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That was from December of '21. It would be $15.69 now.
Maybe we should start with kicking out the non-nerds ??
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
Ultimately the problem is an over saturated market and universities letting their programs grow too large.
It’s not just grads. I have 1 open senior position, 100 applicants. A good 10% of them with 15+ years of experience have had no job in the last year, or have things like “Amazon fulfillment center” as their most recent job. Shits rough if you find yourself laid off or if the company you’re working for went out of business.
This has why I’m happy to work in public service. It’s very stable but the salaries aren’t as high.
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I know a guy with three degrees and decades of experience on a resume littered with well-known companies and astounding projects.
2.5 years out of work.
This is the guy who should be fixing slopper code and he’s working volunteers and startups so his resume isn’t toxic from an Uber or Amazon gig.
Did I apply to your position as that sounds like me. Just passed the one year point.
I’ve been out of tech work for near as long as I have career experience.
Each day feels another nail in the coffin of those 6 years of education.
I don’t regret my education. My major wanted to get out of LAS the way engineering did and im so glad it was an LAS degree as I feel it is a much better foundation.
LAS?
So old man time. In the early nineties things did not look great. Almost any college degree was not bringing in a salary one could like think about having a family with. Then came the late nineties and dot com and tech jobs were like the only thing that paid to possibly have what was, in many peoples mind, the typical middle class life. You know own your own home thing eventually. Since then its been tech or bust and now tech is bust and there is no go to field for people to run to.
Homeowning and paying a mortgage, especially now, is the single most important thing maintaining my quality of life.
A neighbor recently sold and it is now a rental. Paying that rent would effectively raise my housing costs about $20k a year.
It’s almost exactly the same house and lot. It’s insane.
Is it fixed? although interest rates are likely to go down so even a non fixed is helpful currently.
I honestly think this is a lie because it’s because people are mainly going for SWE or Game Dev. But literally everything else in the computer bubble is still doing fine
Tech is kind of all based around SWE though. What are these other roles you are referring to?
what runs the software?
I find the jobs are super picky. Had one with a laundry list except for one job scheduling software and I had experience in the one they wanted but the feedback I got back was that the other one was real important even though I had the other and everything else. So I had experience with job scheduling software in general. including one they used. but not the other. and in that laundry list is software way more complicated than job scheduling. Through most of my career having about half of what they wanted was fine and they got that picking up the rest was not going to be a big deal for anyone who had experience in the field.
To some extent, yeah. I work in web development and there’s no shortage of opportunities for someone good at reactive front end development and JSON APIs. But I think there is a shortage of grads who have the necessary skills.
I’ve been trying to grow my business, and it’s frankly depressing how many people graduate with computer science degrees without learning the basics of the field, the volume of vibe coders is too damn high.
I don’t like my job so I went back to school for tech. Not for the salary, but because I genuinely enjoy it. After 8 months of applying, I got 1 phone interview.
The job I hate went fully remote around that time and I just gave up entirely. I’ll just keep doing a job I hate but at least I can work at home.
The first sentence of the article shows the problem.
For years, we heard about the tech talent shortage — that there were a glut of jobs and not enough bodies to fill them.
The problem wasn’t ever “bodies,” which people have always misunderstood. It’s qualified workers.
I worked in tech for a long time, at a bunch of different companies, and I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
The people going into these careers includes a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.
It’s not just that. HR departments (who, let’s be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they’re busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.
Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It’s the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.
Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you’ll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be “cloud” but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they’re looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don’t want that.
It’s super fucked.
Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of “shortage of workers” while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where “entry level” is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.
Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don’t get too many ideas of independence in their heads.
I knew of a company that listed an internal tool as a job requirement so they could claim a skill shortage and hire foreign workers. They coached them to put that tool on their resume.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. A lot of college grads I’ve interviewed come out expecting to be senior level when they don’t even have a basic foundation of IT. Don’t expect to get paid 6 figures right out of college when you have 0 experience and can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know. Colleges have lied to them that we(the IT industry) needs them and that they’re special. Show me you have the foundation before telling me how the industry works.
can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know
University is not a job training program though. A degree demonstrates that you have the skills to figure things out, not that you already have everything figured out. Even with decades of experience, it takes me a bit of time to spin up on a new library, framework, programming language, etc.
Companies are supposed to provide this training, not just to new hires, but to all employees. It does take a little extra time to teach new hires, but their salaries are also lower so it should balance out. And if they want to keep those employees around, then they should give them generous pay increases so they don’t just jump for a salary increase.
Master in computer science
Doesn’t know how to restart a web server.
I don’t mean “doesn’t know the flavour of Linux” I mean doesn’t conceptually know what a web server is so can’t restart the service running on the box.
Yeah, it’s going to be a couple years before you break into the high earner. The problem is that silly valley was hiring tech grads at $300k total comp when money was cheap. Money isn’t cheap anymore.
AI money is stupid cheap if you know who to bullshit. And, y’know, have no principles.
God this is true.
I’ve seen some real snake oil projects get massive finding and everyone on board getting promos.
Not to mention that many IT degrees are basically worthless as far as practical experience is concerned. You’d be better off spending $100k on certification training.
It doesn’t help that conpanies lie on their requirements in job postings. Even entry level retail jobs are asking for 2-3 years of retail experience. That’s just insulting to those with retail experience and an impossible “entry level” requirement. Leads people to just ignore any requirements.
How much is it that these companies don’t want to train. I have a hard time believing your job is so advanced and technical you couldn’t find someone qualified at any point.
Training people up would be a great idea when you have the attitude that you’re going to keep working there for 30 years. Those old “company man” jobs are all but gone. If you stay at a job 5 years, people start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you. That’s just starting to be enough time for training to be worth the investment.
If tech was unionized, and the union had the attitude that they are basically a trade guild that will build up your skills, that would change things.
In my experience there is a huge gap between those that are smart and enthusiastic and those that are just average. I consider myself part of the former group and I can’t blame coworkers for just doing their job and go home. But it means the gap just widens.
Average in my mind is what the hiring process should be looking for. I would think the average one is someone who gets the job done. Like there is some diminishing returns trying to find above average or hire. The effort needed to get that best of the best turns into what we have now. Plus what I see, the best of the best are job hopping anyways.
This has been my experience as well, since I started in community college in the early 2000s.
There is an unfortunately large difference in tech between a person who has an innate interest and someone who is checking the boxes to get and keep a job.
Both would get the job done wouldn’t they?
Depends on what you see as “the job”. I would prefer many projects to be better than they currently are, both from the end user and the developer side.
When I think about the projects I have seen, you need very good people to clean up technical debt in a viable and sustainable way, as well as develop in a way that is sustainable and maintainable in a good way long term.
If you don’t have very good people, code quality devolves quickly, whereas the negative impact is felt a bit later, and at that point, it’ll be hard for most people to clean up and improve the project in a reasonable fashion, and it usually never happens.
The skill, experience, and being able to grasp what needs to be grasped gap is one thing, the time people are in a project or firm is another.
In the end, it depends on what the job is. Sure, most apps work. But there are so many applications that annoy and hinder me as a user. Even as a user, it’s a mess. I’m sure the dev team doesn’t have it much better on those projects.
With very good people acting as mentors and guidance, others can certainly get the job done, and contribute in productive ways. Most importantly, they learn and improve significantly.
I guess overall it’s not really about the big gap, but more of a continuum of skill. There’s certainly a weighted spread though.
But one you can underpay and abuse because they are excited. The other has a lot better idea of what they’ll accept and will leave when it’s not worth it anymore.
Not in the same way… which is the issue.
It’s a skilled profession, so ideally you want someone who is more skilled, and the person who has interest is more skilled.
It works similarly with other skilled professions like carpenters.
I’ve been in both industries. Hiring carpenters you’re hiring people who have qualifications and experience. The way it should be.
You’re not trying to make the carpenters calculate the roofing truss cuts through convoluted 3 days of interviews.
I believe Tech hiring is more about ego of the hiring managers and team more than it is about hiring qualified people.
I believe Tech hiring is more about ego of the hiring managers and team more than it is about hiring qualified people.
I’ve never been on a team or seen a team where this was the case. We just wanted people who could do the job well, and they were hard to find.
I actually don’t understand where manager/team ego ever fits in, as someone who hired a lot of bootcamp grads.
(…) I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
I have. My first job wasn’t the worst at this but it happened to some extent. My last company had such a huge disparity between work and employees that every single one of their IT projects (dunno about the rest) was in constant state of delays, hotfixing and putting out fires. Things were so bad people were moved between projects on daily basis and at one point management decided to throw everyone in the department (including folks who just joined the company and newbies with little to no programming experience) to triage one of them.
That’s not to mention poaching team members from projects they promised more bodies to (only informing the client about the latter decision) and many other issues. They absolutely needed more people but the way the company is run does little to help with that.
The worst party? They’re still growing as a company while their burnout rate stays unchanged. So yeah, it’s a thing.
Hey look, it’s the late 90’ and early 2000’s again.
Same crap that was talked about after the .com bust.
This was the start of my career. Then 2008. Then now. There’s never been a good time.
No.
They would like it to be. We’re really expensive because they can’t do it. As soon as all shit hits the fan guess who starts earning more.
As soon as all shit hits the fan guess who starts earning more.
A tech farm in <insert developing country> who will vibe code a patch for half the cost? (h/j)
Tech is much more than programming / software
Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)
Probably.
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One of the two major employers of programmers, tech companies, have significantly curtailed future development of their products as the cost/benefit ratio isn’t worth it. That isn’t projected to change in the near future.
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Companies that have full WFH are no longer constrained by office location in hunting for talent. A Bay Area programmer now has to compete with someone in Tulsa or Mexico City, which have far lower costs of living.
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AI slop will probably get good enough to do basic tasks. So, companies who only need a little programming talent may be able to get by on shitty AI code instead of hiring a second or third developer.
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Two decades of “just learn to code bro”, will do that to a profession.
The industry has brought in a ton of soulless goons and uninterested/stupid workers for a decade and it’s destroyed the industry.
I’m not saying there aren’t good people, but I have interviewed hundreds of people over 10+ years for jobs in tech, and the quality bar dropped a lot.
This started well before AI. I met people from Apple/Amazon/Google/etc. who functionally could not do their job, contributed nothing to projects, and were highly paid. Only a few big companies were the exception.
I’ve met a ton of people with phds and advanced degrees from prestigious schools that were total crap too.
We shovelled so many people into the system because the jobs sounded amazing and they’d pay stupid prices for a degree. We fully industrialized low performance hiring, so yeah, no surprise packages are dropping.
Plus, I used to get time to teach interns and new grads too. The staff we taught grew into way better workers than the job hoppers with 6 jobs at fancy companies over 3 years who had never completed a real project beyond the shiny prototype.
The last 3-4 years I had been constantly threatened about looming layoffs, and that we needed to meet targets at all costs. I’ve been perennially told “if we’re just heads down and all out until [6 months from now/project completion] it’ll all be good again”. Only for the cycle to repeat again and again and again.
The big tech machine destroyed my mental health and I’m out, and I’m much much happier and healthier. I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again.
I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again
What exactly do you mean by this? I’ve also wanted to get out of tech but have zero experience in anything else so idk what to do
Biotech is also awful rn
6 figure jobs are still common, but not at the entry level. The companies that used to offer such thing are taking that money and investing in AI, thinking that they won’t need new blood.
They’re wrong, but that’s what’s happening.
This is bang on.
