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You had 6-8 weeks to “take advantage” of the soft hiring market for software engineers in 2020.
By mid-May, tech hiring picked back up. Poof, it was gone.
We may be in that same pocket right now. Blink and you’ll miss it.
But it doesn’t work how most people think.
There’s no excess talent supply you can up on the cheap. Like 2020, there aren’t many experienced software engineers out of work (for longer than a minute). Even with Big Tech making a massive dump, there’s still more seats than people to fill them.
Financial companies, supply chain, manufacturing, still-profitable tech businesses, etc., need devs, too.
You just have a little less competition. Specifically from all the Big Tech firms. Who historically throw insane equity based packages in the mix.
Some aren’t hiring. Others had their equity go down the toilet.
It’s hard to compete against ‘total comp’ packages in the $400k-$600k range without an inflated tech valuation. It wasn’t a scam. Those were real numbers engineers would see. But it only worked as long as the stock was still going through the roof.
Now? Not so much. Grants aren’t worth what they were. Options might be worthless. Companies gotta juice the packages further to hit those total comp numbers. (And if they’re the ones laying off, that ain’t gonna happen.)
And that’s really what this window comes down to: stock prices and valuations. They’re observably down right now. Thinking they’ll remain this way long enough for you to make your 2023 hiring plans puts you in Jim Cramer “how it is even possible this guy underperforms a coin flip” territory.
We’re working with a large financial institution building a 15-person dev team. They're getting all kinds of interest from top tier, former Big Tech engineers. Great org, solid benefits, good pay. Just not one of the “cool kids” of the tech unicorn world.
Could they have done this a year ago? Maybe, but it would have taken a lot more effort. Luckily running a sound business is cool again.
I’ll file this one under “I told you so” when the window closes.
Full video of Hirewell Data Insights: Hiring Trends Q4 2022 here.
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Your window for tech hiring is now.