My experience as a senior dev who is often involved in the recruitment process (admittedly in Sweden and not Silicon Valley) is that there are hundreds of people applying but they all lack sufficient skill. We still have a severe shortage of people who can actually do the job without requiring so much hand holding that they have a negative impact on productivity. There seems to have been a surge in “quick-fix” educations that are a couple of months long, and the new iPad kids are already behind when they start the education because they don’t understand how a computer works. They have no interest in the craft and don’t enjoy it, they just want to check off a detailed todo list and get a fat pay check. We need people who can think, extrapolate from unclear requirements, and ask smart follow-up questions.
The demand is still there, the supply isn’t. Half of these applicants couldn’t even implement FizzBuzz.
i’ve been wondering if i was the only one seeing the absurdly high criteria for software development jobs in the last year or 2.
this field already had an artificially high bar; but it’s taken on a whole new meaning when you solve the hypotheticals during the interviews, yet they’re still not satisfied with the answers because they’re expecting a specific one that they won’t name.
i’ve learned to make peace with the reality that my 20 years in the field is only enough to get interview requests; so i went back to IT.
What you’re describing is a different problem that does exist but isn’t what’s going on here in the US. The layoffs have been so broad and across so many different industries with almost no rhyme or reason.
Several of my friends who have been in the industry for years, and quite good at what they do, have been laid off. Many of the companies fired people simply based on who was hired last (even if they’d been there 3 years and a high contributor). Others fired just based on which team made the least money back (without regard for if they were a support team or some other important group like an infrastructure team not directly developing a product but developing for all the other teams). The steel processing company one of my friends worked for developing their inventory system and such, they told each manager to lay off 20% of their team and didn’t give any more guidance.
The article focuses on the big companies like Google and Microsoft but country wide from the companies with only a few people on up have been laying off developers. This was a safe choice field a few years ago but more is flooded with competing applicants for job listings.
It’s a cargo-cult for stock price manipulation.
I feel like all fresh out of school employees are productivity drains. But the profession doesn’t get experienced employees without hiring inexperienced people and training them, so it’s worth doing a little on-the-job training to make them useful, otherwise you end up in the state you’re describing where you want experienced devs and there aren’t any.
I know how it must sound but it wasn’t like that when I graduated around 2002. 80% of my classmates were self-sufficient and had gained experience and self-esteem through various demanding group projects and their thesis work. Many of them already had more value to offer than the tired self-educated colleagues they met on their first job.
When you have developed and simulated your own ad-hoc wireless routing protocol, implemented distributed two-phase commit algorithms and built your own compiler, you don’t need to ask your colleague fifty times how to use React state. You google it and figure it out. You’re trained to always learn new things and be comfortable with it.
I graduated in that rough time period and also felt like I was great, but realistically my institution didn’t really prepare me for most of the things you actually do on a software coding team. Sure, we had a course on software engineering and we’d had some demanding solo projects, but most of our coursework was computer science rather than software engineering.
And my first job was actually in a researchy role with small teams and manageable process. Now I don’t think I was an actual drain on company resources, but I definitely recognized that a lot of what I did day to day wasn’t something that I was already well prepared for. Certainly it could have been done much faster by a senior employee though, so any task assigned to my was done so with the knowledge that it would take longer and benefit from some oversight, but that would be worthwhile to grow the company.
Bootcamps gave people an unrealistic expectation of the industry and have only hurt job applicants
Sweden is completely different to the USA though, as the salaries are a different order of magnitude.
Like programming is barely a high-status career in Europe - you’re better off being an estate agent, lawyer or senior civil servant.
Machining is a lot of learning, but it’s real, tangible work that gives more satisfaction than anything I did in corporate IT.
Moreover, even though the welding side can be a bit ‘blokey’ (macho?) you’ll find places fall into either horribly sexist (you’ll know within a few meters of walking in…) or millennials/onward that don’t mind who you are.
Machining side even the old men don’t care who you are, as long as you do a good job and don’t skimp on calibration.
It’s sexism in its own right, but a few of the older men prefer me doing the calibrations since they assume women=dexterous.
Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)
