Is big tech’s red-hot jobs market about to cool? | Hacker News Reader

Is big tech’s red-hot jobs market about to cool?

economist.com

105 pointsmartincmartin247 comments

I work at Amazon and we are still hiring like crazy. Last year was the worst I remember regarding attracting talent. We have 6 heads open and only managed to fill 1. A selected few companies have deep pockets and enough cash to weather a recession. They might take this chance to snatch away as many qualified people as possible and come through the other end with a competitive advantage.

On the other end of the spectrum many companies are slowly failing. Layoffs and hiring freezes are even news anymore.

So yes, inertia is big but the tide is changing. I predict that when Big Tech fill their bellies the will stop competing so fiercely and the market will cool down for real. In the meanwhile, if you wanted to join big co, now it's your best chance.

When I worked in AWS the mantra was we aim to fill more seats than there are engineers graduating every year, indefinitely.

Amazon needs engineers desperately.

It's too bad for them that their mistreatment of their workforce is finally catching up with them. The way they skimped on wages, benefits, work life balance, accommodations, vacation, etc everywhere they can AND they put in draconian IP and moonlighting restrictions... It's no surprise they are having trouble hiring.

Anyone considering a role as an engineer at Amazon... Do your research.

We aim to fill more seats than there are engineers graduating every year, indefinitely.

A quick bit of head arithmetic (comparing with the number of 65,000 graduates in CS per year) indicates that this can't possibly be true for the present -- let alone at any moment in the past. And is more likely off by an order of magnitude (and perhaps then some).

So you can add to your list of Amazon's self-blocking behaviors: "They way they tout mantras and slogans, without ever bothering to check if they have anything to do with reality ..."

The numbers I had suggested approximately 17,000 tech jobs per quarter. So, not too far off from your number.

I was also told to expect 30 to 40 percent attrition every year, as engineers burnt out.

> expect 30 to 40 percent attrition every year

Christ. If that's not a red flag, I don't know what is.

What would you say is an average engineer tenure in our industry?

Roughly speaking, 35% attrition means an average tenure of 2.7 years.

When I asked engineers how many year do they think an engineer stays at a job in the industry, I got answers between 2 to 3 years. While I aim for longer relationships and lower attrition rates, knowing the benchmarks is helpful when judging whether something is good or bad.

This approach results in a bit of a self-fufilling prophecy, though.

If you aim for meeting averages (anecdotal or not), then why would you expect turnover better than average? You'll probably end up optimizing just above that average and likely not hit a critical point high enough to deviate form the underlying problem, because your goal isn't about minimizing turnover even if it's an idealistic goal, when push comes to shove its about getting ROI above all and everything else is secondary.

I argue that aside from TC optimizing engineers, most engineers do not want to jump ship that often, especially in the current hiring process. Unfortunately, there's a business culture that created these environments where turnover is this high, sometimes higher.

If you provide no stability for your engineers, no WLB, poor internal growth opportunities relative to market, poor training, and grunt work then you should expect this. The way to reduce employee turnover is to provide a significantly better overall deal to employees, otherwise you'll continue to have flighty engineers and just point at the numbers, "well this is what's going on in the industry." Yes, and if you've adopted the rest of the culture of the industry, why would you expect yourself to be much different then?

Don't start with the expectation engineers will leave in 2.7 years and build a culture around that, look at places engineers stay longer and build a culture around that. Issue is that those places tend to be less efficient and profitable for investors because the engineers are getting a bigger slice of the pie in some fashion, be it improved WLB, better training, less hostility, etc.

I'm not saying that 2.7 years is great. But it is not horrible either, as parent categorized it.

A median of about 1.7 years, by my math.

I was sharing the average (mean) not median.

Can you share how you arrived at that number? I've been trying to verify my approach to this.

What I did:

- Create a spreadsheet for a simulation

- col 1 has "number of people remaining". I start this at 1000

- col 2 has "month number"

- col 3 has "% of people who left this month"

- col 4 has "number of people who left this month"

- in each new row, I subtract the col 4 value from the col 1 value to come up with a new headcount

- I fill this down for 10 years (120 months)

- for each month, I multiply the number of people that left \ the number of months they were there

- I sum the man-months worked, add the man-months for the people who are still there, and divide by 1000 (the number of people in the experiment). This is the average number of man-months.

I just checked the median using my methodology and got 1.95 years. That's closer to your 1.7 than the mean of 2.7 I posted earlier.

So, not too far off from your number.

"Off by factor of 3.9 -- so not too far off from your number". Is that how engineers talk at Amazon? Or is this the privilege of management types, only?

17,000 per quarter = 68,000 per year

The reason I misread that as "per year" as the quarterly figure can't possibly be right. Going by federal compliance reports, for example - they just don't have that 68k engineers, total (in 2022, let alone when that number was passed down to you).

Tech jobs encompasses CS grads in roles beyond just engineer. Amazon experiences attrition rates of 30% per year plus a 5% rate of "top grading" mandated every six months. So right away, we're looking at tens of thousands of roles to fill if there is zero growth.

I don't know why you think these numbers are so wildly impossible if you look at the number of tech roles and Amazon's growth rates pre pandemic.

I don't know why you think these numbers are so wildly impossible if you look at the number of tech roles pre-pandemic.

And that number was what, specifically? Going by which source?

So right away, we're looking at tens of thousands of roles to fill if there is zero growth.

I can totally imagine they have 10k+ actual tech rolls to fill per year; just not 68k, and probably not even half that number. Even assuming their ridiculous (and artificially accelerated) attrition rates.

>The way they skimped on wages

Levels.fyi is pretty accurate and while they do not pay as high, they certainly do not pay low.

> benefits

No issues here. They have 20 weeks of paternity/maternity leave now, fully paid.

>work life balance

very generous WFH during and after the pandemic, lots and lots of teams with no complaints about work life balance.

>accommodations, vacation

Vacation is on par with other big tech, and again, wfh is very lenient.

> It's no surprise they are having trouble hiring.

All big tech is having trouble hiring, because they need qualified people, and those are hard to find. CS turned into one of those fields that people get into for money, and a lot of people think that they can approach a technical field by simply learning patterns and regurgitating them. May work for some turnkey web app shops, doesn't work for big tech.

Anyone considering a role as an engineer at Amazon... Do your research, but not in online forums where there is no accountability.

One small correction, they offer 20 weeks paid for the parent who gives birth and 6 for any parent that doesn't.

That's a pretty big correction, given the time off other companies give to parents. Google and Meta give months to each parent.

I got 12 weeks as a male at my mid size tech company. Vacation is "unlimited", which is often kind of a bad deal, but I do take about 6 weeks a year. Not sure how many holidays we have, but they just added several day off this year. I've been here for a while though so my pay is probably quite a bit under market despite promotions.

I think Amazon is on par with BigTech when it comes to software engineering, though the way they treat their workers in the warehouses has really hurt the overall reputation of the the company.

It’s not just warehouse workers, there was a pretty infamous article from the NYT about the office workers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

The money quote that I find telling:

“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” - Person in books marketing.

What kind of environment are you building if entire teams in BOOKS marketing are getting so stressed they’re crying publicly at their desk?

Reading the stories is just unreal and that article was from 7 years ago. My public perception is that it has gotten worse. You can go on blind and read countless stories about people that were hired to fired, gaslighted into thinking they’re terrible workers, PIP galore.

The only confounding thing to me is that Amazon doesn’t have the same reputation as Oracle in the tech scene.

I've interviewed a lot of Amazon folks at my current job for software engineering roles. The one question they've all asked about my current company is how is the work-life balance. I don't get that so much from candidates who are coming in from other firms.

This is why people should stop watching news, because its all pretty much agitprop these days.

Amazon has no major issues with worker treatment. Sure, there are bad managers and shittier places to work, as with any big corp, but overall most people are content with work int the warehouses.

How do I know this? Prior to COVID, unemployment in US was at a record low, down to the frictional levels. Warehouse positions are entry level jobs. If it was bad, people would just quit, and take another job somewhere else. But not only did people not quit, Amazon was able to hire enough to roll out Prime 2 day and 1 day. Turns out, people like the high starting wage and want to work at Amazon.

> Amazon has no major issues with worker treatment.

Now I know you are astroturfing.

This doesn't address stack ranking and PIP. Any employment that intentionally puts your continued relation on a chopping block to keep you in a precarious situation isn't an ideal working condition, which now includes Google. I get the idea of trying to manage slack but the fact is, all humans need some slack in efficiency and improving labor efficiency indefinitely isn't realisitic nor is a culture most want to work in and it's caught up with AWS. At some point, you're simply doing your labor force a disservice and just sitting around cracking a whip for no good reason.

I was a manager at Amazon, I was told that every cycle between 5 to 10% of the engineers in my org needed to be put on PIPs to meet quota.

I heard Google has a good work-life balance. Any changes at Google of late? Like 10% pip?

Attrition needs to exist for any big company. There is a percentage of engineers that manage to make it past the interview who then get complacent and stop caring.

While I get that people need leeway to improve, its important to remember that a) doing this on company dollar is not a given, b) FAANG positions pay significantly higher, and c) being employed at FAANG for any amount of time is a big boost to your resume at is.

Also, in general, if you are blindsided by a PIP and you aren't in some niche out of the way team with politics involved, you probably should not be working at FAANG.

Amazon has a forced curve, meaning an org with generally well performing engineers can be forced to put 5% or more on a PIP.

Well the hiring process still seems rather insane; there are tons of companies who might pay a little less or the same that have a more sane process. There is no shortage; the hiring process is broken.

Last I heard, Amazon starts you with 2 weeks of vacation and 9 paid holidays. Google and Meta are more like 4 weeks and 12+ paid holidays.

Wages at Amazon were based on explosive stock gains, now that the stock has leveled off, you'll see what Amazon intended to pay engineers. I was part of comp planning, the numbers are lower than you think. Every year I was trained to tell engineers that their take home was higher than expected.

Amazon's benefits are simply worse than peer companies. They've mostly fixed their parental leave, but they still only have 9 sick days a year. Their 401k match is paltry. The office perks are non existent.

Wrt work life balance, how many engineers are oncall? Are they paid extra for their oncall shift? Are they expected to work more than 40 hours if that pager goes off? Also, Amazon is a date driven company - aggressive targets are set and you will be pushed to hit those dates.

Vacation is paltry. Last year, Google employees had something like 19 paid holidays and 20 days of vacation (minimum). What's a new hire at Amazon getting? I guarantee it's not ~40 days off a year. And I already mentioned the limit of 9 sick days.

And WFH, does Amazon allow folks to be full-time remote if they want? Can anyone, at any time say, "I'd like to move to being full time WFH"? If not, the policy at Amazon is hardly "lenient".

You are cherry picking against Google, which tends to be the best in the industry in terms of salary/hours worked. If your goal is to optimize this, then by all means go work for Google.

Doesn't mean that Amazon is a bad place to work. It has its benefits, namely being able to change teams/location easier than big tech, and the delegation of how the team is ran to org managers which are more in tune with their engineer requirements.

Also WFH exemptions in Amazon are pretty common even before covid, with reasons like "i have to take care of my kid" that are well accepted, because it comes down to the manager and the skip manager for this that are generally interested in having qualified people stay on.

My friend just accepted an offer there. He said they were the highest in pay among several other places he had offers from.

Is he including year 3 and 4 RSUs when calculating that? If so not a great comparison as comparable companies don't back-weight RSUs and also give bigger refreshers after year 1.

Amazon has dramatically increased pay in the last year though, to be fair.

Not sure if it’s new but Amazon gives cash bonus to flatten comp, so it’s cash heavy for years 1 and 2 then stock heavy for years 3 and 4

Amazon deliberately tries to pay higher initial offers, but they hold back comp increases aggressively. Your friend might have a couple good years, but they won't last.

Are the interviews still pointlessly hard? I would consider going back to AWS, but there’s no way I’m spending a month grinding leetcode.

I’m convinced this is a conscious decision to weed out the ‘unmotivated’ (old and/or people with families).

This, plus sunken cost fallacy - people who had to work hard to get in will be less willing to just leave if they find out that the job itself sucks.

The interviews aren't designed to be representative of the work that you do, its more about whether or not you are willing to put in the time to study and get to know some topic to be effective at it, and integrate that into your general knowledge.

This is why Amazon doesn't base the interviews for specific teams in terms of technical knowledge, because the understanding is that some Amazon SDE working in web service should be able to take a position doing ML and be an effective contributor in a reasonable amount of time.

Furthermore, the ranking isn't on whether or not you even figure out the problem. One of the things that gets looked at is coachability - if you are given a hint about the solution, can you immediately recognize it and run with it and implement code fast? Many people fail at this step - they can't put thoughts into code even when told almost explicitly on how they should approach the problem.

I've been thinking about this as well, and I think it becomes fairly clear why they do it if you look at it from a BigTechCo's perspective.

From Google's perspective (or whoever), they're about to sink a million dollars into a new hire. I'm getting this number from salary, stock, benefits, other engineers time, etc. They won't see a return on this investment for 6 months to a year, because it takes a long time to learn their obscure, complicated tech stack.

They want to be sure they're getting someone who's willing to grind on "pointless" tech problems, because that's what they'll be doing for their first year there: learning the tech stack.

Amazon has a bad reputation as an employer. I've personally never considered applying nor have I ever answered an Amazon recruiter.

Amazon the gigantic e-commerce megacorp and AWS the cloud company are technically the same 'Amazon' but have pretty different work cultures. Being a dev on the bookstore and being a dev on EC2 are different experiences. I think bringing Jassy on as CEO of the whole thing is going to enable the AWS culture to bleed over into the Amazon side of the house, which is a good thing for everyone.

Perhaps, but it takes years, if not decades, to completely change a company's culture like that. The e-commerce side is the (much) older sibling and I assume still the majority of the revenue.

Agreed on all counts.

I'm perfectly aware and I suffer the consequences every day. No matter how awesome I say my team is, that doesn't erase the bad experiences of others. I don't know what my options are other than seeking change from within or voting with my feet, and I have no intention to leave.

Maybe you should stop referring to workers as "heads," and, you know, treat employees like humans who have lives and stuff. That would probably go a long way toward attracting talent.

I interviewed people who wanted to leave AWS.

Theme I picked up psychologically: "I would really like to leave, the work life balance sucks and it's long hours, but it pays really well."

Qualified, smart people interviewing around for better lives but similar pay.

All these "has the market cooled" "are we in a bubble, " "bubble burst" etc. headlines come as the Nasdaq posts one of its strongest rebounds ever. This is why the media is useless as far as investing and forecasting is concerned. They are always late. Salaries will remain fat for top tech companies because the factors that were in place 2-10 years ago are still intact. nothing has changed. trillion dollar companies means higher stakes than ever.

It's possible this rebound is a bad sign though. Traders call it a 'dead cat bounce': where there is a temporary recovery followed by a massive crash. Michael Burry predicted this exact scenario.

they said the same thing in march 2020 during covid..turned out to be the real deal.

or in march 2009...that was the bottom

Bear markets tend to much briefer than bull markets, so timing them is much harder and trend following methods do not work well. Odds are you will sell too soon or have to chase a bear market rally that becomes the start of a new bull market.

The difference this time around is quantitative tightening and increasing interest rates. If the Fed stays true to its word, then we'll remain in a bear market.

Bear market rallies are bound to keep happening as people's retirement funds get cash inflows and fund managers allocate a portion to equities.

Of course many of the future fears are already priced in, which is always the difficulty in predicting the markets. If you have confidence that it will get worse soon, feel free to bet against the market for a quick buck.

"Priced in" is typically too complicated of a concept for the average HN commentator to keep in their head.

you can look at historic fed funds rate futures for a short overview of what 'priced in' looks like. long story short, markets are mispriced all the time.

You are absolutely correct. Problem is, no one knows to which direction!

fed wants the market down. the market will go down. don't fight the fed.

Bear market rally. Might go on for another month or more. Then fed actions will again drive markets downward. This isn't a secret. Lots of retail investors are going to get spanked.

unless it doesn't and then new highs soon. and those who sold or on the sidelines will be forced to buy at much higher prices or miss out...Bear markets tend to be much briefer than bull markets.

> the factors that were in place 2-10 years ago are still intact

not all the factors - the relentless quantitative easing is no more. people seem to have forgotten that pre-2008 it was common to have cycles of booms and recessions.

> Nasdaq posts one of its strongest rebounds ever

I see Nasdaq is down 23% since beginning of the year. Where are you seeing strongest rebound ever?

Seems like a lot of people want the market to crash. Or, everyone is trying to time the pop.

Fundamentals for Tech is still pretty solid. Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.

IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again.

Don’t believe the BS VCs are trying to sell. Yeah, startups won’t be able to raise money, its ok, there’s a ton of demand elsewhere for Tech jobs.

my guess is that competition for jobs at mega corps is actually going to become relatively fiercer because everyone now is seeking a flight to safety.

i do wonder if that means that companies can get away with offering smaller compensation packages

As long as they’re not colluding but competing, this seems unlikely. As a sibling comment pointed out, wages “tend to be sticky”.

There are pay bands. If you have multiple offers you can usually counter for more equity. In this market if you’re a megacorp you have the upper hand when the competition is Uber and their stock is down 70% eg you don’t need to counter so aggressively and offer so much more money whereas you might’ve a year ago

Mega corp comp doesn’t work like that. It takes years to adjust their bandings. As a hiring manager it always frustrates you because you’re hopelessly out of touch with the pervading market for comp. If they want to reduce costs they’ll slow hiring before reduce comp.

Successfully negotiating for more equity usually depends on other offers. Now that mega corps are clearly outperforming the Uber and DoorDashes and Squares of the world they have no competition other than other megacorps and don’t have to counter with more equity simply because someone has an offer from Uber.

Didn’t mean pay would drop below a band but you’re likely going to be able to get away with the lower end instead of the higher end of a band if you’re perceived as “safe” in this market

If you already have a job then they’re explicitly competing against your existing employer even without other offers. You’re right though if you can’t shop other jobs it might depress your upside, and if you’re coming in off a layout you should expect parity unless you have competitive offers. Ultimately though comp models won’t change.

there are plenty of ways a company can pay you less without having to change their entire comp model and wasn’t suggesting that was what was happening

the point is a flight to safety gives Megacorps leverage they didn’t have 1-3 years ago. they can pay you at the lower end of a pay band or interview you for a lower level than you asked for. and if people are desperate enough because they are in a tanking company or laid off they might take it.

And when everyone is thinking the same thing they can be pickier and get better quality talent for the same money regardless

They won’t. I’ve spent 30 years in fairly senior positions at mega corps. It’ll take a few years and only if the other mega corps reduce pay. Their response to a lot of available talent isn’t to pay less it’s to reduce their conversion rates and be more selective. They aren’t competing for talent against startups or even places like Coinbase and Uber for the most part. It’s against each other.

Stock valuations had a pretty large pullback though so RSU compensation for existing employees is a lot lower than it was at the height of the red hot market.

Both Amazon and Microsoft recently increased pay.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/07/amazon-boosts-max-base-pay-f...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/16/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-...

Isn't this mostly just due to the shift away from equity-based compensation? Nobody wants your stock if it's tanking.

That said, as small-medium companies start crashing and burning, the megacorps that quickly ramp up hiring incentives will be in a pretty awesome spot in 5 years, as they'll have snatched up more great talent than their slower-moving competitors.

Amazon and Microsoft just announced that they are massively increasing their comp budgets.

that's base pay. has nothing to do with equity comp which is where the big money comes from.

The “big money” only comes from “equity comp” if the stock market is going up - which it isn’t doing now.

Both companies are increasing their base pay precisely because employees like the assurance that their pay isn’t based on stock price.

For me personally, it would have taken a lot less work dealing with real estate if I could just have handed the bank my W2s with all cash compensation than having to deal with a 2 year prorated signing bonus and a 4 year vesting schedule.

Don’t you think that Netflix’s employees are kind of happy that their compensation is all cash right now?

Except for the few who foolishly chose to take their pay in cash + future RSUs instead of cash.

Both MS and Amazon announced they were increasing total compensation. Amazon specifically is slowly starting to weight cash comp over stock.

Got an email last week from Apple “People team” - aka HR. They said they’ve increased the salary pool for this year, so I guess we’ll see how that pans out.

My understanding is we’re not necessarily good at preventing crashes. But we’ve used a new strategy (printing money) to avoid one in the short term.

This seems to have created inflation and it’s various seemingly negative consequences.

I believe the technical term is “kicking the can down the road”. We’re experts at it up here in Canada if you’d like any tips.

Deficit spending is not a new strategy.

Financial crashes are often precipitated by short term factors eg inability to come up with enough capital, cascading failures as financial firms fail and spook all investors. The Fed has essentially acted more proactively to assure the market that it won’t let this happen.

If the fundamentals of the system are broken, there isn’t much even the fed could do. That doesn’t seem to be the case (modulo things the Feds cant control eg Foreign Wars).

Yeah, I wouldn’t say we successfully prevented a 2008 crash until we’re through the next crash - as arguably the 2008 crash was a prevention of a 2001 crash.

As someone on HN had previously mentioned - the crash and burn is more for “cathartic” purposes. Big Tech is the equivalent of 2008 derivatives and the greed , the brashness of I am smarter,the IPOs and VC exits,the parties, the insane wealth to gobble up competition and create monopolies. The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006. They pop adderall and leetcode and crack coding interviews like the bankers did brutal Goldman interviews. They go to burning man as a sign of lifestyle instead of counter culture. Big Tech has upended the middle class and data privacy and gamed our emotions and attention so much that I am tired . I will gladly see my stock values halved if I can get back my simpler times of 1998. I wish I could escape the monopolies and their hold on my everyday life . But maybe I am an old fart so ignore me .

This sort of tech worker is more of a creation of the media and people's minds that than the actual median highly compensated tech worker.

Truth is: nerds mostly remain nerds.

I disagree. If nerds remain nerds and the focus is on learning and trying out cool stuff then Leetcode would not exist . There would be way more companies coming out to compete or springing up with cool stuff . Apart from TikTok upending Facebook , none of the other big tech firms have any competition and I do not see them having a viable threat in the next 5-6 years . They will buy up any competitors. Anecdotally- I know of two people who quit tenured professor positions in physics and neuroscience to join big tech . The one in neuroscience had recently made a big find and Google Deepmind came and offered an insane amount of money she would never make even if she won the Nobel prize.

Leetcode is a counter response to an interview type that existed well before the current tech boom, and the interview type existed as long as google was an ascendant company, since they were the ones that popularized it. Before algorithmic interviews, there were microsoft's lateral thinking interviews that were the bullshit interview type du-jour that everyone complained about.

The money is the relatively recent thing that made people practice for leetcode more that wouldn't necessarily go into software otherwise, but the algorithmic interview was there before tech started paying a lot and became the only growth engine of the american economy that is left.

Facebook and TikTok are in a very strong position, imho. Netflix is the weakest of the big tech and has the most competitors.

I feel Netflix used to look like a tech companies couscous they where the first that use the new medium, and expand to the world market whit easy. But in the long run they aren't, you (regular joe,jhon,juan, karen, maria,Raphaël) don't care whats the tech stack of Netflix and not as much for the ux, you care about content, and now you have all the platform who produce content (hbo, cbs, disney), they want to maximize they profits, and they know how to creates long term fans, sustain numbers of rating, Netflix don't. They focus on license media, and short dopamine hits who work for 5 years, but now nobody care anymore.

Despite the FAANG acronym, Netflix was always a nothing burger in terms of BigTech. Even befits the crash they were like #50 in terms of market cap. BigTech should have always been FAAMG. With Microsoft instead of Netflix. Those five ads worth more than a trillion

MAAMA? (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet)

I've recently heard the acronym "MAGMA" thrown around.

This is good too, but that MAGMA the other guys suggest makes sense and is a real spelling of a word. I like it!

Also GAMMA could be good: Google - Apple - Meta - Microsoft - Amazon

I'm coining GAMMA: Google - Apple - Meta - Microsoft - Amazon

FAANG was never about big tech it was about companies that experienced tremendous stock growth 100-300% in a short time.

Then people co opted the term to mean companies that paid well (wow the company with high stock growth pays more).

In regards to this Netflix was absolutely innovative in regards to engineering. They literally wrote the book on chaos practices. They also pay extremely high base salary ($400-600k).

Microsoft never paid well in regards to its peers.

> Microsoft never paid well in regards to its peers.

Their subsidiary, Linkedin, beats most of Microsoft's peers.

That’s fair, I’ve also heard GitHub also gives higher stock grants than MS.

Also remember the original acronym was FANG and left out Apple even though it was growing by leaps and bounds at the time.

> Apart from TikTok upending Facebook , none of the other big tech firms have any competition and I do not see them having a viable threat in the next 5-6 years . They will buy up any competitors

What does that have to do with nerds remaining nerds?

It doesn't lol

Oh please. The questions asked in modern day interviews are ridiculous. If you don't receive a specific quality and caliber of education, then you will be completely hopeless without Leetcode practice and CTCI. Do you seriously expect people to intuitively discover the Blum-Floyd-Pratt-Rivest-Tarjan algorithm in the space of a 30 min whiteboard interview?

This seems right.

Theres definitely positions which the “slick MBA type” can fill in a tech company (PM, TPM, VP etc). But building, operating and reasoning about complex software systems is just hard and so demanding. It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.

There are people who are both arrogant and intelligent.

> is just hard and so demanding.

Keep telling yourself that. What we do is soooo hard and special and we're soooo smart. There are plenty of smart people, and guess what - they used to go into harder and more demanding jobs in search of high pay.

Plenty of would-be bankers end up in tech, and plenty of would-be-could-be doctors end up in tech. Plenty of people who care more about success and money than twos complement are ending up in tech.

Investment Banking? Way worse hours, way worse culture. Medicine? Way longer hours, way more difficult road to a career.

Tech? Easy path (BS in CS is easy), than LC for a few weeks, and boom, you'll land a job - unlike medicine which takes a decade and 2 degrees. Most people can stop work after a 9-5, except maybe for on-call which IB and Medicine both deal with in their own way. Tech isn't nearly as dependent on networking and socializing as IB, which means way more smart people who want good pay can do it, even if they aren't born into a great professional network.

> It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.

Plenty of people aren't nerdy but are smart are filling up Silicon Valley and those open-offices across the country. Google's Operating System research teams? Probably nerdy. ACME Co's Random CRUD App team? Chill guy making a lot of money without knowing or caring about how compilers work, but very happy he can afford to visit Tahoe every weekend.

At my last FAANG job one of my coworkers didn't know what UDP or TCP were, and didn't care and wouldn't learn. Didn't want to learn about anything unless it was needed next sprint. He wasn't the best at his job, but he could do it just fine. Missed some opportunities to be more efficient by leaning on prior art and existing libs he never learned about, but got his work done and supported business goals. Parents told him to get a good job so he did.

> Keep telling yourself that. What we do is soooo hard and special and we're soooo smart.

I flip-flop every 6 months between thinking that everybody can do this and being absolutely floored that I myself can keep up with this.

One day we're writing HTML and CSS, and a few years later we're learning about the shadow DOM and why we may want to use React Native Web to run React Native on the web.

One day we're writing a LAMP CRUD app, and a few years later we're deploying a service mesh for resilience, visibility, and configurable networking - concepts that didn't even exist when we were writing CRUD apps.

I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?

I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?

> flip-flop every 6 months between thinking that everybody can do this and being absolutely floored that I myself can keep up with this.

I agree that it takes a certain way of thinking to be able to reason about strict logic and symbolic relationships. Just ask someone what (X or Y) equals when X and Y are both true. I knew people in my CS classes right up until the end that couldn't tell you correctly (because people in regular English think of "or" as "exclusive or" and its hard for some people to change their understanding).

I disagree with the concept about the rapidly changing tech jargon. I think in SF tech startup scene it may be that crazy, but once I start a job, I use their stack, and it stays that way for years. Different companies different stacks though. Big-Tech is even easier since they have their own custom stacks that are pretty stable.

> I'm not a doctor/surgeon, but I don't think that the kind of work they do changes year to year at this pace?

On the contrary. It changes all the time. They always have to be learning about new medication, new surgical techniques, new diseases. Ask a doctor in 2019 to diagnose the Sars-Cov-2019 Novel Coronavirus. Then ask them about ivermectin.

> I guess you could say that none of these concepts are really that difficult conceptually, but...what is...? Algebraic Topology? Chaos Theory?

I would say that real theory is actually pretty hard in CS. Math is famously unapproachable to people who don't "get it" and I think CS theory shares similar logical rigor - honestly similar to law and how it is a "different" logic than most people are ready for.

I know rocket scientists, and their classes were actually-intense math - but conceptually/logically easy IFF you could do the math. The basic biology of how a viral infection works is pretty straightforward (and taught to 13yo's), but again, thats not the hard part of the job of a doctor.

But most CRUD apps are not. And most people write CRUD apps. At my BigTech jobs, the company always had custom-in-house build tools that were great at doing deterministic reproducible builds and they were always based on strong theory and rigor and had white papers. But how many people actually have to do that at those companies?

A lot of the difficulty to modern web development and so forth don’t even feel like engineering, so much as navigating bureaucracy. The scale of complexity in modern codebases has turned us into software bureaucrats.

It's a bit of both. Most of the work in our space is a lot lamer than we like to make it out to be. Almost anyone, with a modicum of training can do this. The hard problems, and by "the hard problems" I'm not talking about crazy algorithms but rather what does one do when the poop hits the fan, that's harder. Most people could still do it, but it takes a lot more training and experience.

One is development. The other is system ops. Some people like to handle both, and others don't.

I spent the last year migrating our backend off of heroku onto bare metal Proxmox servers with unlimited VMs. It blew my mind that 0, literally 0, of my developers took up my offer to give them free VMs (including KDE/Gnome with NoMachine/NX!!).

It turns out that my devs just want to be devs, and not use their free time to play on sys ops and k8s and ceph clusters.

When I saw this happen, I started hiring staff for sysops separately than expecting my devs to do so, and see much more clarity in output.

In summary, if you're writing the LAMP CRUD app, maybe someone else oughta be the one to deploy the service mesh.

I just disagree that the work done by doctors & IB are at all comparable to what is done by tech workers.

Tech is poaching from academia and quantitative finance people -- not the normal professional careers because the type of thinking that is needed is very different from IB & law & medicine. It's not about hours.

I know plenty of doctors and lawyers and consultants and IB. The only people I know in other careers who I think could make it as well as the top tech workers have are people who are in physics and other STEM academia (my major) or quants who work for major market making firms (ie. Jane St, Citadel).

> ACME Co's Random CRUD App team

"ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.

> I just disagree that the work done by doctors & IB are at all comparable to what is done by tech workers.

You're over thinking this. I'm talking about high school and college students picking majors. I'm talking about what parents telling their kids to do. Immigrants moving to America picking a career to support their family.

No one quits Goldman Sachs's deal floor to work at Facebook. They skip the finance class and go to data structures freshman year. The alum they met at google are rich and happy and the alum from wall street are bitter and tired and overworked.

> the type of thinking that is needed is very different

Eh, its different but its not that crazy. Most of tech is not that hard. The harder part of being at a top firm anywhere is being generally successful enough to achieve the goal. The top few % of people that go to top school and go to top wall street banks or consulting firms or get into med school can do that.

> "ACME co" et al aren't paying $300k+.

You can replace acme with any tech company. You can work at apple making 300k and making a crud app. Tons of Silicon Valley companies are paying 300k+ for engineers and many of those engineers aren't solving problems that are particularly hard.

> It’s not possible to do this without having some level of “nerdiness” or love of technical things.

If you pay enough you will get a lot of focused, attentive, highly intelligent people. Accounting and law have never lacked for employees because they pay. Any industry that pays well enough will get good entry level people and if it continues to do well one day they’ll be that kind of person with 30 years of experience.

I agree but people hear nerd and they picture the John Hughes caricature. This is no more accurate than Hollywood’s “Wall Street bro”. There’s some seriously douchey needs around.

On average yes, but I tend to agree that the 'jock' tech worker is an archetype that didn't exist 20 years ago. Tech is no longer counterculture and has become a more high status profession in the eyes of the public. This is probably good for short term productivity but bad for long term innovation. I'm a big believer in the idea that the biggest innovations generally begin as low status or 'unsexy' endeavors.

I have yet to encounter this kind of person at the FAANG I work for. Perhaps they all work at Facebook.

Same experience, I never met another tech person that fits the bro stereotype? most of my colleagues are like people on h1b. My idea of a bro is like those frat guys with the popped collars years ago.

Some of this other stuff just sounds like over excited college kids, like adderal and stuff?

Hop on Blind for 5 minutes and you’ll see

Is there a nonfiction section of blind?

> I'm a big believer in the idea that the biggest innovations generally begin as low status or 'unsexy' endeavors.

This is generally because low status or "unsexy" confers sufficient time to tinker, make recoverable mistakes and polish until the innovation gains traction. High status or "sexy" attracts all the wrong kinds of attention that brings all the wrong kinds of pressure that steals away that time.

I think it's more because prominent strains of Hollywood/American pop-culture valorizes the low status underdog who succeeds and shits on people who are already high status. We can pretend we are insulated from American cultural norms but we are not.

I don't think there is any real backing to the idea that low-status people are more likely to succeed.

> I don't think there is any real backing to the idea that low-status people are more likely to succeed.

Point. They definitely aren't more likely to succeed. I do contend they are however, afforded a small opportunity to work on their idea in obscurity until it reaches that stage it can gain traction. And in the meantime, position their chess pieces for the inevitable entry of the avaricious, high-status people looking for a kill at the low-status people's expense.

That is, low-status can be deployed as camouflage to deflect attention away from the gathering of resources and information to choose the time, place and terms to start the fight for maintaining control over anything that gains traction.

I do agree however, this rarely happens.

This part resonated with me > monopolies. The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006. They pop adderall and leetcode and crack coding interviews like the bankers did brutal Goldman interviews. They go to burning man as a sign of lifestyle instead of counter culture

I think you are right. The money is moving towards tech and now the MBA crowd is looking to signal that they can code well enough to build products. I went to burning man about 5 years ago, it was already about money and status signaling more than counter culture. many of the people I met there were fairly successful tech people, they’re the ones who can afford it after all.

> The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006

Did you work in banking in 2006? They partied at strip clubs and hired escorts for parties.

The sort of 'tech bro' you are describing already left tech years ago and moved to crypto

Amen. The ladder climbing careerist tech bros who only talk about total comp can please move on to the next grift.

> The nerdy tech worker was replaced by the modern day chiseled , slick , stock options loaded tech worker who would have gone to banking in 2006.

This reads to me as someone who has been in tech since the 80s as a new way to put down the nerds now that they are actually not socially despised any more.

Thanks but no thanks.

“nerds now that they are actually not socially despised any more.”

- go to any working class area in San Francisco and tell them you work in big tech . See if you are not socially despised . Go tell anyone working blue collar jobs that you work in big tech in the Bay Area or Seattle and see if their reaction is not one of despisal.

That did not exist before unless I was living in a bubble.

> go to any working class area in San Francisco and tell them you work in big tech . See if you are not socially despised . Go tell anyone working blue collar jobs that you work in big tech in the Bay Area or Seattle and see if their reaction is not one of despisal.

This doesn’t have anything to do with being a ‘nerd’ or even “big tech”. It’s about housing costs and the result of NIMBYism from long term residents longing for the past.

People are going to move to the Bay, you can’t stop change. If you make it harder only the people with more money will be here which is what’s happening.

I'd say people are moving away, especially those in tech. Why pay more for less when you don't have to?

Most of the out migration from expensive regions is low and middle income earning families. There’s a net in migration of high income households.

As I understand it people were complaining about this in the 90s in SF, so yes you were probably living in a bubble.

Dislike of yuppies is almost 40 years old at this point.

Of course they’re despised. Strange people with alien interests doing incomprehensible jobs making tons of money. Animus is normal and actual behavior is ~irrelevant.

Nietzsche wrote extensively about this phenomenon in his genealogy of morals.

> Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned. (OGM 1:7)

Not to mention the jealousy of the unprecedented and massive bull run that tech has had

This reeks of bitterness. "Simpler times" of 1998 when a whole generation of boomers benefited from Alpha squeezed through multiple wars, fossil fuel addiction, polluting the planet, severely destabilizing the real estate markets, unethical banks.

Sure people that thrived then are not thriving as much now, but it's a much more sustainably prosperous few decades since then.

“They go to burning man as a sign of lifestyle instead of counter culture.”

This. So so so well said

Counter culture stopped existing a decade ago. Everything is profitable now, capitalism is pretty efficient.

Correct - Burning Man was already lame by 1999 among the contributing counter-culture!

I'm 100% sure that countercultures still exist in general, and I think most people who say otherwise are from a specific counterculture that's gone mainstream.

Think about things that are outright criminal, that breach the TOS on most websites, or that are wildly offensive or ridiculous. Being repulsive doesn't mean something isn't a counterculture; in fact, it can be sign that it is.

Fire up IG and you can find people vandalizing property illegally. Really search anything graffiti related. That didn’t exist 15 years ago, maybe hosted on some niche forums, other content was underground magazines and shops. Flickr was the first place you really started seeing this start, IG changed eveything.

Illegal shows? Well dead city punx just had an illegal show in the LA river! Cops couldn’t even break it up. Streamed live on IG, lots of good advertising content.

All counterculture is mainstream, all of it is profitable with advertising. Burn a house down, riot about capitalism, at the end of the day you’re making a capitalist or mega corp money if someone can get the content from a device.

Want to truly be rebellious? Be boring and stop using social media.

So well put, captures precisely why capitalism has been so successful and still persists. everything, even anti-capitalist rhetoric, gets folded into the money machine and keeps it moving.

I would cite heroin users, thinspo anorexics, (real) Neo-Nazis, some varieties of paedophile, and credit card skimmers as examples of communities with their own unique cultures (disclaimer: often awful ones) that are counter to the mainstream. The first two you can maybe make an argument for being integrated into the mainstream, but the last three are totally against the current culture.

Don't strap a tracking device to your wrist. Don't experience the moment filtered through a slab of magic glass. Don't broadcast your thoughts and actions to the world.

This is today's counter-culture. Something like the final scene in 'Fahrenheit 451'.

People were saying "Counter culture stopped existing a decade ago" when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. I'd bet good money they said it before that too.

>Counter culture stopped existing a decade ago.

Maybe in America

Perhaps you simply want this…

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/28/beware-the-pretty-people/

You reminded me of this this article. I always struggled to find it until today. It's opening paragraphs warned about the same thing you talk about.

It's funny to read this now and see how they think about Bitcoin and Uber vs today

I will tell you how we know. There is a correlation between Ivy League graduates flooding Wall Street and an inevitable market crash. Why? Because they can't help themselves but come up with exotic trading (read: gambling) instruments that no one understands and then torching a whole sector for profit. See: the 2008 housing crisis. I just rewatched the Big Short. It's absurd.

Well, now we have Web 3.0. It's the same type of people, creating new devices of gambling, cleaning out the laymen. Tired - NFTs, wired - Soulbound tokens.

Hey there. I think you'll find this worth your time: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1552Gu7F2cJV5Bgw93ZGgCONX...

> Well, now we have Web 3.0. It's the same type of people, creating new devices of gambling, cleaning out the laymen.

So what are the tech and "BigTech" equivalents of broad market index funds like VTSAX held for the long-term starting in one's teens and dollar cost averaging out into bonds in latter decades?

There aren't. I am not comparing the web to the market, I am pointing out that in the past the tech sector did not attract such a large number of frauds and conmen. It was just this thing the nerds did.

Been hanging out on a lot of personal finance related communities. For people outside the tech bubble, this has been brutal. Rents have increased 20-50% in many cases and wages haven't kept pace. People making otherwise decent income are being forced to shack up with roommates in their 30s just to pay rent.

Worst of all, it has debased work. Idiots threw random dollar amounts on crypto memecoins and came out with hundreds of thousands. Degens gambled on memestocks and made millions. Anyone who did the "stable" thing of saving and investing wisely got left behind.

The worker shortage isn't just because people suddenly became lazier. They've absolutely debased money. And in the process, debased work. Why work hard when gambling and speculation and straight up lying ("hustling") are rewarded way, way more?

Anyone who thinks this is sustainable is delusional. And insensitive.

> Rents have increased 20-50% in many cases

Maybe in some cases. Not on average [0]. Here is SF [1]

> Anyone who did the "stable" thing of saving and investing wisely got left behind.

Gambling has always been a thing. Lots of people lost big on crypto.

> Why work hard when gambling and speculation and straight up lying ("hustling") are rewarded way, way more?

If you actually think that, go ahead and make your millions. Efficient markets are not that easy. If you knew you could make more ahead of time, it would already be priced in.

I suggest spending less time hanging in communities and hearing people spitball and more time looking at the facts.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SEHA [1]: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/san-francisco-ca

Yeah, last year’s rent was up 10%. Now do the past decade.

Home prices in my middle of nowhere Nebraska town are up 50% over the past decade. Rents too.

I don’t trust statistics saying “we’re not debasing the currency” from the very people who are currently debasing the currency.

Are we in a housing crisis? Yes, of course. But the problem is not Californians or crypto bros.

Did not realize these claims were over the last decade... rents are up 37% on average, which is 15% more than we would expect with a standard 2% inflation.

And of course we return to the old HN bogeyman of shadow inflation. there are a number of independent academic researchers who track prices showing changes roughly in line with FRED cpi, but I'm sure those researchers are also part of the conspiracy.

You can’t stop a market bubble from popping with policy. You can only keep the cycle going until the bubble is bigger then the policy maker… which, since the bubble grows exponentially, is soon no matter how big that policy maker is.

No, but you can try and gently deflate rather than make it pop.

In theory, yeah. I don't know if this has been done in the past 30ish years, though... it seems that, mysteriously, the people in charge of making those decisions are always the same people who have a lot invested in seeing the bubble continue to inflate.

> the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again.

Yes, the next crash won't be like 2008. The universe is infinite in its ability to present us with new forms.

True. It might be even worse and across many asset classes at the same time.

I agree. there is not going to be major crash as all the overrated pundits are predicting, who keep being wrong over and over.

Yes all the crypto/NFT can crash and burn but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.

Crypto is just a very expensive hobby/fad. It has no bearing on the overall economy. It could all go to zero and the affect on the rest of the economy and stock market would be small or minimal. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 have recovered far faster than bitcoin. Crypto generates no profits, big tech generates hundreds of billions of dollars of profit annually. Facebook alone makes $40 billion/year profit, about 3x that of Walmart.

Regardless of the value of crypto itself, it does impact the job market, especially in the security space. A collapse would reduce demand for security professionals.

Not just crypto - but bunch of companies in other industries that raised a lot of money in the last 2 years have seen layoffs. May was a brutal month - 17K layoffs in tech. https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/tech-layoffs-companies-axe-wor...

> IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again.

So many people have lost so much money to ideas that rhyme with this one.

Journalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place.

These days it feels like they are straight up antagonistic towards the whole industry. A quick scan of The Verge homepage, I see mostly sarcastically negative stories (Netflix is finally taking a page from the rest of Hollywood) and neutral PR placements (Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered is coming to PC in August). As far as I can tell the only positive headlines are affiliate listicles (Here are the best tablet deals right now)...

Well, a lot of people did cattily tell unemployed journalists to “learn to code.”

Wasn't this started because before journalists started losing their jobs, they were telling blue collar unemployed workers to learn to code? So people turn that against them.

> Journalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place.

Journalists first turned on Craigslist when they stole classified revenue, then they turned on Facebook when they stole advertising revenue. They started turning on tech as a whole as collateral damage.

The whole time they shat on wall-street for stealing everyone else's money and being rich. When tech got rich, they turned on them. First in the dot-com era when SF started to get corporate-ified and not counter cultural, and then everywhere when Tech became the new upper-middle class and linked (by journalists) with society's problems.

Tech is never not going to be among the best paying profession until governments regulate the industry into less profitability. If Google can make $millions per-employee by having a global reach, then there is no way to stop the salary creep compared to companies that only have local-reach.

Its the job of journalists to bring a cynical/critical eye to important things in society. I'm glad that these folks exist and its their fulltime job to call out bullshit. Of course they will misfire at times.

People in tech also seem to forget that a lot of attention to tech is brought to them by the media. The first adopters are generally computer nerds and teenagers; people in media write about it, glamorize and make it mainstream (how many Tech CEOs have been on the cover of TIME magazine?). In fact, my personal perspective is that they haven’t been critical enough; when instagram and WhatsApp were gobbled up by Facebook the prevailing media sentiment was that of the unlimited possibilities in tech for wealth generation rather than concern about the anti competitiveness of the market that it caused.

To be fair, anyone sitting on the sidelines watching tech companies spend 15-20 years without making a profit - or ever making a profit - is going to start thinking "what the hell is going on"

More than watching tech go down, I think there's just a general anxiety that all basic business fundamentals have been turned upside down, and much of it is led by tech.

The markets are rallying right now because macro data is poor (which means Fed rate hikes might slow down). It's a bizarro economy and anyone who thinks long-term is understandably queasy.

> To be fair, anyone sitting on the sidelines watching tech companies spend 15-20 years without making a profit - or ever making a profit - is going to start thinking "what the hell is going on"

Big tech companies have been absolute money making machines. What are you talking about?

The ones at the very top -- Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon -- are profitable. There's been a good number of big hyped names and decade+ "startups" that might have a lot of revenue but don't have much if anything left over in the net column. (Uber most famously.)

> IMO the fact is simply that policymakers have become really good at ensuring that crashes like 2008 don’t happen again.

i sort of don't even know where to start with this one...

i'm going to just file it under every other "this time it's different" claim and move on.

watch out for CMBS imploding.

Systems fail in many different ways. Its not that the market can never fail, that would be an absurd claim. They are less likely to fail along the lines that they failed before.

What we’re seeing instead is people fearing a repetition of the same mistakes and the same failures.

Yeah it won't literally be a repeat of 2001 or 2008.

I mentioned CMBS which along with crypto are the fairly safe bets on what will meltdown this time, and they weren't involved (or didn't exist) last time.

The script also tends to vary. I was quiet surprised that the markets had a fit over the 1% fed funds rate and was caught a bit off guard.

They're announcing very directly though that they're going to invert the yield curve. They are quite concerned about wage inflation. They are more than willing to tank the economy to get it under control and are invoking the name of Paul Volker. There is no way we get out of this with a "soft landing" and things are going to detonate.

Then the fun really begins because the political climate is going to be much worse than 2008/2009. The Tea Party Republicans ostensibly claim to be against any kind of bailout and they'll be willing to play chicken with the entire economy in order to harm the Biden administration.

It is pretty obvious that it is going to be somewhat different this time.

The idea that policymakers will magically navigate us through these waters though harkens back to the Clinton/Greenspan era of policy. But we don't even have anyone like "The Maestro" running the show this time.

Wages are out of control and they're going to crash the economy to get them back under control. That's what they do. They haven't figured out anything magical to avoid the pain, and they always underestimate what kind of chaos it will cause.

> Seems like a lot of people want the market to crash. Or, everyone is trying to time the pop.

This same sort of article has been posted here a couple times in the past two weeks. Some news outlets seem incredibly eager to report this story

I feel like there's a certain sort of resentment from the news media towards the tech industry in general, and it's gotten worse in recent years. I think some of it is political, and some of it is out of fear because different outputs of the tech industry have radically changed other industries (e.g. cable TV's former monopoly on entertainment) and their success is dependent on their ability to maintain an online presence

> but demand doesn’t seem like its going to fall unless there’s an actual crash.

Not sure about the US but over here in Europe there are billions of euros (probably tens of billions) that are poured right now into the market thanks to the latest EU Next Generation funds (basically post-Covid support money, in fact a typical keynesian move, with all its pluses and minuses).

There's a huge digitalisation push that comes from top to down, with actual money set up to pay for (almost) all of it. Add to it the the typical keynes-ian "accumulator" logic and things should be ok for at least the next couple of years for many computer programmers and IT people based in Europe, especially those that will get into contracting and will be able to land some part of the pie (a very big pie, as I've mentioned).

I’m pretty sure it already has. Unicorns with a short runway doing big layoffs, “unicorns” with $600k ARR completely folding, and the big boys like Meta and Uber having hiring freezes. The TC may remain relatively high simply because wages tend to be sticky, but the competition for the top jobs will be tougher as the market power shifts to the tech companies that are actually profitable and can afford the top talent.

It'll be interesting how that shakes out with legacy tech platforms. A lot of the high profit tech is built on stuff that's more than 10 years old.

I think this might support your point unless you dont consider this as high profit.

I currently work on a monolith customer service application that did $2.8bn in sales last year (we are a high margin company but sales $ amount is the only data available to me - projected to do ~$3.8bn this year). It's built using Eclipse RCP and a microservice architecture that consumes from a mix of DB2 LUW and AS400(IBM I) lol. It's about 13 years old.

Uber does not have a hiring freeze for engineering. They are for non tech functions. Source: I work at Uber and I’m hiring.

So y'all do have a hiring freeze?

Right, a selective hiring freeze is still a hiring freeze.

Engineering would be the very last thing to get cut, as there will instantaneously be posts here and all over the internet.

Freezing non-tech hiring is the canary in the coalmine. Like when companies start scaling back freebies.

Once the downward trajectory starts it almost never reverses.

I'm sure the people downvoting you know this and are simply mad you called a spade a spade.

What are the open reqs for? SWE? DL? I think for some highly sought-after roles, you never fully freeze hiring. There are also several pipelines for hiring, and some may get shut-off while others remain. Diversity candidates may not see a hiring freeze, for instance.

This needs to be repeated: 2000 took 2 years for the stock market to go from peak to trough. 2008 took 18 months.

Anyone thinking "the crash" is a single moment or even a 3 month downturn should look at history. The fed is barely starting to tighten. Rates aren't that high yet. The job market is still red hot (and that's the problem).

Let's have this discussion in 3-6 months. The fed has done everything they can to telegraph their intent and that intent is to drain money from the economy, slowing or crashing it, to restore price stability which is currently wrecking the finances of most of America. The fed doesn't care about stock markets or the valuation of your tech company right now.

You’ve just conflated an interest rate tightening cycle with a market crash. The fed’s intent is not to crash the economy. While recessions tend to follow hike cycles, I believe that markets also tend to post (small) positive gains over the following two years. To me it seems a lot more likely that “the crash” was indeed blowing off froth, and that there may some recessionary period and growth will be subdued for a while (the actual tightening cycle), reflecting that we’re in neither 2000 or 2008. Either way, I agree that time will tell.

I think it's really quite weird that people talk about the current financial situation without ever mentioning the massive disruption and decoupling that globalization is undergoing right now.

Russia has essentially been excised from the world's economy, and China's lockdowns and other political actions have spooked virtually all foreign investors and business operations in that country. And there's serious consequences for everyone. This inflation crisis is just one of those consequences.

yeah it looks like a lot of market valuations are discounting the China decoupling risk. Maybe unlikely but I was surprised by the complete pullout from Russia.

TLDR: it’s way too early to start comparing this to 2000/2008.

You’re right that stuff is slow. We’re so new into this round of the market that it’s best to be humble.

We haven’t yet seen anything like assets becoming illiquid/worthless and threatening leveraged asset values at a market wide level. Ie something like a domino effect. We’re seeing more of a “marginal effect” where at higher interest rates cap rates are trending opposite of the past many years. This should stay on the business development side so long as “not enough” leverage was set with an adjustable rate. That’s what hurt a lot of assets and people in 2008-mortgage rates went up on the ARMs and thus monthly mortgage payments.

Having said that, 2000 and 2008 had market driven revisions downward. 2008 was particularly bad because suddenly highly leveraged assets had to be marked to market. So many assets had their values pinned to irrational assumptions of the underlying assets that many trillions of debt were headed for default.

As an aside, the economy is in a fragile place. Meat processing and infant formula got concentrated so far that shutting down individual plants takes out the supply of those goods. The economy right now is just about dominated by market concentration-and unions are at historical lows of importance. That is a factor that leads to inefficiency (at best) and fragility/deadweight at worst. Look at how long Intel told people they didn’t need multiple cores.

Edit-A targeted attack on TSMC could wipe out the worlds semi supply and send us back decades. Quarantines and lockdowns can wipe out the worlds TP supply, cellphones, everything produced almost exclusively in China.

Exit2-the attacks on Ukraine either have stopped the (vast majority of the?) worlds supply of neon gas. Etc

Neon is actually easily replaced. It's everywhere in the atmosphere. I believe the steel production in Ukraine was just the most economical place to collect it. Much more important are food, energy and fertilizer disruptions.

Right now we have fairly high fuel prices (not adjusting for inflation, IIRC) and China is coming out of lockdown so expect energy prices to go even higher.

I agree that the world hinges on Taiwan right now. It may be that the illegal(in China) foreign investments of China's ruling class and military leaders are the only thing truly restraining a takeover. Time will tell. Not even Intel can handle a Taiwanese invasion due to the lack of support chips.

Putin caught Europe in an energy checkmate and China seems to have the work in a semiconductor check. These are dangerous times. I am slightly amused by folks who talk about market technicals while ignoring the elephants in the room. We may be witnessing the formation of a new world order that we are simply unprepared for. The US is actually in a decent position, having geography and natural resources on our side. Life may be difficult for our allies later this year, however.

> Neon is actually easily replaced. It's everywhere in the atmosphere.

Except its not easy to build new supply in the short term.

> I agree that the world hinges on Taiwan right now.

Taiwan is safe unless Biden slips and says something too aggressive. China needs chips just like the US and they're stuck with the same sources. They won't take it over so long as their takeover destroys the fabs. The US the EU and CN are all trying to build domestic chip supply. While it probably won't be top-tier, it should be "of this decade" in quality. Thats enough to keep the economy alive in US and CN even if its setback.

> Putin caught Europe in an energy checkmate

And the Russian oil will sell to developing non-western nations that didn't embargo russia. It will be cheaper and maybe a boom to those nations. This will free up supply in western-compliant oil producers, which will help the EU, but again, it does take years to build that infra.

> China seems to have the work in a semiconductor check.... We may be witnessing the formation of a new world order that we are simply unprepared for.

I think china is the most un-prepared. China had the ultimate check-mate since no one would exist without their manufacturing ability. Their continued lock-downs are forcing companies to move around their supply chains to avoid interruption. Even apple, their crown jewel, is starting to expand. Meanwhile the only thing keeping the Chinese population compliant is a growing middle class and quality of life. If Chinese exports slip, it may trigger unrest. A trump-style trade way may help push china to the edge and we may see more ever-grande esque failures that anger the population.

> I am slightly amused by folks who talk about market technicals while ignoring the elephants in the room.

Because you can't put the elephant in your 401K.

> Meanwhile the only thing keeping the Chinese population compliant is a growing middle class and quality of life.

I keep hearing stories about some pretty deep discontent in China, because they no longer see a growing quality of life.

see "lie flat" movement https://www.insider.com/disenchanted-chinese-youth-join-a-ma...

or "we are the last generation" https://globalvoices.org/2022/05/16/the-most-desperate-respo...

note: links are the first results, you can probably find better sources.

And growing discontent in China may not be a desirable outcome anyway given the Chinese governments' historic tendency to blame foreigners for the country's struggles.

Military action would become a real possibility.

They talk about trying for a "soft landing", so although there is a downturn in stocks and it will likely go down a little more, the path of less resistance would probably be to try to get inflation and stocks to average at around stopping right now, with a few parabolic moves.

This would consolidate the wealth transfer in favor of asset holders, but would at least not make it worse, and non-asset holders generally don't really understand what's happening anyways so that's why it's the path of less resistance.

the problem with rates is that they can't go too high or the Treasury gets all stressed out due to cost of debt. the current situation is a certified shitshow basically with bad options only.

Maybe at the bigcorps and over-VC'd startups, but outside of the valley it's hard to find good help in my experience.

It has always been hard to find good people.

Or thorough.

Nice.

It's quite easy actually, you are just underpaying.

More like it's quite easy if you dramatically overpay.

Finding great people at a price you can afford is the usual aim - which doesn't mean underpaying but does mean that you can't just raise the price until the talent busts down your door.

No. Markets mean that you must indeed do that.

Having to pay a lot seems to be the side of the coin that the most pro free market advocates are not okay with.

Seems like the price you need to pay to actually get talent would be paying properly. Expecting to get talent while paying below market is called underpaying.

It sounds like you either find yourself in an industry where tech work doesn't actually have much of an impact on revenue or one where business owners are reluctant to profit share with their productive workers. Other industries that don't have these hang-ups are doing fine with hiring.

If that were true there would be a place chock full of good people, that everyone in the industry knows is there and that they pay very well for good people. Is there such a place?

Netflix

guessing it has a lot to do with pay discrepancies

It's always hard to find good people when you pay way less than the alternatives they have.

I has always been hard.

Layoffs are on the rise http://layoffs.fyi/ (the graphs don't show well on mobile)

Wow, the depressing sibling to levels.fyi!

Surprised to see so many layoffs in 2020 and 2021, makes 2022 look not bad.

Are we looking at the same graphs? May 2022 has more than all of 2021 combined.

I've been through maybe 4 crashes so far.

This one doesn't feel like those ones. So far anyway.

There's still companies hiring. It's still hard to find great people.

Strangely, this feels like a good thing - that talent can get rebalanced to companies that are profitable and trying to grow, but can't because it's too hard to hire. Maybe this is too optimistic of an outlook, and I'll eat my words if I'm wrong, but I'm hedging that a recession takes us from red-hot to pretty warm.

I think what everyone is wondering is whether it will become like one of those crashes.

doubt it for “big tech” eg Microsofts and Googles and Apples of the world. they seem to be largely doing fine despite whatever is happening to valuations.

yes for companies with no profits and no sustainable business model eg the Ubers and the DoorDashes

There is about to be a re-allocation of capital. But there is still far more demand to hire software engineers than the available talent even including the layoffs.

After year 2000 the internet bubble, quite some CS departments in top universities can not even find enough applicants and students.

nowadays, it's extremely challenging to get into a top CS program, for those enrolled, get a well-paid intern or full time job seems to be fairly easy these days. I'd say it's the best time for software developers in the last 2 decades.

Sadly, every party has to end, it's about time.

https://archive.ph/hKfyb

> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

Thoroughly uninteresting question too, if you work in the space you know this is not the case and if you don't what is the point of worrying about it?

If Amazon is such a terrible place how do they manage to hire many people? Are all the other places more terrible?

They pay well, and being a former Amazon engineer looks good on a resume.

From speaking to Amazon engineers, it also seems like the experience is heavily dependent on which team you're on, like most workplaces. I don’t think it is a terrible place to work.

The warehouses sound brutal though.

Something has to happen. Even helpdesk people are starting at $60k in some companies.

Do you believe that is too much?

Where in the US is that an unreasonably high amount for a good junior employee? In NYC metro area it sounds appropriate.

US median salary for full time workers is $56,000

$60k is right around what it would cost to support a single individual comfortably where I live, so that sounds entirely reasonable, if not a bit low.

That's not how salaries are determined is it, otherwise McDonald's would also pay $60k for serving burgers

Well you're free to offer lower salaries and see how that works out.

I'm pretty sure McDonald's do. They don't pay based on living costs

Good help desk people are gold to a company. They please customers and shield developers from having to handle as many support issues.

That sounds more like a customer support manager than a help desk agent. One of these has actual power within the company to push stuff onto the roadmap and get fixes deployed and the other just follows a rote script.

The ones in the middle are the most valuable. The managers are not always technical or helpful — they are managers of people primarily. The useful support people can follow a script, get pertinent logs and information, and find the appropriate development resources to funnel the issue to if needed.

A CSM is not an actual manager of anyone, that's just what their title is. What you are describing is the role of a CSM, not the role of a help desk agent. The bar for getting hired as a CSM is much, much higher than that of a help desk agent, and their pay and impact are commensurately higher.

That seems like a pittance for the role, to be honest.

I was making 65k at 19 like 9 years ago in the bay. That still wasn't enough for a nice apartment near work. How is that too much for a good help desk person?

Some of big tech seems to not have a hot job market and that they're desperate. The number of emails I get from Amazon and Facebook is crazy. And the fact that they're emailing me tells me that that they are indeed desperate.

Their problem is they have too much churn and are big enough that they have trouble finding people that they would accept that haven't already been through the experience of working there.

>The number of emails I get from Amazon and Facebook is crazy.

Well that's the thing, those recruiters will keep emailing you desperately until the morning of the layoffs are announced. Facebook's hiring freeze was so sudden that it even caught their own recruiters off guard.

Also what we are seeing is the early stage of hiring cooling. Some companies will start with "soft" hiring freezes, which means no new headcounts but the ones that's already opened will still be kept open, along with back hire for attritions. In those cases recruiters would still be reaching out.

Then there is the "hard" hiring freeze, which means open head counts are taking away, sometimes even impacting people already in the interview process. That's what FB did for all their recent openings under a certain level (<M2 and <E6).

So yeah, recruiting emails alone don't really tell the whole story.

That's a good point. Upon reflection, I don't think I've actually received a relatively recent email from Facebook, so that must have been due to the hiring freeze you mention. But Amazon keeps plugging away. They require a 90-minute test before even talking to them, so good luck to them.

> Amazon keeps plugging away

AWS or Lab126? AWS is a meat grinder and can't stop hiring or they'll run out of folks quickly due to the turnover(which may actually slow down in a bit if the remaining jobs market gets tight).

Personally, I think hiring in SW will remain stronger than other industries unless we see a profound recession, and even then it will be late in the cycle. Sure, non-profitable companies, reliant on debt to continue operations and lacking solid cash flow, will cut staff earlier as they have already begun to do. Sectors like Defense, which is starting a super-cycle, will likely hire strongly until things really grind to a halt in the economy.

And the fact that they're emailing me tells me that that they are indeed desperate.

Or simply indicative of the fact that they can, and could not begin to care a whit whom they might piss or cheese off by doing so.

Just like every other recruiter out there.

Coinbase was hiring for massive growth three weeks ago and now its rescinding offers.

Things can turn on a dime.

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