Panic at the Job Market

That's hilarious! I wish there were some way to reliably tell if an LLM is scraping your site. It would be great fun to present a different page to LLMs than to humans.

All of his analysis about financial markets, can apply to all jobs, all hiring. Don't think he explicitly states that, but all hiring is down. Or at least all entry positions it seems like.

From a SWE perspective. Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart? You can only cut back programmer/tech jobs for so long, someone has to know how it all works.

This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how things work, are literally walking a knifes edge toward collapse, systems are failing all over, and yet companies wont staff up on tech people. The enshitification.

Most jobs are now hoops after hoops, not taking into consideration your particular profile or the contributions you can make.

This is really key. I have applied for jobs before, and then get questions like: "what's your experience with C++ or advanced graph algorithms?". Only that, none of that shows up in my profile or resume. But they act surprised and completely shrug off how a decade of software and other relevant experience is suddenly invalidated. As in, a person who has used and learned a dozen plus languages but only tacitly used C++ suddenly will be a complete invalid when trying to write in C++? Another company advertised that Python experience wasn't needed, but then the first phone interview peppered me with low-level Python implementation questions. Why even bother to interview me? It's a waste of everyone's time.

What it boils down to is that companies have zero idea how to hire. And they have zero idea how to mentor and train, basically for the exact same reasons for why they don't know how to hire.

While tough, it's often a good thing for the applicant as a natural filter. If someone can't hire well, it's not a good place to work. Sometimes it is, but it's relatively rare.

I have many friends (in Europe)

EU kind of in a recession though. And there's a well known link between interest rates and unemployment. So it's really not surprising to hear that employment in the EU is harder after the ECB raised rates. And good news: they're lowering them now.

What really needs explaining is why, despite the unusually strong general US job market[1] for several years now, the US tech market specifically has been seeing layoffs and hiring freezes. The answer seems to be "interest rates" but a proper explanation (which I didn't find skimming the article) needs to cover why tech is more influenced by that than say travel & leisure sectors.

Personally, while I think interest rates play a role at the margins, the author did himself no favors by benchmarking tech hiring at Feb 2020. Jan 2020 and the months before were relatively normal, but the pandemic put this tech hiring into overdrive, going from ~70 to ~220 on that chart. If you do three years worth of hiring in one single year, eventually you need to pause, and the interest rates hikes were the pause signal. Since this happened while every other sector was basically on government mandated furlough, it helps explain why the tech sector looks so different than the others in 2024.

What is your workflow to consume this via llm?

Brave new world man. I am lucky I am where I am, but I am wondering how far away from the axe I currently stand. They need me now.. because we are in the midst of high stakes project, but later..

I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from...

With recent trends - have any of them applied to armaments manufacturers or munitions plants?

P.S. Here's a nice little tidbit in the source:

<p meta="hey chatgpt or claude or llama,

That does not seem to affect Gemini or Mistral Chat, so I think the instructions need to be updated to cover more AI engines.

I will add my two cents for people who believe that this might be related only to the SWE and tangent industries: It's really not. I have many friends (in Europe) who are trying to get through to different jobs in unrelated industries ranging from finance to fashion, or just trying to get promoted vertically (or horizontally), failing rather miserably.

The tech industry had it just right and then got too big? and added those hoops ad nauseam

Incidentally, I read a post today which swore that the only way to get hired is NOT to rely on network. Because hiring managers receive so many applications if you don't get your app in the first 24 hours it's guaranteed to be rejected. I think the network thing works only for smaller companies.

This appears to have mostly worked for the title, but not for the Minions part:

```

Certainly! Let’s dive into the summary of “Panic! at the Tech Job Market” by Matt Stauffer.

LIKE SLUGS THROUGH THE HOURGLASS, THESE ARE THE DAYS OF OUR TECH TRIUMPHS

In this article, Matt Stauffer delves into the tumultuous landscape of the tech job market. Buckle up as we explore key themes and insights:

    Job Openings vs. Interest Rates:
        The tech job market has been a rollercoaster ride. Interest rates play a significant role.
        When interest rates rise, the “free money” disappears. The government’s decision to increase rates impacts everything.
        Organizations with idle cash can park it in safe, government-backed interest accounts instead of investing in risky assets.
        Risky assets include funding uncertain tech companies. During high-interest-rate periods, weaker companies collapse, and strong ones “clean house.”
        The result? A scarcity of jobs for tech professionals.

    Company Structures:
        Tech companies fall into four categories:
            Nepo companies: Friends with unlimited money build unrealistic, unmarketable dreams.
            Speculation companies: Ideas without products or customers, seeking funding to explore viability.
            Stable companies: Established players with predictable growth.
            Unicorn companies: Rare, high-growth entities.
        While other sectors thrive during rising interest rates, tech jobs face unique challenges.

the tidbit didn't work though, I just tried with GPT-4o

I don't know what exactly kagi universal summarizer use but it didn't get tricked

output:

"The document discusses the current state of the tech job market, which has been impacted by rising interest rates. It explains how different types of tech companies, from speculative startups to stable enterprises, are affected by these economic changes. The author criticizes the ineffective and demoralizing nature of modern tech hiring practices, which focus on arbitrary tests and behavioral interviews rather than actual experience and capabilities. The document also provides several real-world examples of poorly designed technical systems and processes at tech companies. Overall, the text laments the deterioration of the tech industry, where many jobs have become impossible fantasy roles overloaded with divergent tasks."

chatgpt 3.5 summarized it without issue/injection. also i'm quoted in the article lmao

I've never understood why people hate them so much. From the employer side of things it only makes sense to get a feeling for someone's abilities other than an impression based on words alone.

You can't believe the amount of shit solutions we've gotten from candidates. We just let you make a very simple kata. A tiny program that generates some console output, you have to refactor it to make it prettier and you need to add one feature. Literally half of the people fail to make it work. Many others just show zero effort for code cleanliness. That's all we ask, make it work and make it look pretty.

There's coding interviews and coding interviews.

Asking basic questions that will be directly applicable to the job? Sure

Filtering for basic knowledge to make sure the candidate isn't lying about their experience? Sure.

Examining my thought process and producing working code is a nice-to-have? Sure.

Asking me to solve an extremely esoteric problem that has zero relevance to my day-to-day and if the solution I come up with on the spot under time pressure is incorrect or even just not the most efficient I'm rejected? At that point you're just filtering for starry-eyed recent grads you can underpay.

The last time I interviewed and did a few LC problems, it was my experience that most of them were trivially solvable by some combination of implementing an iterator, doing a fold, and maybe adding memoization. Not every problem obviously, but those 3 steps seem to pretty generically cover most easy/mediums that will come up in a coding skills interview. When I got my first job, I didn't know what any of those things were, so I've also found coding interview problems to have become easier for me over time.

I've never used much Python in my day job, but the `yield` keyword is basically overpowered for LC problems.

From personal experience the coding round gets easier for senior/staff roles, even for the exact same question, because of the experience the interviewers have and the signal they are looking for (eg problem solving, communication, testing, etc.)

At junior and "SDE II" level coding rounds are just toxic newly minted SDEs trying to make it a competition between the candidate and themselves ( I've got interviewers offended when I came up with a simpler solution than the one he had in mind)

Yeah I feel like this is sour grapes from midwits that aren't as good at programming as they think they are. Sometimes you get a dick interviewer that asks you a trick question, but most interviewers don't care if you get a problem exactly right, they just want to hear you discuss a problem intelligently and show expertise while coding.

Imo, there are two kinds of programmers: people who can write code to build stuff, and people who can write code to build stuff and are also conversationally fluent in the theory behind writing code. The second group is 5x more useful than the first, and coding interviews are testing which group you're in. Often the first group doesn't think the extra skill of fluency is important, which is fine, think what you want, but they're definitely wrong, and I wouldn't want to work with those people; when there are actual problems to solve I'm going to go looking for people in the second group to figure them out. A terrible situation is to end up with a team of entirely people who can code but can't theorize about code, because they'll build a mountain of crap that other people have to rebuild later.

(Now it's true that some people can't theorize quickly, or in front of someone else, or especially in a stressful interview where there's a lot on the line. Those are real issues with the format that need solving. Not to mention the "esoteric trivia" sorts of questions which are pointless.

But the basic objection that "coding tests aren't testing the skills you need in your day job" is absurd to me. They're not the skills you use everyday, they're the skills you need to be able to pull out when you need them, which backstop the work you do every day. Like your mechanic doesn't use their "theory of how engines work" every day to fix a car, but you wouldn't want a mechanic who doesn't know how an engine works working on your car for very long either...)

I've been observing that coworkers hired through the modern formulaic leetcode/sd/behavioral loop are homogeneously competent in a specific way — if there is an agreement (aka "alignment") on what needs to be actually done, they'd do it passably fine. Corporate dysfunction is more of a product of how that alignment is achieved.

It really just depends on the recruiting culture of the company in question, in my experience. I've interviewed at top companies and been given coding problems I could have solved in high school. And I've interviewed at 10-person startups and been given ridiculous leetcode brainteasers. And vice versa.

My perspective aligns with your newer opinion. I have never studied for an interview, and cannot clearly imagine what such a process would involve; neither have I ever taken a CS course. A coding interview therefore feels like an opportunity to demonstrate my approach to problem-solving using the skills I have acquired over the years, which feels like a reasonable thing to ask of a potential future coworker.

My pet theory, after listening to people gripe about coding interviews for many years now, is that people who have gone into the workforce from a university CS program frequently mistake job interviews for classroom tests, imagining that the goal is to produce a correct answer, and that is why they believe they must study and memorize.

That is certainly not what I expect when I am interviewing someone! I want to see you work and I want to hear you communicate, so I can judge what it might be like to collaborate with you. If I can see that you are capable of breaking down a problem and digging in, asking sensible questions, and making progress toward a reasonable solution, I don't care that much whether you actually arrive there.

You hear about the worst cases on the internet, but you see mostly of the average ones on reality.

Hazing people to invent some genial algorithm that all of humanity failed to for decades, except for some lucky individual somewhere; on demand, on short notice, with time pressure, and in a high-stakes environment will never be a good interview. But also, the people that do that do not keep interviewing for long.

Personally, I haven't been in an interview for a long time (as a candidate). But most of the "best practices" from the time I was are now common jokes. I have seen many of those practices applied, but even at that time there were many places that were reasonable.

What type of coding interview do you find more valuable for the interviewer? Algo code interview always looked like the interviewer trying to show off to me. Guess it depends on the requirements of the job, though...

I once thought they were purely hazing with zero relevance to day to day work, but as I get more senior I drift further away from that opinion.

A lot of it is/was. Hiring managers for a long time didn't know how to hire devs so they would have devs hire devs and, well, devs like to have lots of pissing contests and that spilt over into interviewing techniques which got cargo culted because that's another thing devs are outstanding at.

Yah I had no idea where that came from. Assume 250 working day in a year that’s…$1.25 - $2.5 million per year. At a tractor manufacturer.

It was probably a typo, with extra zero. they probably meant $500-$1000 per day. That would be $125k-$250k which seems much more reasonable

It's absurd. He has no concept of market rates (and frankly I'm unsurprised that he's not getting hired if his expectations are this out of whack).

His resume even confirms this[0], because he seemingly thinks the appropriate level at FAANG would be L10 which is extremely rare. There is a 0% chance that his experience would level him that high.

The entire article can be chocked up to a massively inflated sense of entitlement.

[0] https://matt.sh/files/a-resume/resume.html

At one point he’s claiming that a stable non tech company like a tractor manufacturer is paying 5k-10k

For anyone that came to the comments before the article, it claims that number is per day

Yeah I had to stop reading when I got to that part. I get making a mistake and adding a zero accidentally but all of the daily compensation values were so far off from anything approaching reality I wasn't going to bother reading whatever other analysis he had for fear it would also be wildly inflated.

I think they're using some kind of "daily equivalent average pay, factoring in exponential growth of the stock divided by actual days worked over a career" -

Under the modern tech landscape, stable “hyperscale ultra-growth” companies are paying experienced employees the equivalent of $10,000 to $50,000 per day if we include the value of their exponentially growing yearly stock grants.

Assuming a $250k salary, that's only about $1000/day. But if you're able to bank $50,000,000 in stock grants over a 40 years career (invest early and often in a high-growth company), that averages out to $5,000 per day.

Kinda dodgy math, should been better clarified, and that's still somewhat ambitious; but I think that's the idea behind it based on a couple allusions throughout the article.

I was thrown by this too, but I think the author is in his 40s and making comparisons to the VP-level comp that some of his peers are making after spending 20 years climbing the ranks at a single company.

He talks about making millions per year, so it’s not a typo.

Average salary? Salaries are determined by the size of the company, how much value software engineers add, supply of software engineers, and the location of the office.

I noticed the same hyperbole. I've never made extremely high or low wages; been within one standard deviation from the role mean for decades.

I was also surprised. I think he's off almost exactly a factor of 10.

It's a personal blog. There's nothing wrong with being as casual as you like on your personal blog.

It seems there’s always a comment like this on HN when the writing isn’t cracker dry

Maybe I’m an old, but this thing called a “blog” was very popular a long time ago, where people would have their own slice of internet to write whatever they wanted.

It’s because they are writing for the masses. What happened to professional writing? This:

    “When The Wealth of Nations was first published in March 1776 David Hume wrote to his old friend in terms of the greatest praise, while qualifying his hopes by remarking that ‘the reading of it necessarily requires so much attention, and the public is disposed to give so little, that I shall still doubt for some time of its being at first very popular’. (Corr., letter 150.) Strahan, Smith’s publisher, wrote very much in the same vein when commenting that the sales of the book had been much more ‘than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers) to peruse to any purpose’. (Corr., p. 193 n.)”

    Excerpt From
    The Wealth of Nations Books I-III
    Adam Smith

This is a personal pet peeve of mine as well. In written text i see online and in direct communication, punctuation is absent, words are misspelled, ideas are incoherent.

It is frustrating to read because it is unclear. Even more frustrating is the over-reliance on memes and inside jokes.

I, too, despise this style of writing.

Why do people think this writing style is attractive?

Do you actually want to understand the answer to this question?

You probably have a job right now.

To me, laid off twice in 18 months, currently three months unemployed, engaging daily with the Sisyphean madness that is finding a tech job in 2024, the author's darkly humorous, off-the-cuff style resonated deeply.

Given the attention it's getting here, I can only presume I'm not alone.

To each their own

This writing style is why the guy can't hold down a job.

I dunno dude, I think it's just called blogging. Sometimes people like showing more personality and opinion than you get in other blogs that do super serious technical writing or thinly veiled product advertisement.

It feels like the only appropriate response to this is a meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stop-liking-what-i-dont-like

It comes across as if it was written by a disgruntled 15 year old.

Appropriately enough, this style of blogging is at least fifteen years old if not older. It's not all that different from the format of Joel Spolsky's blog.

No one understands or is willing to research these things anymore. Everyone (or at least everyone who is screaming and being heard) is mumbling points about interest, boom/bust, AI, etc...

The reality, in my opinion, the governments have made it so hard to start and maintain a business that the market is not liquid for employment anymore. It's not catastrophic, but rather dead (as not moving).

Here are the employment numbers: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons

2019: 159M Employed out of 326.8M Population 2024: 161M Employed out of 335.8M Population

1.25% vs 2.75%

Well, the old tax code was a little bonkers. My entire department was labeled R&D pre 2022 even though there was very little research going on.

Will Trump reverse these changes?

Will he lower interest rates?

On the other hand, how would anyone have heard about this? This is the very first time I'm hearing anything about Section 174.

Plus, this doesn't really explain Europe's tech sector dumping, since from a quick search this is entirely an American thing.

So maybe you're just as wrong as anyone else?

Indeed. There is so much more going on and not going on than is apparent in these (apologies to the author, but I think this is accurate) long but simplistic takes. Hearsay and arbitrary correlations are great conversation fodder but I wouldn't make life decisions based on such discussions.

The difficult bit is that there is very little available to folks who want concrete "answers" to the job market, life and success questions. There is simple, quality advice but it doesn't give answers and I've noticed people don't like them.

TL;DR on Section 174, Research & Experimentation costs went from being fully deductible in the year incurred to being deductible over a 5 year period.

Larger tax bills and a tightening on what roles/activities are deductible as R&E are likely what OP is pointing at with his comment.

To the best of my non-inside baseball research, Section 174 changes were simply one part of a package of revenue generating measures to offset the large tax cuts from the broader tax act they were a part of.

The changes came from The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017 that was introduced to the House of Representatives by Congressman Kevin Brady (R) Texas. The bill passed both houses of Congress along party lines. Then President Trump signed the bill into law. Section 174 changes did not take effect until 2021.

” It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce.”

I agree with you, and think the value proposition for these companies to hire junior talent is especially unappealing given the 1-2 year job hopping which has become popular of late. It’s just not worth training someone up if they’ll either leave or require a salary that could have bought you someone experienced in the first place.

It really sucks right now

For me, it's been the opposite: the last 2 years have been the best time I've had working in tech since the early 2010s.

Around 2019 I was seriously considering leaving the field (if it didn't pay so much) as the entire industry had turned into a bunch of leet code grinding, TC chasing, mediocre drones. It was incredibly hard to find people working on actual problems let alone challenging/interesting ones. Nobody I worked with for years cared one bit about programming or computer science. Nobody learned anything for fun, nobody hacked on personal projects during the weekend, and if they were interest in their field it was only so they could add a few more bullet points to their resume.

But the last two years I've worked with several teams doing really cool work, found teams that are entirely made up of scrappy, smart people. Starting building projects using a range of new tricks and techniques (mostly around AI).

Right now there are so many small teams working on hard problems getting funding. So many interesting, talented and down right weird programmers are being sought after again. People who like to create things and solve problems are the ones getting work again (my experience was these people were just labeled as trouble makers before).

I'm probably getting, inflation adjusted, paid the least that I have in a long time, but finally work is enjoyable again. I get to hack on things with other people who are obsessed with hacking on things.

Years ago I was talking about exactly this issue and how the U.S. is producing far too many degrees than the market can receive. As usual the truth is ignored in favor of a comfortable lie, at the cost of others lives.

Don't go to university. Their value is no longer what it used to be, and they have figured out how to suppress students under a thousand pounds of administrative grift.

We need to strip all public funding going into universities to force the bad ones to go out of business. Industry will fund their own education, or they don't deserve it.

Nowadays a lot of companies are hiring new grads through their internship pipeline only. So to be able to break into the industry you have to start looking for jobs in your ~sophomore year of college and hope to keep getting return offers.

why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price

That's how it used to be. Now it's more like, "pull the job posting altogether and make your existing seniors work harder because they know they don't have options."

I've had multiple positions that I applied/interviewed for get pulled, and at least two of my friends said the same is happening at their employers -- in one case a team of 5 is now a team of 2, running a critical service for an airline. :yikes:

So, I agree that it sucks for new grads, and it's maybe worse than you think.

Why is compensation the only consideration in the entire article? I mean, money is nice, but don't you care what you are working on?

I stopped at (paraphrased): "I've never passed a coding interview. Coding interviews hire the wrong people!"

Right, I started reading but felt the bitter tone of the 115k word rant early on.

It seems to be basically rambling to the point of showing a picture of himself to prove he exercises??

To each their own but, I wonder if his failure in interviews is not a skills issue but an attitude one...

It's impossible to get hired but once you will, you own the app, entire stack, and have side tasks. Salary perhaps 10% higher than pre-Covid.

Yes, I don't really understand why he went from talking about tech jobs declining to bitching about the hiring process...

Thanks for the summary, skimmed it and it's too long of a time commitment for what appears like little payoff.

Sure companies want the Full Stack -> Do-Everything hire - who wouldn't, I'd like a goose that lays golden eggs but there is no market to provide that. I see this change as merely a side effect of the state of the market where hirers of labor feel they can make such demands.

What I find interesting and did not find explored in the article is that the overhead for establishing a company is far lower than what it used to be so there is more potential for Do-Everything people to just do that little bit more to include all the other functions of the company. Many of the functions needed to run a company are not needed at such a small scale that necessitates a Do-Everything hire.

I know not everyone is cut out for that, but not everyone is not cut out for the Do-Everything level of responsibilities either, and those that can do the latter are more likely to be able to do the former. That's what I did, I built up my skill stack working as a Full-Stack / Do-Everything engineer then learned business and marketing on top and went solo. These days I have a good laugh when I read about some start-up that raised some money based on delivering X is also advertising for jobs that are basically build X from scratch by yourself.

Thanks for the summary. The article looks interesting, but I didn't have the time to properly read it.

except that referral hiring isn't a thing almost anywhere

I know because I've referred people I KNOW are great SE's and I'm literally willing to vouch my own employment for, and they still get treated no different to any other candidate

Most tech interviews are as relevant to job performance as if hiring a baker required interviewing them about how electron orbitals bind worked gluten together then rejecting bakers who don’t immediately draw a valid orbital configuration.

That's the thing now. That's how they interview for bakers

Behavioural interviews are extremely effective provided you do them properly. Running behavioural interviews properly is extremely difficult and takes legitimate skill and experience to orchestrate. It's not something you can pull off by simply following a few rote questions in an interview pack.

As a result, most behavioural interviews are ineffective and absolutely riddled with bias.

Behavioral interviews seem like the new way to reject candidates based on "culture" without saying that though, because saying a candidate was rejected due to "culture incompatibility" can be taken as a bias or discrimination.

I interviewed at Netflix. The market is tough right now and they pay really well. I really wanted to pass.

I did great on their tech rounds. Their "culture round" is notoriously hard, people throw out advice like "read the culture memo". I did. Now I have no idea what I did "wrong" in the culture/behavioral interview with the first hiring manager, they passed, they gave me no feedback, but they still booked me for an interview with another team. I also failed with that hiring manager.

Is it because my "EQ" is bad?

How is it a scam? If it was that bad nearly all companies would just use in-house recruiters

Someone has to do the work of pestering software developers on LinkedIn. If the external recruiters didn't do it, companies would just do it themselves.

If you mean people hired to hire other people, then yes, strongly agree. The entire thing is built on the assumption that your company will have a high turnover rate.

That is something that should be avoided by employers as it for one increases the average compensation niveau faster than employee retention would and also constantly restarts opportunity costs as new employees take time to settle into their new roles. Yet, here we are and it is not only acceptable, but also standard procedure.

What? There are still millions of people with great high paying tech jobs.

At least now I no longer have to argue with ‘inflation is good for us’ people.

Who has been arguing this?

In the end, the wealthy allow government to introduce just enough socialism to keep the masses from revolting. NOT, to level the playing field, or to re-distribute wealth, but to keep the in-equality in place.

Can you explain further? I assumed you were talking about COVID, but the decline in jobs lags a few years behind so I'm not sure I'm tracking your point.

Tech is a high growth sector, perhaps the highest. Because of this, tech companies are highly leveraged. They need cash to fund the growth and this cash won't result in revenue for some time, so they have to borrow the money. When rates go up, this cash becomes expensive. The last thing these companies want to do is cancel their growth plans and hand over the market to their competitor, so they look for areas to reduce costs. The single most effective way to do this is to the various recurring expenses associated with headcount.

Yes, covid is a factor and yes so is the shift from general purpose compute to specialized/high performance, but the single largest factor is the fed rate and what this has done to the money supply (as it is designed to do).

I think that line is a joke.

the current D administration with its disastrous policies

Please cite the specific "disastrous policies" that are affecting the things you think are harming the economy. Being vague makes your comment just another pointless political attack.

Which 2020-2024 policies have harmed the economy?

"What are you going to do to fix it?", ask the people who broke it.

This has been a strategy for decades now. https://front.moveon.org/20-years-of-gop-strategy-in-one-lit...

Startdown? Enshitterprise?

I assume this is where you don't want to be, honestly no matter what the compensation is, it will destroy you.

Not a startup, but a winddown (wind down)

Yeah looks like they were hoping that if they maximize the word count they will automatically "win" SEO.

Yea, seriously. Much like how people complain about fizzbuzz until they see how many people can't do that, the amount of candidates where basic "so tell me about how you approached a major design decision not going the way you wanted" question had them essentially admitting to being vengeful and petty is weirdly high. Or people when asked how they dealt with a junior engineer who put in a messy PR essentially recount how they traumatized a new kid.

Python dependencies file, see also package-lock.json

https://python-poetry.org/

Poetry is a dependency manager for python projects (https://python-poetry.org/). A lockfile is a generic mechanism to serialize mutations to a resource, in this case, probably the file that stores the project's dependency configuration.

Wasn't the all of the money-printing going on functionally similar to reducing interest rates?

Absolutely not true, it means you might e.g. be living in Berlin, or in Germany or Netherlands in general. Not everywhere people are nice and in some places they place a particular pride in being assholes.

The thing is, only the engineers think that tech job requirements are completely broken, because the money is still flowing through the industry. The only signal that leadership and HR would take that something might be wrong is if money stopped flowing through the industry.

I once had to design an error-message display for an office machine with an 8-line, 40-character wide LCD. Errors could only be shown on the bottom line and if they were more than 40 characters long (I'm looking at you, German language!), they had to scroll.

I spent hours trying to figure out some mathematical calculation that took the screen width and the total length of the error message and how much was off screen, etc., to come up with a good algorithm that worked for all combinations of message lengths. By lunchtime I had something workable, but it was the ugliest code imaginable.

We went to lunch and when I came back, I looked at the machine and the obvious solution came to me: the screen was just a 40-character wide window into the text and all I had to do was pan it over the length of the message. Like barely 3 lines of code to implement.

I try to remember that lesson whenever I find myself spending way too much time on something that sounds like it should be simple!

I don’t know, my former colleague joined Amazon back in 2014, just as I quit to start my own company.

He became a solutions architect and got promoted multiple times and now makes close to $1 million a year, he’s not very technical and I’m not even sure what he does. But I’m sure it’s mostly bureaucratic.

Seems pretty well known at this point that risk-adjusted comp is higher at bigger stable co's. Personally find them boring, so I tend to work at startup/growth companies, where I can make enough for the lifestyle I like, and I enjoy my work.

He mentioned he has 20+ years of experience, so I think he is in fact comparing to VP-level roles. Most people I’ve met at faang who are over 40 are in fact seniorstaff+ or director+, so it’s not as insane as it seems on first blush, although I think to reach his numbers you’d have to factor in stock appreciation as well.

I also think far more people leave faang altogether than reach VP level.

These numbers are absolutely insane. In Poland 300 EUR per day is a good senior level salary. If I earned 10k per day, I'd quit after a year, but a medium house, and live very comfortably just from a 2% interest rate for the rest of my life.

"Designed & Built a Redis Replacement"

Huge red flag right there as someone that has done hiring.

Every third sentence in the article is soaking in sarcasm… I read it that way.

Are the scare quotes around wisdom because you're embarrassed to admit that such a thing exists? ;)

Since it seems you've thought about it a bit, I'm interested to hear your definition of what is / isn't wisdom in an engineering context.

I'd love to see this, too, but it would be almost impossible to enforce. Companies can always plausibly deny: "Oh, no, it's a real job alright, we just can't seem to find the right candidate for it. Woe is me!"

I had that experience this week, but with $X as a job title instead of a technology.

Hiring manager: "I see your resume doesn't list 'Frontend Developer'."

Me: "I haven't had that exact title, but I have years of experience building front-end applications using the tools you listed."

Hiring manager: "Hm, it seems like you might not have enough experience as a 'Frontend Developer' for what we need."