The other side is that the mass layoffs of the last year mean that there are plenty of experienced people to hire over new grads. I can’t imagine any company right now taking on the cost and risk of training up entry level folks when they can hire a 10+ yr senior in that position for the same or a little more than the entry level cost.
Comment on Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.
megopie@beehaw.org 16 hours ago
It’s so disingenuous and absurd to claim this is a AI problem. It’s an over saturation of qualified individuals in a field, problem. These companies and executives are just using AI as a cover story to hide the fact that the industry is not growing fast enough to employ the number of skilled professionals in the field. This was the point of the whole “learn to code” talking points. Executives and shareholders wanted an over-saturation in the field so as to push down wages and reduce the bargaining power of employees.
This situation kind of hammers home the importance of a robust social safety net, strong unions, minimum wages that keep up with inflation, and maintaining an affordable cost of living. There being a saturation in one job market should not doom people to poverty conditions. Even a job at chipotle should pay well enough to live comfortably on, and workers there should have enough bargaining power to ensure decent treatment.
Like, we need to act collectively to ensure stability and prosperity. There is no path that someone can take individually to ensure these things, no escape hatch to prosperity for “hard workers”. “Learning to code” and “Get a CS degree” seemed like a straight forward answer, but here we are.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 15 hours ago
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
5? I know some in the industry who have been out for 30 months. Talented and experienced, as well.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 15 hours ago
That sucks, that’s way beyond what anyone I’ve met has been out for. They’re either very specialized, in an area that requires in-person work (and they’re not nearby to anyone), or there’s something that’s red-flagging them.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
they will just go to h1b visas, and hire lower quality people, to barely maintain things.
t3rmit3@beehaw.org 12 hours ago
From what I’m seeing and hearing in the tech space, I think the opposite is true. I think the current admin’s war on non-white people is making companies really wary of hiring H1B holders (even European ones) and even green card holders. A lot of companies are just halting hiring altogether for a bit, and the ones who are hiring are looking for local, laid-off tech workers at lower salaries, who have to take it because there’s such a glut of them to compete with. Somewhat counterintuitively, this doesn’t mean an easier time for Americans to get hired, it means fewer overall Americans getting hired period (which the recent jobs reports prove to be the case).
Companies tend to hire visa’d workers when they are doing rapid business expansion, because that’s when saving the 20-30% per-head adds up (e.g. if you’re saving 20% per-head when hiring 100, you’re saving yourself 20 salaries-worth, but if you’re hiring 5, you’re better off getting the most experienced ones who give you the best bang-for-your-buck). And no one is doing rapid business expansions in this economy.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 3 hours ago
The bust is definitely pushing wages down, but a lot of tech companies have been able to decouple work from location.
Amazon doesn’t have to pay a wage competitive in Seattle any more for new talent. In the process of searching for the second HQ, Amazon got a lot of information from various cities on what they could offer Amazon, which let Amazon build out new offices where the cost of living is lower. If the job is full remote, you’re competing against applicants from around the world, not just the city you’re living in.
So you don’t need to go the path of visas, but it doesn’t mean the only alternative is well paying jobs in high cost of living cities.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 15 hours ago
Exactly right. Most of us older coders have been warning of this for years. It was not benevolence that Microsoft, Google, Amazon so gleefully pushed for more coders and coding boot camps. They wanted a flood of labor to bring down salaries. They knew this was going to happen, and I’ve been calling it out for years. This is exactly what they wanted.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
i had a “preminition” right before the pandemic that were going to start massive layoffs of tech workers soon, simply because they are earning hundreds of thousands a year, and the c-suites/ceos arnt going to let that slide.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 hours ago
we had a way of life they couldn’t stand. Average people doing normal work were able to afford normal lives while their company suffered under such heavy salaries. Anyone in tech should be planning now on their exit. I’m not afraid of AI, I’m afraid of executives pushing our salaries down to nothing.
I’m personally saving and investing everything I can with my tech salary now to plan for when I’m inevitably kicked to the curb, or they want to pay me minimum wage.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
AI was an excuse to fire people, in reality it doesnt generate profit for the company.