Tech’s talent wars have come back to bite it
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
While a lot of tech companies are going through post-pandemic layoffs, most of them have headcounts that are still larger than where they were in Feb 2020, and have valuations that show steady growth.
My prediction is that over the next decade we're going to see a narrative in the media that hiring is still exceptionally difficult in the technology sector. There's a very real chance that this round of layoffs drives students and recent graduates into other industries if big tech is no longer seen as an easy path to outsized compensation. It was real side effect of the dotcom bust and the 2008 recession.
I'm excited to see what new companies are going to form in the next few years now that it's a tiny bit more difficult for the big tech companies to suck up all the oxygen in the room.
"I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it." [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
The person who took that autocratic decision was AG Sulzberger, the 37-year old publisher and chairman of the NYT. Surely a man wielding so much power and influence would have earned the post through merit and hard work, right? In reality it’s a hereditary post of the Sulzberger family.
It’s shocking that a man who is a product of nepotism has so little written about him. Where’s the investigative reporting into this momentous decision 5 years ago? Where’s the criticism for biasing reporters in this manner? There’s nothing because the family is that powerful.
What evidence is there of this?
Asking because it's not traditionally the case that the NYT editorial staff needs to be interfered with by ownership in order to make terrible decisions.
I wish I could link you to the investigative exposé about this decision published by the NYT, but they don’t look inward. And no other paper looked at them either. Instead they sycophantically copied the same direction to investigate tech.
On that point we can agree.
You lose faith in media once you know that the same journalistic scrutiny is applied to the person at helm of NYT.
Start a campaign against them.
Oh that’s right it’s on everyone else to organize as you desire.
Paranoid delusions of the anti-social crowd is all this rambling adds up to.
That’s my whole point, which flew right over your head. This is a man who has inherited power and influence. There’s no incentive for the NYT to investigate their own publisher + chairman. There seems to be little appetite for anyone else to do so either. So basically there’s no scrutiny of how he wields his power, or how nepotism is rife at the top of the NYT. That’s why you haven’t heard of him.
Do you understand now?
Do you understand how to deal with figurative displays of power? They’re not going to come after us if we actively promote the idea they’re actually weak and useless.
Turn public sentiment against the idea of ephemeral power and value stores.
I mishear or take things out of context all the time. I’m sure this random Twitter person is not misremembering.
You’re being played emotionally.
It's been many many years of this. It's not going to change. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't going to improve. To that set of folks, we'll always be a bunch of picks and shovels. There's a subset of the liberal artsy crowd that will always see STEM as being lesser intellectually, and that's who these articles are written for. To be sure, that doesn't mean that STEM folks should be anti-liberal-arts. Folks on the engineering side need to own what that side of intellectual life offers, because you can bet that there'll be other (traditional-management-and-corporate) folks leveraging the liberal artsy side and learning what they can about tech so they can "manage" it. To which end, I would also consider this article a reminder and temperature read.
I'm indifferent if the narrative would drive away some talented students into other industries. Raw talent isn't all that there is. There were plenty of 10x programmers in the field before tech got big. And not everyone going into the big giants would be so good in a startup. If you ask me, there's other stuff at play, like the competition between programmers today, and the drive to climb the ladder above all else – those things more or less negate whatever benefit the bump in talent was, because those things don't help startups. Those things are much more readily harnessed by the truly big companies.
It's now well established that Software is Eating the World. This downturn is just Software taking a small break between meals.
It’s no surprise that after a decade of loose monetary policy, there’s a shakeout in capital-intensive industries like tech. That’s painful in the short term, but it’s a good thing overall. It’s necessary for capital to be better allocated across the economy.
> Costs incurred internally in researching and developing a computer software product are charged to expense until technological feasibility has been established for the product. Once technological feasibility is established, software costs are capitalized until the product is available for general release to customers.
Then later
> The amortization of these costs is included in cost of revenue over the estimated life of the products.
Here's hoping. Although it's market dynamics at work, I often wish that software developers (myself included) and related were paid a little bit more sensibly, so that other industries could afford to hire software developers and that smaller scale software became more viable.
I think there are plenty of companies that don't necessarily need to be "eaten by software", they could just do some cool stuff if only it were affordable to hire a developer. I mean bespoke programs that help the company do stuff. Make people's lives better kind of stuff, rather than making bucket loads of cash kind of stuff. It's also a really fun role, it has the fun of bespoke automation and problem solving while also being part of the community you live in. Those kinds of opportunities just don't exist now because no company would expect to afford a software developer.
I have a hard time articulating what I mean usually, I'm not a tech bubble hater, I just see opportunities elsewhere going unfulfilled because it wouldn't make the bucket loads of cash needed to pay for the developers at current market rates.
None of the big tech CEOs except perhaps Cook, have presented a future vision to put people on. They’re making money with price increases and staff reductions. Tech deserves to be dumped on hard, as it was government funded socialism squandered.
They’re not superstars but typical middle managers. Being good with computers is not what it used to be in this economy.
What are all these laid of workers going to do? Start dotcoms? Been there, done that is not going to sway the public.
You live in a filter bubble.
And even than the money for people I know, myself included. I want to like the work and the people most of the time and I want a life and side projects next to it. I don't care if the compensation is less for that.
(Ex fang) : Wish this were true. My experience is its working on a stack of entirely proprietary/2nd-rate tools with minimal documentation, weekly bugs within your core toolset, and with as much as 50% of your time being people-work.
Current FAANG employee here -- how I wish this were true.
As someone who did both (and have been at FAANG and the likes more recently), of course you will find incompetent colleagues everywhere, FAANG or not. The difference is, how many of those relative to the competent ones you will find on average.
It is a very different situation when a team of 8 has a couple incompetent devs vs. when a team of 8 has only a couple competent devs (aka the inverse).
Not trying to say that this is universally true for both FAANG and non-FAANG, exceptions apply in both cases and are based on a chance. Of course there are startups and non-tech companies that are composed almost entirely of very strong and competent devs. And there are some teams at FAANGs that are in "rest and vest" mode. But on average, that observation about the averages seemed to be true based on my personal experiences.
Also, shouldn't it be MAANA now instead of FAANG?
There is a sea of candidates who are both insanely ill-equipped, yet pass interviews regularly. I believe the competent candidate pool was probably exhausted 5 years ago, and businesses just kept hiring clueless people because they felt they had no choice. They aren't given enough user support and no training at all. As a result, employees are much less productive, struggling to do basic computing tasks when they were hired as technical people. And yet are payed vast sums by companies with more money than sense.
Like, if someone doesn't know how to chmod or how to set up a .zshrc, I can get them up and running in an afternoon.
These folks aren't clueless, they've just learned at a higher level of abstraction then you did. That's fine.
1) There is often a substantial depth of knowledge missing. E.g. it's not that they don't know how chmod works, it's that they don't understand conceptual models of filesystem permissions and the implications of having overly broad permissions.
2) The problem is often pervasive, where it isn't a single person that doesn't understand, it's a substantial (but non-majority) portion of the workforce.
3) Employees often only stay in their role for a year or two, creating a revolving door of people who don't understand X or Y.
> Can they do the job they were hired for?
It often depends on your definition of "doing the job". "chmod -R 777" will fix whatever issue is blocking the code from working, but is bad. And then someone else will use those permissions to build on top of that application, and it can spiral into a situation where it's incredibly hard to fix the bad permissions because of an unclear web of dependencies.
The app works, but the architecture is fubar.
But I'll engage with the questions intent. Would you hire a lawyer who doesn't know all the skills of their trade yet, because they are just entering the workforce? Does it impact his ability to practice law? Are they interested in learning but never had the opportunity? Sure, assuming I had something very straightforward I needed them for.
Heck, a lot of places offer discounts or free legal support based entirely on this premise - having an issue as a tenant? Go ask a young lawyer who is volunteering their time and is missing some skills, but knows the basics of landlord tenant laws.
Would you hire a lawyer who cannot use a computer (so no email, digital records, etc) and communucates exclusively through fax machines?
Mind you, they can claim to be a good lawyer otherwise, since none of those things directly contradict their claim of good lawyer skills. But something tells me that if they don't use digital record-keeping and can't utilize PACER, I will have my doubts in their practical usefulness.
Show up at office, get paperwork for a lease or a will, pay the lawyer, and move on.
An entry level engineer who doesn't know Linux is fine. An entry level lawyer who doesn't know pacer is fine. You just have to train them and only give them work they can handle with their skill set.
Some of the strongest engineers who walked through my teams started with no practical Linux knowledge, but they had a can do attitude. Give me the inexperienced but driven engineer over the experienced but unmoving engineer 10 out of 10 times.
I am all for letting people to learn on the job. But I, personally, would rather not risk it, knowing that the difference between them "learning as they go" and already knowing it might end up making the difference between me walking free and ending up in jail.
If it was something more trivial and with much lower stakes, like a traffic violation ticket, then sure, I wouldn't be so opposed to a lawyer that is figuring things out as they go.
Also, I think you might've missed the point of my original comment. It is one thing when a lawyer might not know something due to still learning their stuff, and another one when it is clear that they arent willing/planning to do so. If someone still uses fax as their primary mode of communication and refuses to use computers altogether in 2022, I have a feeling that it isn't due to them still trying to get the hang of it.
I have never worked anywhere where engineers got basic training. They were just expected to perform, and so they would perform poorly, because they lacked so much basic knowledge. There's such inconsistency and such little understanding that they often confuse each other and waste each other's time trying to figure out simple things.
That's the bulk of the entire industry now.
And everyone was expected to learn new skills over time, no matter their level or experience.
Meta may be trying to give Wall Street signals they are being prudent by cutting costs in the press, but actions are showing awareness that they need to double down to win.
What company wouldn't want to hire the best? I've been casually making mental notes of the positions/titles of the groups impacted, and it follows common sense that talent acquisition, administrative, junior level employees, units that no longer support the business mission, and low-performing employees (or ones that don't fit the culture) were let go.
If anything, the article could have pointed out that the performance expectations have been shifted-up a notch or two as the remaining employees (once considered to be high-performers) are now "average". This could become a vicious negative feed-back cycle if not appropriately managed.
sigh Corporate life can definitely be a drag. The holidays can't come fast enough!
Look into relationship of EU with technology.
Tech is seen as a potential force for good that has squandered opportunities. Amazon has dramatically gentrified Seattle, for instance, and done little bit shrug and make some relatively small donations to Mary's Place. (Which is good, but not enough.) Meanwhile, they push hard on local politics for a "business friendly" environment and their warehouse workers tell story after story of overwork, union busting, and physical harm.
Facebook and Instagram are great, until you run into problems like Instagrams negative impact on teenager's self esteem and suicide rates. Facebook has historically had some extremely questionable moderation decisions and does a ton of user tracking. But they've also enabled internet access for much of the world.
I think the left often feels ambivalent towards tech because it's something with huge upsides and many negative externalities that tech often shrugs at.
This has negative effects on many others in the economy. For example, Amazon bleeding out small retailers by capturing their supply chains and treating its own workers badly. Or Facebook manipulating teenagers into using its product despite the known negative effects on their mental health because engagement = money.
In such situations, something needs to counteract these companies' market power in order to reduce the negative effects on others. This can be consumer protections, labor laws, unions, antitrust litigation, or other types of regulation.
We've lived with a ton of such regulation that we don't even think about because it seems common sense. For example, we are not allowed to smoke inside a hospital, send our 10-year-olds to work in coal mines, or (supposedly) be forced to work 70-hour workweeks without overtime pay. It is only that the tech sector is too recent and we haven't figured out how to dampen its negative effects.
(I'd disagree that companies should maximize profit, but that's just a bit of an unrelated ideological difference.)