My solution is to get a new account every now and then

It’s good to be prepared. The threat is real. Just look at what happened in Seattle: they took over 6 blocks, kicked out all the police, and set up walls and checkpoints for their new country: CHAZ but it has not yet been internationally recognized

Here in the Bay Area we have local politicians who brag about all the building plans they’ve shut down and voters applaud this!

Most software startups die due to lack of demand for their product.

I don’t know why this is being downvoted so much. It’s a legitimate abbreviation considering that washing hands is the most well known deterrent for the virus

Nope. If you count growth by population increases, Houston is growing more than 4 times faster than SF and still able to keep housing costs low.

When you get rejected, it’s not about you. There’s just too many high quality candidates and too few positions. It’s just the inevitable outcome of a vast oversupply of talent

> There’s just too many high quality candidates and too few positions.

That would be believable if the same positions weren't being advertised for a year or more[1]; e.g. I've had one position[2] sent to me at least 5 times in the last year by different recruiters.

[1] In London, at least. [2] Interesting work and a job I'd want but unfortunately the corporate culture is 100% no-go for me.

London is just too expensive for the salaries some of these companies are offering though..

That was another reason I wasn't interested in that position - I'll suck up a lot of corporate nonsense for contractor money but not for low-perm money.

> There’s just too many high quality candidates and too few positions.

That can't be true simultaneously with "companies are having trouble finding good enough candidates", which is often said these days.

What can be true: There are many high quality candidates, and many positions looking for high quality candidates, but they cannot find each other and overcome matching hurdles.

So you have candidates applying to a large number of positions, and positions seeing applications from a large number of candidates, just because the matching process is so inefficient. Then both sides can legitimately complain about the large amount of work and time it takes.

When two contradictory ideas are true at the same time we call that a paradox.

There are reasons why the current IT hiring status quo seems to be so paradoxical.

https://itnext.io/the-cloud-skills-shortage-and-the-unemploy...

I agree (and I'm fond of the word "paradox" too).

Interesting link, thanks.

I've tried to reconcile that paradox by seeing it as a matching problem which requires both candidates and companies to be overwhelmed with attempts to find a good fit with each other.

However, reading the linked article gives another perspective on it. Which is, frankly, a worrying perspective for candidates, in that it suggests the labour market is shrinking and bifurcating (just like everything else these days) into "haves" and "have nots", where crossing from the latter to the former group may be getting more difficult with time.

I'm not so sure about that. The lobbying for more H1Bs seems to indicate otherwise.

I am quite aware that most positions are for folks that don't have my level of expertise.

I just love designing and writing software; especially software that connects to devices. I'll do it; whether or not anyone pays me.

Well an H1b is basically like an indentured servant that works for a fraction of the cost and much longer hours. Some Companies want low cost labor.

No one wants to buy the cow when they get the milk for free. :)

As long as they are happy with MIT open-source, on my terms, no big deal. They are welcome to knock themselves out.

If they want to own it, though, and have more of a say in what it does, that's another story.

But then collectively as a labor force, where do we go from here? We can't all dumb ourselves down - or won't, and it seems to me that people understand what it is we do less and less.

Techies work in a seller's market (as evidenced by the comparatively huge salaries they command). There is definitely no "over supply of labor".

One of Google's biggest assets is their huge army of talented techies. I'd go so far as to say losing that would be an existential threat to the business.

Comparative to most other jobs, of course.

I sugggest you ask a non-tech friend about their experience getting a new job: how many applications they've sent out, how many responses they've received and how many interviews they've actually been to. Then compare that to a software dev's hit rates.

I submit to you that a halfway decent software dev will have a hard time being unemployed: they might not get hired by FAANG and they might have to code in $LANGUAGE_I_HATE, but they'll be able to get a job at a reasonable salary.

Also, consider the fact that there's been a large number of businesses focused on recruitment specifically in the tech area. That's because everyone wants to hire devs and they're willing to pay recruiters to channel the funnel their way.

Few other industries have that luxury.

A large part of supply and demand is the amount of immediate liquidity. Employers seem to have the upper hand when hiring typically because they have a bunch of options right then whereas few applicants have multiple simultaneous offers and if they do, they don't have many. But that's not the same as supply and demand of labor on a longer timescale.

Somebody who's thought more and more clearly about this could write something better about it, but I felt like pointing out what I think is overlooked.

The issue isn't finding more engineers, the issue would be the sudden loss of institutional knowledge, the paralysis while trying to maintain basic functionality, and the distinct possibility of critical, catastrophic failure due to broken processes from missing people. What's the chances that the 20% of employees who don't show up include everyone needed to prevent a failure of Google's entire Ads product?

When say, the teachers go on strike in Chicago, it's not that it's impossible to hire new teachers, it's that someone in the meantime of negotiation has to watch over (and ideally educate) all of the kids that those teachers are responsible for teaching.

Wherever you work, try to imagine a random 1 out of every 5 employees missing one day. How likely are you (and everyone else still there) likely to run into problems conducting your general work. And imagine that that is going to continue until your company manages to interview, vet, hire, onboard, and train all of those people back.

...Or, the corporation could just capitulate to demands. Collective action is incredibly powerful.

This sounds like an Econ 101 understanding of the labor market.

Most (white collar) employees are not as fungible as people assume, first of all. Two "Senior Back-end Developers" might have such different work experience that one would ramp up on a project in 5 days, and the other would take a couple of weeks.

Second, all turnover is expensive. For a large company like Google, turnover of 100 people could easily cost millions.

Unfortunately, unless those people worked on ads, Google's investors (and therefore C-suite) probably wouldn't miss them much.