Is the age of high paid IT jobs over?

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The market is also oversaturated thanks to the Learn to Code movement and TikTok influencers in 2020-2022 bragging about their glamorized, WFH life.

In the US? Yes 1-2 years after its interest rates drop. Also to note software engineering salaries in the US was and still is disportionally high to the rest of the western world

Covid drove a massive demand for IT personnel, and of course compensation.

Now, it’s stabilizing and things are going to settle, bring the comp down a bit. This doesn’t pertain only to IT but across other verticals.

Right now it’s a buyers market.

It seems to always be cyclical. Companies try to shed IT staff until they're either breached or realize that the company's productivity is taking a hit because of poorly paid and poorly qualified IT staff. It happened years ago when companies thought they could outsource their support to countries like India (Dell was one) only to find that their competitors were bringing the jobs back to the U.S. and started losing market share. If you're a competent IT professional, now is the time to demonstrate your competencies and show your employer that you are a valuable asset.

It depends a lot on what your skillset is.

'Old' technology skills are still well-paid and it's difficult to find people with those skills.

Where I work, we have an Oracle Forms UI on top of an Oracle database. New applications have new UIs developed in APEX, etc, but the old core apps are Forms. Migrating to APEX, HTML, whatever, would be massively expensive and disruptive and require a small army of devs - it's highly unlikely it will happen any time soon, if ever, even though it's been discussed for years. Any new UI would have to run in parallel with the existing one for at least a year, possibly 2, to ensure full functionality before the old UI is 'turned off'.

We still need to maintain the existing apps - finding experienced Forms devs is real needle-in-a-haystack time. It's also difficult to find Forms training courses to cross-train the devs we have, and it would take a while for them to get up to speed.

Similar situation for mainframes running COBOL/DB2. If I wanted to go contracting, I could ask 2.5-3.5k per week (or more) to maintain such systems and probably get it, but I don't want to be a contractor and it's been a while since I worked on COBOL. Again, rewriting this stuff is often a non-starter - COBOL was designed to do exactly the job it does, and newer/different languages just don't cut it.

Organisations that have been around a long time will have stuff like this - older technologies in their core systems that would take ridiculous amounts of money and man-hours to replace, but nevertheless still need to be maintained. I'm not dissing newer tech at all, but the market for that is swamped.

In my personal experience things have dropped off but if you've got an in-demand specialization they're still willing to throw money at you. I'm happy in my current position and say so in my LinkedIn profile, but that hasn't stopped a dozen recruiters from hitting me up in the past week for a job planning and running an OnBase document management system for hospital in Texas. It's been funny watching them raise the salary and lower the requirements as they get more desperate - it's gone from 100% onsite to hybrid to 100% remote within two weeks.

No, it's just on pause until they figure out how much more expensive trusting cheap AI is.

I graduated with a degree in Cybersecurity 3 years ago. 10,000 job applications later and many paid professionals looking over my resume, can’t land a single interview

Lol. Have you been living under a rock for the past two years? The tech industry is highly volatile to rate hikes…

yes it's over

I tend to think that the glory days are mostly over. But who knows what could happen in the future (years ahead) if the fed lowers rates and companies start hiring competitively again.

I still have a job,.still getting asked on LinkedIn.

But it's a little bit iffy right now. Big companies saved then cleaned out and are now restructuring. But let's wait 1-2 years

It is the same for ChemEs.

This is the exact same thing with the Marketing industry. I used to get recruiters contacting me all the time with ridiculous salary jobs. I had at least a 50% response rate to resumes I sent.

Now I get zero responses from resumes, rarely hear from recruiters and the salaries posted for these jobs are much lower than they were just two years ago.

For now. But now that prospective students see this field as “less lucrative “ they will go on to study something else. And all the bootcamp grads will be forced to switch careers as laid off senior engineers take the majority of the open positions. Give it a few years and companies will start asking where all the engineers went and be forced to up their compensation. This has happened multiple times in the past. Just sit tight and settle for 100k+ packages for the time being.

High paid IT jobs exist but they’re much more competitive now. Oversaturation in the field mixed with a worse job market means you’re fighting tooth and nail for scraps. Software Engineering interns for example can still make decent money depending on the company, but I legit got an offer to work one for minimum wage with no housing assistance. It’s less the end of high paid jobs and more the end of easy access. Coding bootcamps as a way of getting into it are functionally dead in the water though and are basically scam adjacent now.

For now it is. It will get better later as soon as the demand for employment goes up. Don’t listen to those doomer Redditors who say it will never be good again. Like what, the market has been bad for 2 years? lol, nah it will likely get better. We had the 2008 crisis 16 years ago and we had a far more booming job market less than a decade after that. And 2008 was a BAD year from a financial aspect.

lol…I’ve seen at least 3 of these boom/bust cycles in the past 2 decades 

• Dot com bubble 
• 2008 financial crisis 
• First few months of COVID 
• Whatever the fuck you call this year  

Every single time - there were people proclaiming what you did.  And every single time - the job market rebounded.

 If you have actual skills and experience- you will be fine.  If you’re a bootcamp grad that expects to coast into an easy career- you weren’t gonna last anyway.  

Let me put it this way I see IT jobs paying the same thing they were paying 15 years ago and their has been just a weeeeeeeeee bit of inflation since then.

There's employee markets and employer markets.  Change jobs when it's an employee market. 

My husband is in IT, had a great well paying job at a faang company before the layoffs hit. He's been employed again for a year but the job and all the ones he's seeing in this area are paying significantly less. His job is very secure though so he's happy enough.

Unless there is a crackdown on h1b visa workers and a crackdown on the export of American jobs and technology know how, these salaries are only going lower imo.

The IT and Tech field isn't dead, will not be dead anytime soon for the next few decades, and A.I. will not take over in the next 20-30 years!! As a hardware, network and software engineer, I know this for a fact!! Right now, we're in a recession!! The government won't admit it but the truth is out there if you really do your research properly and thoroughly!! 2025 will most likely be the year IT and Tech will be back to full force, and companies will start paying like in 2021 and 2022!! Right now, it's a shitshow, in general!!

Not if you have "Legacy skillsets" that loads of people abandoned, still plenty of work out there that is well paid and regular.

No I don't think so. Technology is always relevant. But just currently at the moment due to all the central banks increasing interest rates all at once, 'white collar' investment has just plummeted over the last 18 months.

The market is in a glut for white collar jobs particularly product development, accounting, management consulting and marketing it seems.

Yes and no.

For the most part, yes, it's over. The days of massive salaries just for a Computer Science degree are done. We'll still have some really highly paid jobs for specialists and experts in some areas. If you're in charge of a huge area in Microsoft's AI department, or running security at Amazon, sure you'll have a huge paycheck.

But otherwise, we're now saturated.

For the last 25 years colleges have cranked out more, and more, and more IT graduates. Every year the graduating classes have increased as the entire world was told "learn to code!" And that is also seen as the "way out" for people in a lot of countries too, who got their degree then moved to the US or other places to work in tech.

The problem now is that flood of Computer Science graduates is still coming every single year, but the number of jobs in that area has finally slowed. It took decades, but supply has finally met demand. Need an IT employee? Put up a job posting, and you have 1000 resumes in the first day.

The other problem that no one mentions... This is still a newish field! If you're a lawyer, or an accountant, or a doctor, you know what job you fill? The job opening that's there because someone else retired. (Or someone retired, someone else gets promoted, and that job is now open.) But who was starting off in Computer science 40 years ago? Almost no one. There isn't a huge wave of people retiring from that industry to free up spots, like there are in a lot of industries.

And of course this is all happening right at the time that AI is popping up, and potentially going to take a lot of those jobs. Especially the entry level coders first. Mid to senior folks have a little wiggle room for now. But for how long, no one knows.

I am a software engineer. Here's my personal experience: I work a lot of contracts, so I look for a job often. In the past, whenever I looked for a job, I would get a steady stream of calls an emails from recruiters, tons of interviews, and multiple competing job offers within a month.

Last year, however, I was unemployed for three months. There were tons of job postings for me to apply to, and I talked to plenty of recruiters. I even got a few interviews but no job offers. The problem was that I fell behind on my skill set. Every company was suddenly demanding skills that I didn't have, and the skills I did have were becoming obsolete. This is just my experience, I can't speak for other people

Long time IT recruiter here. The decline started almost 2 years ago. We have a lot of smart people trying to figure out what happened but there are no good answers. There are some small reasons that everyone knows. But Java developers can’t find anything. I had a lead who was the best on the team for 3.5 years. Project finally ended and she can’t get interviews. Thousands of stories like that.

I get random calls from job seekers all week. Never, ever happened before. They call my desk, then my cell. Then text me. If anyone figures out when/if it’s going to turn around, I would love to know.

I work as a Data Scientist in EU and I didn’t notice any drop in demand - so the decline isn’t universal

It depends on location more than anything. Some markets are dry, some can't find any competent IT personnel

we will never be in a such privileged position as we used to be before.

They're even more priviledged because they're getting more competetive. The demand is just fine, the competition just got higher.

I am not in IT but I teach at International Schools in China and know many people teaching in other markets in Asia. Asia is a place where the only acceptable view of education is that it leads directly into a job. 90% of my students either apply for: Engineering, Computer Science or Business and they end up mostly in the English speaking countries to study it with many using it as a pathway to Permanent Residence. I've now seen people in Engineering and IT talk about being over saturated. Many in Asia see Engineering and Computer Science specifically, as easy pathways to big money.

I haven’t updated my resume online in a while. I still get recruiter spam. But then again most recruiters don’t even read resumes before they reach out to you.

I think entry/junior lvl positions are having it tough right now.

Mass layoffs acted like a big reset button for salaries. Companies are absolutely lowballing candidates. When you think about it, a bunch of people were told to switch seats, they’re all getting each others former seats, but at a lower price. The post-covid era is the CEO-recovery era. It will keep swinging back and forth for a while.

Waiting for it to start

I haven't had a reason to het a new job so idk about salaries but Im still being poked by recruiters more or less at the same rate. Maybe it's a regional thing ?

The tech sector basically needed cheap government money from the banks to operate and they can't get that now. So, yes, probably the case. My heart goes out to anyone victimized by this.

All of it is going to shit - IT, developers, UX, software engineers - it’s all oversaturated right now. The worst thing is kids graduating from university can’t find jobs because every company wants senior-level experience.

I have been doing this a very long time. This is the worst downturn for tech hiring I have ever seen, way worse than the .com crash and the mortgage crash. That being said two things are going to drive us back up. 1. As soon as the interest rates ease it will free up money and jobs. 2. I think we are at just the beginning of the ai stuff people are still learning to apply it. Its going to spark some competetion in the market as corporate players start using it as an advantage.

Yep. If you can do it from your home, someone in Bangladesh can do it from their home cheaper. 

Oversaturated. Everyone jumped in for the money. So many classes and such to get you into the high paying tech field. So many people are coming in and pushing the price down becuase there are so many people to do the job.

No, have a look at ML engineers, cloud cybersecurity specialists or blockchain specialists. Seach on indeed.

Not in my specialty. Starting salaries of senior staff has increased from ~$130k to ~$175k in the last few years, and there are more openings than qualified candidates.

Interest rates and AI have really changed the whole tech world in 2 years.

Low interest rates that started in 2002 caused VCs to invest in startups who hired like crazy from tech workers to in house cafeteria workers with no profit to show for it and those days are over.

AI will now allow junior tech workers to be faster and way more productive which will benefit companies while burning seasoned developers.

Tech, Advertising, and Gaming got wiped out in the last two years. I know award winning creative directors that are applying to mom and pop hotels to design brochures.

Personally, I'm trying to get a remote job and I have noticed the same thing as you with recruiters no longer reaching out every other week. From 2018-2021 I used to get recruiters inviting me to their office just for coffee and snacks because they just wanted to update my resume on file. Now, I can't even get a response after I reply to them when they email me for a possible oppurtunity.

Yes

Yes

From Canada, we never really have a covid salary hike. Our salary has pretty much stagnated at 2012 level. In addition the tech boom in Canada mostly only benefits the ppl who was already in the field

In the US, yes. In LATAM and India, it's just getting started

The reason for the great pullback by employers is the lion's share of the coding is done. The platforms are mostly standardized and do not require the large teams of developers as in years past.

Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP, MS have all been developed. So now it is a matter of maintenance and the odd integration

lol no. There are a lot of "it people", but there are not so many actual technical hires.

Know networking, cloud architechture? Easy money.

I get 10 calls, texts and emails every day out here in LA. I have a job but them IT and Tech recruiters be bugging me all the time!!

It has been for 10-15 years

I don't mean to sound cocky, but I definitely saw this coming myself. Glad I switched to a role where I manage operations / people now. These are skills I can take literally anywhere. Hopefully something similar happens to healthcare workers. We pay those people insane salaries, and that is part of the reason our medical bills are so exorbitant.

I know quite a few half wits that are banking in the industry. They literally have no tech skills but are either pretty or very charming. Literally getting 6 figure raises based off being liked and not actual work output or skills. In short, a lot of people are in tech when they shouldn’t be, but being likable and knowing the right people is always the catalyst for success.

I don’t think the market as far as good pay is dead but I definitely see a downtrend in pay. AI is going to make things very interesting and even more specialized which could result in highly profitable opportunities to those that adapt their skillset.

Honestly, the LLM came to finish off low skilled coders (which is roughly 70% of them) that were glamorized into the job after 2021 by tiktokers and other frauds.

It has to be over. Tons of essential professions like healthcare are massively underpaid comapared to this massively overpaid IT. The correction is necessary.