The last time I actively interviewed was at the height of the scamdemic. At that point, funding for tech companies was very easy to get, so jobs were plentiful. This also led to a lowering of quality of the people those companies employ. I recall that wokeism featured very prominently in interviews. It seemed that any company big enough to afford their own HR department, as opposed to outsourcing this function, had to proclaim their love of diversity. The least you had to suffer was a brief summary of how much they love diversity, and how this is reflected in their values and company culture. The worst interviews included questions on one’s “allyship” (my what?). HR ditzes asked me for examples of how I “stood up to promote diversity in the workplace”, and other such nonsense.

In hindsight, it is quite surprising how much of a difference a mere year can make. All it toook was Russia inviting the West to blow through their weapon stockpiles in the Ukraine for cracks to show up. There have been big layoffs by large tech companies, sometimes to the tune of 10,000 or more people at once. The most prominent example is Elon Musk, who took over Twitter and subsequently fired 3/4 of employees, and if you did not hear about blue hairs bitching about it on — oh, the irony! — Twitter, you would not even know this has happened. Twitter seems to be as stable as ever, and now that the censorship team is gone, you can find some interesting content again at times.

Big changes are happening all across tech. I am currently exploring the market, and spend some time interviewing casually, just to see what kind of opportunities there are. To my great surprise, people seem to be a lot more mature nowadays. In several interview rounds, I did not even have to speak to HR as part of the interview process but got put right in front of the hiring manager, and in other cases, I just had a brief chat to exchange basic information, i.e. visa status, notice period, salary expectations, and what I can expect in the interview process. This is what those people once used to do: doing a bit of information gathering and making sure the paperwork is in order. Nothing more.

The tone of the interviews has also markedly changed. I used to get a lot of bullshit along the lines of millennial Reddit spam about how they are all a big family and want to change the world. Instead, the conversations I have nowadays are about concrete challenges. In some interviews there was nothing about “culture fit” but about the problems they are facing and that they are looking for people like me who can help them fix them, because of certain skills and experiences I bring to the table. I have to say that this is quite refreshing. It seems that the specter of an economic crisis focuses the mind of people once they realize that their livelihood is at stake.

I do not want to make the claim that we are seeing a big shift in attitudes across the board. However, based on my anecdotal evidence, I am tempted to say that people in tech are a lot more serious at the moment. This may also be a consequence of a lot of companies shutting down their DIE (diversity, inclusion, and equity) teams. If you are burning a million bucks a week, then keeping a dozen bozos around who tell developers to use inclusive language in their code comments seems to be much less of a priority for a CEO who has investors breathing down his neck to get his act together. Even Blackrock has been getting some pushback for their “shareholder activism”. Let us hope that this movement gains some serious momentum.