“Learn to keep coding.”
You’ve probably heard the line that various politicians have thrown as a bone to people put out of work in the non-tech industries: “learn to code.”
Well, there’s good news for people who already do know how to code. When they get laid off, they find jobs quickly. And there’s even better news for people who have lost any kind of job, tech or non-tech.
A headline in Wednesday’s (print edition) Wall Street Journal says “Axed Tech Workers Find Jobs Quickly.” The title in the on-line version is slightly different: “Laid Off Tech Workers Quickly Find New Jobs.” The news story is by Sarah Chaney Cambon and Gwynn Guilford.
Here are the first 3 paragraphs:
Most laid off tech workers are finding jobs shortly after beginning their search, a new survey shows, as employers continue to scoop up workers in a tight labor market.
About 79% of workers recently hired after a tech-company layoff or termination landed their new job within three months of starting their search, according to a ZipRecruitersurvey of new hires. That was just below the 83% share of all laid-off workers who were re-employed in the same time frame.
Nearly four in 10 previously laid off tech workers found jobs less than a month after they began searching, ZipRecruiter found in the survey.
Of course, the odds are that a substantial percentage of workers laid off by tech firms are not coders. Nevertheless, it’s good news for those of us who think that being unemployed for a long time is corrosive to one’s psyche.
Notice also the last sentence of the second paragraph: Laid-off workers as a whole do even better.
READER COMMENTS
steve
Dec 29 2022 at 1:16pm
Agreed here. Even if it isn’t strictly a coding job coding ability is a useful skill in many areas. I have looked for and hired about a half dozen people now with good coding skills and others with pretty serious IT abilities and it has been a big help. People who are strictly coders all too often write code to solve the problems they think you need solved and not the ones you know you want solved so it helps having your own people.
Steve
BS
Jan 1 2023 at 1:03pm
Once you’ve “learned to code”, learning new programming/scripting languages is (or should be) rarely time-consuming. What you ought to want to be as a software developer is someone who can quickly grasp “the business” – whatever it is – and reliably identify priorities for new features, and someone who brings engineering-profession-like discipline to the workplace. (35 years “learning to code”, retired).
Rule: Anything is possible in code; some things just cost more.
Caveat: If you control the code.
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