Tech Companies Are Erasing Open Job Postings Now

It’s not you, it’s them

“How’s the job search going?” I asked.

He laughed. “Didn’t I say it would get worse before it got better?”

This was the beginning of my conversation with “Ted,” a tech wizard whom I’ve worked with in the past. Ted is brilliant, and he also has that mandatory techie sense of impending doom. So nothing surprises him and thus, he’s not afraid to shrug in the face of disaster.

But he also makes stuff up sometimes.

“Uh. No,” I said. “You never said that. Not to me.”

“Well, it got worse!”

I’ve been talking to Ted, and others like him, quite often. I’m trying to place my finger on the barely detectable pulse of the tech industry job market, not just to write these dark humor missives from the heart of tech industry hell, but also to get a sense of where my own future lies, as I try to fix a few broken things both at certain tech companies and within the tech industry itself.

Ted is a tech veteran. He has a mustache. A good one.

He’s also been looking for a new job for the last nine months, and he recently gave me a heads up on a possible shift in the tech job market. A shift that I followed up on.

The short version of what I learned is this: Jobs are disappearing. Like, for real. I’m not talking about the total number of tech jobs being reduced. You probably already knew that. But the job posts themselves are vaporizing off of job boards.

Here’s… why? I think.

The Rejections Are Piling Up… Or Not

Ted said, “When I first started looking, the thing that sucked the worst was not hearing anything back. I’d apply to a dozen companies a day and I wouldn’t hear a word.”

This is ghosting, when the hiring company doesn’t respond to the applicant beyond maybe an automated email that goes out confirming receipt of the application. Ghosting was and still is a huge problem, not only because of the damage it does to the psyche of some good, talented people — a lot of whom are in this position for the first time — but also to the reputation of the hiring company itself.