The job market for software developers is pretty bleak at the moment. We are a far cry away from the thriving job market we saw in 2022. If you look at this graph showing the software development job posting in the US you can see just how bad things are. Focussing on just this year shows that the number of job postings is going down as well.
To make matters worse there are a huge number of experienced candidates looking for jobs due to the number of recent lay-offs. This week Microsoft let go an undisclosed amount of employees and this is after 1,000 jobs were cut last month and 2,000 in January. We can see even more lay-offs happening on Layoffs.fyi. This year alone over 100k engineers have been laid off and are looking for work.
With so many developers looking for work why is that some people have no difficulty finding work, but others are struggling for months on end?
In my experience, there are a few key areas that make candidates more employable than others. Unfortunately for those already looking for jobs at the moment, this list probably won't be of much use, but hopefully it will be helpful in the future.
Specialisation isn't everything #
As kids, we are told to narrow our focus and get good at just one thing. This isn't terrible advice.
When companies are doing well and trying to increase their head count, they will often look for people to fill specialised roles. This is where you see roles for DevOps engineers, security engineers, QAs and data scientists. Typically, they are willing to pay higher salaries for an expert in the field so it can be very lucrative if you happen to have the right skill set.
This was good advice for the boomer generation who saw a bull market from December 1987 to March 2000 which happened to coincide with their prime working years. Specialising generally equalled higher salaries.
In tough economic times however, companies are less likely to pay out for specialists and instead choose to make do with their existing talent pool.
With a bit of training or further reading, most developers are able to learn enough DevOps or Frontend to get by without needing to hire a specialist.
If you are an engineer who likes to wear many hats it is often easier to find a position in the current market.
It really is who you know #
My last two jobs I have got through my own connections through the people I have worked with before. In fact, I haven't even needed a proper interview for them as they were already familiar with my work.
We live in a surprisingly small world, especially if you are working in tech in the UK. If you get on well with your colleagues then chances are they will put in a good word for you when you are looking for a new job.
The reverse is of course also true. When I have been interviewing candidates that my colleagues have worked with before, they can be quite outspoken if they didn't get along with them. It is always best not to burn any bridges with your employers when you leave as you never know when it could come back and bite you.
Know your domain #
Although I wouldn't advise going down the specialist path when it comes to careers, there is one area when it is definitely beneficial and that is domain knowledge.
As software developers, we are paid to solve business problems, it just happens that we use code to do that. To solve a problem you really need to understand the domain you are working in.
If I asked you to create a dynamic report on payment interchange rates broken down by payment method, product code, card type and transaction region you would probably be a bit lost.
You could be the best engineer in the world, but unless you have worked in payments before a lot of those words wouldn't make any sense.
A great engineer without the right domain knowledge could make a performant report but wouldn't know where to start. An OK engineer with domain knowledge, might not make the best report, but at least would be able to make something that could be improved on later.
If you have the domain knowledge that the employer is looking for then you can “hit the ground” running without having to spend a long time learning the domain.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article — On the origins of DS_store — I have a script that runs on my Unraid server to delete all these pesky .DS_store files that seem to be everywhere on a Mac. Interesting to learn where they come from.
📝 Article — Highlighting journalism on Mastodon — Mastodon have just added a way to link your Fediverse account to your blog posts so if they get shared a link to your Fediverse account will appear underneath.
📝 Article — I received an AI email — This is the main problem with AI at the moment. There are plenty of useful and legitimate use cases for AI. Instead, it is used to promote spam.
📝 Article — Insights from over 10,000 comments on "Ask HN: Who Is Hiring" using GPT-4o & LangChain — Talking of useful uses for AI, this is definitely one of them. The charts look great too.
📝 Article — Analyzing my electricity consumption — I have yet to go down the rabbit hole of analysing exactly how much electricity we use and visualising it. This looks interesting though.
🛠️ Tools — Edna — I am going to stick with Obsidian, but this is a very cool side project.
🛠️ Tools — library-pals/read-action: 📚 A GitHub action to track books you read in a JSON file — I am trying to find ways to streamline my website as well as add more things to it. This looks like a great way to keep track of the books I read. I may well just go with my own BookWyrm instance and pull data from that instead though.
👨💻 Latest from me #
Dometrain is having a summer sale (until 14th July) and offering 30% off with the code SUMMER24 which includes my course on SOLID as well as other courses by expert developers.
If you have a Visual Studio Subscription you may also be eligible for 50% off a Dometrain Pro subscription too.
Note: I don't get any money for promoting these courses unless you buy or watch my course. I just think they are the best courses available especially if you are a C# developer.
💬 Quote of the Week #
Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.
From Patrick McKenzie on X/Twitter
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