Ben and Ryan are joined by software developer and listener Patrick Carlile for a conversation about how the job market for software engineers has changed since the dot-com days, navigating boom-and-bust hiring cycles, and the developers finding work at Walmart and In-N-Out. Plus: “Party in the front, business in the back” isn’t just for haircuts anymore.
If you’ve been laid off or you’re just sweating the possibility, here’s what to do.
Check out the results of our last job market survey.
Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn.
Shoutout to stevenkucera, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I create a global, mutable singleton?.
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Ryan Donovan Want to hear more from tech leaders shaping the future? Join Roblox founder and CEO, David Baszucki, as he sits down with visionaries that are advancing human connection and dives deep on the innovation happening at Roblox every day. Tune in to Roblox Tech Talks at corp.roblox.com/techtalks or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Ben Popper Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I'm Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow, joined by my colleague, Ryan Donovan, Editor of our blog and maestro of our newsletter. Ryan, we have been encouraging folks who listen to the podcast to write in, and we heard from one of our listeners, Patrick, who wanted to talk a little bit about what's going on in the job market. As we mentioned on a previous episode, I think it was in 2002 there was something like 240,000 tech hires, and in 2023 there was something like 700. And so if you go back to 2010 when I started as a tech reporter, and even earlier– five, six years after the dotcom boom and bust, getting a job as a software developer felt like a reliable path in that you are more likely to have lots of recruiters in your inbox and options than you were to be out of work and unable to find new work. So we wanted to have Patrick on to talk a little about his experience, what he's seeing in the market, what he's excited or aggravated or hopeful about. I think this podcast has always tried to be about the practice of software development, but me being the worst coder in the world makes that a little difficult, so it's nice when we have people on who can actually bring a first-person perspective. So Patrick, welcome to the show.
Patrick C Thank you, Ben.
BP To folks who are listening, just give them a little background. How'd you get in the world of software development and what kind of shops and firms were you working for recently?
PC When I started, it was right around 2002 when I graduated, so it was right at the dotcom bust. And I had just got a computer science degree and I had trouble finding a computer science job related to that career, as a programmer. What I ended up doing was kind of falling back on my default IT experience. I was at a help desk and I worked at ResNET at the dorms, so I ended up working for Bell-Carter Olive Company. They make olives, but I was the IT guy there. I maintained their systems and their networking and was the IT guy for years. And I went to another company and did IT there, and then when the industry started to resuscitate and I had contacts, I basically got a referral and I got started as a software developer after a few years after that.
BP Cool. So moving from IT into development which I guess had been your goal coming out of college, what was that experience like? You started as an IC and did you enjoy it?
PC I did. They kind of throw you into the fire. It was sort of like, “Let's see if we can break you.” So it was a tough start, but in a way, it was really rewarding because it was enlightening and reaffirming that I can do this and this is really what I want to do. And it is really exciting to create these things that solve these problems in an automated fashion and you can make them great value.
RD Did you find yourself having any sort of a specialization, any places that you preferred to write code in or languages?
PC We had this weird mishmash where the people in the back end wanted to do Java and the people in the front end wanted to do .NET, and they don't work together so it was this constant conflict and understanding of this new system and complexities around everything, so I got exposure to all these different things. I started off in the UI, and then I did that for several years and then I had an insight to the back end because I was hitting the REST endpoints and all that. At my next company, I had more opportunity and I ended up going to more of a back end focus. I preferred that because the UI frameworks were all over the place on the front end. They were changing and they were in flux and JavaScript was sort of ugly and difficult to work with. I've heard it's gotten better. So I've preferred the back end. It sort of feels pure, it feels stable, but UI has matured over the years and it's getting better.
BP It's the opposite of a mullet. It's business in the back, party in the front. Reverse mullet. And so one of the things that I'd love to know is, you mentioned graduating in 2002 and it seems like you held a series of jobs since then, and went from a developer level two to senior software engineer, to developer level three, and those terms don't apply everywhere, but within lots of companies, that ranking system is pretty normal and shows you growing in seniority and your ability to take on big projects and work at a scope or with a lot of people. So what was the experience like, let's say, prior to 2020? You felt like you were able to make moves as a software engineer when you wanted to from a position of power, like, “I see a new opportunity, I'm going to leave here and take that.”
PC Yeah, it was very simple to get hired. People were clamoring for you. People were looking. It was more of, “We really want you to be with us and we hope you can accept this pay grade,” or whatever. The interviews were quick, there were plentiful jobs. It was just very simple and very quick. And now it's the complete opposite where there's few job postings, some of them feel like they're phantom postings where they keep reposting the same job.
BP Ghost jobs, right.
PC And you're like, “Are they really hiring?” I've contacted the company and they're like, “Oh, we're in a hiring freeze,” and I'm like, “Why am I seeing job postings constantly coming up?”
BP We have had this discussion about ghost jobs, some of which I think have more to do with some kind of weird compliance or regulatory thing than they do with actual hiring. I don't know. Ryan, do you know about ghost jobs?
RD What I've heard is that some of it is sort of morale for the team, some of it is collecting resumes for future positions. There's all sorts of reasons they could have it up there.
BP And so Patrick, what have been some of your strategies? Are you networking with other folks you know? Are you considering, like you did before, maybe falling back on a different set of your skills? Or are you thinking I can afford to, for the moment, just stick it out for the long run and I want to go back to the kind of software engineering job I was doing prior to this.
PC A little of everything. I've hit all of my contacts up, I'm continuing to follow them trying to see if anything opens up, looking at what companies I've worked at before, seeing the jobs they have. And I've also applied to many different places throughout the region. I've looked at hybrid roles, I've looked at remote roles. I think what's also key is you look at the unconventional ones. The job boards are very good for giving you lots of good leads, but they're also inundated with lots of people. If you kind of go with less conventional roles that are not well published, then you have a better opportunity. But it's hard to find those, they're not as accessible if they're not on the job board so you have to kind of seek those out and find them, especially if they're outside of traditional tech.
BP I had a friend recently in California who was going through a sort of similar experience to you. He's a product manager/designer. He's worked at a bunch of startups in the technology space and a friend of his found a gig at Walmart on their mobile app side. And he was like, “I never really thought I would ever work at a big box store in any capacity and I wasn't really thinking of Walmart as a technology company,” but a company at this size that wants to work at this scale with so many consumers actually has a great engineering team and a lot of interesting stuff going on and it feels modern once they got inside. And so they were sort of pleasantly surprised, like you said, didn't look like a tech company, probably wasn't somewhere they would have looked, but once they got there, they were like, “Oh, this is a comfortable place.”
PC One of my old coworkers actually worked at In N Out and said that it was surprising. They do have an IT division, they have their own development. You wouldn't think of In N Out, but all these companies still have their own needs.
RD Any company with ecommerce or a website has a technology footprint.
BP And then sometimes it gets even deeper. It's predictive pricing and geospecific notifications and stuff like that.
RD So you were fairly recently laid off.
PC Yes, February.
RD And we've all been watching the news. We've all been seeing layoffs all over the place. I have a couple friends who were recently laid off. Other friends at companies have survived layoffs and seen their coworkers lose their jobs. Do you have any ideas of why this moment is causing so many layoffs?
PC At least at my company, I was clued in because I followed it pretty closely and it was the second round. About a year ago was the first round and it was a very heavy hit on the organization. At the time, they said, “This is laying the groundwork so we don't have to do this again, and we're going to be more stable financially.” And then they even did a little bit of rehiring and they tried to stabilize and then it seemed like market forces. I hear that the interest rates are high and it hurts the businesses. I don't know, it feels a little unsaid that they're getting this pressure from their board or from whatever but they seem like they're increasing profitability. They want the ROI, they want the bottom line to look better, and their biggest expense is these developers that we've had, and the seniority, and so I think that it's really just about numbers. They were talking about offshoring to India because the developers are much cheaper and it's just a numbers game at that point.
RD We've seen the end of the zero interest rate, zero percent interest rate, but also there was a tax change that made it so you have to amortize developer salaries over five years. So you pay them and it comes out of your budget, but you can't list it as an expense immediately.
BP Yeah, that was a big bad one. I think I tried to explain this yesterday to Eira. It's confusing on the face of it, but if you were to try to explain it to a five-year-old, it's like you are a startup with a million dollars in revenue and no profit because you have five software developers who each cost $200,000. In the past, you would have broken even and owed no taxes. Now you owe taxes on $800,000 this year and the rest goes out year by year or whatever. And so it was a big flip that I think added a lot of pressure, but also Patrick, to your point, I think it's a change in the mindset and the narrative of the markets. From the post-2008 period until the pandemic, being unprofitable was no big deal. All that mattered was user growth and traction and companies went public that were losing hundreds of millions and had no clear path to a profit. When the interest rates more than doubled, the market reset and said, “We want to see something else. We want to see companies that are profitable, break even, and can run under their own steam,” and so I think unfortunately there was a real whiplash effect for a lot of people who had been working at companies that just hadn't optimized for that because their investors, their boards, their shareholders hadn't told them to.
PC It was impactful too that the original founders were more about building the best product. They were about listening to the customer, building whatever they can do, proving themselves, and then when they sold the company, they sold to an investment firm. An investment firm, they're looking at their chart. They're looking at your type of business and you better be on that graph and you better meet that line. If you don't, then you're out as leadership, so I think they have a lot of pressure on them.
RD I think we also saw big hiring moves during the quarantine period when everybody was thinking it's all going to go remote, it's all going to change to cloud native. Did your company participate in any of that?
PC We did scale up. There was a big scale up and it was because they were really trying to similarly go into a new market and build a new product, and it was part of that purchase. We were purchased by an investment firm, but then the company that purchased us wanted to use our product to open themselves to a new market and they were hoping to have a windfall in revenue. And when that didn't pan out in the way they expected, then it all fell apart.
BP That's unfortunate. As you look out, do you think that there's been a structural change in the need for software engineers impacted in any way by generative AI or do you think most of that is just kind of hype at this point? Simple tools, Copilot and your thing, make your average senior engineer 20-30% more productive and so that means you could have 20-30% less developers, or is it really, and this is what I've been feeling myself, more related to these macro issues that are outside our control– a pandemic, a hiring boom, an interest rate change, a sort of flip in the market sentiment 180 degrees.
PC I think it's kind of a little bit both. There is productivity improvements. You definitely have benefits and streamlining. It takes away a lot of boilerplate code. It helps you get insight into possible ideas that you might not have or throw things at something, throw kind of back and forths that are helpful that wouldn't tie up your team that you can kind of brainstorm. It can be helpful, but I think you're right in that it's not the game changers that everyone makes it out to be. That's hype, that's marketing hype. I think that the real thing is that you can't remove the problem solver and the communicator from the picture. And the AI is smart, but you ask it to do things and it's going to go off in its own fever dream. It does all these weird things. I've had it give me the wrong libraries and calls to functions. I've had it make fundamental mistakes, and when I'm asking it, if I don't have that insight into it then I wouldn't know. When I first used AI, I used to think this is garbage because I'm asking these technical questions and it’s giving me these wrong answers. I can't trust it. And so it's tough. As it gets better, it has improved, so maybe that will become less of an issue, but I feel like you still can't remove somebody who's coordinating all these pieces together. I think people think that programmers are just churning out code but we're really operating at a higher level, trying to understand what the business is telling us, trying to look at this machine and see what it needs to change, and trying to combine those two in a way that AI can't necessarily reconcile.
RD Years ago, 10-15 years ago, I talked to a friend of mine who'd been working at Microsoft for 10-15 years at that point. And I said, “Well, you're a programmer,” and he got very offended. He was like, “I am not just a code monkey. There's so much more to what I do.” And I think that's what everybody is sort of realizing with AI. I read a story about a security researcher realizing that generative AI was repeatedly inserting this imaginary library into code and they created the library and put it up on NPM and people started downloading it. And fortunately he was only doing it for research, but if a malicious person had done that, they could have gotten free spyware onto everybody's computers.
BP Although as we've discussed many times on the show, the blame maybe lies with NPM as much as anything else. Just NPM install it, okay? It'll be safe, it'll be fine. So Patrick, in the email you had mentioned that developers are heavily using AI in their workflows. Are you working on anything in the meantime, open source stuff or trying to get some chops in some of these new AI areas, or just as you kind of have the time and as you look for the next role?
PC I've looked a little bit at it. I feel like the AI stuff is sort of a specialization, the language model stuff. And I think that it's sort of hype at this point and I think it's still in its infancy to really see how useful it'll be, and I feel like I don't want to chase that just because that's the shiny new thing right now. I think I'm looking at where my experience has been and what the market is looking for. So for me, I have not a lot of experience with React, but it seems like UI has coalesced for the most part around React, so getting more familiar with those sorts of technologies are my focus right now.
RD So as you're looking at job postings trying to get another role, do you have any sense of where the market is going? Do you feel like there's improvement coming or is it still in this sort of fallow period?
PC I don't know. I hate the word, but perception sometimes is everything. And I don't like that reality, but it feels like that's what it feels like. Even though things may be up and down or maybe getting better, I feel I can tell there's that perception shift. I think it sort of doesn't really matter if it doesn't amount to anything. I feel like the jobs numbers just started recently reflecting that things aren't as good as they should be. People keep saying, “Oh, the economy is booming, things are great,” but they don't realize that a lot of those full time jobs are gone and there's all these part time jobs popping up that are not good. They're not the same. The dynamics aren’t there. I think that just recently they came out and it's now showing that they're not as great as we thought and now we're in trouble because inflation is still high. It seems like at a high level once they have that perception shift that interest rates are falling and that the economy is getting better, I think that they'll start turning things around, but until we have that sort of shift. And I feel like there's that underlying bias against software developers or even engineering in general. And that's this AI scene, or I guess it was Zuckerberg's year of efficiency that seemed to kick this all off, and until we get past that period where it's now seen as it seems like it's too easy to dismiss what we do or what engineering is providing to the value to the company, until we get past that, then I think that's the shift that will really bring in the jobs, I think.
BP That's so unfortunate. I think two things you said really resonated with me. One, I have two friends who work in technology who now are doing contract work and they're happy with it in that there's more work/life balance maybe, but unhappy with it in, and as you pointed out, there's no equity, there's no healthcare. So it's a very different job even though they're doing it 20/30 hours a week. And then I think the software engineer, you said perception was held up as this extremely valuable and limited desirable person in the labor force between 2010 and 2020, and then that perception shifted with the big layoffs and that it may take some time for it to shift back. I also think it might be fair to say that at some of the larger tech companies, they were overhiring just because why not? They had people who would be on essentially a sabbatical for six months in between projects and it didn't bother them. It was whatever. But within companies at a smaller size, I think the reduction in headcount really does lead to developer burnout and unhappiness. People are being asked to do more with less.
PC And that definitely happened. We had our teams consolidate. We went from being more specialized to being more broader, doing more things. We had a mobile side and front end and a back end and they were trying to collapse those specializations and make people do everything, which has its benefits, but it's also a larger cognitive load, it's harder to be an expert in all the different technologies and to be as proficient.
RD I'm wondering since you survived the one layoff and then got hit by the second round, was there sort of morale temperature shift in the company after that first one?
PC Oh, yeah. I don't know how to put it. It was very disruptive. We had our teams, we had our people, and then it was wiped away and you have whole different people around and you have a different structure and it's like you're starting fresh. It's almost like you're just starting your job again because you have to pick up all the pieces. And then I got a new manager, so there's the whole relationship building you have to try to start from scratch. It's very difficult.
RD It's a whole different operation.
BP Well, I just want to say, I think it's very admirable of you to come on the show and talk about this. It sounds like a hard thing to go through, and I'm sure some of our other listeners are experiencing it as well. And we wish you the best of luck, and if there's anything obviously Ryan and I can do to help, we will. And if folks who are listening want to get in touch with you, maybe we'll figure out a way to put something in the show notes so they can reach out if they hear about any opportunities.
PC Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Ryan.
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BP All right, y'all. Awarded two days ago to stevenkucera, a Stellar Question Badge– ask something interesting that's been saved by a hundred users. “How do I create a global, mutable singleton?” Steven wanted to know and so did 188,000 other people, so luckily we have an answer for you. It'll be in the show notes. I am Ben Popper. I'm the Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. Find me on X@BenPopper. As today's episode evidences, if you want to reach out with questions, suggestions, topics for the show, or to come on and discuss something, email us– podcast@stackoverflow.com, and we'll try to make it happen. And if you like the show, the nicest thing you could do for us would be to leave a rating and a review, because that really helps.
RD I'm Ryan Donovan. I edit the blog here at Stack Overflow. You can find it at stackoverflow.blog. And if you want to reach out to me with podcast or blog article ideas, you can find me on X @RThorDonovan.
BP All right, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you soon.
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