Is the situation really this bad?

[neverminder]

First time in over a decade I'm struggling to find a new gig. Being a JVM dev in London, you'd think that wouldn't be so difficult. In the last months I've been contacted at least 20 recruiters, but they all end up disappearing with no interviews lined up.
Is the situation really this bad? Is it because all the recession propaganda and the fact that Big Tech dumped hundreds of thousands of devs back in the market?

 

[neverminder]

JVM - Java Developer ? Looking for contract roles only or perm?

As a developer interested in the current market

Java/Scala. Doesn't matter contract or permanent. I was just wondering how other people are finding the market at the moment, if I'm the only one struggling to find something.

 

[neverminder]

From the other side of the fence (hirer) our company has a full on recruitment freeze as do many others in Finance. I would expect this year to be tough but budget season is in Q3 so would expect an indication on what 2024 holds then.

Hope that's useful to someone!

I suspect many companies froze their hiring. Question is how long can they maintain it.

 

[neverminder]

A recruiter called me yesterday and we ended up having quite a long chat, I asked him why is it so hard to even get an interview let alone get a job?

His reply was basically that we’re in a perfect storm at the moment, there are hardly any roles and shedloads of people applying for them.

He basically said, if he posts a role for a basic software/network engineer, senior - with a standard salary of £80k, within half a day he’ll have between 350-400 applicants.

Out of that 350-400 applicants, 98% of them will be complete dog **** and there will be 4-5 good ones worth interviewing.

This is bad. As an average dev without any big names under my belt, I stand no chance. I guess it's time to go look for peanuts on Upwork, if there's any left there at all.

It's absolutely ridiculous how the situation has changed radically in such a short time. I was able to get a job during the 2021 "Great Resignation" literally in a few days. Somewhat similar in 2022. 2023 so far looks worse than the Dot-com bubble.

 

[neverminder]

Yea I heard about that.

Why was they laid off.

Its not as if people have stopped using twitter and Facebook...

And this goes to show that being a perm staff in IT is a waste.

Perm no longer gives you much job security

The FAANG was up to some next level bullѕhit for a long time now. Such as hiring all the top talent despite needing it or not, only so that the competition couldn't hire them. Then they would give these people to work on some bullѕhit projects to keep them occupied, until the day when their skills could be needed. The bloat was absolutely insane.

And now of course hundreds of thousands FAANG devs were dumped on the market, scrambling for all those second tier non-tech companies that guys like me used to work for, and we are pushed out completely.

 

[neverminder]

No attack on you but all I read is artificial barriers. No wonder why people get annoyed with today's interview process, including myself. It wasn't like that 20 years ago, so why have this BS process now. Especially with how big tech companies can bin you off whenever they want.

Its not a good method of picking the best people for the role, it's a method testing who get can get through the companies recruitment maze because HR doesn't actually know the market.

For me, I don't need an personality test, an amplitude test and an 4 stage interview for an non senior Windows Systems Engineer role with a no name company. When I have been working with the various version's of the software for 18 years. I'm applying for an IT job, not a rocket scientist for NASA.

Bill Gates liked puzzles, so he started the whole puzzle interview trend a long time ago and everybody jumped on that bandwagon. I've seen people talking about how they spent months, years even preparing for FAANG interviews. There are freaking massive books written about how to pass FAANG interviews. Entire industry exists solely for that purpose - the likes of Leetcode, Hackerrank, etc. Harvard acceptance rate is 4% and FAANG acceptance rate is something like 0.2%. People who got into FAANG early on pulled up the drawbridge behind them. Their thinking is something along the lines of: "If I went through hell to get here, then so will you!". There was a case where FAANG hiring committee was given anonymized resumes and they rejected every single one of them. Then they were told those were their own old resumes... The FAANG interviewing went beyond ridiculous a long time ago.

I personally know people who are very good at interviewing, but suck at the actual job.

 

[neverminder]

I guess as a retort, if all the guidance is out there and you can prep - there is no excuse. If you aren't willing to put the effort in, well that's sufficient understanding of the candidate already nailed.

Edit: beaten by @D.P.

Ironically, ChatGPT completely ruined that style of interviewing when it comes to automation. The likes of Codility, Leetcode, Hackerrank, etc are in complete panic, because they are basically worthless now.

 

[neverminder]

Interviewed with a couple of companies this week that were offering the kind of low ball compensation that I wouldn't have even considered in the past. Responses from both that they are proceeding with other candidates, because they have so many. First time in my life thinking that maybe it's time for a change of profession, because this situation is just insane.

 

[neverminder]

Randomly this appeared in my feed. Interesting information about companies hiring process.

You're Not Imagining It...Looking For A Job Is Getting Worse

You're Not Imagining It...Looking For A Job Is Getting Worse. Looking for a new job in today's job market isn't easy. With mass layoffs, employers forcing ...

youtu.be

This guy is in the US, he's generalizing and mostly talking about stuff that is pretty obvious. But I don't think the situation is nearly as bad in the US as it is in the UK. As someone said - over here it's a perfect storm. Consequences of Brexit, Corona, money printing, energy crisis, mass redundancies in tech and now interest rate hike fell like a bag of bricks all at once.

It annoys the hell out of me seeing UK mass media still spouting the usual BS how there's still shortage of tech workers and salaries are growing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I thought that the day when an experienced Scala/Java dev can't find work in freaking London of all places would never come and if it did there would be bigger problems to worry about such as 3rd world war or extinction grade asteroid coming or something. Although ironically right now I would rather be in one of those events, because they tend to reduce the inequality.

 

[neverminder]

If it's tough for people with experience, think about us guys looking for entry roles.

I hear ya. Getting that first job is the hardest, I remember that all too well. But I'd swap places in a heartbeat, if I could be young and broke again rather than older and broke. Living in some crappy sharehouse, little money would go a long way, but when you're older and have more commitments, your burn rate and exposure is exponentially higher. The higher you climb the harder the fall.

 

[neverminder]

The reason why I posted this link because the same hiring process is not related to only the US. Plenty of companies are adopting the same hiring process, regardless of where they are based. Because they have "too many people" applying, so they say.

Amazon
Microsoft
Fifa
PWC
KPMG
UBS
Credit Suisse

I can mention other unknown, non tech companies. I have interview with over the past 12 months. Based in the UK and here in Switzerland they all adopt the US based way of hiring. This is worldwide.

From personal experience of interviewing with at least 50 companies in the last 12 years here in London, not one of them did the FAANG style interview. In fact except the very first job 12 years ago, the last 4 jobs I got by doing single stage 30-45 minute conversation style interview. These were companies varying from very small to big international corporations, although none of them were in tech industry. So at least in my experience when a company actually wants to hire, they move fast and don't drag it out into 7 stage interviews.

 

[neverminder]

Companies don't have as much money, so that new website/feature/app/whatever is either going to:

Not get built
Get built cheaper
Get built later

Indeed. Which is why devs who have comfortable runway whenever economic downturn hits, just wait it out and those who don't are screwed. The problem in the past few years is unprecedented though, because of several big subsequent hits in a short period of time. I was made redundant during the whole initial Corona hysteria and again half a year ago. So what would have been a decent runway under normal circumstances in the years BC (Before Corona), just evaporated.

 

[neverminder]

https://uk.indeed.com/jobs?q=senior+java+developer&l=london&vjk=f522d59f82ad7273

What should be the meaning of this Indeed link? That there are a lot of Java job ads? Yeah, I use Google job aggregator which vacuums up the postings from literally all job boards. I apply to some 20 jobs every day for months now. No dice. The recruiters keep spamming the job boards with new ads as if it was business as usual, but I suspect those are either fake or they get flooded with hundreds of applications for every position.

 

[neverminder]

There is a big difference between not finding work because there are no jobs and not finding work because your resume is rejected. Your post talked about reasons why there are no jobs, now you are admitting there are lots of jobs but you have not succeeded in getting an offer.

IN my areas, there is still a shortage of good software engineers, but we are looking in areas of Big Data and data engineer etc.

Something to note, you say you are senior, but despite the quips from some junior people on the previous page, tech companies are tending to lay off more senior than junior people. Senior developers cost much more and a good senior engineer can take on more responsibility and if they are effective team leads help mange a small team highly motivated junior engineers. You might have hit an age and experience level where most companies don't want to pay for your experience. The traditional career path would be to move in to management. Otherwise staying within dev then moving more to say an R&D positon where experrience is nore valued. Also look at start-ups. Many of my friends run their own start-up and they are often hiring 45+ year old engineers who are happy to get a big pay ct in exchnage for stock options and the ability to have a big impact in a small company.

Our company had a round of layoffs last year and it was the senior people that got axed - The worst performing of the senior grade. Why pay 200K for someone who does little better than the 120K a year fresh grad. We have a few job openings in our team but were told to budget for junior hires

I'm not admitting there are "lots of jobs". I just said there are plenty of job ads, that's a different thing. A lot of job ads are different recruitment agencies advertising the same position. Some job ads are straight up fake. A lot of them keep being reposted automatically when the position has long expired. And so on. Signal to noise ratio on job boards is extremely poor and every legit job ad gets absolutely mobbed with applications.

120K for a fresh grad? Surely that's not in UK? I'm not targeting sky high compensation, especially right now. I'm applying to mid to senior jobs offering £75-100K in London. I think that's more than reasonable.

 

[neverminder]

Looking at it, the more senior/experience you have. The more likely you are going to get binned off or looked over for hiring.

Yeah, hire juniors because its cheaper for the company and you get more out of them. Just like outsourcing a team to India, instead of keeping them in the UK.

So then how come over 90% of the job ads have "senior" in their job titles?

 

[neverminder]

I've been observing how companies are using the current job market situation to shamelessly lowball salaries in their job ads. They're jumping at the chance to get some desperate devs which they otherwise couldn't afford. I am certain this will lead to another Great Resignation as soon as things pick up again. They just never learn.

 

[neverminder]

After a brutal 8 month marathon I got an offer in mid July from a Big Evil Bank. 3 months of back and forth later the offer was withdrawn because of "hiring freeze"... So this is the end. I wish a damn war started in this country already, at least that way the system would be too busy with that instead of grinding down the people.

 

[neverminder]

I finally found something after hammering it for a solid year, when I was about to throw in the towel... It's not a gig I would have considered under normal circumstances, but it's better than nothing.

This has been a great read, thanks. It has confirmed my findings for finding Test automation / devops contracts. The market is beyond bad for work.

A bit stuck as I can't walk otherwise I would retrain as a plumber (in the family). I am considering abandoning tech and doing something else.

It's funny, just recently I watched this video on Youtube called something along the lines of "blue collar billionaire" or whatever. This guy built a massive manual labour contractor company from scratch. He was walking around and talking how ChatGPT is not gonna take his business away, because all those lawyers, doctors, influencers and so on still need plumbers and electricians. He's right for now of course, until the robots take over even that market that is, which I have no doubt will happen sooner or later.

 

[neverminder]

Seems like the New Year has got things picking up. I've been pinged by recruiters several times already since the start of the year about Sales Engineering positions at pre-IPO tech companies in my space (cloud data platfom / engineering).

I don't know about that. A couple of recruiters called me to "check how the job search is going" and when I told them I just landed a role, they basically started begging me for passing the leads of other roles I may have been interviewing with at the time. These guys are still desperate and they are like vultures - won't leave a bone unpicked.

 

[neverminder]

I've noticed a slight increase in recruiter spam lately. Could be just fluctuations, the mood on reddit is still doom and gloom. Mass layoffs may have slowed down, but I don't see any solid reason for the market to be recovering just yet.