[flagged]
A lot of larger tech companies started hiring like mad during the past two years because the economy was over juiced. I work at an enterprise and was chatting with my boss about it and she mentioned that there was this idea that companies that weren't hiring were going to fall behind the those that were.
This is those companies undoing all of that panic hiring.
How much is down to knowingly recruiting people you know you might fire later, how much is incompetence on the planning teams and how much is simply that very large companies are hard to manage: that I don't know.
Engineers, programmers, hackers on the other hand are gonna be just fine. Same as the past 50 years.
and yet this is exactly where the layoffs are happening...AWS, ad tech, twitch
The problem there is that smaller companies are suffering a capital shortage due to the raise of interest rates at the same time, so they have less resources available to capture said talents.
Its not clear which roles will be eliminated, but I've worked in a few of those groups and I can assure you there is plenty of fat to be trimmed outside of engineering.
you can't wish this away
In theory there should be no such thing as a "programmer," programming should be a natural part of any white collar job that people use to automate their work and improve their workflow.
But since programming skills are so scarce, if you can code it makes sense to specialize in software development so you can make the biggest impact and maximize your income.
I’m NOT saying that software engineers are getting replaced, but the kinds of things you learn in a boot camp, gluing APIs together and searching StackOverflow for code snippets, seems like it’s on more shaky ground than a few years ago.
In short, everyone should have a classical four-year liberal arts education.
Now, excuse me while I ignore what I should do, and focus on what puts food on the table. And, unfortunately, CMPT-101 programming skills aren't going to be it - ChatGPT can do that work better and cheaper than a 'basic level' human can, just like it can produce a five-paragraph essay better than a grade school child can.
If you're going to learn programming, you're going to need to learn it to the point where you're better at it than a dumb LLM. And that bar is significantly higher than 'basic knowledge' or even 'working knowledge'.
Nobody cares about my rusty Grade 8 French skills, or my crappy hand-stitching skills in a world when Google Translate and sewing machines exist.