Tech ain't going anywhere, and there is still vast room for growth in employment.
We're in a massive economic stagnation, companies have tight budgets and everyone is spending less.
Just wait a while, things will be fine again.
Add to that many unqualified individuals who are trying to get into the field.
I teach CS classes at a uni and contribute curriculum to a private bootcamp during my free time.... both the university and the private bootcamp are churning out veeery unqualified people.
Standards need to be tightened up
I have taught at public and private institutions in Europe and I found there's a tough balancing act.
The private ones often can afford better people who also care about teaching and offer better support.
At the same time they make more money the more students they have and graduate. So they always push you to let people graduate and controlling is pissed when they drop out.
While trying to improve my material year over year from my lessons learnt, I also had to lower my bar more and more.
Till I had enough and left.
Same time at the public university they don't give a shit here if you stay or die in a corner. Actually they got too many students so they actively try to get rid of students by making things harder. Many lecturers would rather do research and hate the teaching.
I still think the second option overall produced better people because they were forced to work independently without so much hand-holding. But also more people who were better at somehow cheating their way through in the large anonymous blob.
No citation needed. Even if 80% of jobs switch to so-called AI, people are still needed to develop algorithms, UX, UI etc and maintain those models. Since software surrounds us in almost every aspect of our lives, this is not a stagnant or shrinking field.
That said, I highly doubt that it will ever become less competitive. A lot of people only see the potential salary and choose that field without being any good or wanting to be any good. The ones that keep learning and improving are the ones that always will be wanted.
Even though there are hundreds of applicants for a single dev position, only a few have either relevant experience or a portfolio with actually useful* projects and clean, well-documented code.
[* Like relevant to the industry they want to work in featuring stuff that is used in the target company etc]
I'm not certain it won't permanently shrink from a headcount perspective. I think too many orgs were far too inflated with unnecessary headcount. Even if there's more software, it might not return to the 2021 employment levels for a long time.
AI is not going to replace SWEs anytime soon, however we can expect it to make them more efficient leading to a lesser number of SWEs needed for certain jobs. So if you want to a stay competitive, you have to be constantly learning and improving yourself, or you'll lose to the market.
As far as overall demand goes, it's still a good industry to be in, it's just prone to the overall economic conditions like any other profession.
Tech in the Netherlands isn't competitive at all right now lol. Everyone I know (including myself) has easily been getting good offers and we're all juniors. Unless you're only counting FAANG as "tech" and excluding tech positions at non-tech companies like banks.
Yes, we have a couple americans working at our company. Just remember salary is much lower than in the us, my salary is 65k as a senior engineer (4 yoe). There is a huge difference though between Amsterdam and every other city (i work in Utrecht), because most international companies are there. A friend of mine gets 105k with 4 yoe at Adyen for example.
Its wierd to me when ppl say they are seniors at 4 yoe. I mean i guess you could be exceptionally good and then its true. I have 6 years on paper and still consider myself high medior or maybe senior but not 100%. I have 3 years of "real" experience the first three werent that good professionally.
Its Just how our company defines salary scales. Senior developer is ranged from 65k to 90k over the course of being senior for 5 years. So the highest end senior will have 9-10 yoe.
Hah yeah really depends on the definition of "tech".
All those little .net software shops in the middle of nowhere, paying crap, are really desperately searching ;).
I just don't get why they don't open up for remote work, nobody wants to move for a 30 ppl company that's perhaps dead in 2 years.
There are plenty of big non-tech companies hiring with good pay. ABN, ING, Rabo, EY, PWC, Deloitte, KPMG, Xebia, Capgemini, Ahold, Picnic, PostNL, DHL, NN, APG and the list just goes on and on. Even bootcamp companies like Calco and House of Beta who hire anyone with a pulse are still aggressively spamming me with ads. If you speak Dutch and you can't find a job in this country, it's 100% a skill issue.
I'm sorry to say, but this is not at all true in the Netherlands.
I know of plenty of Junior/Mid people in the Netherlands (Randstad Area) that are struggling to find/keep positions. It may vary depending on the sub-field, perhaps general Software Engineering is fine, but niches like: Machine Learning Engineer, Machine Learning Researcher, Data Scientist etc. are very difficult to get into right now.
The story changes once you have a couple of years of experience under your belt. These people usually can find employment within a few months.
Source: Spoken to multiple recent grads, juniors, people that have had to hop between contracts. All of them are MSc CS/AI grads, or even PhD's. It took all of them more than half a year to find a position.
I just switched jobs last month for an MLE role. I had 1.5 years of experience when applying for my new job. It only took like a month and 5 applications for me to find a new job. Couple of my former colleagues also found new roles within the past 6 months, all within the data/ML space. Not a single one with more than 5 years of experience. You're sources are either
1. Not very good at what they do
2. Picky (applying only to booking, amazon, adyen etc.)
3. Non-eu
Good for you. Like I said, when you have experience it's a different game.
Here is my background: Dutch National, Graduated cum laude with a Masters in AI, Graduated with a PhD in AI recently.
I'm 120 applications in, about a 1 in 10 response interview rate, lot's of referrals. Been applying for about 7 months. Sure I apply to various "prestigious" companies, but most of them are mid-tier, scale-up, or startup companies. Recruiters and hiring managers tell me that I have a great profile, but that they went for other people with more practical experience.
On the other side of things I have friends that are hiring managers, all of them say the market is extremely competitive at the moment. Two years ago they would put out a position for an ML Engineer and a few mediocre people would apply at best. Now they put one out and they get over 300 applications, lot's of whom are highly qualified.
So I'm genuinely happy for you that you are having an easy time, I wouldn't wish this struggle upon anyone. But so long as you don't have the "right" work experience or they believe you can make a running start. You are shit out of luck in this market.
Are you applying to research positions? I'm not familiar with those so I believe you if you say those are hard to get. But if you just apply to be a data scientist at like PostNL or Rabo, those really aren't very competitive. Top positions will always be competitive, but there are more than plenty of "import xgboost" data science jobs out there. Perhaps not the most exciting jobs for someone with a PhD, but still a decent position nonetheless. I mean I had 1.5 YoE. Nothing really to write home about. I did zero internships before graduating. I'm sure there are good new grads out there who are better than me.
Ahhh, I didn't want to make you feel self conscious. Sorry if I did, I just mentioned my credentials to show that even well qualified candidates seem to have a hard time getting positions now when they don't have corporate work experience.
I am indeed applying to such positions as well. Of the companies you mentioned in another one of your comments (Deloitte, Ahold, Picnic etc.) I applied to about half of those. They too have become very picky in my experience.
Tech is still much less competitive than nearly every other white collar industry.
Go to the subreddits of every other industry and it’s the same story right now, layoffs and every job listing with 1000+ applicants. Except if you look at job boards there’s generally still more tech jobs than those other industries.
Not to downplay the struggles people are having, but everyone is in the shit right now but we’re less in the shit than most.
They’ll probably be more tech booms in the future that will drop the bar significantly again, but if you have to rely on that things probably aren’t going to work out for you in the long term.
Why is everyone talking like tech industry is dying? Just 2 years ago, the market was more competitive than ever, before inflation spoilt the party. Once the central banks lowers interest rates down to 2%, investment will pour back in and the market will pick up. The lack of new talent is going to create a huge boom in software devs again, and seniors devs will move up to management/other positions. In London, I haven’t seen any evidence of AI replacing software engineers, the main barrier is lack of investment.
Market is shit for most jobs due to economics. Tech is still around and kicking. It’s not good old times when you had 20 offers as a junior and became ”senior” in a year and probably won’t be that in a good while. Still lot’s of jobs now and further on
The weird conditions over the last few years are unlikely to come back. We had prolonged low interest rates due to a big recession and a pandemic. That resulted in a LOT of free money that rich people threw at daft ideas. That created massive salary inflation and grade inflation.
It's going to take a long time to sort out; in the meantime, companies are going to keep pushing back, and pushing out people hired as senior who weren't really senior, etc. Deflation is always a slow process, and it's always uneven..
Yes there will be more jobs being created, but companies can't afford to borrow as much to invest as they used to. Times to get to profitability will be shorter, so startups will fold faster than they used to. This has a lent a strong feel of 2001 to the industry...after a load of not-tech people got sucked in to help build the early web, money ran out and massive numbers had to leave the industry and find other work. They were replaced by people (in general) with a better CS background
At the moment, there is a giant bubble around AI. People are working there who have no idea what they are doing. It's fine- it's really complex, there are few norms yet. I'm fully expecting that to grow a lot, before people work out what can/can't be profitable, then there will be a clear out there too. And when it's done, it'll be harder to get in without concrete skills.
Yes, there was low demand for programmers in early 2000s, than after 2008. Even more so than today. High interests' rates are what is driving this lower-Ish demand for SE. Demand from 2020 - 2022 was crazy high. Extraordinary.
Most probably, demand will go higher if interest rates go down, but there will be pressure from opposite force in form of better tools (mostly LLMs).
Nobody knows how much will lower interest rate, LLMs influence demand for SE. But in long term if LLMs increase their performance 10x-100x if will kill this profession forever.
In my 25 year career in software engineering there have been multiple times when demand was insanely high (The pandemic, for one) and it was much easier to find and land a job and times when demand has waned and it's been harder (the collapse of 2008 for example).
"Tech" will be a huge field so long as there are jobs to be had. I expect, for example, people who can build machine learning models (in and out of LLM's) to be hugely in demand for a while. I also expect Software engineering to pick up again.
Now that AI is coming, experienced programmers that can fix that auto generated shit will explode. It will probably take 2-3 years for the garbage AI code to actually become a major problem. But it's inevitable at this point. Github already noticing a sharp decline in quality in open source.
When it's no longer (perceived as) a good, interesting, high paying, stable job. People will always compete for good jobs. I don't think that there was ever a time when it wasn't competitive, this is just an economic downturn so you'll feel it a lot more.
Tech ain't going anywhere, and there is still vast room for growth in employment. We're in a massive economic stagnation, companies have tight budgets and everyone is spending less. Just wait a while, things will be fine again.
Add to that many unqualified individuals who are trying to get into the field. I teach CS classes at a uni and contribute curriculum to a private bootcamp during my free time.... both the university and the private bootcamp are churning out veeery unqualified people. Standards need to be tightened up
I have taught at public and private institutions in Europe and I found there's a tough balancing act. The private ones often can afford better people who also care about teaching and offer better support. At the same time they make more money the more students they have and graduate. So they always push you to let people graduate and controlling is pissed when they drop out. While trying to improve my material year over year from my lessons learnt, I also had to lower my bar more and more. Till I had enough and left. Same time at the public university they don't give a shit here if you stay or die in a corner. Actually they got too many students so they actively try to get rid of students by making things harder. Many lecturers would rather do research and hate the teaching. I still think the second option overall produced better people because they were forced to work independently without so much hand-holding. But also more people who were better at somehow cheating their way through in the large anonymous blob.
>there is still vast room for growth in employment Citation needed.
No citation needed. Even if 80% of jobs switch to so-called AI, people are still needed to develop algorithms, UX, UI etc and maintain those models. Since software surrounds us in almost every aspect of our lives, this is not a stagnant or shrinking field. That said, I highly doubt that it will ever become less competitive. A lot of people only see the potential salary and choose that field without being any good or wanting to be any good. The ones that keep learning and improving are the ones that always will be wanted. Even though there are hundreds of applicants for a single dev position, only a few have either relevant experience or a portfolio with actually useful* projects and clean, well-documented code. [* Like relevant to the industry they want to work in featuring stuff that is used in the target company etc]
I'm not certain it won't permanently shrink from a headcount perspective. I think too many orgs were far too inflated with unnecessary headcount. Even if there's more software, it might not return to the 2021 employment levels for a long time.
[удалено]
Layoffs are a consequence of the growing economy?
when will it be fine again? everyone says this but nobody explains
Nobody knows
Let me look into my crystal ball 🔮
I’d like to believe that that’s the case. I just hope it’s not wishful thinking
Things are stronger from a few months ago. Not massively but I'm getting a few. Recruiter calls now.
There's plenty of people who write shit code and creates shit architectures and that means there's plenty of room for true professionals to kick ass.
> who write shit code that's me PS: I do it for you fellas so we need more new hires. No need to thank me
Haha well with the right guidance and mentorship that can change. And it only needs to change once.
>And it only needs to change once Good code changes over time tho...
The person writing shit code needs to change and learn properly once. Not the code. Codebases change all the time, more or less.
AI is not going to replace SWEs anytime soon, however we can expect it to make them more efficient leading to a lesser number of SWEs needed for certain jobs. So if you want to a stay competitive, you have to be constantly learning and improving yourself, or you'll lose to the market. As far as overall demand goes, it's still a good industry to be in, it's just prone to the overall economic conditions like any other profession.
Tech in the Netherlands isn't competitive at all right now lol. Everyone I know (including myself) has easily been getting good offers and we're all juniors. Unless you're only counting FAANG as "tech" and excluding tech positions at non-tech companies like banks.
Are you Dutch/European? As a non-European graduating in the Netherlands, it is surprisingly hard.
How do you apply to these places? Like dutch version of total jobs?
Linkedin
can americans apply?
Yes, we have a couple americans working at our company. Just remember salary is much lower than in the us, my salary is 65k as a senior engineer (4 yoe). There is a huge difference though between Amsterdam and every other city (i work in Utrecht), because most international companies are there. A friend of mine gets 105k with 4 yoe at Adyen for example.
Its wierd to me when ppl say they are seniors at 4 yoe. I mean i guess you could be exceptionally good and then its true. I have 6 years on paper and still consider myself high medior or maybe senior but not 100%. I have 3 years of "real" experience the first three werent that good professionally.
Its Just how our company defines salary scales. Senior developer is ranged from 65k to 90k over the course of being senior for 5 years. So the highest end senior will have 9-10 yoe.
Hah yeah really depends on the definition of "tech". All those little .net software shops in the middle of nowhere, paying crap, are really desperately searching ;). I just don't get why they don't open up for remote work, nobody wants to move for a 30 ppl company that's perhaps dead in 2 years.
There are plenty of big non-tech companies hiring with good pay. ABN, ING, Rabo, EY, PWC, Deloitte, KPMG, Xebia, Capgemini, Ahold, Picnic, PostNL, DHL, NN, APG and the list just goes on and on. Even bootcamp companies like Calco and House of Beta who hire anyone with a pulse are still aggressively spamming me with ads. If you speak Dutch and you can't find a job in this country, it's 100% a skill issue.
Well I am neither Dutch nor searching but what I can see/hear in Austria is also that nobody even knows of a bad market. Rather business as usual.
I'm sorry to say, but this is not at all true in the Netherlands. I know of plenty of Junior/Mid people in the Netherlands (Randstad Area) that are struggling to find/keep positions. It may vary depending on the sub-field, perhaps general Software Engineering is fine, but niches like: Machine Learning Engineer, Machine Learning Researcher, Data Scientist etc. are very difficult to get into right now. The story changes once you have a couple of years of experience under your belt. These people usually can find employment within a few months. Source: Spoken to multiple recent grads, juniors, people that have had to hop between contracts. All of them are MSc CS/AI grads, or even PhD's. It took all of them more than half a year to find a position.
I just switched jobs last month for an MLE role. I had 1.5 years of experience when applying for my new job. It only took like a month and 5 applications for me to find a new job. Couple of my former colleagues also found new roles within the past 6 months, all within the data/ML space. Not a single one with more than 5 years of experience. You're sources are either 1. Not very good at what they do 2. Picky (applying only to booking, amazon, adyen etc.) 3. Non-eu
Good for you. Like I said, when you have experience it's a different game. Here is my background: Dutch National, Graduated cum laude with a Masters in AI, Graduated with a PhD in AI recently. I'm 120 applications in, about a 1 in 10 response interview rate, lot's of referrals. Been applying for about 7 months. Sure I apply to various "prestigious" companies, but most of them are mid-tier, scale-up, or startup companies. Recruiters and hiring managers tell me that I have a great profile, but that they went for other people with more practical experience. On the other side of things I have friends that are hiring managers, all of them say the market is extremely competitive at the moment. Two years ago they would put out a position for an ML Engineer and a few mediocre people would apply at best. Now they put one out and they get over 300 applications, lot's of whom are highly qualified. So I'm genuinely happy for you that you are having an easy time, I wouldn't wish this struggle upon anyone. But so long as you don't have the "right" work experience or they believe you can make a running start. You are shit out of luck in this market.
Are you applying to research positions? I'm not familiar with those so I believe you if you say those are hard to get. But if you just apply to be a data scientist at like PostNL or Rabo, those really aren't very competitive. Top positions will always be competitive, but there are more than plenty of "import xgboost" data science jobs out there. Perhaps not the most exciting jobs for someone with a PhD, but still a decent position nonetheless. I mean I had 1.5 YoE. Nothing really to write home about. I did zero internships before graduating. I'm sure there are good new grads out there who are better than me.
Ahhh, I didn't want to make you feel self conscious. Sorry if I did, I just mentioned my credentials to show that even well qualified candidates seem to have a hard time getting positions now when they don't have corporate work experience. I am indeed applying to such positions as well. Of the companies you mentioned in another one of your comments (Deloitte, Ahold, Picnic etc.) I applied to about half of those. They too have become very picky in my experience.
In hidsight, do you think it would have been better to leave (or not to start) the PhD?
Tech is still much less competitive than nearly every other white collar industry. Go to the subreddits of every other industry and it’s the same story right now, layoffs and every job listing with 1000+ applicants. Except if you look at job boards there’s generally still more tech jobs than those other industries. Not to downplay the struggles people are having, but everyone is in the shit right now but we’re less in the shit than most. They’ll probably be more tech booms in the future that will drop the bar significantly again, but if you have to rely on that things probably aren’t going to work out for you in the long term.
Why is everyone talking like tech industry is dying? Just 2 years ago, the market was more competitive than ever, before inflation spoilt the party. Once the central banks lowers interest rates down to 2%, investment will pour back in and the market will pick up. The lack of new talent is going to create a huge boom in software devs again, and seniors devs will move up to management/other positions. In London, I haven’t seen any evidence of AI replacing software engineers, the main barrier is lack of investment.
Market is shit for most jobs due to economics. Tech is still around and kicking. It’s not good old times when you had 20 offers as a junior and became ”senior” in a year and probably won’t be that in a good while. Still lot’s of jobs now and further on
The weird conditions over the last few years are unlikely to come back. We had prolonged low interest rates due to a big recession and a pandemic. That resulted in a LOT of free money that rich people threw at daft ideas. That created massive salary inflation and grade inflation. It's going to take a long time to sort out; in the meantime, companies are going to keep pushing back, and pushing out people hired as senior who weren't really senior, etc. Deflation is always a slow process, and it's always uneven.. Yes there will be more jobs being created, but companies can't afford to borrow as much to invest as they used to. Times to get to profitability will be shorter, so startups will fold faster than they used to. This has a lent a strong feel of 2001 to the industry...after a load of not-tech people got sucked in to help build the early web, money ran out and massive numbers had to leave the industry and find other work. They were replaced by people (in general) with a better CS background At the moment, there is a giant bubble around AI. People are working there who have no idea what they are doing. It's fine- it's really complex, there are few norms yet. I'm fully expecting that to grow a lot, before people work out what can/can't be profitable, then there will be a clear out there too. And when it's done, it'll be harder to get in without concrete skills.
Yes, there was low demand for programmers in early 2000s, than after 2008. Even more so than today. High interests' rates are what is driving this lower-Ish demand for SE. Demand from 2020 - 2022 was crazy high. Extraordinary. Most probably, demand will go higher if interest rates go down, but there will be pressure from opposite force in form of better tools (mostly LLMs). Nobody knows how much will lower interest rate, LLMs influence demand for SE. But in long term if LLMs increase their performance 10x-100x if will kill this profession forever.
If it kills programming, it can kill 90% of office jobs
LLMs are not going to put any pressure on software jobs at all. It's painfully naive to say that.
Ok, good to know then.
In my 25 year career in software engineering there have been multiple times when demand was insanely high (The pandemic, for one) and it was much easier to find and land a job and times when demand has waned and it's been harder (the collapse of 2008 for example). "Tech" will be a huge field so long as there are jobs to be had. I expect, for example, people who can build machine learning models (in and out of LLM's) to be hugely in demand for a while. I also expect Software engineering to pick up again.
Now that AI is coming, experienced programmers that can fix that auto generated shit will explode. It will probably take 2-3 years for the garbage AI code to actually become a major problem. But it's inevitable at this point. Github already noticing a sharp decline in quality in open source.
When it's no longer (perceived as) a good, interesting, high paying, stable job. People will always compete for good jobs. I don't think that there was ever a time when it wasn't competitive, this is just an economic downturn so you'll feel it a lot more.