what the HELL is going on with the tech job market?

[rnottelovesowls]

i have a bad habit known as "reading news about the tech industry" and wow, finding work in the tech job market, from the US and beyond, is rough! this is a community full of people who make web projects for fun, so i have to ask, has anyone else seen this, too?

there's enough news articles (and reddit posts) about workers at big tech companies getting laid off and struggling to find work to make a collage mural. it's almost dystopian. like, you're telling me that executives actually believe that chatGPT can do a better job? that they truly believe that humans are expendable and won't care if we die tomorrow? that applicants have to go through 5 rounds of interviews and STILL won't get hired? that they sometimes use AI in the application process? that applications often ask stupid non-work-related questions like "what's your favorite color"? that mass layoffs always, ALWAYS follow companies making record-breaking profits? that tech workers often have to work 50-70 hours a week and STILL can't afford rent? that most job postings on indeed are actually FAKE? i've known that the fast food and retail industries are bad, but i didn't know there was a sector that was somehow worse!

please feel free to give your input. that any of this information is plausible is mind-boggling

[pepper]

I graduated in 2023 with my 4-year degree in IT. Took me a year to find a job, during which time I was working underemployed at a massive coffee chain that pays their employees starvation wages and cuts workers' hours year over year. I was given job interviews by AI "interviewers", had employers ghost me for interviews (as in, we had an interview scheduled, I showed up to the call, and they never did. I just sat there on video for an hour like an asshole). I put in literally hundreds of applications and only a handful actually called me back. Mind you, I was a couple months from living out of my car at this point.

I found a job not because of a normal hiring process but because I got extremely lucky and had a friend who had a friend who was hiring for a big company and they pretty much needed to hire someone the day I was interviewed bc their open positions were being frozen later that day...

Anyways. I'm looking for another job right now because I really really do not like my current company, even though I am grateful to be employed with a decent wage and health benefits. And the job market is worse than it was in 2023. I was excited just to receive a rejection letter recently bc it meant that someone actually saw my resume at least.

So to answer your question: yes. And it sucks 

[lakes]

I'm not in tech, but my field is another getting replaced with "genAI" & it's gotten to the point where when I do actually hear back, I worry it's a scam, especially since that's happened to me before, but usually I catch it early on.

[Licheus]

Yeah, your concerns are unfortunately accurate descriptions. The problem at the core has always been that leadership are not creators and don’t understand creation or, well, anything except for manipulating social interactions, really. Yet at the same time, these same people have made it their justification for existing to set the agenda and control the creators. So if leadership don’t really understand any nuances of creation, but they hear that generative AI can create things x times faster, their natural reaction will be to shoehorn generative AI into everything.

When it comes to how things are actually being created, the devil is in the details. Nothing in ledership’s heads are about understanding the details (all their skills are about accumulating power, with nothing being connected to the world outside of that). If you don’t have any footing in reality, you’ll be very susceptible to trends. You’ll see no issue in generative AI if you’re blind to nuance.

What you currently hear leadership saying is to make everybody, even the better programmers, using generative AI in their work. Because clearly generative AI only has advantages, right? They don’t understand where the value originates, even if it’s been what has built the company. So you’ll see the suits run with generative AI.

Contemporary society has a faulty language around companies and generative AI. They behave more like parasitic organisms than whatever “neutral” organisations they’re often framed as.

For a company, even if you have a “good” person become CEO, this person has to cut corners and make decisions maximising the short-time value for shareholders. So they either make inhumane decisions and become a bad person, or the company (organism) kicks them out and replaces them with a different vessel in-line with the overarching structure. There doesn’t need to be ill will involved from individual people, but the whole structure moves in this predatory direction.

For generative AI, the dialogue is generally on framing it as a “tool”, but in reality its effect on society is more in line with a psychological mind virus or an invasive species:

https://www.cognitiveprivacyproject.org/research/ai-invasive-species-cognitive-ecosystems

Overarcing effects like these have been observable in different forms for quite some time. Here’s Tristan Harris talking about persuasive technologies (YouTube’s suggestion feed is a concrete example):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRrguMdzXBw&t=56s

Doing anything for long enough will cement it and send the cause-and-effect chain in a certain direction. If it’s done by people sleepwalking in today’s society, contemporary incentives will cause us to end up in a short-sighted and destructive place. The problems have reached the people actually doing the programming. These problems have accumulated in stages, and now the tech industry is eating itself from the inside.

This reads more authoritative than I wanted it to... It’s just my thoughts, but I believe it’s a decently accurate analysis of the situation.

[dogbrain]

it's pretty fucked up that so many of us have been told all our lives how great it is to get a compsci degree and that we should pursue tech jobs when we're older, but now that gen AI is so big, those same people are backpedaling

i was insanely close to majoring in compsci. i graduated high school right around when gen AI was beginning to boom in popularity, but after seeing the current state of things i made what i think was the wise choice to back out at the very last second. it's not that i lost my passion; if anything i'm more into computers and what makes them tick than i ever have been in my life! it just doesn't seem worth it to spend tens of thousands for a degree that won't even guarantee me a career once i graduate