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by indymike
1270 days ago
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BTW, I really enjoyed reading your article. There's some good advice there. Tech skillsets are in demand because there's a huge backlog of unfilled positions at non-tech companies (take a look at US DOL JOLTS reports for November). Non tech CEOS talk about talent shortages and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers. The tech worker shortage is really hitting the bottom line for many non-tech companies who can't bring product to market, can't complete integrations or can't keep up with business demands (the problems at Southwest Airlines are what happens when you understaf IT for an extended time). If the DOL's numbers can be believed, barring GPT-4 making tech workers obsolete, you are still in a market where even with layoffs, demand will remain high for skilled tech workers (and not just SWEs). All businesses are becoming tech companies, or are dependent on tech and looking for talent to move them from on-prem to the cloud, looking for talent to integrate SaaS tools with their existing systems and in many cases, looking to launch new tech enabled products. Most companies hire slowly (my company makes software to fix that), and so yes, if you get laid off, the average company will take 43 days to go from "Hi" to "Offer", so expect it to take at least a few months or more... but the prospects of a .com era style labor market collapse are minimal because the labor market is actually shrinking while demand for workers is growing (US DOL says this will be the case until 2045). |
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A big problem is that most of these non-tech companies are offering far less pay for a much worse working environment, and then wondering why they can't hire people. Even if they could hire, the aren't structured to let software engineering be involved with the product closely enough to actually have a reasonable ROI on their investments. I live in a medium sized city in the Midwest, and anecdotally the medium and large non-tech companies here are capping out at compensation far below even the cash part of the offer you could get at many series A tech companies working remotely. I know more than a few people working at non-FAANG companies whose stock price have taken a beating in the last few years who still have a TC roughly 10x the absolute top of market for these non-tech companies. Even if they can get close on comp, they still tend to use outdated tech, offer very little individual autonomy, and be highly bureaucratic environments.
All in all, I think that if working for companies like this is the fallback position for software engineers right now, it would count as being a fairly dire situation for the job market whether or not there are theoretically jobs to be had.