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I'm glad the article posts about visa sponsorship changes, as an immigrant to the US/EU this is the biggest falloff I've seen. Over the years I've seen relocation as a perk slide:

2013: Was flown to EU country for an interview, accepted, they handled the immigration paperwork (mostly) and helped me find a place and get settled. Plane trip was at my discretion.

2015: Immigrated to US with same company, they handled the visa and gave me help to find a place and get settled. Plane trip was at my discretion.

2018: Accepted new job in US, visa was handled however plane trip was 3am in the morning out of Gatwick.

2021: Accepted new job in US (after leaving the US for 3 years), visa was handled but I had to pay for my own plane trip. No help with finding apartments or any relocation expenses.

2022: Accepted new job in US at FAANG, work permit was handled however visa was not, all expenses to get the visa came out of my pocket (plane tickets, hotel accommodation, embassy appointment). No relocation help or expenses.

2023: Accepted new job in US, all work permit/visa issues came out of my pocket including the fee paid to the lawyers for handling the visa application. No relocation help or expenses.

Not sure how much further this perk can slide.

Not sure what kind of visa you applied for but an employer is liable for all visa-related fees

https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/u-s-emplo....

2028: Accepted new job in US. Work given by them. Salary paid by me to them for the privilege of having a job.
Maybe try sticking around at a company longer than 2 years.
I hope the perk completely stops existing. The tides are very much turning against this perk because of the result.
The "ZIRP" meme is way overdone by now. ZIRP doesn't explain much. Interest rates had been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, were already quite low since the 1990s, and are still not very high today.

IMO the "vibecession" meme explains what's going on within tech a bit better. Tech CEOs and VCs have decided that the tech industry had to shrink, notwithstanding that the wider economy was and is doing fine.

Tech CEOs and VPs found that they're out of ideas on how to grow the pie. So to achieve their personal goals (which is always more), they had to increase their share.

The fear, uncertainty and doubt over the economy serves to make everybody else fear that the pie could disappear completely. And so they're happy they still get scraps, leaving enough for those CEOs - for now.

Lately I keep thinking about Mr Buffett's remark about class warfare...

> Interest rates had been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis

Exactly. So we had ~14ish years of effectively 0% interest rates. That's never happened before in history. Now that we're going back to normal rates, we're discovering that some things we did when rates were 0 aren't actually feasible anymore.

That's what ZIRP is. It's a decade and a half of 0% coming to an end.

People seem to forget that the dot com boom happened under very similar interest rates as today, and the tech companies that are announcing layoffs for the first time ever like Google are the least sensitive to interest rate shifts because they have their own massive treasuries.

What we are really seeing is massive extrapolations from 2020 and 2021 being completely off and companies having to manage more realistic growth expectations.

> Interest rates had been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, were already quite low since the 1990s, and are still not very high today.

Interest rates dropped from previous highs in 1990 and have stayed down. The current interest rate is about equal to the mean and median for the 90s, and is near the peak of interest rates we've seen in that time.

45% of the US population is age 34 or younger. So for nearly half of the country's population, interest rates are nearly as high as they've ever been.

So calling it "not very high" is misleading; you're comparing now to back before nearly half the country was born.

I don't think tech shrinkage is vibecession (though its part of the reason for the broader vibecession), tech saw countercyclical high demand during the pandemic slowdown and took advantage of that and easy money due to stimulus-oriented monetary policy to expand; the demand boost ebbed and monetary policy aimed at controlling inflation took easy money away, so there had to be some correction. You don't see it elsewhere because the countercyclical demand wasn't elsewhere; procyclical demand shifts are buffered by reactive monetary policy rather than magnified the way countercyclical ones are.
Except the wider economy is not doing fine by any metric. Prices go up, people taking home less, etc.

Tech CEOs don't control the interest rates. The interest rate effects their ability to get free and cheap money.

I never heard of “vibecession.”

Is there some article that coined the term or uses it prolifically? I liked your explanation of it.

There is probably a lot of consulting money to be made in cleaning up the mess of the last decade exuberance.

Similar to what we saw in banks after 2008.

Absolutely - I did my best business during and after the big 2008 meltdown -companies threw out the good with the bad in order to save money (on payroll) and then realized they still needed stuff done - but many departments in many companies weren't (yet) allowed to start hiring back FT employees - it was a golden opp. for consultants, especially if you didn't charge obscene rates (good rates, just not obscene), i.e. rates high enough to make real money, but not so high they needed special approval by several layers of management.
I've said this on here before, but I think we're about to see an explosion of "cloud exits" and a healthy consulting demand for companies who want help doing so.

Cloud was a ZIRP, unless they drastically change pricing and billing.

Yep. Consulting is where you want to be rn.
> Job market realities. It’s tougher than it’s been in a decade, with fewer jobs, and more qualified candidates. This is great if you’re hiring, but harder for applicants.

Is this true? Layoffs make the headlines, but the unemployment rate for software engineers seems to be low, at least in the most recent numbers I can find.

The rest of the items ("Compensation changes", "Negotiating offers", etc.) just follow from that premise.

Of course, everything could tank tomorrow, but it's probably not smart to get into a defensive crouch earlier than you have to.

It is definitely true in my experience, and for those seeking 100% remote or with only 0-3 years of real experience (not school) it is even worse.

I have posted this comment before on HN, but ~8-9 months ago we posted a job for a lead engineer at my company - we got 3 applicants (this was for a fortune 50 company, and comp, while not FAANG, was very respectable with good benefits and decent bonus and stock options to boot).

~5-6 months after that we added another exact same position, and advertised it in the exact same places and got over 300 applicants - many ex-FAANG which we never used to get.

So based on my personal experience, there are a lot more people looking and applying for jobs and a lot less jobs to choose from - and like I said, if you are dead-set on being remote, it is even harder - my most recent employer (100k+ employees) will no longer allow hiring managers to interview people who state they are only looking for remote (they don't have to, plenty of people are willing to show up at the office because they have rent/mortgage and bills to pay).

> Is this true? Layoffs make the headlines, but the unemployment rate for software engineers seems to be low, at least in the most recent numbers I can find.

Absolutely true. It's the worst I've seen. I'm looking to fill 5 positions at our place and the scene is just sad. People out of work since feb-june of last year, highly senior engineers unable to land interviews because they want fully remote, leads having their work outsourced, heads unable to find head positions and having to settle for senior roles.

The worst ones hit are the ones that have spent a decade working in ibm/oracle/vmware stacks, now, due to layoffs, entering this new k8s dominated ecosystem, where they're finding their skillset to be undesired, even by big institutions as those have too begun migrating to k8s/cloud.

My anecdata says it's true. Where before I didn't get a single rejection (so applying was sending out four applications and getting four interviews) in this round suddenly some even did not invite me for interviews, they just declined. Strange experience! And I only applied to more positions this month because a position that seemed a safe bet did not materialize at the end of last year, the project evaporated when the (one would think unrelated) automotive market catered, the linked agency instead scrambled to find projects for their existing devs.

So yeah, definitely got harder I'd say.

Just like the dating markets, a small shift at the margins can influence the culture quite a lot.

You would not think that there would be much difference between a city with a 50-50 gender ratio and 52-48 (theoretically). But if you assumed that 80% of people are in relationships (1-1), and 20% are looking, suddenly that 4% difference turns into 33% more of one gender than another (hypothetically with 100 people, it would be 12 of one vs 8 of the other). So the culture between those two similar looking cities will be completely different.

A similar thing happens with jobs. Going from 99% employed to 98% employed without changing number of jobs available can completely change the employment market dynamics overnight.

Anecdotally this seems to be true, if only because companies that aren't actively doing layoffs are at least restricting hiring.

Unemployment can be low statistically, but for those 10s of thousands who find themselves unemployed it seems like a rough job market.

Roughly, we poured ungodly amounts of capital into building out internet infrastructure for nearly fifteen years (fibre optics, data centres, and yes smartphones count as infrastructure).

Just like railway boom and others before, there is a ton of railways going to wrong place, or too much to same place.

Businesses will pay good money to

a. Find out what they actually have running where

b. Move the core in house where it’s cheaper

c. Have sensible ways to scale up if needed (that month end report run etc)

The work is still there. But demonstrating how much is currently spent on what and how that can be better spent is the real win here.

We are in a downward cycle for Software right now. Are higher interest rates a precipitating factor at the moment? Sure, but there are others as well including the COVID bubble etc.. Our industry was bound for a correction. That said, interest rates alone do not predict a tough market for software engineers since the majority of the .com bubble in the 90's saw 5% percent interest rates.
The difference is, the 5% interest rates in the 90's seemed low, because we had been on a steady slide for 10-15 years from rates much higher, so they seemed low at the time.

Now a 5% interest rate seems high, since people were used to the ZIRP.

I think people are overly attributing the end of low interest rates to the current job market in tech.

The truth is over last 10-20 years we've gone through a huge technological boom which has driven the job market in tech. In the mid 2000s almost no one knew how to code. Software engineering was more a hobby than a career choice back then. Yet, from 2005-2015 we had innovation after innovation which demanded people with coding skills.

This article mentions things like the launch of the iPhone and AWS, but there was so much more than just that. The switch from dial-up to broadband meant people were more frequently using the internet, and using it for more than just web browsing – now they were downloading music, watching videos and chatting to their friends. Then the launch of the iPhone and 3G shortly after meant suddenly the internet was now everywhere all the time, and this spawned businesses like Facebook and Uber who enabled companies like Twilio. And now that everyone was online eCommerce started to boom too which enable companies like Saleforce, Shopify and Stripe.

And I could go on here, but our lives are so different today and this shift fundamentally required a large number of software engineers during a time when software engineers were in very short supply.

While progress will continue, it seems unlikely we're going to see a repeat what we've seen over the last ~20 years. AI might change our lives significantly, but it's hard to see how AI would make software engineers more valuable given they fundamentally make knowledge and intelligence more accessible.

Additionally, today software engineering is a career kids actively pursue, and even if they don't pursue it most kids will still end up doing some basic coding at school.

Meanwhile things are getting easier to build all the time. When I was learning to code building anything was a technical challenge. For one, Youtube and Stack Overflow didn't exist. There was no cloud hosting, and no free tier hosting. Programming languages themselves sucked – if you think Java sucks today then try using it 15 years ago. But the biggest changes have been in SaaS where today literally anyone can start an eCommerce store or take payments online in minutes.

The things I do as a software engineer today are becoming increasingly niche and a lot of it is just plumbing services together which doesn't take much intellect. And even this can increasingly be done with AI tools.

I think tech as an industry is going to do great over the next decade, but they won't need as many software engineers.

I'm actually thinking we will need a lot more (competent) engineers soon when someone needs to start fixing the immeasurable piles of garbage that no-code AI crap produces. This is a good time to really level up on the ability to solve complex problems. But yeah, your average React.js developer will most likely go out of business.
Agree with a lot of what you say except that software engineering was most definitely not a "hobby" in the mid 2000s! We were already past the dot com crash. There were lots of professional software engineers.
The biggest thing that companies need to optimize on - which they don't seem to have caught on to yet - are management processes which create unprofitable overhead.

While "overhead" is an overloaded term, in practice it looks like:

1. Too much documentation, blog posts, spreadsheets (designed for management optics). Every one of these artifacts takes dev time.

2. Excessive stages in CI pipelines, internal tools, saas tools usage (designed for engineering promos). Every one of these takes dev time.

3. Excessive features (designed for IC and management promos)

4. Excessive amount of time spent in promotions, stack ranking, and performance reviews (designed to make management useful)

5. Excessive time on making agile work such as time on Jira story points, backlog grooming, retros, meeting minutes, agendas, scrums (designed to again, make management appear like they are doing something).

6. Excessive number of management layers (manager, sr manager, director, sr director, sr sr director, associate vp, vp, svp). Every person on this ladder is overhead*365 days a year.

All of these are entirely a problem of management layer overhead.

The only and only thing that works in a tough environment is few "skilled" managers who are still very technical and can align people and teams work towards specific goals.

As much as I agree with the high-level message, I disagree with the specific list.

The list makes sense from the bottom, where the goal is to get stuff done. The list makes no sense from the top, where the goal is to make sure the right stuff gets done. Without a lot of those, you end up either with:

- 1000 employees moving in 1000 directions

- 1000 employees working from home doing nothing

... or similar pathologies.

Organizational alignment is hard. I would have written a similar list to yours two decades ago, but right now, I see just how much effort it takes to make sure things don't go in the _wrong_ direction.

The good stuff on your list to eliminate are management layers, excessive features, and promotions / performance reviews / stack ranking.

Most of the things designed to provide communications, alignment, and transparency (e.g. documentation, spreadsheets, blog posts, many types of internal tooling / dashboards, backlogs, retrospectives, minutes, agendas) are very much necessary evils. There might be better ways to accomplish some of those same goals, but if you just cut them, organizations break, and break very badly.

You definitely can (and should) do without those at 1-5 people, and possibly up to 30. It's worth noting "people" here often includes external stakeholders, such as investors.

> 5. Excessive time on making agile work such as time on Jira story points, backlog grooming, retros, meeting minutes, agendas, scrums (designed to again, make management appear like they are doing something)

I lose so very much time to not just the ceremonies, but to wrestling-with/losing-things-in all these bafflingly complex tools like Jira or Asana or "Azure Devops" and such.

Most places I've been use Github or Gitlab. The issue trackers there are fine. They're close to the code, and in a site I'm already using. They're easy to have conversations in. They work well with built-in review processes, and with pull/merge requests. They don't permit enough strict structure that one worries about smashing some PM's carefully-constructed sandcastle by just trying to use them, but have enough filters and tagging and such that you can apply every bit as much logical structure as I've ever seen in Jira and friends, if you want to, it just won't also make it horrible to use when you do.

I wonder sometimes what % of productivity companies are losing by letting PMs pick where tickets & communication about tickets live. Plus the extra cost of the tools themselves.

7. Excessive componentization. Microservices. Many many source control repos. Many many artifacts. Many many highly encapsulated classes/modules/services/entities. All creating a conceptual and practical trail of complexity and usually shipping the org chart instead of a product.
This is a direct result of engineering teams being let loose and becoming risk disconnected from the wider org. This leads to risk evaluations at a macro level which absolutely destroys efficiency.

Sit down with your risk or compliance officer for a couple of hours and thoroughly explain the ins and outs of your complex CI/CD pipeline to them. Your whole team will be up shit creek by end of the week.

But we don't have those discussions.

I don't think it means much at all. Software jobs boomed in the 80s and 90s despite high interest rates. Tech tends to do well in almost every econ environment. And already, interest rate forecasts falling.
I don't know. From an employee's perspective there's such a long tail of incompetence in tech. I also have doubts about a large chunk of new CS grads who were born with a smartphone in their hands. Software engineering is only continuing to diverge from CS and the lack of startups will impact their ability to get up to speed compared to older millennials who are now mid-career.

If you're used to being the smartest person in the room, or at least the one with the most guts and speaks their mind, nothing is changing for you. Your career is fine as long as you don't work for a startup (anymore) and have at least 5 years under your belt.

From a business cost perspective running one is now more expensive. Though it's important to remember how cheap it's always been for tech and how cheap it still is. What's more difficult now is that "hockey stick growth", but that was never easy either.

I just gotta shrug here idk.

> The job market is brutal for new grads and early-career developers

Getting one's foot in the door has always been hard, but it seems there's another trend here: Computer Science is now the most popular major at many schools. All of those students need a place to go.

The rest of the article is behind a paywall.

> while bootstrapping becomes more fashionable

The idea that bringing in revenue and bringing in more revenue than you spend was something that fell out of fashion cracks me up and shows the fantasy land we've been living in

The title mangler somehow got from "The end of 0% interest rates: what the new normal means for software engineers" to the incomprehensible "What the The end of 0% interest rates means for software engineers".

EDIT: Not complaining about downvotes, just checking site norms. My understanding was that it used to be appropriate to point out failures of the title mangler, so that dang could fix them by hand. (Thanks, dang!) Is that no longer appropriate, or is there some better way to do it?

There will always be a shortage of engaged talented people. FAANG no longer big deals to everyone under the sun doesn’t change this.

The big change will be to folks in the middle. There won’t be huge offers for them any more.

> companies sponsored visas and paid for engineers to relocate from abroad ... where the pay is too low for local candidates.

Doesn't that violate the "prevailing wage" requirement of the H1B visa?

> It is notable, however, how both the smartphone and cloud computing revolutions of the 2010s coincided with the start of this long ZIRP period:

Nope. ZIRP really had nothing to do with the start of the cloud computing revolutions, since the industry was already moving in that direction with outsourced IT, and outsourced SaaS-like stuff (Application Service Providers was the old term for it).

I think the reason why IT & Software engineering benefit in most types of rates has to do with efficiencies and profitability.

Fantastic compilation of data that really gives good insights into what is going on.
> To begin a software startup before AWS launched in 2006, a founder needed to purchase and set up servers, then operate them. This required thousands of dollars, and weeks to launch a website. But with a cloud provider, all that was needed was a credit card, and a founder could have a website up and running in minutes, for only a few dollars.

Nonsense. colo was very cheap and fast, took minutes or an hour tops to set up. And most startups needed something like webhosting or Ruby/Python hosting, both available.

AWS added speed to scale and being lazy with performance.

The end of ZIRP is the tip of the iceberg

1. Consolidation. There will be fewer and more powerful tech companies in the future and they will grow and profit as they shrink their headcount. The belief that profits and growth = jobs will soon be recognized as twentieth century thinking.

2. Automation. Spiffy tools, reuse, AI...no matter how you slice it, your skills are getting pushed into the shared stack every day.

3. Internationalization. You might be surprised to find out that there are React coders in South America that have all the right tats and piercings, read HN and Blind, bang on leetcode...and will work for 1/5 what you will.

The only question is how many people leaving tech presently will never be able to get back in, or maybe they just realize driving a Fedex truck for the same money is less stressful.

Also don't be too spooked by layoffs so far, its just beginning in tech and finance and this wave still hasn't hit the huge cohort of permanently cashflow-negative startups somehow still clinging to life...they will ALL be gone.

It’s just no longer a good career. The time investment is too much.
The ZIRP thing makes no sense, very few tech companies were funded by loans besides a bit of convertible notes here and there. Funding for small to medium companies was from VC and acquisitions, bigger tech was funded by stock appreciation and massive profits.
What the end of 0% interest rates means for people who are not software engineers:

- less income inequality

- less competition in the housing market

- less homelessness

If an "employee" is getting paid with borrowed money, for years, and the money will never be repaid, because the "employer" has no profits, because the "business" is a farce, is that really a "job".

Perhaps clients and customers will not pay for whatever it is these "employees" do, but investors will pay, so yes, it's a "job" burning someone else's money. However this only lasts for as long as there are no other, more attractive short-term investment options.