Tech Recruiter Interview (Ed Nau) 

:) glad you liked it

FWIW most non-technical recruiters are HR background, not tech. Tech recruiters that have a dev background are pretty rare. Part of what good recruiters like to do is listen to devs talk about tech they are interested in. Just have to roll with the convo and try to balance listening w/talking. Many of them try to get by with keyword matching. So you might know flask and they have django written on a piece of paper and they are waiting to hear you mention that specific word. I used to help train the recruiters and give them cheatsheet maps to help them get associations but that's rare. Honestly the entire recruiting field is pretty much broken nowadays, and unless we go through a period of labor shortage the orgs don't have a lot of reason to fix. Only suggestion is to find/network with a few recruiters that get tech and do it when you aren't actively looking. Find local recruiters and offer to buy them a coffee to get their thoughts.

I am definitely not well networked I’m Seattle; I’m a transplant from eastern WA experiencing the classic urban-rural divide. I did reach out to Ed and I’m looking forward to speaking with him-thank you!

@@gizzardelectric awesome - good luck! check out user groups too, eg SeaJUG is very good. FWIW lots of folks I've worked with over the years in tech in Seattle have rural backgrounds, just be chill/nice and you'll be fine. FWIW I grew up in central northern cal which is VERY rural.

Disagree.

My sense is that 2001 & 2008 were clearly financial in nature. I think a lot of folks are worried that this one is more structural, esp for traditional devs. Lot of it I think boils down to hype/reality for AI/LLM and IMHO no code/low code getting better as well. Kind of a wait and see as folks try to parse out what the limits (if any?) are for LLMs esp at scale.

@@ChangeNodeAgreed that those two prior down markets in jobs were definitely finance driven by market corrections and bad financial oversight. I would argue that this cycle is also related to finance as well but primarily driven by the Federal Reserve. Powell has come out and said that he wants to slow the economy down as well as hiring to cool down the markets. Since then, we have definitely seen what Powell wanted to happen. I would also argue that this is still all a fallout from 2008 with 0 percent interest rates being finally addressed by Powell.

@@JohnTube2K yeah, the 0% interest rates were very interesting. I don't think that "let's fight deflation with mounds of debt" world actually works out all that well esp when the hangover comes. MMT, UBI, etc all part of the swirl but my guess is that fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART changes significantly it's going to continue to go along w/usual inflation/deflation/fed rate movement. On my other vids comments are running roughly 2/3rds or more that tech jobs aren't coming back. Interesting times and all that.

@@ChangeNode Yes very interesting times and opportunistic times for those that can take advantage.

38:00 and 1:00:15

A business needs to be willing to pay for it though.

@@comp20B if it's backend stuff in my exp it's faster to run test cases from cli/ide than trying to flip back/forth to eg some REST UI. If it's frontend, yeah, that's a PITA to maintain w/o focus & biz level investment. Either way being conversant w/the issues esp challenges is a win esp for looking...

For backend stuff eg REST services it should be faster/easier than trying to do it all through a REST UI tool. But for frontend, yeah, that's a lot more complicated.

FWIW Ed's just reporting what he's hearing from hiring managers. RE: the employment stats, yup, long term/discouraged get dropped from the default national rate. You can find versions of the data that include those those folks eg data.oecd.org/unemp/long-term-unemployment-rate.htm fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UEMP27OV Normally the two views loosely track which is why I think they mostly report the default number. RE: AI jobs, 100% agree that right now those jobs are going away and we aren't seeing new ones. Esp as, eg replacing 10 people with one specialist person using AI tech is a big net loss in total employment. The example I keep thinking of is Blockbuster -> Netflix. Probably a 10x reduction in jobs. I don't think as a society we really have a good model for what to do about this. FWIW my next vid is likely on AI robotics and the one after that is UBI. :)

​@@ChangeNode Thank you for handling my outburst with class. I guess I walked into this video already frustrated with people who aren't in it. I really appreciate you and the other creators who are starting to cover these topics. And thank you to your friend, for being willing to report what he sees, and exposing his opinions to online chuds. With respect to UBI, I think that is the best conversation to have right now. One of the things I'm worried about, is that the "universal" part of UBI means that it can never serve the social purposes that our current models of employment and social-station serve. I know that some people think of that as a final victory against what they perceive as unfairness, but my worry is that if the currencies distributed in UBI do not allow us to distinguish between eachother, we will not value them. And as a result, we will not accept UBI as payment. I'm very afraid that the rush to score political points, and solve all past grievances, will prevent us from solving the very real and very deadly problems of the present and future.

AI, for some time, will be a valuable assistant. A second set of eyes and QA.