I haven't found direct hiring data, but the second chart in [1] tells a very interesting story - job postings in tech are now below pre-pandemic norm. I know that resignations in tech have been falling steadily the last several months as well, so it seems like hiring is likely down quite a bit.
Anecdotally, my software dev friends who are unemployed right now are having trouble getting hired, compared to a few years ago where they were turning down interviews weekly.
Chiming in here with a bit of data on the hiring side of things. I'm the cofounder of SharpestMinds, an ISA-powered mentorship marketplace for data scientists. For all the obvious reasons, we track the hiring rates for our grads very closely and have been keeping close tabs on the pandemic's effects on the tech job market.
Our observations so far:
1. Hiring in tech has definitely not gone to zero, even for the junior-level roles we skew towards.
2. We're seeing more like a 60-70% drop in hires compared to our original (pre-COVID) projections for the month of March, so far.
3. Companies least affected seem to fall in two major categories: A) BigCos with deep pockets; and B) SaaS businesses with predictable revenue streams and some degree of economic insulation from the "meatspace" economy.
Many software businesses (e.g., Zapier, GitLab) are already run partly or fully remotely, so their hiring workflows can take quarantine in stride, to an extent. Many others (e.g., Stripe) are quickly adapting to these new constraints.
The effects of a global quarantine and pandemic are almost certain to propagate to all companies eventually. But some are less affected than others, economically and operationally. We're fortunate in tech that it's still quite possible - albeit measurably harder - to get hired under current conditions.
Interesting data. Looks like postings are still up nearly 100% since the bottom of the covid curve.
I'd be interested in seeing this compared to other non-tech job postings. I'd expect the trends wouldn't match entirely but that software development jobs are still in higher demand.
There are still good tech jobs but hiring is down compared to its high. Whether its down compared to pre-covid times - can't say. What I will say however is: job search sucks no matter what the economy is doing. If you want to skip as much bs as humanly possible look for companies where its still possible to talk to the founders one on one and only apply if you've basically already done exactly what they need doing. Don't waste peoples time.
It's definitely rather bad at the moment. Probably a tiny bit better than last year/the beginning of this one, since I've had a lot more interview calls than I did then, but still really bad compared to previous years.
Now it seems like 80% of open positions are for senior developers/engineers, the list of required technologies for these roles is higher than ever, and you're competing with hundreds if not thousands of other candidates too. If you ever want to feel depressed about the market, one look at LinkedIn's candidate numbers for any role is probably gonna do it.
As for why this seems to be the case... the best I've heard is that the end of the pandemic shook multiple industries to their cores.
Interest rates were good (for these companies) during that time period, so they had money to throw around on hiring developers en masse. And with everyone locked inside, internet based businesses were booming, whether it was online tools like Zoom, media companies like Netflix or gaming companies as a whole.
Unfortunately for them, when the pandemic ended, all this went away. People went back to normal life, and in many cases, actually spent far more time offline than ever before. So the stats went down, the beancounters and CEOs panicked, and we've seen the effects ever since.
All those companies either shut down, laid off a bunch of staff or outsourced the work to some cheaper locale, and said staff flooded the market. So now it's an employer's market where they can be ultra choosy about who they hire, and where the requirements to get hired are higher than ever.
Absolutely. Total comp, not to mention hiring in general at publicly traded tech firms has dropped significantly since the “software recession” and mass layoffs.
The current good times for employees are mainly in the economy outside of tech
Yes, the market is pretty bad right now, and Indeed's data shows it quite well:
https://www.hiringlab.org/data (go to Sectors and choose Software Development)
We are currently at -64% from the 2022 peak job market and even -20% compared to pre-covid number of job openings.
Seems pretty bad right now. A lot of companies, mine included, are in a hiring freeze. Some companies outside of big tech are hiring(I noticed quite a few jobs from banks), but a lot are expecting relocation or hybrid in addition to substantial pay cuts compared to tech salaries. I've had most of my recent applications rejected without even a recruiter call when in the past I had felt my resume was very strong.
I don’t know how much closer to reality this is. I can see tech hiring probably slowed down but my guess is it’s opportunistic. The companies that are doing poorly before the pandemic simply cut jobs. I don’t see a real impact on the market. Of course I do realize I am arguing against data here and saying stuff without evidence but the sample size is small for the data and it’s a gut feeling that it will not hold long term.
While unemployment is high right now, I'm not sure it's affected most tech workers. I don't have numbers, so this is purely anecdotal, but almost all of my friends are in tech, no one has been laid off, and I just started job searching myself after being voluntarily out of the market since pre-plague, and I can barely keep up with interview requests.
It'd be great to see some comparisons to other fields/industries versus just looking at computer science in a vacuum.
It's quite possible there has been a slow down in tech hiring from the mid 2010's with multiple offers and signing bonuses/RSUs but relatively I suspect its still easier to find positions than in other fields. There have been mass layoffs in many other industries. I can't imagine hiring is as robust across the board as it was during ZIRP.
This is happening in tech companies across the board. From my network I understand many companies have either stopped hiring or have strongly reduced hiring.
Hiring has slowed to a crawl, and the hardest hit appear to be junior/low level devs not going into the startup space.
I'm seeing a lot of hiring for senior positions. I'm getting more, not fewer emails for interviews as a CTO. Meanwhile, it seems like unless a new grad is headed to a FAANG they are not finding jobs the way they were a year ago.
This is how things started in 2007, anecdotally. The ladder got pulled up earlier in the year, and then right around the holiday season everything fell apart. It took a good 2-3 years for everything to recover, but in that time salaries were down roughly 20-30%.
Anecdotally, my software dev friends who are unemployed right now are having trouble getting hired, compared to a few years ago where they were turning down interviews weekly.
[1] https://www.hiringlab.org/2024/02/20/labor-market-update-tec...
reply