Technology Jobs bubble bursting in the US?

Are the number of technology jobs not increasing at the same rate as the number of people who have the skills to fill them?

Here is a youtube video I found a bit scary, but perhaps there is alot of truth in what he is saying. Has it become over saturated with grads and people looking for work?

The scary part of this is STEM jobs have been pushed quite aggressively here in the US so the bubble burst seems appropriate. But I wonder if we are seeing a contraction in actual software jobs (because there is more code and open source tools developers can use rather than another body), or is the number of those looking for work far out-passing the number of jobs in the field and increasing at a much greater rate.

https://youtu.be/rLGCpRPwtj0

Curtis Szmania

I am no expert, but the trap many of my arrogant friends with STEM majors fell into was the belief that their degree would make them magically immune to a hard job search. There is def a well earned comfort fact when your degree is in demand, but that doesn't always mean YOU are in demand

I think this is a great point. One must still have the desired skillset in order to get hired. A piece of paper called a degree, no matter if the degree is "in demand", guarantees work.

Have you ever looked for a CS or IT job? Literally thousands of postings. I guess it does depends on where you live, but I'm gonna need more than a youtube video to convince me IT and CS is dying.

I agree but

Imagine you are going into that job search after say graduating from college in 2013, working in CS from 2014-2017, and looking for a job in 2018. You are competing against recent grads who went through courses where they gained more experience with current tech, that you may not have garnered while working. The longer you arent getting any experience, the more your knowledge seems obsolete.

I disagree. I just got out of college and my job hunt was pretty tough. It seemed like every single job wanted 2+ years of experience. Most work places are expecting to train new hires on their technologies and how they use them, but they want the workplace experience so they only have to teach 1 thing rather than 2. If you have 4 years of experience in CS or IT you are not competing with recent graduates, you're competing for a mid level job, not an entry level job. My experience is based mainly off the CS field so it may differ in other fields.

Meh

Exactly how much experience do you have from working in the industry? Because that's exactly the opposite of reality. Employers are much more likely to hire someone with actual working experience than someone straight out of college. Your 4 years of practical experience in the field is much more valuable to potential employers than grads with 4 years of academia.

Unless you're getting hired into a staff aug position, the exact details of the specific technologies isn't generally as important because this stuff moves so quickly the expectation is that you'll need to come up to speed anyway. Staff aug positions are contract work and are planned as short term work (with a potential for full time hire, often) but those guys need to hit the ground running straight off the bat. Work experience trumps fresh from college.

-Byshop

There's always going to be demand for talented tech workers. As they are the difference between a good product, and a bad one. But all these startups and tech companies that aren't making any money. Relying on investors to keep their ship afloat. Hoping for a big profitable company to buy them out. Are not sustainable jobs.

As the world goes more digital, cloud based, and such. Tech jobs should continue to see growth.

learn to code ( i hate that word btw.. "code". when did programming become coding? ) hardware rather than software

MUCH smaller pool of potential competitors for jobs

Well I'm someone that started working as an IT professional around the year 2000. I can only tell you this, if you're someone that does this kind of stuff for fun in your free time, you will always find IT jobs. Of course when I was starting it was a golden age for It professionals, but when I started working, I knew more than about tech than my whole departement and a lot of people worked there for years.

Of course, excluding 'the enthousiasts' like myself or whatever you want to call them. I mean who else was going to solve the real problems. Sure they did a lot of explaining but IT is not you clear cut law book with rules and text to memorize. It's problem solving, trouble shooting but there's also creativity especially in coding, which in the end will create a lot of problems again.

I'm sure today you will have more people that study in this field and because of that there will be more quality available to employers but that won't change the fact that enthousiasts will always be the core of the business.

If you're not an enthousiast, I can only give you this advice, find something else to do. I'm not saying that non enthousiasts don't have a place in this sector and that they cannot build careers around them but if the competition has increased this much, (I'm not working anymore in the business for quite some time now so I wouldn't really know about that) then it might be wise to find something else. The business has always been interesting because of the demand for personnel. IF this isn't the case, then wages will drop and let's be honest here, this job can be quite stressfull, not to mention ungratefull.

Things change quite rapidly as well, your knowledge today will not be worth as much in 5-10 years from now. That's not the case in a lot of other fields, at least not to the same extent.

"Tech jobs" aren't just programming jobs, which are the ones you are talking about.

And even programming jobs aren't short in demand. Almost every business there is can benefit from having at least one programmer on the team. If there's a bubble about to burst, it's the programming jobs in software companies, and that's it.

I think a lot of the arrogance comes from the fact that these people imagine a world where they won't have to work a traditional job, or a traditional role.

As far as I can tell, you still need to "put in your time", you need to either work a job in labor, or work a low-paying job, or work a job with ridiculous hours with sub-average pay, and so forth...at least for a time. These are all roles I consider traditional, or if your prefer, "rites of passage". Putting in your time, in other words.

You don't just magically go to school and land a job that fits your lifestyle, your pedigree, your demand. That only happens if you're the top 0.1%. Oh you're parents both make six figures? Yeah good luck with that, they're still poor by the elite's standards, you're going to need to pick up the hammer and sickle...

That might be true, but as a company that is currently undergoing a tremendous amount of A.) automation in production and B.) a significant growth in "whatever you want to call online presence", the standards for tech workers are astronomically high.

As someone that, a year ago, could by hand crank out product at 150% efficiency, and is being held back by tech workers for the last six months, I have to admit that I feel very little demand for tech workers. Things were much simpler when i could just walk ten feet, turn a valve, and do exactly what I wanted.

At the same time, I Feel very high demand for tech workers because they've ingrained themselves so throroughly in my company that it's like a flea infestation and the only way to get rid of them is with more fleas!

I am not arguing against automation; I totally understand the purpose of it, I would love love love love love if the automation worked as intended and was flawless, and it I do enjoy seeing the progress we make...and I have to admit to being a skeptic because things are getting better but I just see things getting worse with each thing they work on after they "fix" each thing they work on....but yeah...

TL;DR: I think it's a trade off. On one hand, it was easier when I had to tell people "turn this valve when you want to do this"...but now I don't have to walk 50 feet, bend over, etc...now I can just push a button....but pushing that button requires about 5x the thought, and the people I'm training sometimes don't have that kind of brain lol.

Please keep in mind, this is in no way meant to disrespect anyone in "tech" (or whatever you prefer to call yourself), it's just someone's observation/s that is subject to it. I feel the people we work with (in tech) are very good with our job, I (and my coworkers, immediate) are very critical because we are just a bit more used to turning wrenches than clicking buttons.

Pretty much, at least that's been my near decade commercial industry experience so far. College is so pedestrian in the tech jobs, that it doesn't even rate anymore.

I disagree. What you need is a degree (at least it helps) and the ability to learn. Hiring people based on skillset for a vast majority of jobs is pointless. STEM area is not all rocket science. The right attitude and a desire to improve and make good things is all you need to succeed in a vast majority of roles. The whole "omg the hard job search thing" is over dramatic unless you're only accepting jobs that pay 200k or something. I contend that you could take 17 year old kids that never even went to college, train them and have badasses all over the place. The world is designed to waste time and fill it with fetch quests and boring grind that can be avoided by people who have the spark to make shit happen.

IT jobs layoffs much in India as well?

How the wheel spins

@Toxic-Seahorse

Good point. But how many applicants you think these posts receive?

@comp_atkins

Yes, learning to code is important, because the ones who can code seem to have it easy. I guess what people need to do is show that they can code through contributions to open source projects and the like.

@commander

Thanks for your personal experience. I think what you say is true but I also think that tech and the type of life and how it influences us all is much greater than it was 15 years ago.

@schu

I don't think the willingness to learn and having an agree go hand in hand. Some of the best programmers I've ever met never went to college. I think the want of learning is much more important than opportunities or the financial support one might have had in able to go to college.

Curtis Szmania

www.curtisszmania.tk

Well I did work longer than two years in the sector, I stopped working in IT in 2011.

I don't know what you mean by with your comment though. You say there's more competition but you seem to imply here that there is more demand as well, and maybe that people have more affinity with tech in general.

But the tech has also become more complex and a big part of IT will always be about innovation.

So that people know more about tech nowadays is pretty much nullified by the increased complexity of it. The fact that people know there is demand for it and go work in the sector doesn't change the fact that some people are more talented than others as well. Still, talent is not even the most important thing, you need to have some talent, but it's the amount of interest you have for the subject that is the most important. You also need perseverance. I always had the interest, but it's only after a year of studying in a similar course like one of those bootcamps you mentioned I went looking for a job.

And you will find the job if you really want it. The guy in the video you posted talks about that all the infrastructure is there, that most code already have been written and that a lot of companies don't make any money but it's easy to look back at it like that in hindsight. A lot of companies that produce the tech that is widely adopted now lived of investments for quite some time in the past too.

This isn't the first time that there is a bubble burst btw and companies living of investors is something that is inherent to the sector. But there will always be a stable market and there will always be innovation. So if you want to work in the sector, I can't see much changes actually, software can always get better, and it has to be adapted to new situations and new tech. With newer systems, new problems arise to maintain them also. Not to mention not everyone can afford everything at any given time. You would be surprised how many companies run off older tech.

There's one more advice I can give you, one of my instructors said that I had talent for the three major fields I could choose from (after like a month of introductory study in general IT). It had talent to write code, I was a great trouble shooter and was also very handy. I also had a feeling for art and I was interested in all three courses I could choose from, that was making websites, network admistration/system engineering and general programming.

He said you cannot learn all three things, well you can, but you're never be really good at any one of them. You could maybe work for very small companies with that skillset, but your value on the job market will increase exponentianlly by how specialized you are, even within one of the three fields you choose from and in the end he was right. When I quit my last job in IT, it took them a year to replace me.

I agree. I think I kind of contradicted myself a little in my statement. I think a degree makes things easier, but its not necessary.

dot com bubble burst in the late 90's.

Here is the thing there are jobs in stem but for most people you'll end up as code monkey's or IT support. And I can tell you that coding is going to be all about you fixing and modifying code.