work dead-end jobs outside of big cities, why work if you can bring home $2500 a month for doing nothing? They just doubled their income by sitting on their couch. The job market won't stabilize until the COVID benefits finally expire.
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That probably plays into it, but it's certainly not the only thing. Not even the biggest thing.
The bigger reason is that the shutdowns greatly limited the employment opportunities service industries for a year. In that time, the reliable smart employees that understand the value of good customer service didn't just sit on their hands. They all went out and found new -and typically better- jobs. Now, those service industries are having to scramble to get the good reliable employees to come back and offering
Re: The hottest job market in every field (Score:2)
I was replying to someone talking about help wanted signs on every business and was specifically talking about dead-end jobs you idiot.
Nobody said a damn thing about tech workers. If you consider a tech job as a dead-end job, that says more about you than anything else.
It isn't a tin-foil argument as more than half the country (26 states as of June) have already opted to end the program early because it is causing more harm than good. It isn't even a political argument as Democratic governors as
One thing not mentioned (Score:4, Informative)
One thing not mentioned is people retiring. In many large companies the pandemic is now convincing many older tech workers to retire.
Most of these people were hired in the 70s and 80s and work on various (non-sexy) business systems, now they are leaving (retiring) and there are a lot of them.
The end of complacency (for now) (Score:4, Insightful)
If everyone made a habit of periodically reassessing their jobs and making the effort to seek out new jobs, this "hot" market would be a normal situation and employee quality of life would probably rise a little more in line with share prices. This sort of constant churn is more common at the executive level, and probably part of the reason by executive salaries tend to outpace people who actually do work.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Feast & famine (Score:3)
It's a far cry from the early 2000's after the dot-com bubble burst, creating a glut of techies in the West . I had to hop state to state on contracts just to survive. My legacy knowledge paid off as I had a leg up on the web-only newbies at the time. I wonder if an AI bubble poppage will do the same? The future is hard to predict.
Re:Feast & famine (Score:4, Funny)
My machine learning algorithm predicts that this tech boom is here to stay!
Real Meaning (Score:2)
What they really mean is that the "perks" (if you want to call them that) that the competent always demanded and received are now being offered to the incompetent in order to fill the chair space.
This will, as it always does, result in a general increase in the shoddiness of work and stupidity of design. Crapware, spyware, and all sorts of malicious software prevalence will increase, both by the direct action of the incompetent and because of the total piles of shit they will create from their addle though
It hardly changes a thing... maybe for me. A bit. (Score:2)
It's not that suddenly sane POs are popping up offering Gigs that suddenly make sense and are well planned. I also have the strong suspicion, that when I given them my bullet list of things I need to get the job done, the amount of useful answers won't be any better than in the last 20 years, perhaps even worse due to the fact that I will be speaking to leads that had a two-day Scrum certification but don't know squat about Scrum and even less about software development.
The only difference is that now I'm a
Talent? (Score:2)
What is the difference between tech talent, tech skill, tech experience, and tech competence? Is talent is an ineffable quality that makes a person a legendary 10x developer? Is the word "talent" argot for developers whose productivity in the 95th percentile?
The world will ALWAYS be short of 10x/95th percentile developers. That's why we created software development methodologies, best practices, and processes. By analogy, most people will never be able to ascend a rock climbing route with a difficult of 5.
Re: Talent? (Score:2)
Oh God. I've become a cranky old man.
yet the hiring process is worse than ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Never have I ever seen such nonsense in hiring processes as is happening right now in the tech industry.
All of my tech jobs in the past basically consisted of a screening interview, then a more in-depth interview on site (often with multiple people or teams throughout the visit/day), then get an offer (or not) and accept the offer (or not). Quick, straightforward, reasonable.
Now many of the companies complaining they can't get qualified workers have a "required skills" list a mile long with no understanding that equivalent/similar skills transfer from one language/framework/tool/domain to another. Often you can only apply through an automated system that mangles the data from your resume before dumping it into some hiring database. Some companies sit on your resume for weeks or months before even contacting you, then drag out the process to several interviews on different days, plus make you do "homework" or take an online coding test by a third-party company with a horrible interface. Some have you interview on camera instead of a real person, or judge and grade you via "AI." There are often rounds and rounds of interviews over an extended period of time, dragging on weeks or months.
The companies show a complete lack of respect for the candidates and their time, and often in the process squash any enthusiasm for the job/company that the candidate might have started out with. If they want to hire good people, many of them sure aren't acting like it.