What Happens Now to All the Laid Off Tech Workers? [audio]

I'm a Sysadmin with some networking certs, and the linkedin messages have started coming in more frequently, and stating (quite good) salaries up front.

So it certainly does not seem like are 100,000 unemployed sysadmins in the job market currently.

The last 10 years or so have seen outsize investment in the product focused roles and comparatively little in infrastructure.

Generally speaking the trend has been "who cares just move it to the cloud" and then proceeding to not hire sufficiently to work on that infrastructure, which then leads to a move to a more expensive more managed version of the cloud, on and on until you are in a really bad spot and find yourself paying out the ass for an MSP.

There are way way fewer people with experience on the infrastructure side now as a result of basically being ignored for a decade, and so pay has been increasing rapidly.

Just go look at the department handling your company network or whatever you've got for infrastructure. Half those people are on deaths door. What's the plan for retirements when everybody new is just being funneled into front end development?

There have been studies which put the average age of successful founders in their mid-40s. We romanticize the kid in college making something happen, but the reality is that people need experience to see problems worth solving.

Found it: https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

I blame stock buybacks. Reminder that theyy were illegal untill recently.

And they perform no legitimate function other than being unregulated, tax-evading dividends.

> But in the United States, capital expenditures aren’t accelerating. Instead, new cash is being used to reduce the number of equities available, thus artificially driving up their value. That practice has been exploding. It’s an irresistible temptation, partly because everyone is doing it. Nobody wants to be left out. And the cash is just sitting there, idle, because it’s a rare C suite that has continued to invest in new, creative growth rather than pick the low-hanging fruit of easy money to be made through financial maneuvers. It was a good thing that companies receiving stimulus money to stay in operation during the Covid-19 shutdown have been banned from using it for stock buybacks. But it’s too little too late.

If I were you, I would make as much money as I can working for a big tech company (e.g. gigantic monopolistic company with too much money on their hands). When you're 40/50+, you'll see what your options are.

> and those useless HR departments staffed by those who can't do real work

As written by a guy who is:

> author, reporter, editor, blogger and columnist

So he just writes about stuff others are doing. Would that be real work then?

There seems to be an incredible arrogance in the tech community (and especially among devs) that only devs are real tech workers. That all these other roles like HR, legal, marketing, recruitment and management are just fluff and everything would be better and more efficient without them. This stuff is short sighted and wrong.

As a developer, do you want to write employment contracts? Do you want to think of benefits packages? Do you want to make sure the WiFi network is functioning correctly? You you want to change the ink cartridges on the printers? You you want to write down list of keywords for ad campaigns? Do you want to sit through sessions with investors who want to know everything about a product they hardly understand?

No, you don't and all these people exist because you don't have to all that stuff. They exist because they're good at handling those things while a dev is good at writing code. Are they annoying sometimes? Sure. Are there some people in those roles who don't add much value? Probably, but I've seen plenty of devs who didn't add much value.

Why do discussions in dev communities keep discounting all the layoff because "it's probably just recruitment"? These are still people who lost their jobs and need to find other jobs and their lives aren't worth less because the don't push code.

Work hours? I would think that _work hours_ would be a particularly _easy_ adjustment going from Big Tech to a bank; those are normally 9-5.

My guess at the parent commenter's presupposition would be that they had been overpaid and will now be forced to work for normal wages. At those lower wages, it might become economical to employ them, while those same people weren't economical at silicon-valley-scale wages.

They might be able to for example go work for a company that produces objects, and then sells them to consumers in exchange for money. Then the value of their skills will be a little more obvious I guess.