[zer00eyz]

No, it is not.

For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.

1. Your best bet to get a job is your network. If you were a clock puncher, if you didn't go above and beyond, if you aren't the person who is gonna make the co-worker who vouches for you look good... you are not gonna get much help in your network.

2. The next best bet is to either a) start your own company or b) find someone who wants to start their own company. You know what got us out of the 2000 crash? Web 2.0 was the sexy name but it was ad tech that put money in the bank. Pop unders for Netflix, free iPods, and mortage sign ups... all sorts of nonsense... Today it's much easier to get something small going that pays the bills nothing is stopping you other than you.

3. If neither of these things are for you, and you want to be in tech then you might have to suffer. Job at the liquor store checking out drunks while you do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game.

Every one I know who survived not having a job when the 2000 bubble burst fit in one of these buckets. The rest left tech for good.

[PheonixPharts]

> The rest left tech for good.

This is an important reality check for many people.

I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash. At that time software engineers got paid well, but not insane. Additionally, every software engineer I met was passionate about writing code.

Honestly, around 2019 I was really missing those days. The field has become flooded with people looking for a high paying job with essentially no interest in software or computer science beyond the paycheck it provides. I don't blame people for wanting to make money, but I do miss virtually everyone in the industry being genuinely fascinated with software and programming.

The good news is, if you're the kind of person who would write code even if it paid minimum wage, you'll survive this. People whose book shelves are filled with CS books, who find themselves working on coding problems at night because it's fun, who can't help hacking around with new ideas on the weeked, will very likely continue to work in software. You'll likely make less money, but you'll also have more fun.

Unsurprisingly, in this current market I'm getting paid less but having more fun at work than I've had in nearly a decade.

[drewcoo]

> I entered tech in 2004, during the immediate aftermath of the dotcom crash.

I entered in 1999, when there were plenty of jobs mostly filled with people who liked paychecks a lot more than coding. It was hard to find jobs doing anything hard or nerdy in the sea of webmasters.

I remember working at startups in the mid-late oughts after the bubble burst and the industry was awash in get-rich-quick, gimmicky companies. Those founders had learned the lessons of the dotcom bubble: make your money and get out before it happens again! There was a VC slot-machine for quick, happy exits. And if you don't do well at the slot machine, well you've learned important leadership lessons, so start another startup.

If there was a golden age of nerds, it must have happened before I was in the industry. But, on examination, I'm not sure those actually existed either.

I think it's worth focusing on the work and atmosphere and how makers get stuff done, but I balk at about appeals to former glories. Make Software Great Again? Hmph.

[shrimp_emoji]

Even if it never existed, it should exist. The false description is prescription. M"${foo}"GA!

[nytesky]

I sympathize with your perspective, when most programmers were really nerds was a magical time.

I do wonder if we are indulging in an “eternal September” mindset though.

[anal_reactor]

The times when IT department smelled like pizza, sweat, and Mountain Dew lol

To be honest I don't think we'll ever go back to this. The only reason why this existed was that programming was socially unattractive, so developers self-selected to be people with certain personality characteristics. Once the society recognized the importance of IT jobs, it started pumping all sorts of people into the industry. There's no coming back, unless a) programming becomes a bad career choice again or b) all people get the luxury of working jobs that interest them

[Der_Einzige]

Don't worry, programming remains very unattractive. Where and how one gets their money matters. You can literally watch the "ick" reaction happen within fractions of a second of mentioning to them that one is working as a "software engineer".

I find that if it's not an ick, it's resentment. Normies are catching on that huge amounts of tech bros are "overpaid" (working ~10 hrs a week at a rest and vest retirement home like Microsoft), and they're becoming luddites over the impact of AI in their industries.

They call San Jose "Man Jose" for a reason. Women don't like tech-bros, and it shows.

[zer00eyz]

I have been theorizing that they all get FAANG jobs now.

Free everything, stock options, good pay....

Crush the competition before it gets its feet under it. It isnt that we dont have as many nerds, they are all just "locked up".

[mech422]

I sometimes think FAANGs select for that group... Basically, all they have to offer is the paycheck. Outside of a few 'interesting' departments, most FAANG stuff seems to be the same sort of work you'd get in any other industry. And they make sure to run you thru a gauntlet of interviews for the positions.

I think a lot of the "lifelong geek" crowd just finds more 'interesting' work (for whatever qualifies as 'interesting' to them...) in other companies without jumping thru all the hoops (and for less pay, of course). Lots of startups, niche companies, etc offer challenges that can make up for the lower pay.

[eru]

I used to work at Google (and even Facebook for a very short time). They ain't what they used to be.

[ghaff]

To be somewhat cynical, they're big companies. Big companies have lots of process, layers of management, fiefdoms, etc. etc. Doesn't matter if you're Google, Facebook, or a big bank.

[red-iron-pine]

size matters, but publicly traded matters more.

like sometimes that bureaucracy is a good thing. i remember an uncle who worked for EMC talking to me about being a big company vs. small company person; each has an advantage.

[spamizbad]

I think there's a bit of generational shift at play here. Elder-millennial earnestness vs younger millennial/Gen-Z social anxious binary view of things as either "based" or "cringe" (and openly geeking out about stuff definitely fits their "cringe" definition, whereas its endearing to older millennials).

[jacknews]

Any open positions there?

[lifeisstillgood]

I was box number three - tried to be box number two and went bankrupt, and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs. Couple of months in I had coded up a sort of automated PC fix program - turned 2 hours into 5 minutes. There is always a way to find an entrepreneurial gap - even if I never quite exploit it to my own financial benefit

Worst day in that job when I was trying to crawl out of bankruptcy was meeting a few of my ex-colleagues while wearing the crappy purple uniform. I was putting food on the table and they looked like I was a joke.

I still put food on the table, the job market always wants people who can just code. Networking is hard and requires longitudinal effort. But the jackpot remains elusive.

Keep trying

[bluedino]

>> and took a job at PCWorld (UK version of BestBuy?) doing repairs

My first non-restaurant job (starting in high school) was Best Buy. Before they had the Geek Squad, they just had a generic tech area. You could get your VCR cleaned and your PC upgraded in the same spot.

Anyway, it seemed like once or twice a year someone would come in and take all the good sales people by offering them more money and fulltime hours. First it was the Gateway Country store (that didn't last long), then it was the local dial up ISP, then the regional DSL provider...

[M95D]

Any advice for those who absolutely hate networking?

[AnimalMuppet]

Be nice to the people you work with. If you can't do that, at least don't be a jerk.

Do your job. Do it well. Your coworkers will know whose code works.

When someone leaves for a new job, get a personal email. Put it in a file somewhere (not in a work computer).

That's networking. It doesn't have to be going to the bar every night with your bros from work. It can just be that people know you, know your work, and have moved on to other places.

[ghaff]

Right. I think a lot of people confuse having a network with "NETWORKING" (i.e. going to networking events, asking to have a coffee with one of the hundreds of thousands of people who went to your undergrad but you've never met, etc.). The former is useful; the latter mostly not so. Especially given that during a less-good market like we have now, a networking event is going to be filled with semi-desparate people all looking for jobs.

[ghaff]

I think they're giving the answer. You might need to do something else at least for a time--including mostly crappy service sector jobs. But, honestly, even during better times I've relied on my network and you may end up severely disadvantaged if you don't. (Note. Networking doesn't mean going to networking events. It just means keeping in touch with and reaching out to people you've worked with.)

[codethatwerks]

I disagree with #1. Not entirely but it is about perception. Working an extra 10-20 hrs a week for free in return for a chance but no guarantee of a vouch is in itself a bad deal. So while you may have reasons for working long hours, hoping someone has your back is not a great one. Unless you have known them since you were 8 or something and even then.

[zer00eyz]

If you have a job and they are hiring. Two former colleagues come in.

Bob: he comes in, he does his work, he goes home. He's a good productive developer.

Jane: She comes in, does her work, it's always documented and well tested. She is happy to roll up her sleeves and help the people around her out. She will pause to help you even if it means she gonna finish up at home.

Your boss asks you: Your call who do we hire. You're not fucking picking Bob.

Dont be Bob.

[ptero]

This is not nearly as clear cut. In the real world, Jane has a much higher chance to burn out. Or mess up the team, as everyone now wonders if working long hours is Jane's peculiarity or the new normal. And if this makes people explore other options you always lose the best folks -- those who have opportunities in any market.

While I would agree with a softer form: "don't be a 9 to 5 clerk, do what is needed, including occasional long hours and weekends", if someone needs to regularly stay late it's a problem with the management, not with the Bob. My 2c.

[fileeditview]

And then the company just lays off Bob and Jane and thousands of others. Now Jane is angry because she committed a lot of her personal time for the company but was laid off anyways..

Don't be Jane.

[AnimalMuppet]

Yeah, that happens. Jane gets a new job before Bob, though.

[nunez]

Not at all guaranteed.

[PascLeRasc]

Bob learns to surf before Jane.

[piva00]

And don't be Jane either, extending your working hours at home just to help someone out of your normal duties is a recipe for an eventual burnout.

The balance is in being both: good, productive, amicable, helpful to others while also knowing that you deserve a life outside of work.

This infatuation with killing yourselves for work (mostly Americans but also in Brazil and some other cultures) have is really not healthy, to yourself and to other workers that you put under pressure because you do more than what you're paid for. You're not being a great employee, you're being an exploited employee, and leaving the door open to normalise this exploitation to others that might have other priorities after working hours.

From my time with leading teams I wouldn't hire Jane, I have done it before and eventually the team falls apart because others feel pressured to work more than they are being paid for/willing simply to keep up with the Janes of the world, it crumbles team morale.

[red-iron-pine]

Or it turns out that Bob went to the same University as half of the team, and they pick him for a culture fit.

Jane works hard but puts in long hours because she's just not very good and has to hustle to keep up even on basic tasks. She's helpful and kind to others because she understands their struggles, but can't hack new tech as well and will ultimately pause to help. Her well documented, working code takes 3+ weeks longer, and no one cares about Documentation.

[drewcoo]

Preferring stabile predictability is not a bad thing.

It's just something we pretend cannot happen in software.

Most industries don't want anything like software's "death march," "sleep under your desks," "eat pizza" cultural ideals. Well, pizza is maybe ok once in a while.

Who's going to burn out, Bob or Jane? Bosses, often completely untrained bosses who just "know" how to boss, say they want Jane, but they're probably better off with Bob. Assuming they want stable long-term businesses, of course.

In your scenario it's likely that Jane becomes a boss soon and hires people with her own "work ethic." That sucks. Don't get Janed!

[mrmuagi]

Where do you draw the line in not being exploitable though? Why wouldn't you hire someone who does all your work for you then it feels like the next question is. When there's a scarcity in job openinings compared to applicants, sure one of those might be chosen, but in a regular job market I feel like both should get hired.

[zer00eyz]

>> Why wouldn't you hire someone who does all your work for you then it feels like the next question is.

Yes, this is why people start their own companies, and cash out.

>> Where do you draw the line in not being exploitable though?

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, that's why I shit on company time... as the old adage goes.

The reality is that giving you a job only works if the company makes money off of what you do. If it lost money or broke even that would not be worth it. You're always being "exploited".

If you want to feel equal, there are plenty of companies that are collectives (mondragon look it up). I have a few projects going on right now that are structured like this. If one of them "takes off" it's a very even distribution for all involved as long as they are working there.

The beauty of capitalism is that if you hate how companies are run you can and should go run your own with the rules you want. If it was very equal, then everyone is incentives to go above and beyond... your still not gonna hire bob!

[nunez]

Depends on whether Bob is friends/relatives with someone in the C-suite or board.

[pokstad]

It’s called hustling. Not everyone makes it, but putting in extra effort improves your odds. It’s pretty amazing to me that this is now considered controversial.

[nytesky]

My perception of hustling isn’t about long hours, unless those are hours hanging out after work building relationships. It’s more about making your self visible for the work you do, being memorable in a positive way, maybe helping people who in a way that leaves an impression. Working late to deliver one day early, no one is going to notice.

[codethatwerks]

Given you are happy to work say 60 hours a week, what is the optimal use of the extra 20.

For some it might be free work for their employer in return for something. Example might be in financial trading etc. to get a bonus or raise or promotion in a shop that is killing it.

For some it might be leetcode and reading everything on levels.io and teamblind.

For some it might be active investing for example property renovation.

For some a side business.

For some TOGAF and Scrum qualifications.

But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters.

Etc.

[antisthenes]

> But remember 1000hours a year is a lot to bet on your company or colleagues vouching for you and being in a position where that matters.

Yeah, at 50/hr that's $50,000 for a chance of someone vouching for you in the future that may never come to pass.

There's also the chance that maybe they were the manager that made you work 60hrs in the first place, so they don't see you as going above and beyond.

Whoopsie, you just wasted 1000 hours of your life.

No thanks. I'll get the job on my own merit.

[axpy]

You do you but don't complain if you end up having a harder time during economic downturn. Everything in life is about risk-reward and going the extra mile is about tipping the scale in your favor. To be fair, don't think op advocate for putting 60h every week. It's about being passionate about what you are doing and sometime just being available for your coworker outside of working hours can be enough. In my professionnal career, it was fairly obvious which colleagues was more than just clocking in and who I would be happy to recommend or hire on the spot.

[antisthenes]

> You do you but don't complain if you end up having a harder time during economic downturn.

Everyone has it hard during an economic downturn. Ugly people also have it harder, so do shorter and dumber people.

I don't find this exercise of comparing myself to others helpful. Despite having good feedback for my work, it doesn't really grow my network.

> who I would be happy to recommend or hire on the spot.

Yeah, assuming you don't have any biases and are a perfect judge of who's doing a good job. That's omegacap as the young kids say.

[ghaff]

It's really not about the hours. It's getting the job done and helping out etc. I've gotten every job in a long career post-school through my network and I've never worked more than ~40 hours except in specific situations. I agree with the other comments. I am flexible and generally available but that doesn't mean I'm working ridiculous hours. I guess that means a certain discipline in that regard.

[financypants]

There’s a good paper on how effective networking and “weak ties” is for getting a job. It’s silly that this person is blaming AI resume parsers. https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4865899/mod_resou...

[acdha]

I’d add one other option: look outside of tech. I knew people who were hit by the dotcom bubble pretty hard but ended up getting jobs in government, academia (I left for a computational research lab myself), non-profits, and high-touch but not tech businesses (e.g. a friend bailed to a law firm - they were flush with cash but none of the partners knew how or wanted to run the IT side of things.).

I’d especially add that this can be good for people without extensive personal networks or who are worried about discrimination. If you’re on, say, https://usajobs.gov they are going to be a lot more fastidious about equal opportunity laws than many private companies and won’t think twice about hiring a middle-aged person with cubicle bod who has to go home at 5pm to pick up their kids rather than grabbing beers after work.

[beauzero]

I would agree with this for state work as well. Alabama, because Montgomery is super cheap, is a very good option. I will warn you though...the red tape can take a while. Fill out the paperwork or call the local contract recruiters. We find most of our people that way. They come in on contract, which I did, and convert to government. Depends on the department but once you are in it is fairly easy to move around. DOT is Java, Banking is a mixture of Microsoft and open source, Medicaid is a mix etc. If there is nothing immediately it may take 6-9 months before you get a call but if you are reading this you will be in the top candidates. Sometimes I think we are as "out of the way" as Alaska as far as people considering working here but we would love to have you. I love the state and I didn't start here until I was in my late 40's. Shooting for retirement at 70-75+...I really just love doing this for a living. I moved to government after my 4th 5 year startup/SMB experience. Just needed the stability, someplace I could code and feel good about what I was doing again, and good health insurance. It's the nicest group of people I have ever worked with.

[acdha]

Yeah, I mentioned federal because that’s where I have experience but I know more people who went to state level agencies, libraries, etc. Nobody gets rich that way but you also don’t get asked to work unpaid overtime or mysteriously laid off when you turn 50, either, and if you have any reason to be in a different part of the country outside of a tech hotspot that might be an easy way to stay near family, too.

[nunez]

Montgomery is cheap for a reason! But they definitely have lots of gov jobs down there. I'd actually recommend Huntsville (because rockets) or Birmingham (because of UAB and it having a larger economy) over Montgomery.

[Scubabear68]

After getting laid off after the .com bust, I did a variation on 3), accepted a contract job with a terrible company. It got me by until the market improved and got a much better job.

The trick in a bad market is to understand that mostly the cool perks are gone, and for a time you need to lower your expectations. I think that is going to be very difficult in this cycle.

[hsuduebc2]

Out of curiosity. How long till things turned to be better in these days?

[ghaff]

It was years in my case but should arguably have been less. (It wasn't a crap job by any means but didn't pay well by many tech standards at that point.)

It's always been through personal contacts but I've surely been lucky.

[Scubabear68]

I held on to the crap job for 1 year 11 months. In 2004 I quit and found a Wall Street gig that was much better.

[sevensor]

> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.

Just as we saw in 2001, the market is worst for (a) recent graduates who have not yet established a professional network and (b) people who had poured into fungible commoditized job roles during the boom and were a dime a dozen when the bust came. (b) is roughly "programmer/analyst" in 2001, "Java developer" in 2008, and "data scientist" today. It's not that some people working under those titles don't have non-fungible skills, but that there are so many others with that job on their resume, that it's hard to differentiate. My advice is, _don't go looking for those jobs._ The opening anecdote in the article describes how terrible it is to try to get hired as a data scientist right now. And no wonder. The job market is flooded with low-quality data scientists.

My experience working with data scientists has drastically lowered my expectations: you get a mediocre Python programmer (you must be willing to accept Pandas + Jupyter notebooks as their work output), combined with a mediocre statistician (can do linear regression and ANOVA, but don't expect them to do it right), combined with a mediocre SQL programmer (probably SELECT, maybe JOIN if you're lucky), and a mediocre machine learning specialist (has a list of preferred sklearn functions in random priority order depending on training, plus maybe one other random library that stops working in the middle of the project due to an API change). They made up for their cheap salaries by spending lots of money on AWS.

Maybe I just got unlucky. Didn't know how to hire well. I'm sure there are good Data Scientists out there, but it's so easy to hire bad ones that it's no wonder people are reluctant to do it. If you're one of the good ones, and if you're in any way qualified for a job with a higher barrier to entry, or even just a job with a more unusual title than Data Scientist, go for that instead of trying to stand out in a sea of mediocrity.

[nytesky]

Interesting you don’t mention a huge option that opened up after 2001 — govt/defense work. There was a huge ramp up in military spending in the 2000s and it was still “tech” work, albeit often of the more “move slow, change incrementally” variety.

[pokstad]

I spent the start of my career in Defense in the late 2000s. People told me it was foolish to leave defense for less money/benefits in tech startups where nothing was guaranteed. I ended up finally leaving and it was the best career decision I ever made.

[nytesky]

Without question. I had a kid around that time so startup life seemed really mismatched, so now kinda stuck.

[CoastalCoder]

I worked a decade in the DoD, and then another decade in various tech companies. I was laid off from a startup 12 months ago.

There are definitely pros and cons of both sides. Here's my take on working for the DoD:

- PRO: Having a long tenure means you really get to know the software systems you're developing, and the people with whom you're collaborating.

- PRO: Lack of commercial / profit pressure lets you focus on what seems good for the country, rather than for stockholders.

- CON: Congress is insane. They still haven't passed a defense budget for FY24. The DoD is the only employer I've ever had that missed payroll.

- PRO/CON: Supporting the U.S.'s military might is good or bad, depending on how it's used. A lot of soul-searching may be required to do the work. But working for the private sector can also feel awful, especially in this age of surveillance capitalism.

- PRO/CON: The pay is okay-ish compared to the private sector (PRO), but there's no potential for major bonuses / RSUs (CON).

- PRO: Layoffs are far less common than in the private sector. There's no boom-and-bust cycle tied to interest rates (AFAIK).

- PRO: The hiring process is 10000x better than what I've endured from the private sector since being laid off about 12 months ago. No LeetCode tests, no 5 rounds of interviews followed by being ghosted. And yet, despite the far simpler hiring process, my corner of the DoD generally managed to hire good people.

- CON: Bureaucracy. It can be soul-sucking. But since leaving the DoD, I've learned that it's just a symptom of massive organizations in general. E.g., I encountered a lot of the same frustrations working at Intel under Brian K and Bob Swan.

- PRO/CON: Physical facilities. At least where I worked, the DoD offices were generally run down compared to typical big-corporation offices. On the other hand, the DoD workspaces weren't under financial pressure to maxize programmers per square foot. So there weren't any open-office floor plans. Everyone at least had a cube, more senior people generally had offices.

- PRO: No significant ageism. If you start working for the DoD, and don't egregiously screw up, you don't need to worry about being laid off because of your age. But beyond that, many of these systems / problem domains have long learning curves, so long-tenured developers generally command a lot of well-deserved respect.

**

Right now I'm actually interviewing for private sector jobs (Microsoft) and DoD jobs. I might have to take an offer from Microsoft because of financial considerations. But I'm also kinda hoping I end up back at the DoD.

[nytesky]

How did you transition from govt work back into tech. Ive made some efforts but never seem to be able to bridge it.

[CoastalCoder]

> How did you transition from govt work back into tech. Ive made some efforts but never seem to be able to bridge it.

Probably a combination of factors:

- I finished my PhD in computer science shortly before looking for work outside the DoD, and that probably lent me some credibility.

- I'd had good success with several unclassified software projects while inside the DoD, and I was able to talk about them during the interviews.

- I put some effort into interview prep. E.g., I'd done very little with networking, so I brushed up on DNS, etc., before interviewing for a company that does internet stuff.

- Luck and timing. I'm sure there was some luck regarding which interviewers / hiring managers were interested in my resume.

[nextworddev]

Interesting- what trades did the people who left tech back in the first Dot Com bubble end up going into?

[zer00eyz]

Preacher, Painter (houses, now has a painting company), two cooks, a few went back to school for various non tech things and I lost track of them at that point.

[datavirtue]

I went back to being a cook, then a mechanic. Then I freelanced for a while, slung mass code in personal projects and slid back in as an application support engineer. Now I'm a senior senior dev that can drive product design/strategy, architect, code, and write copy for marketing.

[margalabargala]

It was during covid, not dot-com, but this person went into carpentry: https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...

[ryandrake]

It’s probably mostly temporary, until CEOs decide the “bad economic climate” is over and start hiring again.

I know decent former tech company employees who are stocking shelves at Home Depot until hiring picks up.

[maerF0x0]

I'd rather collect $14 an hour on unemployment than earn $18 exacerbating the ageism I'll face when the market picks up.

[esaym]

Real estate

[MOARDONGZPLZ]

Investment banking

[MOARDONGZPLZ]

1 definitely tracks. My last company did lots of layoffs and the people who didn’t have a problem getting a new, maybe more senior or well paid, job were the ones that did a great job and put some oomph into their work. Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5, but the people who did reasonable work and then were unavailable after 5 are the ones that are having issues getting new jobs.

I don’t think the next best thing is to start a company however. Because the people who didn’t get jobs from their network are more likely to be the people who won’t necessarily excel at this. Plus there are so many variables here.

Next best thing in my view is to grind the heck out of Hacker Rank problems and get a job out of pure spite from brute forcing software challenges. Not fun or interesting, but can work really well to land someone a high paying job without having to think about starting a company.

Next best thing, or parallel best thing if this is your preference, is probably to get a more local dev job. There are surprisingly many local companies who don’t post remote roles, don’t post roles on HN, pay less than FAANG market, but are comfortable, in person roles with medium expectations. This is way better than being a liquor store clerk.

[zer00eyz]

>> Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting or needing a 9-5,

Kids, life, have these things. Just make sure you are hitting your marks, that your helpful that your gonna roll your selves up and get shit done. If you have to leave, then leave, bow out.

If you cant come in, or have to go cause you need to be at the gym or your spin class or D&D night. No one is calling you back right now. They remember that you put you first and not the team.

It does NOT have to be, and SHOULD NOT be, toxic.

[fragmede]

Easy enough to say, but when you’re going against people that put their life aside to deliver, and you’re not getting called back, and you’re emptying that 401k… I mean, I get where you’re coming from, but also, shit.

[zer00eyz]

>> and you’re emptying that 401k

Door dash, lyft, über, liquor store. NOTE: dont end up in a back room some where! You want to keep your social game sharp and you never know who will want a web site, or a pc repair, do these things too, your networking while your working.

Start a side project: Build a CLI tool, in a new language... Go, Rust, Zig are all sexy for this right now. It doesn't have to be perfect just launch. Stay in the game make yourself hot.

Your job is getting a job. You will work at least 5 hours a day at this till you have a job. Thats on top of Lyft, and side project...

If you have a life, or a family your gonna see them less till your back on your feet.

[aaomidi]

People who didn't put extra effort into a job that wasn't their own is not indicative that they won't for a job that is actually their own.

[MOARDONGZPLZ]

Unpopular to say, but probably is relatively strongly correlated. Yeah some people will be horrible at a regular job and amazing at a CEO of their own startup job, but I bet the qualities like good time management that make one successful at a regular job are qualities that would make one successful at the other. I’m open to being completely wrong here.

[richrichie]

Is this similar to saying that people who did not do well in school are unlikely to do well in life? (Things like time management, focus, dedication will make you a good student).

[aaomidi]

Well I have ample personal experiences saying you’re wrong. I think you’re basing a hypothesis off of what you think is right, and not going deeper to confirm or deny it.

[red-iron-pine]

organizations created conditions of learned helplessness, cynicism, bitterness, etc.

like, studies have shown that most people think their jobs are, partially or wholly, bullshit. that may or may not be true, but once you've checked out, you're out.

meanwhile when you're a manager / owner / founder, you have a lot more control; no learned helplessness while swimming in an ocean of processes when it's just you and 6 other people.

[antisthenes]

> Your best bet to get a job is your network. If you were a clock puncher, if you didn't go above and beyond, if you aren't the person who is gonna make the co-worker who vouches for you look good... you are not gonna get much help in your network.

Regarding this...I was the guy on both ends of the spectrum. The Rockstar that goes above and beyond and the guy who was punching the clock (sometimes a little too early). It made no appreciable difference in the quality of my network - it is still essentially non-existent, since none of my peers or ex-peers have much influence over hiring decisions.

My best shot at networking into a job is through a personal friend who works in a non-tech sector at a high level position. He's probably the only person who can actually get my resume seen by hiring people out of several hundred that I have met over my lifetime.

[wolfie69]

> do whatever crappy contract work you can find on your laptop to keep yourself in the game.

Ha ha so true!

I entered tech in 2000, right as everything was going down. Hey, it was fun for the 8 months I worked for what we now call a startup in Miami. They closed abruptly, and luckily I was able to get another job within about 4 months.

The market in tech is definitely worse than 2020 (I don't know why some here say those were the days of wine and roses) and I was always able to find work during the financial crisis, though it could take a couple of months. So, I'd say that the job market for tech is not as bad as the dot com crash but worse than 2009 or 2020.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Thank you. This article is just downright silly (and that does not mean I don't have a ton of empathy for people who are job searching right now). All of the following are true:

1. There was a massive amount of tech hiring not just over the pandemic, but really in the whole period from the end of the Great Recession until the latter half of 2022.

2. Many of those jobs were not just unsustainable pandemic hiring, but they were really just speculative hiring enabled by the ZIRP era, where more companies were worried about being left behind than overspending. Some examples: during the "Big Data Boom" there was an explosion of "data scientists" and "data analysts". I put those titles in scare quotes not because they're invalid jobs or something, but just that there was so much of a "just throw bodies at the problem" attitude that many of these roles were poorly defined at companies. Similarly, lots of companies staffed up massive user research teams. Turns out a lot of that low hanging fruit has been picked, and many companies have realized they can get by with much smaller, more targeted user research.

3. We are now undergoing a massive job restructuring, I would argue even stronger than what happened post dot com bubble, for a bunch of reasons: (1) the end of the ZIRP era coinciding with the end of pandemic-specific overhiring, (2) I've heard it said "Elon Musk showed with Twitter that you can run tech companies with a lot smaller teams" - while I strongly disagree (I'm always thinking, have you actually even used the complete garbage cesspool X has become, even more than before???), I think there is a valid point that a lot of companies just had way too many people than they needed, and (3) Gen AI really is having an impact on specific roles, e.g. copywriting roles and low-level data analyst roles.

It's simply a game of musical chairs where a ton of chairs were taken away all at once. Yes, the job application process is painful, AI-assisted ATS tools can feel like a labyrinth, and there are a lot more scams. But that is not the root cause. There are just a ton more people looking for jobs than there are roles available.

[ghaff]

I was really lucky. After getting laid off. Called a guy who I had been a client for and had a lunch with him and a business manager. Ended up with a job in the post-2K bubble. Didn't pay well and barely made it to the other side but ended up the basis for how I ended out career.

[eru]

> For those of you who are new here (aka didn't live through the 2000 bubble) welcome to a shitty job market.

But is the job market actually shitty? I still get plenty of recruiter spam on LinkedIn.

[benreesman]

“Shitty job market” is an awfully charitable way to say “illegal, anti-market activity is de-facto sanctioned now”.

We spent the lion’s share of the 20th century building a vast “sovereign wealth fund” of technology via effective partnerships between the public and private sectors (substantially though not exclusively under “defense” budgets of one kind or another): everything from the transistor to the laser to the packet-switched Internet to Unix, the list goes on and on.

Then, somewhat abruptly in the scheme of things, a few things happened around the same time: “Dutch” Reagan was sharp enough to realize that he was a fucking movie star not a policy person, and needed some academic and intellectual heft to round out a serious presidential bid. The exact causal structure remains unclear to this day, it seems mostly to be related to cashing in on a Cold War that was winding down but good for one last corruption orgy, but somehow he and Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan all got together and sold the public on a bunch of policies that were and remain disasters (Greenspan has since grudgingly admitted that he was wrong about pretty much everything in the kind of tortured language people like that use when they’re wrong about everything), Lewis Ranieri realized that in his words “Mortgages are math” and began a disastrous trend of extreme complexity financialization that created modern K Street (basically figured out how to buy up the commons for pennies on the dollar by gutting any remaining taboos against flagrant bribery of elected officials) and smoothly pivoted all of this into the Clinton Administration while codifying “Goldman Sachs is where we source finance people” in the form of Robert Rubin and his heirs, and the piece de resistance: brought Larry Summers into the mix, whose biography reads like the prelude to impeachment proceedings: everything the guy has ever touched has been illegal, icky, stupid, racist, misogynistic, kleptocratic, corrupt, or all of the above.

The last person to put up a serious fight was Brooksley Born, who was in the middle of preventing both the 2001 and 2008 financial meltdowns (and therefore almost certainly preventing the rise of reactionary populism in the Western World) when the cabal of incompetent Randian fuckups knee-capped her (using gender discrimination as a lever) and basically started running the “build a technology-denominated sovereign wealth fund” process in reverse: it’s been game on regarding raiding that cookie jar if you have the right “network” ever since.

The Department of Justice was taking time out of its typical day chasing around terrorists and human traffickers and what not to try to police stuff like trivial collusion and flagrant wage fixing in technology as recently as like 2011-2012, but seems to have kind of given up: it’s a losing battle. The last major legal action around big cap tech wage fixing wound down with a 400MM parking ticket in ~2011.

Three guesses where Summers is putting his greasy thumbs (the rest of that clique is dead or retired) on the scale now and who is the heir apparent to this nightmare.

[benreesman]

Well, maybe I didn’t give the DoJ enough credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/technology/apple-doj-laws...

I’ll be convinced when they do NVIDIA and wage fixing, but they’re at least making some noise.

[emh68]

Nope, it's different this time.

1. My entire network is struggling, even the ones who have jobs are worried. Despite being universally acclaimed and vouched for by my past coworkers, it seems to have no impact. Companies don't trust their own employees references right now.

2. Maybe this is changing, but it seems like entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. Nobody has ideas, everyone just wants to go to sleep at a comfy 9-to-5. Maybe bootstrapping a company is so outside of people's comfort zone that they can't even fathom it.

[ulfw]

The only 'ideas' allowed are AI and AI if done from the ground up can only be afforded by billion dollar companies, which is why you see nvidia, microsoft, google owning most of it.

The entrepreneurship of ten years ago of two dudes sitting in a house coding apps is gone.

[PheonixPharts]

This is not true. The one benefit of all the AI hype is that there are many small teams of smart people getting funding. Maybe in 2-5 years they'll all get acquired or go under, but right now is some of the most fun I've had in industry in a long time.

And, despite all the hype, there is a lot of unexplored stuff in this space that can be done on hardware that can be run in a home office.

Yes, it's not literally coding apps any more, but I know quite a few people working on small, funded teams having a lot of fun right now.

[codethatwerks]

Not sure. Read the recent PG essay. But I reckon you are going to be writing the procurement app for a midsized building firm, or a ERP for a road haulage firm, or a shift management system for a hospital, rather than some low hanging tech bro idea fruit. What they call “IT”.

[pascalxus]

it has nothing to do with ideas. It's about opportunities: and right now there's not very many of those.