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Comment by sfriskzo2005 | Hacker News Reader

sfriskzo2005

>> If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now.

Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them. You mention ZIRP, so I'm assuming you're probably in the US.

Practically every news show in the past two weeks has noted the importance of having a concerted US policy to help fill these open positions. They also mention the existential risk to the US caused by the massive shortage of engineers.

How does this square with you saying " If you haven’t searched for a job since then it will surprise you how much more of an employers market it is now." Where is the disconnect?

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The disconnect is that the news is completely wrong. I can confirm that it’s an employer’s market from personal experience as well.

Just because a position is advertised does not mean the position is going to be filled - a lot of companies advertise a job that doesn't really exist. They do this for several reasons - to look like they are more successful than they are (if they are hiring they are expanding), and some just collect resumes. They might even do a few interviews, which helps their team practice doing interviews even if the company isn't going to hire. I'm sure there are other reasons.

I've been in the tech job market about 30 years, and this might be the second worst time for people in tech, the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s being the worst. My boss knows it too, he knows I can't leave and find another job that pays as well right now. A couple of years ago I was still getting about 20 recruiter contacts per week, and now I'm lucky if I get 1 per month.

If you haven't noticed how bad it is, I have to wonder why?

I mostly hire and dont actively code for work, so I never got 20 recruiter contacts per week before or now.

Agree on not all postings are real (we do some because we're mandated to do a proper search when filling positions with people we know)

I started working in 1996. The dot com bust wasn’t bad if you were in a market with profitable enterprise companies like banks, insurance companies, etc.

I could throw my resume up in the air and find plenty of commodity Windows programming jobs.

It’s much worse now. I found a job quickly both last year and the year before. But that was only because I have a combination of skills and experience that puts me at the top of the pile of resumes in my niche.

These stories are bought and paid for, to pressure lawmakers to make it easer to hire H1Bs and/or offshore to lower wages. Much like recent stories about the shortage of engineers or workers in general. Shortage of suckers willing to work below market, that is. None of these companies will consider training existing engineers for a month either.

https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I agree. H1Bs are akin to indentured servants who do not have the ability to vote. Meanwhile, employers make large payments to politicians to keep the status quo.

What I dislike most is the cheating from H1Bs though. My friend in an AZ university described how foreigners were known to cheat on their exams based the clique of the country they came from. Similarly, I met an H1Bs who sends his work to Indian cheaper workers even though it is supposed to be confidential. They also collude to get their family and friends into the U.S.

Bloomberg news covered it recently, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-...

My guesses:

Fake job postings to give the appearance of growth for funded companies who are struggling to grow to meet investor expectations.

Posturing to distract from the actual practice of hiring less-expensive talent overseas while pretending to be on Team America.

Political spin to avoid losing face/clout during an election year.

In short: some form of lying (or at best, twisting) to avoid the shame of not being as successful as one might look on their <insert social media here> profile.

And even more cynical take: They are marketing for AI hype cycle. That is there to drive up the stock prices, not actually hire. Spread out effort to make companies and AI overall look more popular.

> Could you clarify further? Front what I hear on the news, there are hundreds of thousands of open engineering/ai positions in the US and we cannot find workers to fill them.

The only thing that matters is the ratio of job seekers to open positions.

There are always a lot of open positions because there are a lot of companies. Even during recessions most companies will be opening to hiring the right candidates.

When there are more candidates than positions combined with a lot of layoffs, companies get more selective. Companies are hiring, but they're being more careful about who gets hired.

The other disconnect is that the employers are trying to fill positions at a certain price point which is usually much lower than most people will accept. Asking why we can't just take those positions when desperate is basically asking why you can't work for significantly less than you have been making for the past 10 years. People have houses and families to support. In some places those jobs pay so little that you can barely make rent with roommates. They exist solely to prove there aren't any qualified US workers for H1B purposes.

A lot of really good people can be had in certain US states if you're willing to pay them a lot of money relative to their local market. I've gotten several applications from some pretty overqualified people simply because the pay for the associate position is higher than their local employers are offering for mid-level people. If you then turn that around, it suggests that some of these employers struggle to fill positions because they actually have to compete on the nation-wide market for people.

Lots of job postings are fake

> engineering/ai

Most software engineers lack credentials to get hired to build ai, unless you view conventional software engineering as ai.

The time to build out ai tracks in universities was back in the Obama administration. It’s ridiculous that all of a sudden the whip is being so harshly cracked for everyone to re-skill. I applied to CS grad programs for two straight cycles, with strong GRE scores and a solid CS undergrad degree, and not a single non-remote university program offered me admission, seemingly due to enrollment caps as bottlenecks.

I ended up joining a well-known online MS program, and I feel that it is teaching me so little for the effort I put in that I don’t think my ai skill has improved over what I had from outside of the program, but hey, if the system is broken, what can you do? I can learn nothing, remotely, and use that degree to get an ai job where I do genuinely valuable work, but I’m definitely not allowed to make those genuinely valuable work contributions in a remote role.

The opportunities available are extremely limited or they don’t make sense/aren’t very good. Just smile and play the game… or is it the game that’s playing with candidates?

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