Published earlier this year, but still relevant.
Even in europe there is no workers union for IT. Atleast not that i know of. IG metal and Verdi didnt answer my email about that
There’s a couple in Norway for engineering / technology, NITO and Tekna
Would you happen to know of any for germany?
No idea!
Computer science is not IT. IT is about knowing how to use, deploy, and administer existing software solutions, along with a bit of light development to get things to work together when they aren’t necessarily directly compatible.
CS is about creating software solutions and understanding how the pieces fit together (at a low level), as well as how to evaluate algorithms and approach problem solving.
It’s not even coding, though coding is obviously involved. For a coding class, they’ll teach you the language and give problems to help learn that language. For CS classes, they might not care what language you use, or they might tell you to use specific ones and expect you to learn it on your own time. The languages are just tools through which you learn the CS concepts.
An IT professional might know about kernel features and how they relate to overall performance. A coder might be aware that there is a kernel doing OS stuff under the hood. A computer scientist might know the specifics of various parts of what a kernel does and how one is implemented, perhaps they’ve even implemented one themselves for a class (I have, though I was personally interested in that kind of thing and it was for a class notorious for being difficult, so most grads didn’t).
Computer science is not IT.
ooof got some bad news for you there.
Guessing you mean in a similar vein to the connection between various degrees and food service jobs?
Personally, I’ve been able to avoid IT jobs so far.
IT as in information technology is a stupid broad category, and the only people who say otherwise are just trying to not be painted as in IT.
Network engineer, IT. Software Dev, IT. Program manager for that big roll out, still IT. Call center meat in a seat, IT.
My employer considers developers, infra, SRE, PC Support, even QA all to be part of the “IT department”. I’ve always used the term “IT” to just cover any specifically “tech” sort of function. As opposed to, say, finance, sales, HR, operations, etc.
CS education is notoriously prone to boom-bust cycles.
just learn to code
There were recent CS grads in my coding boot camp 8 years ago.
Computer Science is not learning to code.
In fact, most high end University Computer Science departments do not at any point teach a coding language. Coding languages are taught, in Canada, at Community Colleges and such.
Computer Science is all about developing, perfecting, and discovering the algorithms that are then transcribed to computer code by the junior IT technicians (code junkies). Coders are a dime a dozen. It is the Computer Systems Designers, project architects, and project developers that make the big money.
A coder can only make good money if they have mastered a computer language that is not very common, like Kubernetes, [Kubernetes,] (https://kubernetes.io/) And you will not learn that from a 'Kubernetes-for-Dummies book borrowed from the library,
Kubernetes is not a programming language. It’s a program written in a programming language called Go. Working with Kubernetes involves writing in a data serialisation language called YAML but YAML is not a programming language (IIRC) because it’s not Turing complete.
(I’m just a “code junky” btw)
Kubernetes is definitely not a programming language. It is not a program. it is a complete system. It is an approach, a method, a tool, a way to organize, a way to think about tasks,
Kubernetes is just yaml
Kubernetes produces yaml using AI techniques from extremely complex procedures. The goal of Kubernetes is to generate the yaml that will allow a teenager to port the entire NASA launch operation system onto the device of her choice so her technophobe brother can completely operate the ISS including all resupply launches and docking procedures from her smart phone.
I feel like I need to point out, just in case anyone is reading this and falling for the smug tone, that the entire content of both these messages is embarrassing bullshit. I have no idea what drives any human to teach others their uneducated guess on topics and dress it up to make it look like they are a mr knowledge professional. When I think about it, it’s not even passable as a troll joke, it’s just feeble attempts to seem relevant… which is kinda sad. Hope you find human connection soon. I don’t imagine you want my advice now, but try to be more honest to the world, you will be automatically more honest to yourself then.
Most of what is written about Computer science by computer scientists is embarrassing bullshit to the uninitiated. But the ones that usually refer to it as bullshit are the ones that have absolutely no idea what the entire field is about, not even an inkling of how the resident gurus think, nor even of what is being talked about. It is the ones who call it ‘bullshit’ that are the ones trying to pretend they understand in depth what it is all about. You do not want us to be honest, you want us to speak in terms that you might have a chance of understanding. Unfortunately, the language of Computer Science, like science in general, has to be absolutely precise so as to not be misinterpreted. It can not be ‘dummed down’ without losing much of its utility to other scientists.
I could have said "Kubernetes defines a set of building blocks (“primitives”) that collectively provide mechanisms that deploy, maintain, and scale applications based on CPU, memory[29] or custom metrics.[30] Kubernetes is loosely coupled and extensible to meet the needs of different workloads. The internal components as well as extensions and containers that run on Kubernetes rely on the Kubernetes API.[31][32]
"The platform exerts its control over compute and storage resources by defining resources as objects, which can then be managed as such.
“Kubernetes follows the primary/replica architecture. The components of Kubernetes can be divided into those that manage an individual node and those that are part of the control plane.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes
But that is just a very fancy way of saying that Kubernetes developers look at a very complex computing environment consisting of many hardware vendors, several operating systems, several architectures, (some incomparable) but one common application outcome, and integrating them all together into one centrally controlled and managed interface using a common instruction set and command structure…
I should clarify that ‘YAML’ is used facetiously and generically to refer to the concept of ‘yet another markup language’ as an allegory, without specifically meaning Kubernetes produces the true implementation of ‘YAML’ the formal system. Maybe we should coin a new term ‘YAMLized’. That is, 'reduced to ‘yet another markup language’.
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Thank you for pointing out that CS <> programming.
CS is mostly math, cryptography, signal processing, image processing, information theory, data analysis/storage/transformation, etc.
As a Computer science graduate, I have to say:
No shit! The industry is terrible and has no standards (I don’t mean level of quality but there is no agreed accreditation or methodology). If you do end up in a job you will most likely not use even 5% of what whatever school you went to taught you. You will likely work for peanuts as there will always be someone to do it cheaper (not always right, or good, or even usable). You will work with people doing your job that just lied about having any post secondary education. There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry, and like everyone I know that stuck with it you will have the same job until you stop working (you will have to take a side move into another department most likely). This is also the industry most likely to get touched by the “good idea fairy” so you will also be exposed to the highest levels of stupid, like 3 layers of outsourcing the NOC to an active warzone sort of stupid.
I should have known it was a bad idea in college when most of my classmates where ACTIVELY WORKING IN THE INDUSTRY TO PAY FOR SCHOOL so they could get a piece of paper that said they could do the thing they where already doing. But I did my 15 plus years and got out, I have my own business now selling drugs and it is way less sketchy.
You know its bad when dude casually drops that he’s a drug dealer and we all collectively shrug, like yeah sounds about right.
There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’…
I work in pharmacy and casually joke about being a legal drug dealer all of the time.
Not all drugs are street drugs!
Oh you guys have the HARD shit, I don’t even compare.
We have all been conditioned by the media to think of drug dealers as bad people, but if you aren’t violent and only selling to consenting adults there is nothing inherently wrong or evil about it, other than braking the law. You are providing a valuable service to your community, like every other job.
A lot of drugs are very addictive and ruin people’s lives. I’m well aware a lot of lives were ruined by the stigma attached to to drugs, but to swing from they are evil criminal people to just equating drug dealing with every other job is insane to me.
If someone breaks their arm doing a skateboard trick, do you blame the seller of the skateboard?
Consenting adults know the risk of taking drugs, if someone gets addicted the blame doesn’t fall on the dealer.
Not to mention that the vast majority of drug users dont become addicted or have their lives ruined. Rather they have their lives significantly improved
Also have to point out in my case it is very much legal. I am no different then someone with a liquor store (well maybe my stuff is potentially less harmful).
is insane to me.
Of course, it goes against all values that you were taught.
You have no idea how many of my closest friends have been to jail for drugs. I think that is a problem with the system, but im not going to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and act like we were being upstanding citizens.
Getting people addicted to things is bad. It doesn’t matter if you are a drug dealer, a casino, or a social media app.
People are not so much harmed by most drugs but by the circumstances. It’s not worth talking about dealers as long as society is cruel to the point of people needing an escape.
It does depend on the drugs though. If you’re shotting crack and heroin to your community then you’re just a predator preying on your own people.
Yeah, also. if it’s the illegal kind there’s a huge price payed in blood in the countries that manufacture and transport them.
The war on drugs sucks but it’s a fact that buying illegal drugs fuels an industry of violence.
Hey, its a new legal industry. And selling drugs lets me sleep much better at night compared to having to pretend whatever new bullshit they are pushing is not terrible.
There is almost no ability to move up in any position in the industry
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
The insanity of the industry is that employers will hire some schmuck with “10 years experience” on their resume for twice what they’re paying the guy who has worked at the firm for ten years.
Eventually, you can get yourself into a position where you’re unfireable, because you are the only one who knows about the secret button that keeps the whole business from falling over.
That’s when you can really squeeze’m
Urgh, yeah it is just so bad. Most places don’t even have a possible job above yours to even potentially move to. Where I was they literally sold us to a competitor (then unsold me as they forgot about a few contracts) and then just removed all the positions above us or related to our department. I lost 3 layers of bosses one day (not that anyone noticed much). And then expect people to just happily go on and on and on.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices, that automated the requirements in such a way that the only people who could get an interview would have had to lie on their applications. They where desperately trying to say they wanted to hire more people but no one was “qualified”, meanwhile they froze pay for years (really showing that dood that was there for years how much they care).
When android and ios were taking off, I’d see job requirements saying 8 to 10 years experience in Android development.
It hadn’t been out 8 to 10 years.
Oddly a very common occurrence. It was normally one or a combo of 3 impossible things:
- Experience needed with a thing that has not existed for the time asked for (like your example)
- Experience needed with a thing that does not exist at all (typos or just full on bullshit like “5 years in QQR8F deployment”)
- Or my favourite, Experience needed in a tool/program that is only used by the company like our proprietary call management software.
The fact they could not hire anyone (I was the “new” guy for 10 years on my team) was down to really shitty hiring practices
Not a bad time to start collectively bargaining, especially if you’ve got your fingers in the dam.
HA, not at that sort of place. Unions where never even allowed to be talked about, they instafired anyone that even hinted, illegal or not they did not let that happen.
Edit: oh and everything did fall apart, but like a lot of large companies, they don’t care/notice. We used to joke around that we where in the business of getting out of business, and business was goood
Change jobs every three years until you find a place that doesn’t suck.
Most of my social circle is in tech and we’re spread across or have worked for basically every company in our city and that isn’t really a thing here.
If you know a big chunk of your city’s skilled developers and you collectively agree all the firms suck… might not be a bad idea to start organizing and withholding your labor as a unit.
I only know a handful, we’ve all just moved around a lot through our careers.
That was a ride and i love your last sentence.
You’re dead on about the 5% of what you learned thing. I’m on like my 20th tech job and pretty much every one has been different. What I learned in school has applied to only the most basic aspects of any of those jobs. Everything else was learning as I go and just generally understanding how PCs and software work. I have done fairly well with upward mobility (currently about as high as I can go without taking another leadership position) but I had to bust my ass to do it and it was only because I always stood out because of that so I would be first choice. There were never enough promotions/mobility to go around to everyone that was deserving.
If you talk to people who went to different schools you quickly realize that its all different. I spent a lot of time learning antenna theory, Cisco networking and really out of date system admin, while on the other side of the nation my future co workers where learning soldering, cable terminology and text based HTML.
I was on the college board of governors and the thing I learned is that no one knows what computer science even is. Sad part is that it was the same for a lot of the subjects taught.
My experience is so different to yours.
Work a lot with what I studied, need the algebra very often. I still have people randomly contacting me for interviews. People move a lot, it’s rare to be in the same function for over 3 years.
Hey man I hear you, so how much gor a quarter?
cheapest I have in store is $20, the fanciest is $40. All in CAD of course.
I’m halfway through my bachelor’s CE, but really thinking about dropping and doing a trade instead.
I’m probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you’re thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you’d definitely be better off doing a trade.
Good luck either way.
If there’s no hope for getting a job, it doesn’t mean they’re not passionate.
It’s really not like that, programmers will always be extremely sought after. Just not bad programmers that haven’t really coded anything yet. Those are in quite an abundance. After giving the thirtieth intern a try and some lessons, it starts to feel hopeless when they turn in something that is using divisors on tick to solve a problem the engine already does and doesn’t notice the cpu cap because they are on a monster beefy developer station
The most important aspect is motivation to improve and do cool shit. That can, also, be said about a lot of professions. The best thing you can do is to find what is most interesting to you and spend at least a few hours a week learning about it or engaging with it. It could be new features of a language you know, a programming methodology that is new to you, learning about/contributing to a FOSS project you like, or anything else.
School and work will almost definitely force you to engage with the parts of development you don’t like, as well will give you an opportunity to engage with the parts of development you do like. It’s on you to keep yourself engaged and improving in your skills.
Don’t. Just finish it and join an electrical union with your math skills. After you complete your degree. I went into electrical after getting laid off from a malware defense software oem. Get your degree. It carries you further than without it. You can always join the Electrician union nearest you right after you graduate. Check for their sign up times for the year.
I’ve never met anyone in the broadly tech fields (and I’ve been through quite a span of them) who regrets completing an even somewhat relevant degree. I’ve met, many, many people who lament not starting or finishing one (and many of these were very competent, capable people, good at their jobs).
It’s expensive and difficult, sure was for me, but it is very useful (and the learning is fantastic too if you do it right).
Can’t agree more.
CE is neat because most companies will treat you as if you had a CS or EE degree. Can always pivot to HW or FPGA
Even if you don’t get a CS job you should still get your degree anyway, it will make getting other jobs easier. A degree is better than no degree.
Might not be the best use of that time and tuition money though
I’ve never met anyone who regretted getting their degree.
I have met people who regretted not getting one because it closed doors for them (including talented people who were otherwise doing well at their jobs) so if someone is really going to forgo their degree, they should acknowledge it’s a risk.
I don’t necessarily regret getting a degree, but I would have perhaps focused on a more in-demand degree if I knew how the economy was going to change.
✋ Now you have.
Hi there, now you have my curiosity.
Which degree was it, why do you regret getting it?
Computer Systems Tech with honours and a Computer Sci advanced degree with honours.
I would have been better off just working, my 3 years in school (including being on the board of governors and student union) was a waste of time and money. Not saying school is always a bad choice but watching people who drop out of high school make double your income from working in retail (since oddly there is potential upwards movement) once you do get a job in the industry feels bad. Then continues to feel bad when you bust your ass off for no advancement or additional pay while those same people are now working less then 4 hours a day in a middle management position. Then it gets downright frustrating when you have been in the industry for over a decade and shopped around to find out all the companies are shit and when you realize you have made a poor choice in career those same drop outs are entering into lower executive roles while being paid to take college courses (I have 3 examples of this sadly) and telling you that you should “go to school and get an education”.
And to see the money being made in oil and gas… or some of the trades?! Urgh, I should have just started my own buisness instead of going to school. I had the same skills before and after I graduated anyway.
I don’t think going to school prevents you from transitioning into a management role, nor does it seem to have prevented you from obtaining a career in the industry.
I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to blame your degree for a lack of management positions, you could always transition into management like others have done. I don’t think those others got hired into management specifically because they didn’t have a degree, or because they were high school dropouts. It’s entirely possible they only got into their roles through nepotism, which would have nothing to do with a degree or a lack of a degree anyway.
With that said, yeah, the money being made in the trades by business owners… yeah, that would have been nice, but even then there’s no guarantees that everyone can start their own successful business and make well into 6 figures and beyond.
Kinda glad I took the community college IT/infra route when I went back to school a little bit ago, but still scared for the future lol.
0% of the fault lays on the students who got the degrees they were told were in demand by every single adult in ther life.
This was a coordinated push by our government and tech sector to drive down the cost of skilled labor by oversaturating the field.
I say this as a CS major that was forced to work fast food for 6 years until I could find a shitty tech support job and work my way up from there, there was never a single opportunity for me to be a programmer like I intended.
Yep and the parents and adults pushing them we’re often basing things on how it was FOR THEM. The job market changes constantly. I’ve got a worthless degree i deeply regret
I’ve got a worthless degree i deeply regret
Meanwhile, not far from this comment is someone claiming no one regrets getting their degree, lol.
Not surprised. Anecdotally I’ve met loads who do and loads who say “I don’t regret going to University but…”
When I started college I was in for biochem. Quickly realized there aren’t many jobs and most pay pretty shit, so I switched to computer science. Did some research and found that while there are good paying jobs, good luck finding them. Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in, and I had a full ride that I didn’t want to waste dropping out). Graduated and now I’m a mechanic and make more than I would have if I stuck with my original bio degree. I also love what I do for a living despite the possibility of making more doing something else. Some fault is absolutely on the students for failing to do their own research, hopefully they have all learned a valuable lesson about being gullible. Always do your own research, and pick from various sources! At 18 you should not sign on for massive amounts of debt because “somebody said I’d get a good paying job later if I spend all the money I don’t have right now”. Not saying young adults weren’t fooled, but you cannot say 0% fault lies on the students. By that logic you should be a trump supporter because some boomer told u to be. The thing that differentiates and adult from a man-child is their ability to take responsibility for their own decisions. It’s not like you were FORCED to go to school.
Settled on a business degree (their the easiest of anything I was interested in
I specifically avoid hiring students from business majors because they are only into the networking and not doing work lol.
That sounds about right lol. I went to what is known as a REALLY good business school, and I learned more about how to run a business in a year as a service advisor and the owners right hand than I ever did in 4 years of school. I know nothing beats on the job experience, but still I thought I’d learn a little more of value than I did …
Business as a major should be abolished.
In fairness they are very social and make great spreadsheets.
There is always free time to self educate. Being a programmer means constantly keeping up with the news, new technologies, and adapting to new standards to keep the code clean, maintainable, extendable, readable, and relatively fast.
This is what we say now instead of expecting training and apprenticeship programs.
It’s propaganda
It can be both. Jobs should invest in their people, but individuals should also take some ownership of their own skills.
The apprentice/journeyman dynamic was a lot better suited to a time when a) people left their hometowns a lot less, b) information was MUCH less accessible except from people who showed you how, and c) businesses put a lot more stock into their people as an asset, instead of treating labor as a liability.
A isn’t anyone’s fault.
B isn’t anyone’s fault.
C is where businesses have gone sour, but it’s not like businesses have ever been well known for taking care of their people (labor laws, unions, OSHA are all examples of this from history)
It’s not propaganda that people need to take ownership of their own skills and careers. Nobody’s responsible for you or your success but you. If you want to be good at what you do then that’s on you. You can take what your job gives you and that’s it, and you’ll probably do fine at whatever tasks you got specific OJT for, but unless you get lucky or play your cards right that’s not going to make you very successful.
I really don’t want to sound like an old person saying that kids these days want things handed to them, and I really do think that employers in general don’t invest in their entry level workers as well as they used to, but expecting an employer to take you from know-nothing to a master of your craft is naive, frankly, because the days of someone working at a place for 10-30 years are just gone, and everyone has accepted it. There’s a ton of reasons why that’s the case and a lot of that is employers not incentivising employees to stay via wage growth, promotion opportunities, and training, but there’s a lot of other factors. Either way things have changed, and it doesn’t really do much except make you sound like you need a waahmbulance if you just sit back on your haunches and complain about it.
You can still become an apprentice if you want to work a trade, and a good union will train you up if you’re a good worker, but that isn’t fast. It was never fast, and most people aren’t satisfied with the pace today, because it doesn’t get you earning six figures out the gate. You had to work hard, earn a good reputation, and stay in the area for 10-20 years. Most people don’t want to do that, and that dynamic never took a hard root in the tech sector in the first place, which is where this conversation started.
I encourage you to stick to a career that you enjoy enough to take some joy in getting better at your skills for the sake of getting better at stuff instead of just trying to earn a paycheck. Nothing wrong with a job being just a means to an end, but I say this because you’ll enjoy your jobs much better if you’re passionate about what you do, and you’ll naturally be drawn to opportunities to gain mastery in skills that will make you more successful.
None of this might change your mind, might just piss you off even, but the guy you’re replying to sounds like he enjoys the job enough that he’s trying to be better for the sake of being better. I wouldn’t knock them for that.
Well said, I do enjoy my field and my employer. I worked for quite a few different companies. One I was all on my own and had to learn myself - my seniors hardly ever had time to explain shit to me so I was left alone with documentation and asking least possible amount of questions. Then, I had a team leader who was passionate about explaining stuff and telling me what to do, how, and why.
Everyone is different, do what you like, chase what you desire, and do the job you enjoy.
On the other hand, I am now in the boots of a senior, and I am desperately trying to show more junior colleagues how exciting it is to explore the work we do - nobody seems to care, nobody seems to implement whatever co shit I try to show them, nobody wants to change their ways, and I feel like fighting windmills.
If you want to be successful, you have to either be super lucky, or be passionate and constantly improve to reach new heights.
I think the biggest systemic issue in most places is that most people don’t actually know how to train people, including most senior staff. Very few people are actually natural trainers/instructors, so they have to be trained in how to train, and the expectations that they do so has to be part of company culture as well as time baked into the workday to do it, because it DOES take time. It pays off huge in the long run but it can be hard to see the forest through the trees if the management themselves don’t know or understand the value.
As much as I hate corporate jobs they’re generally better than small companies about having a formalized training program. It’s a shame because there’s so much garbage in corporate culture that a lot of small businesses don’t want to implement the good with the bad.
One thing I’ve seen over the years is that a TON of businesses have NO IDEA how to be functional. It’s a person that started in their garage and managed to grow and they just do stuff, and keep just doing stuff and hiring more people to do stuff and quickly outgrow the garage but don’t introduce sound business practices that you need to run things effectively. It’s crazy how many businesses are like that.
Well, then “their” plan backfired, because the cost is still as high as ever for senior and lead engineers, it’s just the enty level jobs that are ever rarer (and FAANG rarely hired entry level anyway).
In case anyone is not aware:
Are you currently employed?
Have you actively sought a job in the last 4 weeks?
If the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, then congrats, according to the BLS, you are not unemployed!
You just aren’t in the labor force, therefore you do not count as an unemployed worker.
So yeah, if you finally get fed up with applying to 100+ jobs a week or month, getting strung along and then ghosted by all of them…
( because they are fake job openings that are largely posted by companies so that they look like they look like they are expanding and doing well as a business )
… and you just give up?
You are not ‘unemployed’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed
You are likely a ‘discouraged worker’, who is also ‘not in the labor force’.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#discouraged
…
Also, if you are 5 or 6 or 7 figures in student loan debt, and… you can only find a job as a cashier? waiter/waitress? door dash driver?
Congrats, you too are not unemployed, you are merely ‘underemployed’.
But also, if you have too many simultaneous low paying jobs… you may also be ‘overemployed’.
…
But anyway, none of that really matters if you do not make enough money to actually live.
In 2024, 44% of employed, full time US workers… did not make a living wage.
https://www.dayforce.com/Ceridian/media/documents/2024-Living-Wage-Index-FINAL-1.pdf
(These guys work with MIT to calculate/report this because the BLS doesn’t.)
You’ve also got measures like LISEP…
Which concludes that 24.3% of Americans are ‘functionally unemployed’, by this metric which attempts to account for all the shortcomings of the BLS measures of the employment situation.
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So basically this is a way to try to measure ‘doesnt have a job + has a poverty wage job’.
…
A more useful measure of the actual situation for college grads, in terms of ‘did it make any economic/financial sense to get my degree?’ would be ‘are you currently employed in a job that substantially utilizes your specific college education, such that you likely could not perform that job without your specific college education?’
Something like that.
It sure would be neat if higher education in the US did not come with the shackles of student loan debt, then maybe people could get educated simply for the sake of getting educated, but, because it does, this has to be a cost benefit style question.
- sincerely, a not unemployed but technically ‘out of the the labor force’ econometrician.
So, i’ve been told that all these people need to do is pick up a trade. /s
I’m glad if trade-work was good for you but like all major careers, it’s not meant for everyone. Similar can be said of telling miners (not minors) to learn to code.
Also trades have boom and busts too
Plus the ones making really good money take a good amount of time to get there and really good money means starting your own business but either way, you won’t escape long hard hours and weekends until probably at least your 40s, that’s if you manage to scale up the business enough with numerous staffed work vehicles. Like a 22 year old software developer can be making what a master plumber does in their first year out of college. Not super common but the $130k+ a year plumber is the top small percent of the field too
Correct, and the other problem is that if you live in a house with 6-8 other people, and don’t even have anywhere to park a vehicle (as in, not even on the road outside) then it’s never going to work. I imagine what it’d be like if I did a trade, but I couldn’t get to work in the morning because another tenant decided to sleep-in and block my vehicle from leaving the drive. Just ridiculous.
and trades are usually only employing a specific demographic and they have
The miners thing is insane; as if we dont still need fucking minerals.
Edit: and other heavy machinery operators
Removed by mod
Well yeah, when the tech industry went through multiple waves of massive layoffs, that’s going to be the case in the short term as things shake out.
And everyone and their dog is trying to get into tech. The industry is bound to get saturated eventually…
I’d it’s already saturated if we’re looking at high unemployment in the sector.
Not necessarily, it might mean it I’d an industry easy to get into, but hard to master. If I was short on people, and inexperienced person might actually make mistakes that require even more work to fix.
Everyone thinks they are Mr Robot after they let ChatGPT create a simple HTML page. No, they are not, and they won’t even pass as a junior. Surprise surprise, you have to know the basics.
Yup. We’re hiring, but the candidate pool is a minefield of utter trash, so it takes a while to hire despite having hundreds of applicants. We don’t expect much beyond basic competency, but apparently that’s too much to ask sometimes.
Same here. It’s popular to rag on leetcode-style technical interviews, and yet it’s astonishing how many CS grads with 3 years experience we get in who can’t seem to get through even the most basic “reverse this array”, “find the longest substring” type questions in the language they claim to be strongest in.
People sign up for CS degrees because they see high salaries, but don’t realize those salaries are for the high achievers who have been coding since the age of 10 and are writing code for fun in the evenings as well. Then they flood the market, only to discover that no companies have need of someone who cheesed their way through college, have never written more than a few hundred lines of code their whole life, and have no useful skills to offer.
To the tech people listening… I was high up in many areas for a few decades but I left it all behind. There is still a massive talent-acquisition problem, not just in tech but every industry, that is just waiting to be solved. The departments and staff tasked with hiring are not competent, nor capable of connecting qualified applicants to jobs. The entire hiring system is broken as fuck, and the “job boards” and apps didn’t fix it, they made it far, far worse for everybody on all sides.
Exactly. Our recruiters aren’t tech recruiters, they handle recruitment for the entire company (and we’re not a tech company). As a result, a lot of our candidates have flashy resumes, but no actual skill. As in, I asked someone to write code in whatever language they wanted and they couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t some difficult assignment, this was a first round weeder task. The candidate straight up lied about having any development experience whatsoever. I even had an Information Systems background candidate say straight up that they’re not interested in a dev role, which they were explicitly applying for.
And that’s unfortunately far more common than not. People think that because they paid for a bootcamp that they’re now competent enough to write code professionally, but it turns out, a lot of them didn’t apply themselves at all.
There are good candidates in that mix, it’s just hard to find them. We’re happy to train a promising candidate, and we’ve hired interns that we’ve offered full-time positions to. We don’t even particularly care about age, we had someone internally decide to transition to tech from a blue collar background, so we funded their education and now they write code for production on the side of their main job (they’re our support person for our blue collar users, and they’re really good at it).
If you’re not a big flashy tech company, you’re not going to get as much attention from qualified candidates, and you’ll get a bunch of trash applicants who are looking for easy marks on the job boards.
What you are describing is a constant. Everything is scaled up. I don’t believe for a second that it’s difficult to hire unless you’re talking about these idiots who say things like “Don’t I deserve to hire the best candidate for the job?”
It is not hard to hire someone, it is hard to hire someone who doesn’t give you more work than they solve. I am not against hiring juniors, but they have to show initiative that they are passionate and able to improve. I don’t want a person who will be junior for the rest of their career, because juniors usually require babysitting and that that away work and attention from competent people (the chads who actually build the core features and have to attend business meetings on why it is so good for customers to see additional offers during checking out).
It is a combination - incompetent HR, incompetent candidates, or bad hiring process. I am yet to apply to a company with a hiring process I’d call pleasant on all angles.
And most importantly a lack of companies willing to train their employees. They’re all pointing fingers at every other company to do the training for them, then wondering why they can’t find anyone with the training they want. Whodathunkit
It’s really not. Hiring was much easier 3-4 years ago as the pandemic nonsense was ending and people were bailing on companies forcing people to be back in office 5x/week. The competent devs knew they could do better, while the less competent devs held on to what they had.
Now with a bunch of layoffs, the candidate pool is completely flooded, and since we’re not a big flashy tech company, we seem to get a ton of drive-by applicants who aren’t qualified at all.
I was laid off from my charger oem. Now I work at a grocery store till I find a new job. Needed the cheap insurance plus its union. This won’t last for long.
Damn. Didn’t know about that at all. I’m genuinely glad the direction where I live (Germany) is the opposite, that way more people are needed and searched for than there is demand.
(I would have enough private projects without a job though lol.)Same issue here. My company is freezing any hiring this year. And next year won’t be looking good either. And to add on top of that, most big companies are outsourcing to Eastern Europe short-term because it’s cheaper, or directly to India, as was the case with Amazon Romania that laid off a bunch of its workforce and then hired back a few of them to make workshops for the people in India that are going to pick up their jobs to do the exact same thing.
Also the pay in the sector in Germany sucks ass. It’s really bad
Thing is: there’s lots of vacant jobs in IT because of the unwillingness of adequate pay in Germany. Either the employers don’t see the value in hiring motivated people or the motivated people are unwilling to work for peanuts.
Entry level in Berlin was like ~36k for IHK Fachinformatiker für system integration. As a result my last company started to hire in Eastern Europe because no one could afford to live on that even in one of the cheapest cities. And it wasn’t a small company by a long shot. Just greedy bastards
Entry level at my company is 55k, in a much smaller city, in a field that’s not super competitive salary wise (i.e. not automotive industry), so I’d slap a huge YMMV on your comment.
Nope,same story here,just not as extreme: https://www.heise.de/news/Wirtschaftsinstitut-IT-Fachkraefte-sind-in-Deutschland-deutlich-weniger-gefragt-10544518.html
From by experience, that doesn’t exactly equate to forced unemployment here. I do know of a friend from computer science in the UK who struggles to get past any interview, but I don’t perceive the market to be this hostile in Germany, even if not quite as vast as in the past.
Because at the moment we don’t have a “hostile” job market yet - as written in the article, the market is only rapidly cooling down. As the market before was massively undersaturated it just means that people currently have less choices - but they still have their share of opportunities. But tbh, pure anecdotal, it pretty much reflects what I hear from graduates atm. The market for newly graduated has cooled down definitely, unless they have a ITsec background or have a fair share of experience already.
An unfortunate but completely predictable result of the debt manufacturing industry. Widespread and getting worse.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech. Used to be full of other people like me and I really liked it. Now it’s full of people who are equally as enthused about it as they would be to become lawyers or doctors.
The industry went to shit after non-nerdy people found out there could be a lot of money in tech.
I started my undergrad in the early 90’s, and ran into multiple students who had never even used a computer, but had heard from someone that there was a lot of money to be made in computers so they decided to make that their major.
Mind you, those students tended not to do terribly well and often changed major after the first two years — but this phenomenon certainly isn’t anything particularly new. Having been both a student and a University instructor (teaching primarily 3rd and 4th year Comp.Sci subjects) I’ve seen this over and over and over again.
By way of advice to any new or upcoming graduates who may be reading this from an old guy who has been around for a long time, used to be a University instructor, and is currently a development manager for a big software company — if you’re looking to get a leg-up on your competition while you look for work, start or contribute to an Open Source project that you are passionate about. Create software you love purely for the love of creating software.
It’s got my foot in the door for several jobs I’ve had — both directly (i.e.: “we want to use your software and are hiring you to help us integrate it as our expert”; IBM even once offered a re-badged version to their customers) and indirectly (one Director I worked under once told me the reason they hired me was because of my knowledge and passion talking about my OSS project). And now as a manager who has to do hiring myself it’s also something that I look for in candidates (mind you, I also look for people who use Linux at home — we use a LOT of Linux in our cloud environments, and one of my easiest filters is to take out candidates who show no curiosity or interest in software outside whatever came installed on their PC or what they had to work with at school).
I guess that anyone who managed to make the effort to join Lemmy is already on the right track.
My own experience (being probably around your age) is that “Software development being fashionable” and hence there being a subsequent oversupply of devs, comes in cycles, with the peaks being roughly coincident with Tech bubbles.
I remember that period in the mid and late 90s when being a software developer was actually seen as “a good career choice” as the industry was growing fast (with personal computers, then computing spreading into all sizes of companies and vusiness activities, then the Net bubble).
Then the bubble crashed and suddenly it wasn’t fashionable anymore. The outsourcing wave made it fashionable again but in places like India, because they were serving not just their own IT needs but also a big slice of the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world’s, so the demand-supply over there was so inballanced that being a software developer was enough for a good house with servants in places like Mumbai. (I actually managed a small team based in India back then and I remember how most were clearly people who had no natural skill at all for programming). At the same time in those countries which were outsourcing to places like India, programming wasn’t a good career choice (mainly because it was the entry level stuff that got outsourced) but if you were senior back then demand had never been as high.
Then came a period of retrenchment of outsourcing because it wasn’t that good at delivering robust software that does what the business needs it to do (the mix of mediocre business requirements and development teams which are in fact not even it the same company means that deliverables invariably don’t do what the business needs them to do and the back-and-forth cycles needed to get it there take more time than it would if everything was in-house) and a new Tech bubble, so software development became fashionable again and once again people who would otherwise not consider it, were choosing it as a career.
I think that what we’re seeing now is the initial effects of the crash of the latest Tech bubble: the Stock Market might still be ridding its own momentum, but the actual people “at the coalface” are already reducing costs, plus the AI fad is hitting entry level positions like the outsourcing fad did, and probably it too will fade because AI “coding” has its own set of problems which will emerge as companies get more of that code and try and take it through a full production life-cycle.
As for how you chose devs, I would say it’s really just anchored on the eternal rule that “toolmakers make much better devs than tool users” - in my experience gifted devs tend be the ones who “solve their own problems” and for a dev that often means coding coming up with their own tool for it, either as a whole or as part of an existing open source project.
I’m going to amend your timeline slightly, but only to note that Y2K masked what likely would have been a bit of a slump in the late 90s. Hiring around Y2K was crazy — but once the crisis date passed (with little fanfare due to the tremendous amount of work and money poured into remedying the issue), we definitely hit a slump as many of those extra hires weren’t really needed in a post-Y2K world.
…at least until we get to Y2K+38 in a few years. And maybe Y2K+40 two years after that 😛
