Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home.
Sure, things felt a bit crazy, but I remember thinking how lucky I was to land in tech as a career and that it was hard to see a future any time soon where the world wouldn't value tech workers highly.
Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have.
We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years and now we see this dramatic turnaround in hiring which will likely make it significantly harder to get a good tech job in the near future.
And in addition to this we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months.
It doesn't help that I'm going through a lot in my personal life at the moment too, but I've never felt so vulnerable about what the future holds.
I guess I should just be grateful that we had a good run while it lasted, but it's hard to think like that when people depend on you to have things figured out.
Anyway, I hope everyone involved in these layoffs lands on their feet.
Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck.
Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig.
The vast majority of over-hiring was with engineering-adjacent roles, think project managers, recruiters, hr, etc.
Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?
A trend of "everyone's constantly waiting on <blank>" should trigger the manager to think "if we could make <blank> not a bottle neck, we could raise our sprint utilization factor by x%" and thus set prioritization accordingly. Engineers still have to figure out how to do that.
The engineers need to surface information about where their processes suck, but they need prioritization to implement fixes
They'd be furious and would be raising hell about it. Very few people want to just warm their seats, especially engineers. They want to do things.
I have a hard time believing that most of the affected engineers haven't raised the problem to management.
Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge.
It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.
I have literally never seen this happen at any place I've worked. I think I must be doing it wrong!
that hasn't changed, and has nothing to do with layoffs. projects move at whatever speed they move at, and fires will pop up to steal the attention of others.
Do you have more info about the job. I keep seeing this, i did some interesting and hard work and it doesn't match what im coming across.
like remote ok? how much are you paying? whats the tech and problems being worked on?
I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation.
If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options:
- Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars.
- Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager.
- Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it.
And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain.
There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.
I keep seeing folks say this but I don't know if it is true. I just looked at some layoff lists from Twitter on layoffs.fyi and the vast majority looked to be Software Engineers of some shape or form.
Layoffs in the companies I personally know about have affected software engineers but have massively affected back-office staff and other business functions.
Nor are they on the same timezones.
Nor are they comparatively cheap to fly out, if needed.
There is a big reason why offshoring has been tilting more and more to Mexico City... or Alabama.
I think when people are planning for the future, they need to be realistic about what actually may happen rather than hoping for their preferred ideological outcome to happen. Don't write yourself off from ever getting a job, but at the same time understand that the job market of the medium term future will probably look radically different from the job market of the past. Very little of it will have anything to do with location. In fact, most jobs will probably be in the same places they've always been, it's just likely you won't get paid as much to do them. There will be more people vying for them. And they won't be quite as secure as they used to be.
Keep in mind that If I want to hire:
A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0]
my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone?
Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
The legitimate users of the H1B program are really looking for specialized skills and hard-to-find talent. Especially for software, it's not even cheaper to hire qualified candidates from abroad...
This is me. But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one. Maybe I'm bad at interviewing. A couple of places put me through ~8 hours of interviews all for nothing. I will also add that 3-4 of the places I interviewed with have since had a chunk of layoffs right up to discussions here about them. Maybe I actually got lucky? It sure didn't feel like it after that many failures in a row. Luckily I landed a new role that I'm finding I like.
Just wait till you get grey hair!
I wouldn't worry too much if I were you. Worst case scenario you can spend time intensively prepping for interviews. :shrug:
It does seem to be the common factor. Then again the industrialized interview processes some companies (some of which have since had bulk layoffs) suggests another possibility.
I hate having to develop interviewing as a skill. I'd rather develop my development skills.
Sometimes they're less sure of their plans than an interviewee might think.
There were anecdotes like this (and worse) even during the supposed hiring boom of 2021-2022. It was never a walk in the park as the prevailing narrative seems to portray.
I had multiple job openings for my team throughout the pandemic and I dont think that people who are not constantly exposed to the hiring side really understand how wonky things were.
You had this confluence of both whole sectors of the economy completely shutting down and tech experiencing a big boom. This caused A LOT of people to try to make a transition to tech.
I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc.
Most of these people are not going to make it in the industry long term (assuming they ever even got the first job). I wasn't around during the dotcom boom but I read stories about people landing six figure jobs because they learned HTML. Landing a 6 figure job by going to a 6 month React bootcamp is the modern day equivalent of that. Most of the 1999 HTML guys are no longer around. The bubble popped, the tech jobs were less plentiful and they moved on. I suspect the same will be true for most of the JS bootcampers.
It's almost as if you couldn't seriously be hired at a law firm after a 90 day Law bootcamp. Shocking.
I'm just angry at the people who run these bootcamps and lure "students" into cutting them big checks, promising them 70-80K jobs that never materialize.
> I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc.
That was for dev jobs. Imagine all the "tech adjacent" jobs out there (PM, tech recruiters, something something diversity). The signal to noise ratio during the pandemic was catastrophically bad. No wonder there are so many layoffs happening right now.
Why aren't there any entry level positions? We don't need any, we have 100M people with degrees everyone else in the world banging down the door to work here, so there's no incentive for corporations to train junior developers.
I never got any FAANG interviews until I'd had a developer job for a couple years. I got to a final round at Facebook, but didn't get hired there.
Still doing ok at that first job, though.
And yes, I agree, I am happy that I am not hitting the job market out of a bootcamp today.
about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100 (thats maybe 1 in 1000 cvs)
> Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have.
how long you have to do what? to learn? to make money? you will find a way to make money, i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine, some times you have to steal some bread, but its not the end of the world, and you have a life time to learn.
just don't stress too much, tech has ebbs and flows, your job does not define you.
i know you're exaggerating but it doesn't change that dev is extremely saturated.
and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.
ask someone how 'typing in a textarea in hackernews' works, and you will be surprised (just an example because thats what i am doing right now haha)
> and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.
of course, who said its going to be easy, my point was, it will be bad for a bit, then good for a bit and so on, it just happens that the youngsters now have only seen the good bit, and are freaking out because they think their job is who they are.
How does it work (or rather, what answer are you expecting from this question, from an interviewer standpoint)? I'd say something like, your keyboard sends an input event for each key that's captured by the OS, then translated to a letter, then transmitted to the application, in this case the browser. Or I guess the browser might also capture the key event and translate it itself rather than the letter (which would be how key rebindings work in online IDEs).
I've honestly interviewed developer candidates that didn't know what an operating system was. I asked this person what their favorite OS was and they answered "MS Excel". I politely asked them if that was an operating system and they declined to change their answer. Sure, at some point you might consider Excel an "OS" but I don't think they were thinking that deeply. Yes, the pool is that shallow, or at least it was back in the late 90's.
It is wonderful that we now live in a world of highly portable development where you don’t need to get into the nitty gritty to do basic things, but you’re missing out too much detail here.
You know when you write a web app, when you start it, you need to bind to a port? Guess what provides that port? What does it mean to “provide a port”? How does it physically work? How does this differ on Linux vs BSD vs Windows? Are there reasons you should care?
You know when you write a mobile app you need to use public apis to do things like draw to the screen or get user input? Guess what provides those apis? How do these APIs differ from OS to OS? What’s missing that you always reach for? How does local storage work? Or a remote API call work?
And then arguably the internet itself - and I mean it in the sense of the RFCs that define the behaviour - is an OS in itself. When you type something into your browser location bar and hit enter you start a chain of processes that involve DNS resolvers, root servers and registries, multiple routing algorithms (at different levels of the stack from Ethernet or wifi up to BGP), get invoked as your packets try to find their way to their destination, and the replies try to move their way back. Way, way below the HTML and CSS is this monster of dependencies. How does all that work? Why is it built that way? What are the failure modes and can you mitigate them?
These questions are rhetorical but they are meant to provoke a little nudge of curiosity: there is a rich, deep vein of thought that has gone into every corner of that experience, and knowing a little more about it will allow you to develop better software higher up the stack.
And honestly, even though I have worked mostly in the web app sphere for 20 years, if somebody just hand waves it all away in an interview, I know there is a lot of training we will need to do to get them to a level where they can successfully debug 100% of the issues we will see in production (and therefore reduce the chances of me getting paged).
It’s not a red flag, but if somebody walks in just as good everywhere else and is locked and loaded on this, I’m inclined to hiring them instead.
It would take a curious person a few weeks at a couple of hours a day to learn enough about this stuff to be able to talk to it and apply that knowledge. Meeting candidates who have never even thought about it is frustrating.
I have also never had an interviewer seem to want that level of detail. It probably depends on the job and the interviewer.
I am a little skeptical that there is a large enough pool of people out there who can meaningfully compare Linux vs a closed source OS like Windows, other than maybe current or former Microsoft employees. But I agree with your overall point that comparative knowledge is good.
I still struggle to find an accurate and complete single sentence definition, for if I were asked "what is an OS" in an interview though. Maybe I am being too pedantic and the best answer is just to start listing the parts or functions of an OS.
I had this vision when I got into computers that I'd be working with a lot of people who like and regularly use computers. No. I work with a bunch of people that heard computers were a good gig that paid well and got a degree that makes them useful in one very very specific area or at least seem useful in that area while they frustrate everyone around them until we get the email about how great it's been "accomplishing so much with" us but they've accepted a management role somewhere else.
There are some solid folks out there, but the ratio is indeed bad.
I've known maybe a dozen engineers who could describe the entire boot sequence all the way to the server being ready to receive a request, at a level where they could debug each stage and independently fill in the gaps. Same for the "enter text in hackernews textbox" or any of the other widely known full stack tasks.
I could tell you how I might build one of those but I'll inevitably be missing some associated detail.
I got a new position about 9 months ago, at a company that's not taking the current economic environment with much grace. Over the past 9 months the workplace has changed pretty drastically from what originally drew me here, so I'm looking for something new. (Which pains me, because I generally do not "job hop" like this, but most jobs also don't bait-and-switch like this)
I've gotten zero replies so far. There's a striking lack of "interesting" jobs to do on the market right now, and I'm shocked at the lack of interest I'm getting when I find them given my skillet, if I may be so bold. I think it's just a REALLY bad market out there.
To be fair, a lot of this may be due to lack of organizational knowledge transfer. I might be able to map a network drive at home, but I'd need someone to tell me what the location and stuff is if it's a pretty-existing drive at work.
But then again, maybe I'm one of the shitty developers you're talking about. I know I'm a low performer.
Windows, Linux, macOS? NFS, Samba, etc…? Simple folder share or are there AD credentials involved. We haven’t touched on what’s available in the cloud like efs.
There is so much now, that’s it’s hard to know it all. What they should be able to do is have some idea on what to google for.
It's not, 100's "applied" on LinkedIn's job ad mean nothing when the most applicants can't even explain a for loop.
I'm seeing mid-level backend devs making 350k who e.g. don't know what SQL indexes are. These people are going to get cut, I'm a lot less worried for people who know what they're doing.
Yo where is this? I am not making anywhere near that and am pretty confident in those kind of skills.
Maybe big tech / FAANG, but not at all the other companies that still struggle to fill positions. I can find front end people with some work, native mobile is impossible, backend is hit and miss.
It seemed fairly obvious from the GP: How long they have before they get laid-off and struggle to find employment in the technology industry.
> i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine
I've lived on $0 a day, seeing as I've literally been homeless and dead broke in my life, but today I have a demanding career, a spouse, children, dogs, a home, etc., and all of them are massively dependent on me.
I don't think I'm personally at-risk of losing my job today but, like the GP, I also have to regularly engage with my brain to keep my anxiety about the future of the technology industry at bay.
edit/ And that's just me, I'm a US citizen and CBP can't come deport me because my Visa expired. There are other things at stake here for a lot of people beyond the simple act of earning an income.
Many people can relate to that.
On a more serious note, there is not much we can do about all this, really. We neither have the complete picture nor know what hides behind the corner. So relaxing a bit (while still taking the time to learn some new skills...) is not bad advice.
Future benefits of technology will primarily be enjoyed by the 1% with the other 99% becoming poorer and working (hours wise) more.
The history of technology & capitalism is quite the reverse.
A few years back, a steamboat from the 1850s was discovered buried in the muck in the Missisoupi. Archeologists rushed to dig it up and discover what it was carrying. They had the same notion you did. They were shocked that the steamboat was not carrying luxury items at all. It was loaded to the gills with manufactured stuff for ordinary folks. Things like factory made shoes, textiles, tools, pots, pans, dishes, bottled food, nails, hardware, etc.
You see the same thing today with, for example, the iphone. That machine was made for everyone, not just the 1%. And it made Apple the richest company in the world.
Look at what wealthy tech companies make - they make stuff for ordinary people.
Umm, what?
The iPhone is meant to be a status symbol, not "for everyone".
The next generation will have a lower quality of life than ours. They will have less wealth, they will work more, they will experience less.
Just looking back to 2003 compared to now and there’s so much more information and opportunity compared to 20 years ago. It’s not uniform and there are certainly some parts worse (housing) but I think that just the example of smart phones shows a huge leap of businesses and life improvements available now. I expect improvements to be available 20 years from now.
For who? Real wages have been falling for decades. 'Quality of life' is amorphous. Do we have a higher quality of life than people did 20 years ago? We're fatter, we have less wealth, we spend more time commuting, it's basically impossible to buy a house for most people.
I'd disagree with your assessment that we are better off than we were in 2003.
Somebody gets to pay for this:
https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...
and it's gonna be you and me.
I appreciate that capitalism has been better than any of its competitors in every case to date in raising living standards. There's no question.
But I still think it isn't equipped to handle automation and AI on a very large scale. If I'm right it'll become painfully obvious as soon as something approaching or close-enough to AGI appears. And the trajectory we're on seems to make that appear to be something we'll see in the 2020s rather than the 2100s or beyond as I previously thought.
If by 2029 90% of the knowledge work humans do today can be done more cheaply by a LLM, that's a tremendous shock to the system. Especially if they'll be able to start to write code efficiently and create new AI models to solve problems, we could rapidly see easier problems like self-driving cars solved in a few years. Which leaves as available human jobs "politician" (presumably robots are banned from holding office) as well as any forms of skilled and unskilled manual labor that require walking around. If computer vision etc become good enough it's not hard to conceive of a bipedal android that can do tasks like build houses, deliver packages from a truck, etc.
In this situation, the vast majority of Americans would not have "jobs" in that no business wants their labor when a machine is cheaper and better. Capitalism dictates that those 90% starve. See the problem?
Note: I'm not saying the above will come true. Just that if the technology part does come through, I'm arguing capitalism as-is simply will not work anymore. And the breakdown would hurt everyone. The wealthy won't have any consumers to sell to when all consumers are unemployed.
Capitalism works imho because of scarcity. When 'labor' isn't really scarce anymore due to AI, that is a fundamental change that is bound to totally transform the game. It's like playing Mario Bros with gravity turned to 10000% so you can't jump. The game controls and level design then no longer make sense.
I'd encourage you to read up more on current affairs! Capitalism is global. How happy do you think impoverished people in Vietnam are? How about people exposed to toxic chemicals for their entire lives?
Your understanding of capitalism is based on a 50 year blip. You should read up on your history.
Capitalism is not why they are exposed to toxic chemicals as you say. It's the corruption...which won't be solved if we are using some other system.
I lived in Vietnam for a couple of years, very recently. I could drive around with no license and pay police officers some cash if I got caught. Sometimes they would shake people down when they were low on money, especially around Chinese new year. This was also in a big city.
I also wonder what your alternative would be? Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit. Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).
It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.
It's not corruption. It's capitalism. Who do you think funds the corruption in Vietnam? Don't look to closely at Nike or Apple's connections in SE Asia.
Vietnam was just an example. Capitalism firms expose billions of people all over the world to unsafe conditions to maximize profit, even in the United States and Europe.
> Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit.
Your post reads like every conservative in existance. It's not capitalism's fault! It's just everything that exists in a capitalist system!
>Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).
I'm not sure why you are rambling about communism or socialism. You understand that there are a lot of economic and societal theories in the world. You don't have to buy into binary narratives.
>It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.
It's funny how many privileged people refuse to acknowledge the huge amount of human suffering caused by capitalism.
If you look at Vietnam before capitalism and after. It's a big difference. But I don't think you care about this.
Why do you think children have to work in these countries? If not for companies like Nike, they would have nothing and no ability to feed their family because of the government in power.
You are the privileged one. Not understanding actual human suffering.
All systems contain human suffering. Capitalism allows for actual freedom.
You still haven't given me an example of a better system.
Fun fact: "The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")" [0]
Both Blanc and Proudhon were socialists.
Further more, I would argue that kindness and sexual intercourse have been responsible for more human happiness than our current economic system, although it's possible that by "everything else" you meant "any other economic system", in which case maybe you would have a point, with the caveat that perhaps more primitive economies (your stereotypical 'merry band of hunter gatherers') would have, on average, healthier and happier inhabitants.
Or that 'socialist' Danes tend to be much happier than 'capitalist' Americans.
Or that with the regulatory capture of most industries by big company lobbying, our current economic system would more correctly be described as corporatism, where the means of production are owned not by individuals but by corporations.
And you could also argue that the North Korea/USSR were less happy than Western countries due to democratic, liberal governments being nicer than authoritarian ones.
^_^
I think it’s a transitional economic force though. Like it works for getting super poor, super inefficient systems up to moderate and then starts scooping up and concentrating.
I feel like being able to complain about capitalism is a luxury created by capitalism and people who are too poor complain about other things (like starving to death). Similarly to the shift from dying from infectious disease to dying from chronic disease due to eliminating or reducing preventable disease. It’s not that vaccines cause cancer and diabetes, it’s that vaccines stop people dying earlier of vaccine preventable diseases.
> Amazon is undergoing the largest layoffs in company history after it went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
This isn't to suggest there's no other factors, but monetary policy is a major driving force in the boom/bust cycle.
Why would a company entertain demands of Spoiled Tech Dudes Union, whose work can be performed by people overseas equipped with ChatGPT for a fraction of cost?
This could be not too distant the future, if IT workers decide to unionize
Here in the UK the unions are medium-strong and haven't prevented self checkouts, ticket sellers being replaced with machines, etc.
What you need is strong labor laws. A universal three or six month notice period in favour of the employee would do wonders to prevent overhiring and overfiring.
Tech workers are the most privileged class of workers in the whole world. No one will take you seriously when you say these things. Also the metaphor doesn’t make sense. I wish we could keep this Reddit style, front page politics off our tech website.
Which is why it only takes a layoff or threat of layoff for many of them to feel like the world is ending. Not to minimize the impact that a layoff can have on someone.
HN is not just a "tech website". Never has been. You seem to not understand what hacker means.
Having six months of outflows liquid in a special savings account goes a long way for peace of mind.
This is an unreasonable fear. If your job can be automated, you should be out of work. If you are delivering actual value, you will always have opportunities.
Someone is still going to be doing the automating. Computers can't think.
ICE has priorities, and this is very far from being one of them.
Generally if you want gov assistance in the US, you pretty much need to be poor for a full calendar year, plus about 4 months.
Also, in CA, you can make an "urgent" application and be enrolled within 2 days. I requires some pressing medical problem, but that doesn't have to be life or death.
It's really not. Also no asset test so you can have a nice house and $100,000 and you still qualify as if you were utterly broke.
I learned this because it almost happened to me. I learned about it after a lot of phone calls to the insurance company piecing together this rarely talked about possibility.
What leads you to believe that fizzbuzz is a relevant litmus test for competent software developers?
It weeds out people who can't write code at all.
Yes, tons of them do apply for dev jobs.
Wrong. Fizzbuzz is the epitome of a hiring test that is gamed by rote learning and adds absolutely nothing in terms of decisive info on wether s candidate is competent or not.
Your argument is like arguing in favour of using hello word in as many languages as possible and then claim that there is no need to memorize them because that's the point of the question.
that said i would only want to do it on a terminal, not on a whiteboard. i'd probably fuck that up somehow.
The concept of FizzBuzz? If you are a programmer you should be able to write a simple program with arithmetic and string manipulation. There's no reason an interviewer needs to ask exactly the FizzBuzz - but just something a bit like it. Asking the exact question from the blog is pretty lazy anyway.
For the love of god, please Google what fizzbuzz is.
People who need to memorize a solution to that have no business coding.
Yes, please do google what fizzbuzz is. You'll eventually stumble upon resources on how to memorize fizzbuzz, which is such a Hallmark of the test that it's even explicitly mentioned in the C2 wiki on fizzbuzz.
Fizzbuzz basically just tests you know how to use a conditional, do division/mod, and print to console.
I'd argue someone who cannot do those three things has no business applying for a dev job, regardless of how many times one actually needs to fizzbuzz in 'the real world.'
No, fizzbuzz test rote learning and it mainly serves to game the hiring system.
Its so far from anything useful I've done.
By now surely there's a Python module for it anyway!
Either you're really, really crappy at filtering resumes and other pre-interview signalling - or you're exaggerating.
No doubt they exist - but they aren't 99 percent of all resume-screened applicants. Let alone co-workers.
For some, it's the boot sequence of a PC. For others, it's the Liskov Substitution Principle. For others, it might precise definitions of all the database transaction or normalization levels.
That is - pieces of genuinely useful knowledge, to be sure. Stuff we probably should have been exposed to at least once. But also stuff that, once we've gotten the basic point - is easy to slip out of our muscle memory over the years.
Especially as we end up doing, you know, real work for real people. And we start to develop genuine technical horse sense that goes beyond the ability to memorize (and retain for years and years) zillions of verbal definitions for things.
That's what worries me. There was a time when I could write low level C and even some assembly. Similarly there was a time when I could explain the ins and outs of IP packets and routing. However, none of that is what the market wanted and I don't remember any of that anymore.
Heck, with most of my work involving running around trying to hold understaffed systems together and juggle the unreasonable demands of management; I don't even have the programming/web development skills that I used to.
This is very reminiscent of the dotcom bubble. If you knew how to turn a computer on you could get a relatively high paying tech job.
The quality of tech talent has dropped significantly in recent years, even (maybe especially?) among the leetcode grinding crowd. Software engineers have already replaced themselves with AI by turning into interviewing machines that know how to survive in a large tech company but if asked to build and ship a product from nothing would be completely frozen.
I really miss programming in the post-dotcom shadow. Most people in tech where in it because they loved writing code and solving hard technical problems. TC was literally not a term at that point, virtually nobody had RSUs, comp was fine but nothing amazing. There were plenty of jobs that paid better than writing software so all the people looking for a quick buck fled there and left coders alone.
If you could do a 180 switch this quickly I think you should look inward. The concept that you could be more concerned about the future in 2023 rather than 3 years ago where a novel virus was killing thousands per day would be funny if it wasn't so absurd - consider therapy, because this seems to be an internal issue rather than a problem with the world at large.
Nobody should be "wishing for 2020". Everyone in this country is better off than they were in 2020 at this point.
[0] https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/small-business-applicants...
Some of the players changed, but they've also changed since 2015 and 2011, yet I don't hear anyone complaining about either of those years.
If I live to 2073, I fully expect to still keep hearing the meme that half of the small businesses in this country permanently closed in 2020. It'll be as nonsensical then as it is today.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-i...
They even will accept english if you're a good developer as lingua franca instead of german. YMMV
regarding the rest - with german pay you wont have money to travel across Europe. your best bet will be "backbacker" style travel on budget - which is hard to do with kids.
and dont get me at the quality of their daycares....
Unlike in the USA, these people in Germany don't get their insane voices boosted by the ballot box equivalent of Affirmative Action (aka the Senate and Electoral College). Their views have remained far from the PM's office.
And Germans have plenty of money (and vacation days) to travel across Europe, in fact you will encounter them pretty much everywhere.
The quality of care in German daycare centers is still not great despite recent improvements, I'll give you that.
I would consider moving to Germany before considering the UK. I certainly wouldn't ever move to the US.
The only place you mentioned I would rank above Germany is Switzerland.
The other thing to keep in mind is that tech has attracted a lot of people in it just for the crazy money that FAANGs pay, despite that not being representative of the industry as a whole. Regardless, as that crazy money exits there will be less of those people.
At the end of the day worry without preparation is pointless. I don't think it's a tech apocalypse, but I also work for a company that was formed in the wake of the dotcom crash. Crashes can cause problems for incumbents, but it also provides opportunity for others.
I think a lot of the industry shake up will be to clear house of these people. At big tech companies it’s easier to hide, especially remotely, but slowly layoffs or PIP will come for some of them, and they will have a harder time getting a job than the rest. I just hope the layoffs can affect the management layer like the IC later, because I’ve seen the growth of pretty crappy management.
I was recently laid off, and I know a few other people laid off. I have years of doing projects and contributing to OSS and being a technically curious learner. I found a new job much faster than my peers who admittedly joined tech for the money and don’t care to learn or grow beyond their next pay raise.
I will echo the preparation thing though. I started saving an extra few months of salary across 2022, and tried to convince my partner to lower spending for a while.
"Why do you want to work here?"
Because money rocks, my dude. I'll give a nice politic answer in an interview, but I'm there to do a job.
However, for many people who are only in it for the money and do the minimum necessary additional exploration in the domain - if they find that they need to switch technologies or domains they may not have practiced enough to be able to make that switch in a timely manner.
On the other hand, people who continue to explore outside of the "this is what is needed to do my job" will be more likely able to adapt to a new stack or show to a interview panel that they are able to change to fit the needs of the organization.
I care about my income, pick good jobs and negotiate my salary. I also care about technology, and care about the quality of the product I work on. I don't care about "family" or whatever.
If you're in tech for the money, and the money dries up, you'll leave. That was my point. I personally work in tech because I enjoy technology and I enjoy software development (the money helps). I don't think ill of someone who is in it for the money, money is important. That said, if you're in it for the money, and you're not in-tune with the industry (or trying), I won't shed a tear if you have trouble staying in it during a down-cycle.
I do think ill of managers who are in it just for the money and don't care about anything beyond their middle-management fiefdom. I've worked with plenty of them, and I enjoyed working with none of them, and I think they've all had a bad affect on the success of the business (especially at scale).
Deep breaths. All industries are cyclic. We've been here before, we'll be here again. From my perspective as a wizened curmudgeon, this is more directly disruptive to tech careers than 2008/9 was. But it's significantly less of an existential disaster than 2001.
It is true, though, that to new entries to the labor market, these things can be unfair. Someone coming out of college last year had a vastly different experience than a very similar candidate trying to get a job right now. And that sucks. But over decades, things even out.
I felt the opposite:
I have no idea how anyone could look at the tech craziness for the past 3-4 years, especially after COVID, and think any of it was sustainable. But I've also lived through a couple of these economic cycles...
Things like remote work, many people absolutely loved it, and it changed how people can work and hire. It had far-reaching affects, and many thought it'd last. Not everyone was convinced, of course, but we had proven it works for at least some conditions. As Facebook recently announced, it may not work as well, but for many organizations, the savings is better than the decrease in productivity.
Regarding a lot of the crazy tech-industry changes like salaries, employment demand etc, yeah I totally didn't think it'd last either. Same with the affects of 0% interest rates (not that I really invested any differently).
I think this probably has the majority effect on how you're feeling. Jobs come and go, layoffs happen. I've been laid off and I've been fired, and I've found jobs afterwards. As long as you have a decent bankroll to keep you going through a couple months (easy for me to say as I'm single and have supportive family), I wouldn't worry about THE STATE OF THE WORLD/ECONOMY.
Many people who choose full-time work for corporations would not have an experience any differenr whether they worked in Soviet Russia or USA or Feudal Japan. These corporations (especially in Japan) are intertwined with our lives and even sense of self-worth. In Japan they coordinate with your landlord. Here they are who gives you health insurance etc.
If we had strong safety nets, none of this mentality would be an issue. You’d be jumping for joy that a project or warehouse has been automated and you don’t have to be a cog in a machine or warehouse wage slave.
That’s if we had UBI and Universal Health Insurance too. People would work on projects because they want to, whether that is art, science, open source, wikipedia or other gift economies. At the end of the day, that’s where DALL-E, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot get their content to ape from. It’s our collective work product! We humans have given it away online for these companies to scrape and build models from.
Be proud. Stop demanding a living wage and health insurance from a corporation and start demanding a Universal Health Insurance and a UBI in your community. We have to start valuing stuff the market doesn’t.. raising children instead of government schools, taking care of our own parents instead of nursing homes. Look around … if you and your partner are working 10 hour days just to make ends meet, the problem isn’t robots taking your job. It’s society not truly valuing human beings authentically living their lives!
> we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months.
I am of a realistic nature that in today's craze over anything people tend to call pessimistic. However, some of the code generation examples we've seen are truly astonishing, but a far cry from replacing anyone in the real world. Best case scenarios it would save you minutes.
> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years
You're being very generous with the word "talent" there. Things have been a bit crazy and all, but from anecdotal evidence the large influx of new developers has done what large influx always do and lowered the bar.
I've literally been asked in two different companies who boast about their standards being high to "leave aside my ideals" and have "realistic expectations", while the only thing changing in the set {expectations, hiring goals} being the latter. "we need to hire very good people very fast" while not changing anything about the process and sourcing has to make you forgo one of these two. It's physical, people don't get instantiated out of thin air.
So I think it may be harder on average to find a job in software for a while, mostly because of the direction of the job market, but it will be harder for people with less experience, and those who can do something else in which they have experience will also be incentivized to do so.
If you're worried about ChatGPT taking your job you weren't doing much. We're still going to need humans to find the horrible bugs in codebases caused by humans copypasting ChatGPT output into production code. You need to become an actual expert in something. Pick a system that is critical to your employer and get good at it.
Harsh, but it has to be said! Too many devs are focused on code rather than the business it serves.
Very true, colleges have been seeing double-digit growth in applicants of CS majors every year in the past 10+ years, and this year the number of applicants is at least 2x more than last year. That said, I'm not sure about the growth rate of qualified talent. At least 8 out 10 senior engineers who I interviewed could only throw some terms around and draw a few boxes. "Experts" of Apache Beam can't write a simple word count using even pseudo code of Beam's APIs. The team leads from FAANG could talk only about team coordination but not specifics of the tech stacks of their systems. ML experts could throw terms like BERT around but could not explain simple things like the difference between layer normalization and batch normalization, let alone coming up with models to solve specific problems. Experts of distribute system couldn't design a simple stateful system or articulate any distributed algorithm. The list can go on and on.
Given such shortage of true talent, I'd rather worry about whether there will be growth in IT the industry. Without growth opportunities, investment will drop, so will the demand of talent.
> Experts of distribute system couldn't design a simple stateful system or articulate any distributed algorithm.
What do you picture as an acceptable answer? Leader election via broadcast? Simple link-state routing? Something more complex?
It almost sounds like part of the problem is convincing competent people that the bar is lower than they perceive it to be.
Is it that most of your applicants are liars with what they put on their resume? Or that those specific skills you mentioned aren’t applicable to their day-to-day work? Or is that your expectations are out of line with the reality of their work or is there something amiss with your interview style?
Btw, I use copilot every day. It makes me more productive. Someday I may only use copilot or maybe I'll do something else.
Nothing is permanent. Speak to those who have been laid off, and make sure you can take care of yourself if it happens, but then stop worrying. You'll suffer more in imagination than reality.
The good news is that what came after that contraction was a huge wave of innovation that became known as Web 2.0. Most of the unicorns you're familiar with today came out of that period. Keep your chin up and you'll see.
So far this is nothing like that from what I can tell. People are taking longer to land positions and at least some of the highest compensation will be very hard to come by, but there seem to be lots of positions. They may just be in insurance companies rather than prestigious tech companies.
In my case, I had worked for a computer company as a product manager (with some coding on the side) and then an IT industry analyst--and there was very little in that vein.
I also did a little HTML/JavaScript and Perl.
I graduated in 1996 and while I did take classes in FORTRAN and COBOL, I also took a class in C.
I learned C++, Microsoft technologies (MFC, COM, etc$ VB6 and SQL on the job as well as HTML, JavaScript and Perl from the O’Reilly series of books by 2000.
It's absolutely not true that getting a job in tech, in general, wasn't a big deal in the early 2000s.
>Back then...
Oh wait...
So, no, in general terms there were no easy money then compared to today (or the years up to today).
But sure, a lot of the money that was around at that time went into IT/dotcom companies instead of into other sectors.
When you pull up the financials for many newly IPO'd companies you'll see that many of them have questionable ability to ever generate profit, and most certainly not at the size they are at. However all of them have pretty healthy cash reserves from the (obviously overvalued) IPOs they just went through.
Facebook/Meta was the poster-child for "don't worry about profit, just worry about growth!" For years it was assumed that Facebook proved this strategy made sense, but even today we're seeing this giant falter. Even if Facebook pulls it off, it doesn't mean that many of the "growth is all that matters!" startups following in its shadow will.
We'll see companies fail, but this bubble will take a lot longer to unwind than the dotcom bubble.
I think Uber might be a better example of the strategy you're referring to.
Only I'm a low performer who might have a real chance at getting fired for performance issues.
Also, you are not competing with new talent, unless you are entry level.
My assumption is that by next summer, interest rate will go back down to 1.5% (the long term growth based on demographic) and than you will see tech rise again (as it is still the only growth story around).
There is of course a lot of nepotism and politics but generally if you have talent you will be employed. There is simply too much demand for talented tech people.
The large layoffs are not good but they are course correcting and these companies are still actively hiring despite the billboard layoff announcements.
I have watched engineers consistently automate themselves out of a job and didn't even have the foresight to update their resume because they over inflated their own self value to the company.
Hint: You are about as valuable as your tech companies building's custodian crew. Tech companies know their burn rates, why do you think they stay close to campuses like Berkley? Plenty of fresh blood to burn through.
I love programming but I certainly hate most ofthe tech companies and products that exist nowadays. I’m part of it, though, since it doesn’t pay that bad in this part of the world (not usa).
Toys aren't useless. People enjoy playing. I'd certainly rather work on a "toy" that lots of people use and enjoy than some CRUD app to handle insurance claims data or some other random "serious business" use.
But seriously, Twitter is a global network that can disseminate news globally in minutes, its been used to start revolutions. TikTok, YouTube, etc help distribute knowledge, and grow communities. "Thousands of SaaS apps" help people work better, faster, quicker, and employ millions of workers to build and maintain. "Millions of NPM libraries" are the result of the toil of countless developers choosing to freely share their hard work and learning to anyone who wants it.
What is not a waste of time to you? What is noble enough to receive your approval?
The real problem right now is not the layoffs. The layoffs are needed, because many companies cannot reasonably justify their headcount, and it's destructive to a culture to have so many new people join so fast. If you've worked at the same company since 2021 you might have more tenure than half your coworkers!
The real problem is the hiring freezes. These especially impact new grads, but also experienced people will have trouble finding jobs simply because few companies are actively hiring. If you get laid off from a FAANG you might be able to find a startup job paying ~1/4 to 1/2 of your previous total comp. Might as well just not work for a year. Businesses overhired so much they need to shed more employees before they can even backfill or grow teams that work on things that make sense.
This happened in 2001 too, but the big difference between now and then is we aren't seeing a lot of tech companies completely fail and go out of business.
GPT is cool, and has a lot of potential uses, but don't be scared by the hype.
The biggest impact GPT is going to have on most people's software careers is that everyone will have to include "Prompt engineering" on their resumes in the very near future, and data science/ML folks are going to have to answer a lot more questions about transformers by people who have never heard of "Attention is all you need", even though the deepest they'll have to dive into the subject in practice is a few api calls.
Google, Amazon, Salesforce, etc. all have reported very healthy quarterly earnings and year-end results. Yet their actions are those of failing companies operating in the red for multiple quarters.
Every company is giving the same excuses --ahem, I mean reasons-- ("overhiring", "economic downturn"), laying off the same amount of people, and making their announcements within days of each other.
Have we ever seen such an industry-coordinated event like this? Especially with no public data supporting their actions?
The real reasons many believe for these layoffs amount to taking back the power & control that employees gained in 2020 until early 2022:
1. Salary correction: Compensation boomed, with major tech companies offering new grads and junior engineers job offers high than employees 2 levels higher. Has there ever been a time that employee pay raised so quickly?
2. Corporate control: Leadership wanted everyone back in the office but employees collectively refused. Can you think of another time where companies had lost this much control over their own workforce?
3. Pay Wall St: The only public financial data to support layoffs of this kind are from the stock prices, which mostly plummeted. However, they did not plummet due to poor performance but rather due to the macroeconomic events out of their control. Even at their present day levels, they are still mostly above their pre-pandemic highs. And guess what? Almost every other company's stock price in most industries fell significantly as well. With the profits erased from the surged stock prices, layoffs are the quickest and easiest way to push up a company's value.
I can only hope that employees continue to band together to know their worth and not settle for less.
Funny, I attribute that "assistance" to improvements in hardware and networking. Today's commercial software is not great to say the least. And then we have the ridiculous amount of surveillance that comes with it.
Without a doubt, computers and networks are proving their worth. But intermediaries calling themselves "tech" companies I am not so sure. It seems the market, too, is questioning the need for them.
If you work for a company like Amazon, and you don't want to be laid off, the only thing you can do to move the needle is join a union. (You can also be a top performer, but it's not clear how big of a difference that makes; top performers with big salaries make big targets for layoffs as well.)
They do stifle the ability for ultra-rich CEOs from becoming even more ultra rich at the expense of their workers.
american automakers produce one of the low quality cars, and heavy lobbying from lawmakers is the only thing that keeps them afloat.
Argument: I do not see a single [union] effective at "Stifling CEO's from becoming rich".
1st Proof: American Automakers produce low quality cars.
2nd Proof: The only thing keeping them in business is lobbying from American Lawmakers.
Your proof has nothing to do with your argument. At all. They're not related. They're also very subjective and impossible to actually prove. They're not proof; they're opinion.
A more effective argument would be:
Proof: The largest Union employers are x, y, z, and their CEO's make $x, $y, $z.
CEOs are not the rich class, they are elite but they are employees. Plenty of CEOs get fired for doing bad job, or get softly pushed out.
Argument that labor union keep CEOs from getting rich is absurd because CEOs are part of labor force.
it is shareholders who get rich by squeezing profit, so I dont get why bring up CEOs. A CEO maybe get paid $10 mln a year. But shareholders get dividends/buybacks in order of hundreds of mils/blns
My argument was that labor unions lead to piss poor quality due to mediocrity (example: US automakers).
the japanese automakers have factories in the US and produce much higher quality cars without labor unions. How come???
While this is sometimes true, the executive status class overlaps significantly with the haut bourgeois economic class (and most of the rest of the executive status class is in the petit bourgeois economic class; there are probably working class “CEOs” somewhere, but they are very much not the norm), and very typically they are specifically significant holders of capital in the firm of which they are CEOs. CEOS are not just employees, and their relationship to either the firms they control or the economy more generally are not very much like those of regular employees.
tech is more merit based, compared to traditional boomer's industries. I dont see how CEOs in tech are part of elite, while they are simply hired managers. You do your job well - you can become ceo one day
Any CEO making $10M/yr would only need to work for a year before they could retire and live comfortably the rest of their life without ever touching the principal.
Layoffs affect these groups differently.
Audi Q5
BMW Serie 3
BMW Serie 2 coupé
Honda HR-V
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Jeep Compass
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[1] https://www.motorpasion.com.mx/industria/autos-produccion-me...
Engines, tranny, suspension parts are manufactured in US/Europe/Japan and simply shipped to Mexico for assembly due to NAFTA favorable trade agreement and cheaper labor for simple assembly
You removed a major conditional.
I do not care if the CEOs become rich, the dream of getting rich via business success is why capitalism works, what I care about is if they do it by underpaying their employees because of a power differential.
there is a bell-curve for leadership, and it's pretty damn clear after centuries of mercantilism and capitalism that they're not smarter than you are. it's a cartel, and the bellcurve applies to them just as much as it applies to your SWE I's straight out of college.
problem is most retail investors never even vote for annual shareholder meetings and never bother to read proxy statements and shareholders' meeting agenda.
For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy.
Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical.
I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works.
Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine.
All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business.
Why would anyone gove a vote to these people?
Employees are critical in literally every industry, otherwise they wouldn't be employed.
> For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy.
You're confusing "importance to the business" with "market power". Tech employees generally tend to have market power in the current economy. And how many of those options (read: lottery tickets) and shares even grant the employee voting power?
> All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business.
This is absolutely not true at the companies where I've worked. Can't speak for FAANG.
> I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works.
This is a really weird example to generalize from. Most businesses are absolutely not organized this way.
> Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine.
This is speculation. Google does a lot of things that aren't directly "making money on ads", but if they didn't think those things were worth doing, they wouldn't do them.
> Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical.
Weirder still is the notion that businesses ought to give their employees voting shares based on some notion of criticality to the business. I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions. Some leftists argue that the union should be entitled to this share. I won't even go that far, although I think it's a good idea.
if we talking in a context of unions, then there is nuance. Employee class can be critical, but unionized employees - may not be critical to business. If unionized employee is replaceable cog that anyone with Associate degree/IT Bootcamp and 3 month training/offshore worker can do the job, then unionized employees lose their bargaining power, and the incentive to unionize disappears.
US airline pilots enjoy unionization because US laws require quite extensive training&experience to become pilot, so that only former US Air Force pilots can qualify. With these Government protections it is easy to enjoy labor union benefits.
Try to pull it off in tech? Unionized folks will be fired and their jobs will be offshored very quickly.
>> I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions.
This argument could work in 20th century, where the barrier to create business was huge. To become factory/steel mill owner you gotta have huge capital$$$, and most ordinary folks had to be laborers for life. So there was natural divide between owner class (capitalists) and labor class, so labor unions provided some sort of bargaining power and a seat at the big table.
Nowaday in tech - literally anyone can create a startup. Anyone with a pulse and a PowerPoint deck could have create a startup funding during zero interest rate era. Some FAANG engineers earn more in salary+stocks than some business owners make in profit (talking about traditional small-medium businesses like barbershop or corner shop owners)
That means there is no real divide between capitalists class and laborer class. In 21st century your brain is the capital, not money. Money is cheap and investors are willing to fund good brains with good ideas.
Because not everyone is gifted with good brains, this created a natural divide within modern laborer class. People with good brains don't want to share big pie with every other laborer (via labor union). They'd rather become capitalists and get the biggest slice of pie for themselves.
This is why capitalism and market forces always win, and archaic schemes like labor unions are unfit for 21st century where quite a bit of jobs can be offshored/Automated/ChatGPT'ed
I frankly dont see this idea getting any traction
Like in Cuba, Russia/Soviet Union, DPRK, or Campuchia during Pol Pot's time?
"workers should organize for greater market power to prevent abuse by employers" - tech engineers dont need it - because if you dont like it - you can simply leave to another employer. market forces will find equilibrium, labor union is only an obstacle in reaching market equilibrium.
it is telling that people who escaped communist countries never want to see any sign of communism in their life. Because communism doesnt work, never worked, and will never work
This is my whole point. This is only true for some, and it's not distributed according to merit. People get mistreated all the time at both tech and non-tech companies, even in career fields that are traditionally high-paying and high-mobility. The only way to stop that in a way that also promotes a relatively free labor market is for workers to self-organize, and for the government to legally protect their right to do so.
I understand your concerns about communism. Nobody in their right mind is proposing that we bring communism to the USA. The fortunate workers who have market power uniting to support for their fellows who lack market power is not itself communism, nor does it lead to communism. American labor unions are not communism, and never will be.
The USA once developed a strong tradition and culture of organized labor that brought us out of the brutality of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. There were plenty of smaller socialist and even anarchist groups at the time, but in general most people were not that radical, and no group anything resembling the Bolsheviks ever gained popular support in the USA.
Ironically however, communism indirectly enabled big business to crush that tradition of organized labor, because the Red Scare of the early 20th century allowed them to label pro-labor policy as socialist or communist and therefore anti-American and anti-freedom.
If anything, the kinds of labor unions that people join the USA are a uniquely capitalist institution, being dedicated specifically to the purpose of balancing asymmetric market power.
How do you define if it is or not distributed to merit?
Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?
I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.
You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.
You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping? You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol
Work performance?
> Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?
No. The price system is very efficient at certain kinds of allocation, but not in all or even most cases.
> I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.
Only if you have enough savings to survive without income and/or you can easily find a comparable job, which is not even true for many high-wage tech employees anymore.
> You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.
Yes, that was temporary.
> You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping?
It won't, because it currently doesn't. This is not at all an established phenomenon.
> You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol
This simply isn't true. Even labor unions that struggle to negotiate with management are doing better than 1.5% over a decade. I'd be interested to see some data on this, but I'd bet that median union-negotiated wages are rising at about the same rate as median non-union-negotiated wages (read: slower than inflation). I say "median" and not "average" because there will be high earners who have seen huge pay increases recently that would skew the mean upwards.
I am in camp of owner-operators, cause I see myself one day creating a startup and hiring engineers and I dont want to deal with unions in any capacity.
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
In a market economy, successful unions are powerful interest groups. They tend to have more influence on political parties than the other way around. Much like big businesses, but on a different subset of politicians.
Oddly enough, I don't see too many former communists movie to Somalia or Ethiopia or Afghanistan. Former communists seem to favor the EU and the US, where we have heavily socialized large aspects of our public life (health care, etc.)
Looks more like minimum safety net, rather than socialism
There is no concept of "safety net" in capitalism.
"Approximately 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the next generation, with 90% losing it the generation after that." [1]
1: https://fortune.com/recommends/investing/generational-wealth...
in the end only smart ones will have $$$, everything according to their merits/efforts
So it's not a meritocracy - it's an inter-generational relay race. A meritocracy involves a level playing field. A 100% inheritance tax would help.
Do you like capitalism, where everyone gets unequal outcome? Like in Liberia, South Sudan or Chad?
The context here is about unions. Democracy at work is important and unions are the best way to achieve it in a capitalist nation.
Did you obtain you theoretical knowledge of what actual communism is - purely from Lenin's books? Have you tried to reconcile communism theory to communism in practice?
In any case it segued into Stalinism .. and all of these were oppressive authoritarian top down rule.
People that think of post revolution Russia as a good example of communism are the kind of people that think of the USofA as a good example of capitalism.
Btw, I didn't even claim that communism is the best way forward, you just assumed it. I would rather advocate for socialism which has better chances to succeed in US. Still, the moment we wave off 10k from student loans people start shouting "communism". Those same people got millions of dollars in PPP loans, still fired their employees and saw nothing wrong with it.
The main context here was about unions and people still cry "communism" whenever they hear the word union. I have seen immense benefits of unions from past generation and feel sad that they are not as prevalent today. "United we bargain, divided we beg" is the whole point of unions and still people choose to beg because "big bad communism". This propaganda has been enforced on us so much by govt that we forget what's good for us and that makes me sad.
However there are many cases where it's hard to fire underperfoming unionized employees. And there's always the possibility of the union playing a kind of long game with management where they are willing to trade away the possibility of rewarding standout individuals in order to preserve the baseline.
There are a lot of ways to do a union, you don't have to set one up exactly like a detroit auto factory
Do you want Tech labor union to gatekeep profession?
IT is already merit based and is good because there is no gatekeeping, just spin up your own website and start making money if you are that good.
As an IT professional I simply dont understand why I need labor union to dictate rules to me, when I can negotiate on behalf of myself perfectly fine.
If company decodes to lay me off - well it is company’s loss and fault - I will simply go work elsewhere or freelance, while company will struggle retaining skilled engineers
Maybe interviewing or freelancing lead generation is a hassle - your local IUP (International Union of Programmers) could help sling jobs your way like a pipefitter union.
Maybe you want something different? I bet we could find a model of some union doing that; the world is big
We dont need formal union, but informal one - through information dissemination over Internet and absolutely voluntary participation and knowledge sharing - this is fine for me.
This is how we get leetcode practice, interview prep, job hopping, quiet quitting, overemployed, and other “best practices” to get edge over employers
They do not gatekeep. They provide contractual minimum pay and benefits for their members, and that's it. Members are free to negotiate for higher pay, and many do. (In the NBA, the cap is imposed by the owners, not the union. There is no cap in Hollywood.)
Hollywood productions and NBA teams are free to negotiate with and hire non-members, with the caveat that such individuals may become members of the appropriate union upon the signing of the contract and that contract must then adhere to the union minimums.
In both cases, union membership is automatic upon certain events. For SAG, this means appearing in one or more SAG-governed productions (depending on the level of the role, i.e., lead vs supporting vs background). For NBA players, this means getting signed to an NBA team.
If you don't like how one party can make changes to your job without your meaningful input, you should throw in so two parties can make changes to your job without your meaningful input? Also, you should be sure to pay some part of your wages to the second party, even if you don't like what they're up to.
I'm not particularly pr-union but I'd argue for another dimension: to the company, you're an employee, but to the union you're a customer.
If too many people dislike an union, it can dissolve. If too many people dislike a company, things aren't as simple, because they depend on their wages (and in the USA: insurance) to live.
I think that's a fair summary of my worldview. I don't like unnecessary complexity in most of my life, and adding an intermediary to an important relationship needs to get over a high hurdle for me to consider it's necessary.
Maybe if there's an example of software development under a union shop that you can point at and say this particular Union improved working conditions for people like me in this particular way, I can say hmmm, maybe that's worth the added complexity. But most of what I've seen from unions is that they add a significant chance of not being able to work because of disagreements between the union and the employer or solidarity in disagreements between other unions and other employers; as well as most often salary rules that are based on time at the job rather than quality of work. Quality of work is hard to measure, but I've been generally happy with the results of that measurement.
Maybe the model of talent unions rather than blue-collar unions is a more appropriate model, but I'm not sure how that works. Do I need to give union dues and hire an agent, too?
You may not be able to work on the same problems when you work for yourself, or at a company you can stand working for. But there are lots of things you can do in tech as a company of one. This is in contrast to a lot of industries; you can't meaningfully mine for minerals, or build cars or even car parts as a company of one; although there certainly are artisanal car builders, and small auto repair shops.
Doctors don't use unions. They instead artificially limit supply by erecting massive barriers to enter their workforce. This keeps them in demand. Software contrasts this with an open-door policy. On top of that, all white-collar labor jobs barring software involve serious licensing requirements as further gatekeeping.
Lawyers maintain leverage by making sure the it's Lawyers all the way up. No MBAs, people-persons or bean-counters controlling their profession. This means that the workers control important intangibles like customer relationships & hidden information ...both of which make you irreplaceable. Software instead pushes technical people from the stable-and-monetarily-rewarding positions by making the management-track entirely distinct from the working professional (IC). At the same time we obsess over building tools and systems that make everyone replaceable and automate ourselves away.
Immigration is another form of leverage. Tech being majority immigrants, means that they lose all leverage in what they can ask for when the ultimate guillotine is held over their heads. Do tech workers vote as a block on matters of immigration to improve their leverage ? No.
Work culture & pressure to conform can also be a type of leverage. If someone likes being well groomed, then professions that expect you to spend those 30 minutes getting perfectly ready are not cumbersome, it is leisure. Afterwork drinking ensures a good social life, but also ensures that everyone leaves work together at 5. It excludes, yes. But if you fit into that clique, then the conforming is effortless and the leverage comes for free. Consulting & finance are some examples of such businesses.
Tech isn't the only broken business. Restaurants & game design are broken for similar reasons.
Unions have their place, but a nation-wide tech worker union is a logistical impossibility. All too often, other levers are over-looked. Tech has made its bed : "learn to code. be a college drop out. get PMs to do the boring work and let them be promoted faster. I will let a glorified secretary be my manager. we will never put my community's 'legal' immigration priorities over those of the greater social issues I 'facilitating illegal immigration' my tribe asks me to commit to....and so on. No we have to lie in it.
You can get totally socialized profits at one place and totally performance-based at another.
If there was a sudden influx of 5000 doctors, we’d end up with 5000 doctors seating idle.
I doubt the same would happen with 5000 engineers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Hundreds of thousands more doctors could work in America without any sitting idle
I think we'd actually see an uptick in the amount of americas getting treated for their conditions. And a decrease in the number of doctors that work over 60hrs a week. But maybe not, there are a lot of Americans that need help.
That's not true. Not sure about US but in many european countries doctors are organised in strong unions. There is otherwise no artificial supply limit initiated by doctors or hospitals.
I wasn't really sure what this is getting at. H1Bs?
The murkiness of the current H1b allows anxiety which companies can exploit.
A dual-intent, 5-50 yr green card wait-times, lottery system with underdefined qualification criteria has to be seen as a terribly drafted visa. Replacing with it clearer messaging and more predictable rules (predictable doesn't mean looser) would return a lot of leverage to tech workers. The weird rules of the H1B mean that every I know has violated some under-enforced parts of their H1B at some point. Every once in a while it gets enforced, and someone's life gets uprooted. The 2 month deportation timeline is joke, when it takes 3 months to catch up on leetcode.
The visa doesn't even have to be more permissible. Just a more sensible & clear.
Reading over the rules (it’s not clear what you mean by “rules”) they all seem clear to me. What examples do you have of unclear or nonsensical rules?
And a lottery is the best way to do it ? Points based systems, merit based systems or even seniority based systems make a lot more sense. How is complete and utter randomness (lottery) the best answer ?
> unclear or nonsensical rules
You have to find a new job with 2 months or leave the country
Spousal work visas can take 6 years from start date in ideal circumstances.
Greencard queues are now 25-100 years long for certain countries.
Going back to school in the US is technically illegal.
Can't have any secondary income.
I'd go into all the irritating bits of the H1b if I had hours, but the H1b can effectively be summarized with this video - https://youtu.be/mKc32jQIY0w?t=88
Because you’re building a system in which you have preference over others. While we need high tech workers, it’s unfair to only invite them first.
> You have to find a new job with 2 months or leave the country
You are here on a work visa. While I do think it should be a bit longer, rationally if you got a visa to work for a specific company then your visa should be invalidate at the end of that employment. The visa was granted because the company said they needed a particular skill set and they couldn’t find it in the US. This doesn’t mean once that job has ended that this skill set is still required in the US.
> Spousal work visas can take 6 years from start date in ideal circumstances.
This does sound odd, but is in line with how slow the US gov is in my experience. I remember for my wife's citizenship we were looking at around 6 years for them to simply process the paperwork and perform an interview.
> Greencard queues are now 25-100 years long for certain countries.
This one is very understandable. Given green card applications have been skyrocketing since the 2000s, and only ~1mil are granted per year. Then you have people like me who have priority, who as a citizen request their wives green cards (and ultimately citizenship), which takes another slot away.
Securing the US border is something I'd also like to see done, but that's a highly politicized discussion that's off topic here.
> Going back to school in the US is technically illegal.
Well as a student you are not providing much / any value to the US, at least not yet. I can see why they keep these separate, as on an F1 you are here using our schools and our educators, our research, and could potentially take that back home. Meaning we see no value. An H1B does not give you the permission to use any of that, and again is only because a company could not find the talent within the US. An H1B can be more viewed as the US exploiting you for gain, whereas an F1 can be more viewed as you exploiting the US for gain.
> Can't have any secondary income.
An H1B was granted, again, because that person had a skill that was not able to be found within the US. Many people think H1B visas are granted to anybody and everybody that's smart that wants to live here. If you're a webdev from another country, and we have webdevs sitting on the bench, you should not get an H1B visa and should have any existing one revoked. It is a US first policy.
Continued immigration in the USA is vital to maintain business as usual, for one basic reason: It is too damn expensive for US Gov to give great education for everyone. Starting from daycare to college - if you sum up cost of raising a kid in private daycares/preK/schools/colleges it will be > $1M.
Account for probability 1/100 of a kid being gifted/talented in certain area like IT, and you are looking at spending $100M to get one gifted specialist. Just one!
It is much cheaper to cherry pick and import foreign talent and give them education at top tier places like Ivy leage/MIT/etc.
The gov doesn’t pay for private education, they provide infrastructure for a free, public education instead. Some cities give vouchers if parents choose public over private but it does not pay the entire tuition.
The actual cost to educate a kid using public infrastructure is average $15.5k/year/student, which brings the total cost per pupil to $186k. Given there’s about 50 million school age children in the US, that puts total cost at $775 billion a year, or a total of $9.3 trillion.
We can easily afford it.
I am opposed to the vagueness around everything having to do with legal immigration. If you want to import the top talent of the world permanently, then make it easy for them to get a Green Card and regain leverage. Let them start startups, let them spend longer durations between jobs so they can figure out that one brilliant idea.
Lots of people exploit the H1b brute-forcing every single grey-area loophole to get here. Many aren't even well-educated. On the other hand, the MIT/Ivy League straight shooters follow the rules and find themselves locked out of any future in this country. Other 1st world nations have fewer immigrants, but the process is transparent, cleaner and has well defined boundaries.
Yes, import the top talent of the world. But the H1b does more to kneecap them than enable them.
So the question on a lot of employees minds is: Do we try to relocate in time for the May 1st RTO and risk getting fired - or do we wait to see if we're part of the layoffs and then try to relocate with the remaining 2 weeks we have left.
But.. where do you go as an overpaid FAANG employee? Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc all have layoffs
As others have mentioned, you might not be able to find a $300k-$500k/year job, but you should be able to find something.
Eats out frequently, goes out for drinks occasionally, travels a few times a year, owns a new mid-range car, lives in a modern apartment complex or small home/condo near a downtown area (with a < 30 minute commute). New electronics, big TV, minimal but high quality furniture.
Pairing back on those choices you can begin to save every month, but not at a pace to buy a home in a reasonable time frame.
On dual income assuming consistent earnings YoY you can start to buy a house in a cheaper neighborhood later in life, around the time many are starting to have kids.
I have to imagine kids can put a 5-10 year delay on buying a house without various kinds of assistance.
That’s what I’m saying.
> On dual income assuming consistent earnings YoY you can start to buy a house in a cheaper neighborhood later in life, around the time many are starting to have kids.
Dual tech income folks are in a great spot, but with gender ratios as they are, there can’t be very many such couples. Also this could be a function of social circle but I find many women (even in tech) expect a husband to provide for them while the kids are young.
https://sfist.com/2022/05/24/sf-still-the-most-childless-cit...
This is a case of lifestyle inflation and then complaining about lifestyle inflation. Public school is good enough, your kids aren't better than the rest of the people in SF.
The different experience is that you make more than your parents did at your age and thus have lifestyle inflation.
Obviously Bay Area amenities are worth something. Are they worth descending an entire social class? Maybe to some. But I think most rational people will go fix the computers at that car dealership, and put their kids on the travel team. You are not obliged to live an austere life just because someone offered you a (locally) mediocre job in the Bay Area.
Nobody's "descending a social class" by sending their kids to public school or having them do normal stuff, this is hysterical.
What city has 1/4 acre lots? (11000 sq ft (1020 m^2))
It is all a matter of tradeoffs and the level of urbanization you want. I cant walk to a bar or music venue, but I can still walk to a grocery store and a smaller number of restraints.
Interest rates are up, but property prices are down quite a bit (my house is down about 15%). While last year may have been better, I think is a still a decent market if you have a few 100k saved from a 150k salary, better if you saved more.
I think the parent commenter might be eating a lot of garlic since his move. :)
If you don't have a down payment and cant save one, you are in for a bad time everywhere.
Point being whats luxury living for one could be basic, minimum living standard for others. And I am talking about people doing roughly same IT type jobs.
So that below living wage of 150K in bay area is from that school of thought where having single family home, 2 car garage, a bit of front/backyard and 30 min leisurely commute by personal car is basic minimum standard of living.
To be clear my spouse would also consider this as basic things despite spending far fewer years than me in US. And after decade and half in US I still think these facilities/perks are matter of great fortune that I ended up with and not just oh everyone has it type.
Not in the bay area, though.
maybe it's time to swing back a little.
So why in the world would I want to hire an overpriced ex-rest-and-vester when I can instead hire someone hungry with a track record of making a difference at small to medium companies?
I also don’t think people generally have a problem with interviews. You have to be assessed somehow, obviously, and people at top companies still get interviewed when jumping to other top companies. I’ve really only seen serious complaints (that is, beyond mild grumbling) when interviewing is a huge time sink for a specific company, especially when that company’s compensation is lower and/or the communication process is poor (e.g. ghosting).
Why in the world would anyone interview with you if your company offers less than top tech for equal or harder interviews? (Spinning your rhetoric back at you for added effect. I don’t know what your hiring is like.)
People who need job will apply. Its not like some one is forced to apply when otherwise they could get million dollar a year job to develop deep machine learning AI at Google.
If that attitude persists, it doesn't matter how good they are, their toxicity will override that skill and they'll be out before long.
I'm saying this as someone who came here from FAANG companies and put in a lot of personal effort to not become the FAANG brat.
Your organization does drug tests, and you think this guy is the toxic one?
If you have a family to look after, you cannot casually have your partner quit their job, your kids to switch schools in the middle of the year, break your lease/ mortgage and move states overnight.
There are real transaction costs for employees that do not allow for proper free market function
But remote work showed how high they would have to pay to retain talent in a real free market environment.
So unsurprisingly everyone forced a return to office policy.
This is hilarious
Would you have thought a few weeks ago that California and the federal government could apply enough pressure to the largest pharma companies to set the price of insulin at $35? Me neither, but here we are. Come out swinging, we have nowhere to go but up.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/01/1160339792/eli-lilly-insulin-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/sanofi-insulin-pr...
Edit: Looks like California has gone so far as to contract to have it manufactured and set the price at $30, even better. Thesis is “change is possible.” Please excuse the length this example took to demonstrate the point.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3907583-california-mov...
Housing crisis, traffic crisis, transportation infrastructure crisis, environmental crisis.
Covid showed how many jobs can be conducted fully remotely.
You forgot freedom of assembly.
Alternatively, Covid showed how little people were working in the office too.
If remote work would "drive wages down", it would already do so -- since that's an option available to employeers now
The skilled on-shore would be paid more, the fungible would be paid less.
But again offshoring is not always the cheapest answer due to the inefficiency that time difference introduces.
I've been hearing this sort of doom and gloom since the 90s, yet here I am making bank in the USA still
Things that can be resolved in 5 minutes have to wait for a day.
AI is coming for those roles before they end up in India or PI.
Speaking of NAFTA, that's one of the reasons we're seeing Mexico City as an offshore hub. Better timezone overlap, can usually trust that their credentials are legitimate, and it's not hard to find a (Mexican accented) Spanish speaker in much of the US.
Plus the NAFTA TN visa means if they're good you can easily bring them across the border with no H1B headaches. Cheaper flights, too.
I know you don't mean it this way, but it should right? It's fundamentally cheaper - no commute on the employee part, no office space on the employer side. Greatly enhanced flexibility all round. Both sides should definitely splitting the dividends.
I'm fine with it if that is how it works.
This also means the worker can live where the cost of living is lower, and be willing to work for less--thus pushing down wages. Arguably the worker still comes out ahead though if she can live where she wants to...assuming she likes working remotely from a low cost-of-living place. If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office, she might not be happy to see her wage go down.
yep - in the short term there will be some discontinuities like this. But longer term - more staff working remotely is going to take pressure off real estate prices in cities, so it will actually be justifiable even there that salaries can fall. Unfortunately since so many office space leases are long term, and rezoning of land use even slower, this can take a very long time to flow through.
> real free market environment
I'm hoping you're just kidding.
The tech labor market would not exist as it does today without substantial very specific regulations of various parties' behavior; e.g., stopping me from:
1. copying my employer's codebase, or
2. exfiltrating my employer's customer and pricing lists, or
3. holding two jobs at competing companies at the same time, or
4. shorting my employer's stock then actively sabotaging the company.
To say nothing of the even more basic stuff like squatting in my employer's office or even just using force to take what I want from the company or its executives/sharholders, for example.
Labor markets can't exist without lots of strong legal guardrails, and in the case of tech those property rights and contractual obligations are highly fictional and extremely unnatural. Intellectual property, non-competes, non-disclosures, securities regulations on insider trading, laws about industrial espionage and sabotage, the list goes on. All of it highly fictional and unnatural.
Modern markets are, definitionally, just a dynamical process playing out that is governed by an enormous collection of state-backed rules. Nothing like what you might consider a "natural" market, such as early civilized man bartering at the bazaar.
The amount of propaganda/brainwashing required to believe that something like a modern equity or labor market is a naturally occurring phenomenon... oof.
Positing a cartel in employment wages doesn't explain RTO.
You don't have to actually be good to find a well-paying job in this industry. You should be looking regardless.
Now your manager can no longer approve it, and even if your manager did previously approve it you might need to request approval from a higher authorisation level.
Otherwise if you have a family and are settled somewhere, I'd wait to find out before moving, then either commute during the week or get a temp spot once you know if you are RTO until kids are out of school where you are and you can plan a move more fully.
Imagine working there right now, that uncertainty must be so stressful, it would be for me.
Why are companies so interested in RTO, when the data seems to show that remote work is more productive? It seems like traditional management needs new training to sustain remote productivity gains, not that remote work should be discontinued to increase managers' trust in their employees.
I have found these people to generally be bad managers who use this to compensate for their lack of effective management skills, but that’s why.
We've also been tracking the shift in cloud spending patterns that Amazon is describing on earnings calls and how that may be compressing margins. In Q4 this was particularly noticeable, https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report/2022-q4
But the thirst for growth is never quenched, so there's always new features, new services. And maintenance of that automation. The work never ends.
There's a 25-50% operations tax every AWS employee pays. But they're handling the operations load that several employees were 10y ago. I used to wake up in the middle of the night to restart individual machines. Now I'm alerted for much much more complex problems. But i'm still woken up :(
Sometimes I wish I could learn everything from scratch. I wish I could join an on prem team to learn all those small details slowly and painfully.
Learning "from the middle" of a tech stack outwards is the default case for everyone, so don't be so hard on yourself. There is no "from scratch", never was even in the Bombe days, just a question of how many abstraction layers you want to tackle. Give yourself time to learn and plenty of room to fail and try again, and "all those small details" will ingrain themselves into you as second nature.
And they do automate, claims that a service like S3 does not have automation are totally ridiculous, and few other general hosting providers have AWS scale here.
That said, their development pace is crazy, with plenty of partially built solutions -> so yes, until something scales enough to need it I'm not surprised they have sysadmin toil. Reality is even the VMware worlds and other onprem stuff, even when "automated" have plenty of turmoil just staying fresh / current / backed up / secured etc. So that's what AWS is selling.
I'd look for other reasons..
I know multiple people who have worked on AWS. There is definitely some manual stuff going on, but there is also considerable infrastructure and automation in other areas.
The SDE role at $FAANG I work at is essentially glorified tech support, which makes the leetcode interviewing process so much more ridiculous than it would be by default if you were actually writing code and solving meaningful problems most of the time.
I don't think you're generalising to all FAANG, just whichever one you work at.
That said, this has not been my experience at all at another FAANG which doesn't use the TLA "SDE".
Which one do you work at so I can go there?
Or at least appear to have those hobbies if you do not.....
One big difference working against the cloud is the same thing that worked in it's favour 15 years ago. We don't always remember why we just adopted the cloud. Linux networking at times had scaling issues, and virtualization and linux was not where it is now.
It's astounding how much more a $5 VPS can do. Imagine the medium end. Self-managed hosting tools have come so far to handle production quality, it doesn't even feel fair that it is not more well known. Whether it's Proxmox, or others, it is pretty close to most things out there. Making a tool cloud compatible, but cloud agnostic is one way to avoid a lot of technical debt (assuming it's not created another way).
It doesn't have to be for everyone, but demand is probably slowing in part because of this. In a recession cost efficiency is everything.
Now they moved to Kubernetes, it has added a ton of unnecessary complexity. It takes magnitude more effort to run anything on it and they call it progress...
Sometimes it can be both but not always.
The savings could be in 7 digits TBH annually. There are so many low hanging fruits no one cares when the day is good. Tables that have no partition expiration that grow into hundreds or even thousands of TBs, buckets with same amount of data that no one looks at, VMs that no service uses, large clusters well above their load (e.g. only 20% used maximum -- and a full replica too), very bad ETL pipelines that cost hundreds of bucks EVERY RUN, very costly queries generated by Looker dashboards EVERY view...there are just too many.
Sigh, I'm late for everything in my life.
I just have access to small bits and pieces, but what I have seen I like.
I don't mean that cynically or sarcastically. The cloud makes it legitimately more easy to deploy resources; I've experienced this in my own teams. But the flip side is that it is easier to deploy things without thinking about the costs, or deploy things and forget about them, and management can just shrug and say "yes, it's cloud, it must be cheaper and better".
This is by no means a cloud-unique problem. Watch any datacenter a company has been at for a few years get shut down and moved to the cloud. The stream of "hey, who owns this?" and "are we still using this?" and "I just yanked the network cable, has anyone noticed?" is morbidly amusing. Even if you think you're tracking everything, you quite likely aren't, because the owners don't update their own tracking info very well.
But cloud makes this worse.
So I just find myself wondering how much of AWS profit is on this sort of stuff.
I myself have S3 buckets full of crap. As I do watch my spend, said buckets full of crap are in the ~10-50$/month range. At that price point it is difficult to justify engineering time to clean out the crap. But it's not hard to imagine that scaling up by three or more factors of magnitude.
Last couple of weeks the whole data org underwent a forced upgrade of certain components on Google cloud and we got quite of clusters no one knows who owns.
I don't know but I'm itchy to start finding ways to build new projects because that is the best way for techy people to grab ownership and promition.
[1] Get a "server as they should be", https://oxide.computer (no affiliation)
But then, when uncontrolled inefficiencies need to gobble up more hardware, you would have to buy, install, network, maintain, and understand this new hardware.
Real inefficiencies do, but then you will have the more detailed data the GP is talking about.
You don't need to make a large datacenter, or to migrate everything at once. Find some low-risk services, get some consultant help you improve some room on your premises (you'll need to care about security, electricity and cooling), get a pair of network contracts and one hack of servers (or maybe even 4 servers), and move those services. Favor things that are used internally.
If you are looking for 7 figures of savings just by picking the easy fruit, you will almost certainly get positive ROI on that. Just do not move critical services if you don't know what you are doing.
Big top down push to move to public cloud, basically no thought to operating expenses.. and now theres a ton of low hanging fruit. Most of these same firms have very little ability to measure their costs in a timely, granular manner, and so put in only very blunt processes to try to limit costs.
Last org I was at could probably re-allocate 10% of engineering staff using the cloud to a SWAT team finding cloud cost saves for 2 years before they ran out of stuff that costs 5x their salary to get fix/optimize/kill in the cloud.
A lot of the same orgs CTOs sold themselves on the idea that they'd need less infra people in the cloud. This really has not been the case, and more often the cloud infra people are more expensive too. Meanwhile many need to permanently maintain an on-prem footprint for latency/legal/legacy/etc reasons.. so you end up with net more staff.
I know a handful of Wall St firms that are moving a lot of "big data" type use cases back out of the cloud because its hideously expensive for their use cases.
Bonus points if you can autoscale those same on prem workloads into the cloud provider of your choice seamlessly
In the absence of friction to buy more immediate incremental capacity, teams may never optimize their code..
This may be good when you are "moving fast & breaking things".
This may be bad when you are trying to operate an already-scaled business profitably.
On the other hand, in AWS, at my last shop.. we were just .. doing stuff. We at one point noticed a non-production RDS instance was going to run us $60k/year.
This was for some small part of our processing, that in on-prem land would just occupy a slice of one of our $30k servers. But in cloud, we had the pleasure of $5k/month until we noticed & turned it off.
At the scale our estate worked, we had easily 100 entities that could trigger this kind of spend.
oh and it really sucks when your brand new SSD's arrive at your main DC, after a 4 month wait, you open the box and the boxes are empty - someone robbed ya. Those expenses are only linked to the infra team, but the effects reverberate through the engineering org.
For us, Cloudfront was a massive expense that is without exagerration an order of magnitude more expensive than other providers, and even in the world of AWS custom pricing, it's a struggle to get cloudfront costs down to even the retail offering of other providers.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...
So for instance company would have their hosting costs upped from £500 a month (dedicated servers) to something like £5000, so that they could "scale up", while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive. They have actually never reached the level of traffic that this old set up wouldn't be able to handle, but investors were always saying "what if we get sudden surge of users" which has never materialised. But then it was their money so nobody objected.
I can see that now that hosting costs in the cloud have become ridiculous, cash strapped smaller businesses will be looking for savings and the cloud is quite an obvious area to look for cuts.
Sounds great, for some use cases. Particularly if you don't need multiple 9's of uptime, and just need a few 8's. Most companies don't have: * Guaranteed sla's for replacing components when the RAM needs to be reseated, a drive fails, or the fans get too dusty and things overheat
* Redundancy set up in case the network connection fails
* Redundancy set up in case the power fails. (Many places will have a UPS for under an hour, but generators, along with a regular maintenance schedule and processes for ensuring fuel is another thing)
* On site security, to make sure nobody breaks in and does some corporate espionage
* Ultra-high-speed links to the internet
And if the little startup takes on a client with important certification requirements, it can be very helpful to have a cloud provider. A lot of contracts I've taken on over the years ask tough questions during the sales process about our practices regarding the above things and much more.
The points you have listed are important, but are really non-issue unless you are co-locating servers in the utility room somewhere, rather than in a proper data centre.
But now many of the companies that moved to the cloud are hitting different challenges and are stuck in a setup that is pretty expensive to maintain. I am not expecting the death of the cloud computing, but that pendulum will likely swing back a little as the companies experiment with other options. I think a company that can help medium sized businesses optimize their compute setup with a mix of on prem and multi-provider cloud will do well. My 2c.
It's extremely true! The fun is that bad code looks totally different from each other. The "bad" Scala type astronaut code would be unrecognizable from Python raw dictionary enthusiast code.
Lackey: "Excuse me, sir. The council is worried about the economy heating up. They wondered if it'd be possible to fire 500000. Maybe from one of the smaller companies where no one would notice..."
Zorg: "Fire one million."
Lackey: "But 500000... One million. Fine, sir. Sorry to have disturbed you."
Either way it is almost certain that a large amount of people working in these companies don't contribute much to the generated income and now the executives have been given an excuse to perform mass layoffs without scaring off the shareholders.
And "in tech" is right. At my current company, we have more PMs than we do developers. This leads to a really poor feedback look where the PMs are trying to justify their jobs, so they "look busy" and start generating cruft that is probably not important (like changing text without really a great reason, sure maybe it is "polish" but ... there's real things to do and it distracts the engineers).
We don't need more PMs than we have engineers!
Even if a PM does the right thing by talking to customers and learning about their pain points, the giant bottleneck in dev capacity means that those customer pain points take forever to address, which often leads to more customer frustration than if you had never talked to them in the first place.
“What the heck happened? This was just working last week! Where’s the… ugh! Where did the button for this go?”
“It got Product Managed.”
Google Meets and Slack are repeat offenders.
Until you solve the problem of middle management status being based on the number of people you manage, you will keep getting bloated organizations. Until an organization figures out a better way to manage their dependencies on each other, every new thing an organization wants to do will require an n log n number of people. (In bad organizations, it's n^2.)
Organizations are just committing on "not growing" in terms of product offerings in the next period of time. The stock market, after some time, will reward growth and the cycle will start again.
I understand this is signaling that the author understands technical concepts like big-O, but why use technical terms imprecisely when non-technical terms work just fine?
It's beyond the scope of this conversation, but the short is that it seems to become a network effect problem. Every team does not work with every other team, but it does end up in a hub-and-spoke system with matrixes over the system. Oversight (ops, security, PMO) do not scale linearly because the competing priorities make scheduling more difficult.
I've read others who have spoken about it, but I'd have to go back and find it.
With more typical interest rates, rich people will make more typical investments.
They put their money in hype when the money is free or close, and putting it in those "investments" make sense. Like when you have QE and near-zero interest rates...
"even the tactical errors committed by investors were insufficient to create the bubble that burst so dramatically last year. For that, we needed a perverse private-public partnership led by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. The Fed mistakenly created too much money in the fall of 1999 in order to fend off the expected deflationary impact of the Y2K bug—effectively pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire in the stock markets—and banks and brokerage houses used some of the excess liquidity to fund the share price bubble. In the fourth quarter of 1999, the Fed expanded the money supply at an annual rate of 22% (9.6% after seasonal adjustment). In comparison, the rate of growth of the money supply in the fourth quarter of 2000 was 9.2% (–2.8% after seasonal adjustment). Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, seeing the flood of money into risky start-ups, pricked the dot-com balloon with monetary tightening in the spring of 2000. It was the dot-coms’ misfortune to be first the beneficiaries and then the victims of these larger economic forces".
In that case they didn't need "near zero interest" rates, because they were artifically promised much larger returns than the actual rates.
That is the actual key driver: easy handed loans for BS uses (to VCs, and even better the general public), and hyped returns above the rates. The "near zero" rates is not necessary, it's just the more extreme case.
https://hbr.org/2001/05/whos-to-blame-for-the-bubble#:~:text....
And too many of these organizations still act like they think throwing more engineers at a problem makes things go faster.
And the $$ and prestige of working in tech still attracts too many people whose primary interest is not just in getting things done, but being seen doing it, and, as, you say, improving their status.
The tide is going out and we're seeing who isn't wearing bathing suits. But it might be the whole beach.
... Still though the primary thing driving investment in tech and software is the same thing that drove investment in industrialized cotton mills or Ford Model T assembly lines: mechanization makes profits, and... computerized mechanization is the most powerful cost reducing system ever known to mankind.
Agreed. WeWork being the prime example of something that was evaluated as "tech" despite being anything but.
Plus the "deliver cheap and fast" was not just because tech was so useful and must have, but mostly because of a number of factors, like people having money lying around to put into stocks, interest rates being low, QE, and so on.
With a decline in income comes a decline in advertising, (taking "eyeball" based companies), and a decline in BS subscription spending (taking down many "real business model selling SaaS" companies, resulting in a downward spiral...
We might never see it "back in full swing", the same way cobblers never did came back in full swing...
https://novum.substack.com/p/what-if-worldview-zero-interest...
(More technically, they aren't shareholders until it vests, but they are long the equity)
Usually layoffs include accelerated vesting anyway.
Did I wake back up this morning in November 2001?
On one hand I felt like I was blowing major opportunities by not trying. But something just felt off when receiving so many sudden contacts from the largest of companies offering remote work, despite working in tech for over a decade and never hearing from them before.
FANG still has a very low (<1%) success rate.
So, don't assume that just because you got a recruiter email you'd be qualified to make it
That's misleading. If you're able to get an interview, the success rate is much much higher than 1%. Can you imagine the wasted effort if it was 1%? And I assume if you're getting a recruiter to email you, you can usually get an interview.
The 1% number I always see should include those who try to apply without recruiters emailing them.
Nope.
I was an interviewer for one of the FAANGs. My approval rating was around 2%. And I was one of the most lenient ones, at least in my org.
The actual hire rate was lower than that. Maybe much lower. As I said, I was one of the most lenient ones. I did my best to approve, while still remaining within calibration and hiring guidelines.
I interviewed people over the course of years. I was a developer, so interviewing was not my main role.
And I never felt angry about having my time wasted. I work for money. As long as the company is paying me, what they want me to do during billable hours is at their discretion.
Time spent interviewing has an opportunity cost in terms of learning new things or working on promotion-grade projects.
I studied new things on the side (very important for switching jobs).
It isn't that bad, interview one per week and you end up hiring about one person per three years (5 interviewers per onsite, so about 50 there and 100 phone screens). Most people interview 1-2 times per week there, and that was roughly how fast they grew, so the numbers adds up.
Maybe your FAANG experience is different than mine, but 2% means either you're very picky or your hiring pipeline is awful.
I approved about 2% of candidates.
The actual hiring rate was much lower, meaning that even when I approved them, they ended up being rejected anyway.
Either your org was way too picky, or your hiring pipeline was absolutely awful.
There's no real reason to interview 100 people and only hire 0-2 of them.
But I didn't make the rules, I just worked there.
I’ll call out Google specifically for this. They seemed to just make up their own questions. Difficultly ranged from basic coding to a math brain teaser with a lot of easy graph questions in between.
For context: this was last November.
Edit: lost the point in my rant - 2% approval is probably the result of flexing.
I met a guy on a train, who was working as a server, but just had some HTML on his resume. Like OP, most of these people wear that as some badge and can get into FANG anytime. Reality hits when they actually do reply and actually make it through phone screen
Amazon, Meta, Google were contacting people all over LinkedIn etc and everyone had an interview prep kit that you needed to study in order to get in.
The FOMO was real but it felt so weird and robotic. I rejected all of them. One meta recruiter was even offended when I said no to them. The extra € were not worth the hassle and I’m glad I didn’t going there FAANG rat race in the past 2 years.
Management of big tech companies like to pretend they’re geniuses, but really they just wanted to ride the hype train to the moon.
They made it hard for smaller companies to hire tech talent and have now had to put tens of thousands of employees through layoffs.
I at least hope that some good comes from this in the form of reducing middle management and bureaucracy in the tech giants.
Also, hopefully tech workers will be more willing to fill roles across the country at jobs where they might be able to make more of a positive impact. Getting people to waste time on social media is not exactly a benefit to our planet.
There is always a need for more engineers. But at a company this size there is going to be parts that are more efficient than others.
I guess they were right.
Hang in there, AI hype is just started, I think within a year things will be a lot better, assuming there's no WW3 or Credit Suisse creates another domino effect.
This time it does seem quite useful, but I think in a few years it will be commoditized and offered from all major cloud vendors, probably even get to choose the models.
Yeah for inferencing, sure. Try designing and training the models. It takes whole organizations to do that effectively.
I think it's a Tesla situation. Tesla did very well, and I believe OpenAI will be too, but everyone else will catch up and then some.
Once the first model rolls out, knowledge from that model would eventually disseminate. And it doesn't even need to be on a human level, industry and academia experts could probably make very good guesses on what's going on behind the curtains - and follow up. And we already have plenty of good models on our hands, some even open sourced.
"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible. The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted. "
So people [Amazon employees, the market] are just supposed to just excuse them not just for being crappy at analyzing project costing and the market and overhiring like crazy last year.. but also being crappy at their job at managing the layoffs this year, too?
... We're overstaffed... but we can't tell you who we're overstaffed with. (So just a hunch then?). But we have to do these layoffs. We, uh, just didn't want to rush who they, uh, were, uh, back then... before... so, trust us, we need this number of people gone. So we'll announce this, to put you on the edge of your seat that it might be you... because, y'know, it'd be rude to, announce who, uh, before we're ready?
Barely even trying to hide that it's really just about making Stock Price # Go Up (it didn't go up enough with the last round, I guess) and keep employees on their toes.
"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible."
(From the announcement.)
Also, it is pretty easy to confirm with anybody who works at AWS that OP2 planning process did in fact complete recently
who is to say the reason why? maybe Andy Jassey just went for a long walk and came back and decided 9k more were out the door
for all you know he may want 25k more gone and is just figuring out the how/when
1) Any business can tolerate a 5-20% layoff without loss to business continuity.
2) A 50% layoff results in losing critical knowledge about how to keep the business working.
3) Therefore, if you want to lose 50% of your employees, it makes sense to do it in rounds.
I can give similar logic for larger layoffs too, mostly having to do with impact on employee perception. If I'm in a business who has layoffs every 3 months, I will be sending out resumes to more stable places, to the extent they exist.
Does adding 2 months between your 5-20% rounds recover that continuity?
I can't make my mind. It still looks like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but it will spread enough knowledge to keep your lights on. The problem is that "keep your lights on" is the only thing people will care about while overworked looking for another job.
Yes. The knowledge is consolidated in fewer people that way.
> It still looks like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but it will spread enough knowledge to keep your lights on. The problem is that "keep your lights on" is the only thing people will care about while overworked looking for another job
Agreed. However, if a business is bleeding $1M per month and has $10M in savings, "keeping the lights on" for a while is considered success.
I will mention: I'm not advocating for a specific course of action. I'm merely trying to explain one way of reasoning. Personally, I think there are usually out-of-the-box solutions which avoid layoffs, especially in situations similar to big tech.
Google could, for example, spin up a consulting arm and (1) Get dead-weight people out of core operations (2) Likely, make a mint.
So these were probably just non-engineering people from other parts of the economy.
Now that they're both slow at the same time, I'm not sure what he's planning.
Amazon had a lot of trouble hiring during a 'normal' market.
The job market is still really strong, and Amazon for example hired 300k people from 2020 to 2021. These layoffs are a drop in the bucket, happening at Big Tech mostly. Corporate profits are still at all time highs.
1. The management has so completely screwed up that they don't deserve a job.
2. Is the management approving projects that they don't believe will impact the bottom line? Did all of the companies mature at the same time and became risk averse?
3. What does it mean to immigration and cap on it?
Yes and no? It feels a bit silly to look at things from a results perspective instead of a process one. Management everywhere was spending money to grow as fast as possible. Reality hit (and whether or not you think this reality was predictable is up to you--but I'd like to see if any money was put where your convictions were) and now these research/growth projects need to be cut down. For many, it was the correct decision at the time given the information they had at the time.
Until laws are put into place to stop the boom/bust cycle the people being hit are always going to be the labourers.
These companies aren't employing fortune tellers, no one really knew what the future held when the pandemic hit. It was extremely reasonable to think that there was a chance that big tech's market size would massively increase. Even if that chance was only 10% the correct management decision is hiring as if it will happen and then laying people off in the case it doesn't, because catching up is hard, but firing people is easy.
Also it seems like unfortunately 35 hours a week is not the most output that can be extracted out of most people. Nor are 40 years in education/labor (from 20-65). This is despite the studies showing that people have trouble focusing after 35 hours being mostly true.
The problem is with the large number of people who don’t even put in a serious 10h on the job.
Feels odd to see that play out in industry.
Amazon's vesting schedule is so toxic that 90% or more google engineers have higher total comp, better benefits, and better WLB than Amazon.
The backloaded stock gives you stability up front with their high signing bonus, and high growth potential for TC assuming stock growth in two years. My pay is basically equalized over 4 years at current stock prices when I began, so my expected 4 year outlook without raises/performance bonuses/stock appreciation is:
Y1: ~70% Base, ~26% Bonus, ~4% Stock (5% total initial grant)
Y2: ~70% Base, ~18% Bonus, ~12% Stock (15% total initial grant)
Y3: ~70% Base, ~0% Bonus, ~30% Stock (40% total initial grant)
Y4: ~70% Base, ~0% Bonus, ~30% Stock (40% total initial grant)
Rough numbers, you get it. Not everyone has the same deal, but from what I've seen @ Amazon this is pretty standard and honestly significantly better than having to deal with the volatility of a 1 year initial vesting cliff like most public companies.
- Year 1: base + high prorated signing bonus + 5% stock vest
- Year 2: base + slightly lower signing bonus + 15% stock vest
- Year 3 and 4 - base + 40% stock vest
If the stock doesn’t move, you should make about the same amount Years 1 through 4 or slightly more.
Lesson learned, but I don't think there's an archetype of engineer that prefers that kind of risk profile over large cash payments each month. My downside for Y1 at Amazon is 4% of the agreed upon TC.
Perhaps I'm not as good as a negotiator as I thought (or the schedules are within the past two years) b/c I haven't ever received an offer that balances the agreed upon TC as you describe. It sounds great!
Anyone who was hired over the past two years would have been more than happy to receive a large stable cash prorated signing bonus over the past two years than stock.
If your business can’t “buy” the supplies needed for your products - in this case development labor - and sell them at a cost where you can have a sustainable business, then you don’t have a good business model.
Google is massively profitable. That money has to go somewhere. Why not the workers?
If Google is succeeding at attracting talent from other companies, including the company of the person I was responding to, then it's more likely that they're not "overpaying", they're just paying enough to attract the talent away from other companies.
This is capitalism working. Google has a lot of money and they're putting it towards attracting and keeping their talent.
Are there that many good-paying jobs remaining within the tech industry that they can re-shuffle to? Are people finding placement? Are coders now competing for less-technical jobs as well?
I've heard stories of recruiters who were seeing 1 resume per week now seeing 300 resumes per week, but I'm not noticing any sentiment of widespread panic on HN or even Reddit.
I don't think we'll ever be there yet. Tech people are still one of the richest in the US and the Earth.
Like most US tech workers, I was getting paid comfortably, but nowhere near the level of FAANG/fintech/top startups. I took a small pay increase with this new job.
I've got friends who were part of the FAANG layoffs who have been struggling because they only want to work at FAANG or top tier fintech/startups. That said, they are also not trying too hard due to generous severance.
Fwiw those I do know that've been laid off have gone travelling/career break (severance helps here) or pivoted (all from HR, none from engineering).
LMAO no. Admittedly I have been out of the job hunting circus for a decade, but the number of positions I've applied for in the past few months that have resulted in a first interview is laughable. Recruiters are still useless and such an active waste of my time I don't even reply to them any more.
I'm seemingly having better luck these days getting freelance contracts through non-standard avenues (but I'm holding off from celebrating as I'm still negotiating and haven't signed anyone just yet)
I suspect anyone with a decent network is fine. If you are applying through portals though, the competition is steep.
Seems like companies are focusing on cutting folks that don't contribute (code, reports, something tangible) directly to revenue streams.
> Seems like companies are focusing on cutting folks that don't contribute (code, reports, something tangible) directly to revenue streams.
Follow from this?
> more on the senior/higher paid side of things
Are you implying that every single senior+ person you know who got cut was worthless? Because generally, the more senior the more you contribute to a company’s bottom line.
Happy to be wrong here.
Whether there are 250k open positions at suitably-high levels is less clear, but there are more than twice that many open positions.
Of course, people used to making $300k+ might balk at positions offering half that or even less, but they're out there.
I think there is an assumption that all of the layoffs have been engineers or engineers, designers, and product people, but a huge chunk of them have been in support roles that are less needed without big hiring demands.
If companies are cutting travel and expense budgets, that means you can cut accounting staff. If you are largely not hiring, you can cut recruitment staff. Etc., etc., etc.
There are lots of tech openings these days in non tech businesses. Of course these don’t pay the top of the market salaries.
I took the black pill. Maybe I can find wisdom in past professions' cataclysms, like ice harvesters and milk delivery.
Unless we invent an actual superintelligence, in which case, no humans will be needed for work ever again and you will either live out your days in some kind of early retirement paradise or be fighting over the last can of cat food.
Unfortunately that's not the norm, but I find branding yourself in that way can at least help overcome this challenge in the hiring process (if you get past the screener that only looks at these filters that is)
The problem with hiring from the ivies is these are people who got into ivies. They know how to game the system.
For FAANG-level engineering salaries, the answer is largely no, perhaps save some very specific areas like finance or extremely hot AI prospects.
There is going to be a broad leveling of engineering salaries in my opinion. The engineer with 8-10 years experience making north of 500k at FAANGs is largely going away. Of course, a big part of that is due to equity values not skyrocketing every year. And of course with FAANG-level salaries going down, lots of other companies will feel less pressure to compete.
For engineers, I think a large number of those who were laid off will have difficulty replacing their level of salary for some time. I think that the past 10-ish years, with rock bottom interest rates, were really a "once in a lifetime" chance for non-managerial employees to make as much compensation as they did (again, broadly).
If those salaries go away, so will the talent. These workers will start new tech companies that either eat away at market segments or end up costing large sums to acquire. You're right that it may take time to replace the salary in the short term.
Sure, some talent will leave and start new companies, but on the whole I think hardly any of them will ever be able to match top-level FAANG compensation from the 2010-2020 period. Again, there will be some outliers, but even then I think the number of outliers will be small. For example, look at AI. A lot of people freaking out the most right now are people in other areas of AI who are realizing that all of their work is being completely obviated by LLMs.
I can tell you that candidate expectations have changed a lot in recent months.
For a while we had a lot of candidates applying who wanted to stretch the interview process out to 2-3 months so they could shop around, compare offers, then negotiate up as much as they could. Candidates would frequently disappear from the interview pipeline or go weeks between following up.
Now that quality of resumes we receive has increased dramatically. Applicants are much more responsive and are making it clear that they're willing to do anything, as opposed to holding out for their dream job.
Meanwhile my employer is celebrating the latest salary comp data showing that industry-wide compensation has declined sharply.
There are still jobs out there, but it's no longer easy to put in a little effort and find a good job. It's now a competition.
Any pointers?
Many interviewers can recognize when you don't have many options. The more options you have, the more confident you'll be.
Don't take rejections personally. If you're not getting rejected a lot, you're aiming too low. You should be getting rejected frequently! Use it to hone your search.
There is still plenty of work to find, but it all depends on how much people built their lives around their income level
The company I work for, a tier 2 or 3 company for tech, depending on your perspective is still hiring, although mostly not in the U.S. But if more U.S. talent becomes available at more reasonable rates, we might do more hiring here.
That's because companies announce layoffs but they usually don't announce mass hiring.
While cloud sectors are laying off, healthcare and defense are hiring tons right now
A year ago I submitted to one job post and got a full round of interviews from it, which ultimately I decided wasn't a fit.
Over the past two weeks I've submitted my resume to 80+ jobs, and so far have had a handful of declines and no interviews.
So, yeah, it's a different market than it was, for sure.
I don’t look at LinkedIn much most of the time but I do try to connect with most of the people I work with, and I am nice to recruiters. I generally rely on my network and recruiter outreach for most of my jobs, can’t remember the last time I did a cold application.
For the past few years there’s been a layer of bottom feeder recruiters who were terrible about phone and LinkedIn spam. They made previous job hunts unpleasant. Nowhere to be found this time around, wonder where those people went.
The quality roles are still there but maybe 25-50% less abundant in terms of cold outreach from recruiters.
For someone still employed this translates to a very manageable interviewing pace that probably leads to better results in the end.
If I were unemployed I might be more anxious since you probably can’t do 3-4 interviews a day without hustling quite a bit. The pace reminds me a lot of my experience interviewing for mid-level roles a few years back, before I made senior.
Overall take, the bottom has definitely not dropped out of the market. Yes FAANG comp is less available than it used to be, but the just-below level isn’t too hard to find, and even the FAANGs are still hiring in key areas. I expect a ramp-up late this year/early next once the operational cracks start to show from layoffs and attrition.
The idea was to build scalable solutions for HR to modernizing hiring, etc. and productize those. I'm not sure the external product piece ever panned out, but they were mainly focused on eliminated manual processes for HR inside of Amazon and migrating legacy systems to modern ones.
And that's revenue. We still don't know about profitability.
Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall;
That last is huge, btw. Leadership setup a disaster to require a few layoffs. I'm assuming leadership is having to take on some pain, as well?
It has also been proven there had been collusion in regards to poaching employees before - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement/a...
Why not this? Doesn't have to be a collusion setup that looks like UN resolution vote.
Apple didn't overhire and double its headcount during the Covid money printing bonanza like others did.
AZ could have very well gone nearly 100% remote for SDEs and slash the office costs without messing up teams and deadlines.
RTO is about control.
They may or may not also see multiple rounds in the same light many of us do: as incompetence in the management team.
and add another $15B of revenue growth
Why would someone rely on Google when everything else is either better or good enough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea
Apple has a tendency to keep things close to the vest, but I am sure they have a plan. If you look at the M1 and M2, they have insane memory bandwidth that can be quite useful for running large ml models.
It would be interesting if Apple released models that can locally on your Mac or iPhone and bypass the whole only run these models in the cloud model of the other companies.
I love it how the older generations today are astounded how employees have no loyalty towards the company, and are job hopping like crazy.
Doesn't matter how good your team is, how nice your manager is, always look out for yourself first. And always squeeze as much as money as possible from companies.
Collective ownership of the means of production?
I, too hope that automation will eventually help us figure out how to do Socialism that Doesn't Suck, but it's one hell of a jump to imagine that it will just happen automatically on top of existing systems given their long and well established history of relentlessly concentrating the ownership structure -- what is it, 90% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans, or something? Even if super construct-o-bots became cheap, you'd also have to unwind the private ownership of natural resources. No, I don't see any of this happening smoothly. Do you?
I was thinking of proliferation of existing, but still uncommon incentive structures. More stock compensation, in more industries. More co-ops for smaller orgs. More unionization, while not distributing ownership directly, at least balances board memberships. More sovereign trust funds for resource extractions etc... I wasn't thinking state-controlled production, it's been tried, and failed horribly.
One reason why US is reasonably stable is precisely because of 401ks. That is, a large middle class has a true stake in the stability of the system, and will not rock the boat. Increase that stake, there's existing mechanisms.
> I don't see any of this happening smoothly
There's no reason it needs to devolve into violence. Small example: USA-gov specifically needs to co-opt resource extraction, and setup trust fund, like Alaska. This is primarily a political program that we're being hoodwinked into not accepting. The onus is not on evil Exxon, they're not threatening to kill us if we try to (because they don't); the onus is on the american people to actually demand this from our representatives.
Violent transformation will throw away the baby with the bathwater. Take what works, dial it up. Devalue (in your heart and actions) what does not work. Vote & advocate accordingly. The doom&gloomers are missing that so many pieces are there, already, today.
Of course it won’t work in a fake democracy where corporations are allowed to buy politicians.
the true lesson imho is that any positive project for the future will need to reject iconoclasm, and lean into incrementalism. preserve the good, prune the bad.
The 'terror' is 'famous' only because of the ~300 years long propaganda of their enemy, the English establishment - the aristocratic establishment that hates anyone or anything that threatens the aristocracy with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Otherwise, what is called 'the terror' accounts for ~3000 people, and most of them in Paris. And it consists of aristocrats, their surrogates, their servants who aided them with their conspiring with their foreign relatives to come to France and massacre their own people so that they wouldnt lose their privileges and the 'plebs' would 'know their place'.
Conspiring against your own country in wartime in that manner still carries the death penalty even today. Even in the most democratic countries.
> the french revolutionary program traded aristocratic rights for bureaucratic corruption
Corruption existed in all eras and all societies in human history. 'Bureaucrats being corrupt' at or after one point does not invalidate a system. That system worked spectacularly well when it was first instituted, literally reforming the entire continent by removing aristocrats from power and appointing non-nobility to those positions on a meritocratic basis. It worked so well that even after the aristocrats were able to destroy the Napoleonic remnants of the revolution, they kept that 'bureaucratic' system. If it became corrupt, you can tie it to the influence of the aristocrats - not the revolution.
...
No, the French did find the solution to it - the French Revolution is the unique event in human history that destroyed the elitist, aristocratic stranglehold of the minority on the society by invalidating all the historic traditions and trappings that trace back to the Agricultural Revolution and all the norms that those enforced on the people. And it set the standards for our actual modern society. It has basically created the blueprint of how we live today.
> It has basically created the blueprint of how we live today.
The same case can be made for the american revolution, which was earlier, and which legacy is longer lasting.
But yeah, point taken. Any book recommendations on the topic?
Indeed - after being on the Internet for a while, I learned that what is taught on this topic in the Anglosphere and the rest of the world !greatly! differ. In high school curriculum, we were taught what the French Revolution did, what were its principles and how it related to our current society. What is incessantly drummed up in the Anglosaxon literature as 'the terror' was just mentioned as a part of the turmoil that was the revolution and the ensuing war. But of course, its no surprise how then-existing Anglosaxon establishment and its modern contunity hated 'the terror so much':
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/989759-there-were-two-reign...
Because 'the terror' was directed against the aristocracy. It did not matter whether hundreds of thousands of French died during the famines in which their aristocrats starved them for maximum profit to keep their luxurious lifestyle. It matters that ~3000 aristocrats and upper class were executed by those very peasants.
> The same case can be made for the american revolution, which was earlier, and which legacy is longer lasting
That is also a proposition of the Anglosaxon literature, and there is a quite different view of it outside that literature for that topic as well:
Whereas the French Revolution totally did away with all the existing political and social norms and brought an egalitarian and meritocratic format into politics and the society, the American Revolution was more a rebellion in which the elite of the colonies broke away from their motherland in a move to protect their privileges and position by incorporating some of the Age of Enlightenment principles. We see total commoners get into positions of power at the end of the French Revolution, whereas the American Revolution (or rather, rebellion) does not disturb the existing power structure in the colonies aside from ousting the parts of the elite who were royalists. There was also large scale land appropriation and land redistribution done at the end of the rebellion.
That is extremely important - because that is the reason why the leaders of the rebellion created an anti-democratic political structure: The American founding fathers thought that this kind of land redistribution could easily target themselves (and there were voices demanding it), and they wanted to protect their holdings and power. Which is why de facto architect of the American constitution, John Adams, openly and contradictorily advocated that the government should protect the society from 'the tyranny of the majority'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
The tyranny being democratically voted and enforced land redistribution, obviously. American founding fathers were rather blunt about it in their memoirs, letters and private communication. Some did openly politick against it as well.
This is the reason for the existence of the electoral college, the senate, and the 'checks and balances' in the American system - all of those were devised as ways to enable overriding or controlling the democratic majority so that they wouldnt come with pesky land redistribution schemes. So at the end of the 'revolution', we see the exact American elite occupying the same positions of power and privilege, but with the losing segments of the elite who sided with the crown removed. The actual aristocrats who sided with the rebellion kept their possesions after the rebellion, with the exception that their nobility titles not having a legal basis anymore. Which did not matter since it was the possessions that made the title.
On top of that, the Age of Enlightenment ideals were not fully materialized into their radical forms at that point. So what the nascent American republic did was to mostly copy the earlier Dutch Republic, the oligarchic trade/merchant republic that was seen as the pinnacle of systems at the time. The Dutch Republic had had copied its systems and format from the Venetian Republic in turn. So even from the start, the US was set up as an oligarchy and it shows even today. So if the US looks like a merchant oligarchy in which the merchants, traders and businessmen dominate the entire society, its not a happenstance - it was made to be that way.
Additionally, the nascent republic maintained the medieval feudal common law system that it inherited from Great Britain, which created the hodgepodge of legal mess that exists in the US when the holes of the medieval common law were plastered over with the civil law that originated from the French Revolution later. Its not so surprising that they kept common law since the colonists, including the American founding fathers did not want to break away from Britain at the start and for a long time after that - their demands were representation and/or abolition of the new taxes and being left alone like how it was in the earlier centuries. It took a lot of work by a few founding fathers to agitate for independence and a republic. (reading about Thomas Paine and his activities immediately before and after the rebellion could give some perspective)
So unfortunately, contrary to what is heavily advocated in the Anglosaxon (or rather, mostly American in this case) literature, the American revolution/rebellion was not the paradigm-shattering event that shaped the modern society - it was at most a step in the process, which definitely helped the leaders of the French Revolution to crystallize their ideas after seeing how the incumbent elite was able to protect their power during the process of the American rebellion. Leading to the crystal clear egalitarianism and absolute abolitionism of privileges seen in the Revolution later.
At this point we must note that the entire world uses civil law, a product of the French Revolution, whereas only a few countries (like the UK) and a few small islands still use the common law. Even the US has a mixed common law + civil law environment. Merely the major difference in between these tells how different these two events were and why the French Revolution is the event that shaped modern society:
In common law, the judges still act as the stand-in for the local feudal sovereign with the power to 'interpret' the law and override it with those interpretations, leading to 'precedents' that end up becoming de facto laws themselves.
Whereas in civil law, the judge is just the speaker of the democratic parliament that has written any given law, tasked with communicating and precisely implementing the pre-written law with literally no interpretation. Even in cases in which the existing law does not cover something in the exact manner, the judge is responsible with falling back to a broader law that does cover that specific thing and implementing its articles in an exact manner - he or she can not 'interpret' any law or set any 'precedents'. All the power lies in the people who make the law, and those who implement the law are just their representatives.
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Of course, these are quite large topics with a lot of reading buried in them, so its a bit difficult to recommend stuff that could bring a different perspective - especially from the Anglosaxon literature. But reading Howard Zinn's A people's history of the world is one shortcut - it would touch a lot of similar subjects as well.
However still, its not difficult to find some articles that were compiled on the matter:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2141520.pdf
https://www.stratford.org/uploaded/faculty/jjordan/Viewpoint...
Of the cuff, the common vs civil law issue seems more of a formal difference, rather than a difference in outcome. Interpretation of common laws changes over time as well. And what republic are the french on now? Fifth, sixth? I lost count somewhere in my own lifetime. Laws that need rewriting every generation or so or poor laws.
Anyways, appreciate the in-depth response and sources!
Nope. Its fundamental. Take what happened during the BLM protests: A NY court suspended habeas corpus, the basis of all rights under common law. At that point, the authorities, including the police, could do whatever they wanted to anyone they wanted. It was reinstituted only after a higher NY court overruled it. If the higher court decided that the emergency warranted the suspension, ALL rights in NY would have been gone for the duration. Same goes for the US in general. If in the future, there is a major emergency that can 'justify' the suspension of habeas corpus and the supreme court lets it stay, all rights will be gone for whatever duration decided. In common law, the judges play the role of the sovereign monarch who owns all rights and gives them out as he sees fit. So it can 'reinterpret' everything at any given time and everyone is at the mercy of it.
Now take civil law: No such thing can happen. What rights the citizens, residents and even refugees have are written in concrete in the law, including what rights can be kept and what rights are suspended even in emergencies including global catastrophes, and they can never be taken back by anybody. The only one who can give or take back laws is the society itself, ie the people, they do that through democratic voting and proportional representation, and nothing and nobody can overrule them. Sovereignty belongs to the people.
> And what republic are the french on now? Fifth, sixth?
The majority of the French republics were destroyed by external sources that were trying to eradicate the remnants of the French revolution. Mostly backed by (then) 'the leader of the free world', Britain. We can also include World War II in this, since Britain was trying to use Germany as an attack dog against the Soviets and therefore propping up in any way they could, especially diplomatically. (including preventing an Europe-wide attempt of an anti-Nazi alliance that could totally prevent Ww2).
Outside those cases, the people democratically changing their constitution and calling it a new 'republic' does not really make it a new republic. Its still a republic, with a changed constition. The power still resides in the people and they decide how the 'new' republic will be. There is nothing outside the revolutionary principles there.
Though, one can easily say that the latest republic was also prompted by an external intervention - namely the CIA coup attempt to depose de Gaul to prevent the French from giving independence to Algeria.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/10/20/jfk-assassination-plot-mirr...
This is a very hairy affair, by the way - CIA organizing a coup in France using the military in lieu of JFK's policies and opposition, Parisians mobilizing and setting up barricades across Paris to protect the president, JFK being powerless to stop the CIA and leaking info and updates to the French via diplomatic channels to help against the coup...
Funny to see this called out, my father is a huge francophile and I remember him going on about this when I was a kid (tbf - he sees CIA coups everywhere in the 60s, murder of jfk, murder of lumumba, ...).
Considering how that is the whole business of CIA (aside from drug running to finance those and the paramilitaries, guerillas and islamists they fund), he is not far off. Solely the coups in South America would already flood the list, Africa would need a few more pages. Then there are coups in the Middle East etc. Incidentally, the later Iranian Islamic revolution is the result of the 1953 coup that CIA helped organize in Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
They even hired the most famous mobsters in Tehran to help with the coup. So I guess the tendency of the CIA to choose the worst type of people to work with did not originate in the 1960s, and instead it was there when it was founded...
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The murder of JFK is very specific, btw - its very plausible that CIA did it (Dulles) because JFK has sabotaged two CIA projects - the Bay of Pigs push and then the French coup. And that Dulles was a nasty, nasty, nasty man...
Denying the existence of The Terror is just weird. It was condemned at the time by fellow Jacobins like Danton/Desmoulins who were then executed themselves as the revolution devoured it's own. Robespierre had lost his mind by this point.
It isn't called la Terreur because of English propaganda but because the revolutionaries openly discussed the concept and deliberate use of terror in the period. You can quibble about what they meant by it and whether or not terror was an official policy or just the reality, but that is where name arises. Robespierre: "The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror".
You are way off on the death toll. The official figures are 17k executed (2-3k in Paris) and 10k died in prison awaiting trial. Historians put the total figure at 40-50k because of there were also summary executions outside the official figures.
Even if I was, why would being so anti-French like the English establishment and its followers are be ok, but not being 'anti-English'.
> spreading disinformation
You are not the arbiter of truth. Neither the establishment that you are defending. The one that was called the 'perfidious albion' for 400~ years by now.
This is the first time I see someone talking about 'misinformation' regarding referenced historical material. It comes across extremely funny. Demonstrates how big the gap is in between how the Angloamerican world sees itself and the world and the rest of the world does.
> Denying the existence of The Terror is just weird. It was condemned at the time by fellow Jacobins like Danton/Desmoulins who were then executed themselves as the revolution devoured it's own. Robespierre had lost his mind by this point.
Aside from the charged emotional wordage used in your paragraph giving away the level of ire and propaganda levied against those who you consider to be your 'historic enemy' in line with your establishment's propaganda, nobody denies the existence of executions. ~3000 people were tried and executed in Paris.
What is 'denied' is the delirious, emotionally charged exaggeration that comes from the establishment you stan for - just like your emotional approach, that establishment has portrayed this event as if millions of ordinary French were wrongfully killed. With the judge, jury and executioner of that sentence being the English establishment, the traitorous aristocrats who escaped to England, and those who finally accomplished in destroying the French Revolution. Its like asking Dick Cheney to describe the Iraq War...
> It isn't called la Terreur because of English propaganda but because the revolutionaries openly discussed the concept and deliberate use of terror in the period. You can quibble about what they meant by it and whether or not terror was an official policy or just the reality, but that is where name arises. Robespierre: "The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror".
The word 'terror' had different meanings 300 years ago. Whereas it has been made into something quite different from the usage in the period in the following centuries. Maybe they should have used the word 'fear of god' instead of the more rational-sounding 'terror'. Like how it is in the Anglosaxon literature. Then it would be all good and well.
Regardless of the propaganda subversion of a term from a different language by a hostile establishment, the incident is what it is - the execution of ~3000 people, mostly the aristocrats and their surrogates for conspiracies against their own people.
> The official figures are 17k executed (2-3k in Paris) and 10k died in prison awaiting trial.
The Anglosaxon 'Terror' propaganda is about the executions in Paris. Its about 'blood flowing in the streets'. Guillotines. Not the events that transpired elsewhere in France, during the wars, or in the killings of the revolutionaries by the French aristocrats or the foreign armies that they have called in to murder their own people.
It is very likely that even more people died from both sides in the events during and after the revolution. But the English propaganda is not about that. Its about 'blood flowed in the streets'. Emotional manipulation to demonize. Because otherwise different sides in a civil war executing collaborators of the other faction in court martials across the countryside does not make the same emotional manipulation effect. Even more so because the English history is chock full of such incidents, and the accusation would turn against the propagandists themselves - hence, 'blood flowed in the streets - guillotines!!!'.
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There is absolutely no difference between how the French Revolution was demonized in this manner through emotional propaganda and how other targets of the English establishment were demonized before and later. All the way from starting the demonization of the Spanish by the Elizabethans to the demonization of Europe during the Brexit process.
Here is an example of the actual terror that existed back in that time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
That doesnt count, of course. It was not directed against the aristocrats, but commoners. Who are not 'real people'.
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Yes, how the French Revolution is viewed outside the Anglosphere and inside the Anglosphere is !starkly! different. For your demographic, this is a vicious football matchup in which you must vilify and demean your opponent even if the arguments are based on lies for emotional manipulation by totally invalidating even the principles that built our modern society by originating from that revolution. For the rest of the world, its one of the most important events in history of the world. An event that permanently destroyed the myth of the god-given rights of the aristocrats to rule, and freed the world from their yoke.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Dog_(1975_film)
I did not expect to learn the film was set in 2024 and found it oddly coincidental.
https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/whose-does-layoffs-bette...
What was really amazing to me was when I fed his email into Google Translate, had it translate to Mandarin, and then fed the output back to English.
“Eventually, Email = Gmail” was one conclusion: their email offering was not just “the hardware resources of a paid product (gigabytes of storage, etc) for free”, but also “the feature development velocity of a paid product (teams of full-time well-paid engineers) for free”. So essentially, other email providers wouldn’t last very long being undercut so heavily, and Google’s ad revenue allowed them to undercut forever. One of us pointed out that you might not even get other email providers in the first place, since Google could just hire all the email developers to work on Gmail. Even if they didn’t add any value - even if they subtracted value - as long as AdWords kept ticking along Google could still afford to keep them on payroll at a higher rate than any competitor could offer.
Our sobering conclusion was that Google could be this gigantic elephant sitting on top of dozens of different product markets, squeezing them all out by undercutting revenue streams and hiring all the talent - an elephant that would stay perched there based mostly on whether people kept buying ads elsewhere, and based not at all on whether they did a good job on the product or not.
Things didn’t quite turn out like we worried (it became FANG/FAANG instead of Google, for instance) and it seems like our pessimism was somewhat unwarranted, although writing it out now, parts of it do certainly ring true.
But! One thing we absolutely didn’t expect was that Google/FAANG would one day voluntarily decide to shed tens of thousands of “captive” developers! Many of these devs were doing no work, busywork, or redundant work, so these layoffs represent a huge and very real injection of talent back into the tech sphere (e.g. they were building a redesign of Gmail, but are now building the first design of a new product).
I know there’s an impression that many of the layoffs are “people in tech” non-developers (talents in their own right, to be sure, but somewhat less relevant for engineer-hungry startups), but many of the layoffs are developers, and they will find work building new competitors instead of rebuilding/maintaining existing market leaders. Something to be happy about at the birds-eye view of tech progress, even while the layoffs themselves surely suck for the individuals affected.
This is all regression toward the mean. The next couple years should be interesting.
A pity for those who enjoyed the calm of the last two years!
Speculation, but the "dollar milkshake theory" seems to fit the best here, which would imply we'll probably be stuck with high interest rates for quite awhile. It's entirely possibly we never see money move as freely as it did in the past 10 years in our lifetime.
I agree with your speculation, I do not see the money as free flowing as it once was. Anecdotally, I was recently given a worst interest rate in 2023 with a better credit score, and more income than I had in 2015.
I think you're reading too many cranks on the internet. The state of the economy is fine, significantly stronger than where it was just 3 years ago. Real consumer spending hasn't budged much and the labor market is the strongest in 50 years despite the well publicized layoffs.
The dotcom boom happened under equivalent to higher interest rates than we had now. "Morning in America" happened with an unemployment rate double what it is today.
Some comment I read recently (but I can’t find) put it in terms like “Meta spent 36 billion to make secondlife for the wii”
For a given technology you can only sensibly produce a product of complexity X, beyond which it scales at some awful exponential rate, so throwing more labor at the problem rarely works because the organizational coordination costs scale up faster than the productivity gains.
from my time at amazon this feel like only small step in fixing so many issues. engineering has too many manager in promotion race..layer after layer of manager..empire building focus and not customer benefit.
step 1 to rid these “professional” managers who not understand technology, installed themself at company for cushy job title and pay. many come from other uninnovative company like ibm.
IBM has to be shittiest company I had to interact with in a professional setting. We have an AS400 iSeries. It ran the company for many years but now we are building a lot of apps around it in C#/.net/blazor.
So, in order to use entity framework with iSeries one needs a data provider. Most of the data providers are generally "free", for example if you have SQL, Oracle, MySql, PostgresSQL you don't have to pay anything. BUT not IBM.
We tried getting a license for the iSeries data provider, and I literally gave up and said fuck them I will just use OleDb and write queries by hand. First, nobody could answer which license we needed for our use case. Then, I received a trial license, which didn't work....I spend days snooping around to realize it was for the wrong version of .Net core. IBM support was clueless. I finally received the correct version, but the instructions for the install had a link to a dead URL.
IBM forums were full of IBM employees responding with "sent you a DM" when people were asking questions....followed by many replies "i have the same problem can you share the answer publicly"....followed by "sent you a DM".
Seriously screw IBM, awful company.
It seems that going into a profession based on how secure it is or how much money you will make is at best a gamble, and at worst a recipe for existential disappointment. Looking back (and up to) the engineers of earlier years (1970s, etc.) they look like people driven by passion, going into the areas where they were to remain forever branded as “nerds”.
And the sentiment I see related to layoffs is that people who are genuinely interested in the tech and love it for what it is are not affected as much or even if affected would be quickly welcomed to another place that has resources to appreciate what they have to offer.
So yeah follow your passion and all.
One of our LPs is ownership. Jassy sure isn't owning anything here.
If they announce early, people are waiting for doom.
If they don't announce early, people are caught off guard.
With automation, why do we need so many people to work? Even without Chat GPT or whatever… after Amazon builds an amazing framework to run X part of their business, they can just let the business intelligence and maintenance be mostly automated, fire 90% of the developers and have a few people be around to tweak and maintain it.
I never understood why these tech companies needed so many people in the first place
If you can accurately predict exactly what your customers want 30 years from now, you can take the approach you’ve mentioned. Otherwise you’re just waiting for someone to eat your lunch.
Tech is not nearly stable enough yet. Too much value to add still.
I think I'll drag my feet, thank you very much.
Yeah right lol They meant billionaire shareholders
The only thing that is growing are cloud cost optimization consultancies.