The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
A lot of people working in tech were delusional by the 10+ year long cheap money printing bonanza which fueled VC growth, and a bust is a good reality check that no boom lasts forever and that it's best to be humble and not inflate your lifestyle while you're on top, as your position on top was most likely due to survivorship bias and great market conditions and not earned through raw skills and hard work alone.
I was around for the last 13 years, and I'm pretty certain that it was *self-identified left-leaning journalists* who told coal-miners "LearnToCode" and then got all huffy when they got told "#learntocode".
Developers weren't taking part in this mess.
It's irrelevant now, it's more properly "Learn to prompt" [-engineer without tell anybody you have self-obsolesced your own career].
By January 2023, I was already certain that professional writing would be increasingly-difficult to enter (as a career field) as a novice content creator: I was already able to generate extensive copy and then just act as copy-editor-"writer"
Thankfully a natural disaster (landslide creep) has forced me to re-prioritize my life, down to potentially building yet another house — I'm not sure at this point I have the physical energy, but I certainly know that my brainpower cannot keep up (competitively) in a paid-market content onslaught (which is inevitable).
Whatdo? My body was so excited to sit in a desk, just shy of 40... and now I just don't see a point competing with all the more-qualified laid-offs (redundant white collar worklings, some replaced by AGI-like services, competing against novices like me... which GPT certainly outperforms, at 1/100th the price).
How about working for the government or public companies or institutions?
ChatGPT knows a lot when it comes to information that's public in the internet or open sourced a lot, like web dev, but a lot of business require institutional knowledge that's always in the heads of the workers and never opensourced online like electrical engineering, embedded programing, train operators, plumbers, electricians, PLC programming, etc.
Knowledge work is so much more than web dev or copyrighting.
As a general purpose novice copywriter I think yeah a lot of people are gonna struggle in this new world. But you are an electrical expert. Maybe that's your angle.
Thank you for your motivational participation — I have actually copyedited tons of technical documentation (some even paid, lol =P ) but definitely would need to specialize fiercely and apply realworld knowledge into the computer systems.
It doesn't only affect the people you don't like so I would chill on the glee, personally.
People laid off from big tech are now kicking it back in SE-Asia with the severance money they got. No tears will be shed for them.
They'll easily find other employment outside of big-tech. They'll still be middle class.
I'd put my energy caring more about underpaid teachers, doctors, nurses, emergency personnel, or other the lower classes of the middle class that got laid off, if I were you, instead of defending overpaid tech-bros that got a dose of reality.
Those people didn't become "tech bros", to the extent they were admirable individuals before coding they remained so afterwards. A lot of people only entered the middle class because of coding work and will exit it when they can't continue. I'm one of these and I enjoy mocking tech workers as much as anyone but I trust my class solidarity is well placed in bowing out of this one.
c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer , possible emergence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfa... , remote working, AI, and the implications of that.
This whole thing was a repeat of the dotcom bubble. Back then it was 'learn web design!'
Here too we had bootcamps to learn to code in weeks. At that point the bubble was reaching critical mass.
Same damn thing happened before.
I tried warning people- here on HN the sentiment was 'we are indisposable'.
When the cost-cutting measures and hiring freezes began I tried warning again and was told 'its not a hiring freeze at Uber, we are fine...just stopped hiring for certain departments (definition of a hiring freeze)'.
Then Twitter began the firing dominoes and here we are.
Thing is it was their company culture and management that made this happen.
Unreal perks, infantilization of the workforce, telling them how important they are, how they are changing the world, they are the 10x programmer.
I can't believe our workforce is going through this again only 20 years later. Seems housing is headed the same way.
We need protections for people, not companies. This is going to keeo happening unless we stop it.
Maybe if you were actually any good. I reckon at least 60% of these bootcamp alumni were just dead weight. I've interviewed so many people who "learned to code" but had no meaningful logical reasoning or problem solving skills. They could maybe understand syntax, but for the most part they just have some basic familiarity with various frameworks and tools. They don't know how any of it actually works.
Experienced developers are often mediocre communicators, so it's not even like they'd be able to explain what needs to be done clearly enough for people without problem solving skills of their own to run with the ball once its been handed to them. Developers are there for their programming skills, not pedagogical ones, so it's just not a realistic staffing model to be this way.
They can write code if I translate it to requirements and show them something similar already in the code. They tend to flail around when handed a more open ended problem like "we need an endpoint that will return the last 5 purchases made by a particular user". They don't yet grok the kind of questions to ask like where should the data come from and what format should I return it in?
I don't mean to disparage them as students, I just think they were sold a lie. New programmers probably can learn the very basics of a language and framework in 8 weeks, but learning to solve open-ended problems takes a fair bit of practice for most people. There isn't really a shortcut through that.
The first year of law school is often said to be the hardest for the same reason, they're breaking down your intuitions and teaching you to think like a lawyer. I went through the same process as a social scientist. Every discipline has this acculturation process where its disciples are trained in the skills and values of the discipline. It's not just information transfer. You can study sheet music all day, but unless you actually PLAY you will never get it. It's not something you can just boot-camp in a few months.
If people have the skills or values they developed from other disciplines that they can transfer over then the boot-camp can work. If you learned how to do logical reasoning from being a philosophy major, then you'd probably figure out symbolic logic and learn to program pretty easily. If you figured out how systems are put together from a career as an electrician or mechanic, then you can probably apply those skills to architect software too. But you need some foundation there to build on and I don't think a lot of people just getting into it because they heard it's a lucrative career have that.
A junior hire I worked with a little while ago had actually done a college class on web development. I must admit the more senior engineers did rib him a little about it, being a little incredulous that a serious college would teach web dev and give out college credits for it. But nowadays there's even one at Stanford so we were wrong.
Anyways, the first thing they learned in that class was the HTTP protocol.
> I just think they were sold a lie
At the same time, where are the aerospace engineering bootcamps? Where's the law or medicine bootcamp? Did the people enrolling really thing they would be on-par with actual engineers working in the field after 12 weeks?
> At the same time, where are the aerospace engineering bootcamps? Where's the law or medicine bootcamp? Did the people enrolling really thing they would be on-par with actual engineers working in the field after 12 weeks?
2 thoughts on that.
The first is that at least 2 of those 3 (not sure about aerospace engineers) require a specific degree (in most states). It would be a bold faced lie to tell anyone that the AMA is going to recognize them after a bootcamp, and certainly punishable under false advertisement laws. They're probably right that someone could do a bootcamp and be on-par with actual engineers. It might have to be a very specific someone with a very specific background, but it's probably possible.
The second is that yes, I think people do think that. I've had a couple of friends that have done them, and they were convinced that they could pay $12k for a 9 week bootcamp and be a desirable and productive developer. I tried to convince them otherwise, but failed. I hate them because I feel like they're selling an expensive, unrealistic dream to people who have no way to know better.
They do. Anyone who takes a web dev class or takes a Senior Project Course should be familiar with it. I was surprised bootcamp grads didn't know about it since it's most often the first slide of a web-dev class.
> I generally think colleges do a meh to poor job of preparing CS grads for the real world,
Often, an issue I've observed is that students will minor in CS and major in something else, or the way the CS program is structured, you can major in CS with mostly math classes. Which is the way to go if a student is aiming at grad school, but not the best in industry.
> They're probably right that someone could do a bootcamp and be on-par with actual engineers.
I'm very skeptical of that claim. I've never seen it play out. Cramming a 4 years degree into 12 weeks?
> I hate them because I feel like they're selling an expensive, unrealistic dream to people who have no way to know better.
I've interviewed someone from a bootcamp who, after 50 minutes, could not come up with a function to count the words in a string. I use it as a warmup question for freshmen who have completed one semester or CS and it usually takes them about 10 minutes.
So yeah, I completely agree if someone paid 12k for that, they got scammed.
This is 70% of software development, this is why I think people from the hard sciences often make better software engineers (in the true engineering sense of the word) than people actually trained in CS. Most CS folks can't experiment their way out of a paper bag.
Then in my career, I have worked alongside some brilliant software developers who had academic backgrounds in non-technical fields like history or English.
I don't know if there's a way to assess someone's problem solving ability based on their field of academic study. It would seem that those from science and engineering fields (CS inclusive) would generally fare better.
Your dismissive comment about "most CS folks" is just offensive.
I am not judging you, my statement was a generalization.
I would also say, most people in the hard sciences that are not CS cannot code their way out of a paper bag.
I agree with you, some of the best, most rigorous thinkers I have come across had a liberal arts background.
This isn't a quantitative statement about the kinds of people, but the things they focus on. I think CS is hard, but one thing that seems to be repeated is that super capable people can get by operating in an unscientific open-loop fashion which causes cognitive blind spots, and those blind spots are in using experimentation and the scientific method to solve problems.
Which is why I refuse to use the term "Software Engineer."
Sorry, Java CRUD and copy-pasted React snippets from SO are the furthest thing from an engineering discipline. MOST jobs are web development, even if you're a "backend" developer.
There probably is some legitimate engineering in embedded or development that requires an authentic scientific and engineering background, but considering the majority of code written is CRUD stuff...that ain't it.
I suppose the OS, database, networking and infrastructure to run those CRUD apps as well as the languages and runtimes magically appeared out of nowhere.
This mindset will limit your advancement, teaching and mentorship work becomes increasingly key for senior and senior+ roles.
But I suppose by the time someone has a senior title and 5+ years of experience they’re not really in the category being discussed in this article.
Yes but there aren't enough of them, and they're not being paid to teach fundamentals to fresh faced entry-level hires. We'd expect them to teach higher level things than the basics of how to program. The skill set to be able to teach and explain to a complete naif is a little different from the skill set to communicate with someone who has already been inducted into the jargon and practices of your field.
We've seen that pace of innovation matters and if your goal is to maximize the pace of innovation, you want that fast response even if it means overshooting somewhat whenever there's a step change.
But, if that is what you mean, i.e. historically low interest rates accelerate the pace of innovation, we would witness innovation gains in countries with negative or zero interest rates. But we haven't seen any shift.
There's a difference between malinvestment and investing in projects that don't go anywhere.
This is the difference between burning cash in a bonfire, vs using $1 dollar to make $0.XX cents.
I'd argue the system was rife with the former, not the latter
For example myspace vs. facebook, webvan vs. amazon vs. instacart. You can also look at physical industries like the aerospace boom after WW2 that brought us into the jet age. The high influx of cash allows huge numbers of companies to bloom, representing the testing of lots of ideas and designs in parallel. Many aerospace companies failed, just as many tech companies have failed, but those tests accelerate innovation.
Does the pace of innovation really matter as much as you think? Or is it possible execution on the business side can matter more?
Also, it has been proven that adding more software developers can actually slow down a project. Increased hiring, therefore, does not necessarily correlate with faster innovation.
It's still unclear to me the layoffs are affecting actual engineers, outside of Meta and Twitter.
Meta is trying to execute one of the biggest company pivot in tech's history after completely giving up on the metaverse. Industry-wide they account for a huge number of laid-off developers.
In the meantime, Twitter's layoffs are minimal (it's always been a small company) but extremely visible due to the company's new owner's very public persona.
Elsewhere, it's pretty close to the normal number of layoffs large tech companies do every year. It's a little known fact to outsiders, but tech companies trim underperformers every year from their workforces. The media almost never report on it, except this year they did because Twitter and Meta were in the news cycle.
These stats also have "Software Engineers" as a category alongside "QA Testers", "Web Devs" and "Application Engineers" listed as different jobs, so I'm skeptical of how accurate they are.
They have? What are they up to now? I guess I haven't been keeping up!
Meta is a huge company. Switching to AI and spinning down their VR investments means a large restructuring.
[0] https://qz.com/meta-layoffs-2023-jobs-metaverse-ai-185019657...
While some companies are known to regularly use the tactics you mention (and a lot others also do the same from time to time), they don't use mass firing as a means.
Website started tracking sometime in 2022.
> there are a lot of rows with more than 5% fired or where the numbers are in several hundreds to thousands.
These include "Non-Technical staff" which have been the majority of laid off employees. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]
> they don't use mass firing as a means.
They do. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple all had yearly layoffs for underperformers, while maintaining growing headcounts. Target was around 5-10%. The difference is these layoffs were not nearly as talked about in the media.
[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...
[3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...
[4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...
There is a lack of humility that is far too common, that manifests as a toxic attitude and bad spending habits. I see a similar issue with people in finance, and once the illusion fades such people are prone to suicide, as was the case in 2008.
Many of these engineers have been hired for new business units that didn't end up being profitable with cheap credit going away. Others might be in business unit that is purely a cost center.
Nothing has really changed over the past few decades. Regardless of your role strive to be part of the company that produces the company's profit. Try to avoid parts of the company that are viewed as cost centers and are constantly under the eye of finance as they manage costs. You will find how are you treated in good and bad times radically different.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but often businesses lay off the high-performing-but-best-paid people because that drives the biggest savings while reducing the vanity headcount metric less, especially in companies where the effort of the team greatly outweighs any individual. They assume (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) that the team will carry on without the 'superstar' people. There's also an assumption that the best people will leave when there's a layoff (mostly rightly), so getting rid of them means maintaining control of who's gone.
There should never been an assumption that you're safe from layoffs because you're the highest performing person on the team. Sadly.
The highest paid ones were usually the ones who job hopped the most during the times of economic boom. They added little value where they went as their tenure was too short for that, but the market was so hot and the dev demand so high that tenure length and adding value didn't matter back then.
If you knew how, where and when to jump ship during the past boom, you could be an incompetent buffoon and you could still end up making way more than the tenured workers actually adding value to the company.
Now the companies are attempting to correcting that "mistake".
Some of them did get fire and are having trouble finding a job that paid as well as the last one.
It was a risk they were willing to take and I believe in some cases it paid off.
Good
Sure, but there should be no surprise (or complaining) when the cycle reverses.
Remember the posts a year or so ago of people working multiple remote jobs?
Given that no one can agree how to measure, I'd bet that most of us are.
Or rather: I’ll mortgage my house and put my life savings on the line against that bet.
Brought to you by another chapter in the book Recreational Arguments.
One man's brilliance is another man's "who wrote this crap?" It is indeed quite likely that most of us, possibly even all of us, will fall below the median of someone's measure.
Having 60% of a sample below the median means someone calculated the median wrong.
No. It is very much possible when the measure is undefined, as was the condition setup before the bet was made.
If we take it to the logical end where your chosen measure is simply the inverse of my chosen measure, then those above the median by my measure fall below the median by your measure and vice versa, leaving the entire set of those outside of the median to be seen below the median (and also above the median).
As it pertains to the larger discussion, how the quality of a developer is measured has not been established, which means everyone is likely to measure differently and often in conflicting ways, and so most of us are bound to be below the median according to someone.
So, yes, this was originally pointed out in a humorous manner. The bet made on the basis of that joke was, indeed, unfortunate.
I promise you, it's not, because that's not how medians work. This is the Wikipedia definition of a median:
> In statistics and probability theory, the median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution.
There have to be half on each side or it's not a median. The mean doesn't have to be distributed like that, but the median does. It doesn't matter if the measure is undefined; the median divides the upper half from the lower half. There are always 50% on each side (and one on the median, if there are an odd number of samples).
> If we take it to the logical end where your chosen measure is simply the inverse of my chosen measure, then those above the median by my measure fall below the median by your measure and vice versa, leaving the entire set of those outside of the median to be seen below the median (and also above the median).
Sure, but that's not a median. That's the intersection of people above 2 separate medians of 2 separate measures. You can't combine the median of separate measures and have it still be median; you can combine the measures into a single measure and that has a median where half are above and half are below.
> As it pertains to the larger discussion, how the quality of a developer is measured has not been established, which means everyone is likely to measure differently and often in conflicting ways, and so most of us are bound to be below the median according to someone.
Totally agree there, I'm just beating a pedantic, dead horse that that's not a measure (it's a bunch), and it doesn't have "a" median (it has a bunch). You're talking about the intersection of people above the medians of a bunch of measurements, which doesn't share any of the properties of a median or being above/below it.
And? That's a given. The comment we are discussing made it clear that the are multiple measures, and that most developers will fall below the median (in at least one of those measures). Not that difficult to understand.
> You can't combine the median of separate measures
Sure. Which is why nobody did. What are you trying to add with this strawman? If you are simply trying to refresh your memory of your kindergarten-level math classes, I'll chuckle for a minute over the foolishness of me thinking you were trying to have a discussion and leave you to it.
If you're arguing for some quantum metric that could make me lose it, you're for some reason not providing the word "us" with the same leverage which puts us into a situation we should just default to the literal definition of median since there's literally no way to prove (or disprove) your point.
But sure, you've proven you can buzzkill anything, so you win!
There is no mathematical contradiction. Perhaps a misunderstanding on your part? Either way, the bet was lost. Time for drewcoo to reap the rewards.
Again, not saying that every dev is a good dev, but that median is a silly measure.
Longer answer: also yes.
That's not abnormal.
There's only so many surgeries a man can perform, and so many cases a lawyer can argue. But software scales differently. Good luck performing surgery on three different continents at the same time.
A mediocre developer can be a drag on a company or just keep the lights on. A mediocre CEO gets paid enough to fund an overpaid developer at $400K a year for... oh, about 560 years.
The damage that a mediocre (or worse) C-suiter or VP does to a company is a lot worse than the mediocre developer (and, in fact, there's a straight line to overstaffing/overpaying and the "leadership") will ever do.
As long as folks are calling out other workers as overpaid and neglecting the execs, the industry is going to continue to get worse.
People are evicted, set free, imprisoned, and suffer serious economic setbacks (or not) based on lawyers. This completely ignores any knock-on effect of jail time in a persons life.
What on Earth could you possibly do that would be more impactful to society?
To show the full picture, you would need to also see the share of new jobs filled from end of 2020 to end of 2021 that were software engineers positions. I don't think people really grasp how massive the hiring spree was for software engineers in that time period.
To me, the fault is in the industry and how the ships are run.
For most people software engineering is about driving results, not making everything beautiful under the hood. Although it's nice to do that when you have time.
But I think the GP here is describing when people really can’t program. Like they can only write trivial programs by copy/pasting code from stackoverflow, and they don’t understand CS at all.
That is a different issue then knowledgeable devs cutting corners to meet deadlines.
Sometimes it's legitimately not worth optimizing something that will never need those optimizations. Sometimes management doesn't realize something needs to be optimized before it falls over. Sometimes management does make a bad call and doesn't want to optimize something that should be, but that's been uncommon (at least for me).
If management is going down a rushed path and unaware of the tech debt piling up, that's a failure of senior developers to raise those issues.
My senior experience is that if I see trouble that requires management intervention ahead, I communicate about it and then bail out. Trying to save it will just burn me out and as long as I am trying to fix issues, management thinks everything is ok and I am just stupid worrier. The issues must get real bad for them to be noticed and fairly often, it is best to let them go there fast.
If you are given really hard questions in an interview or they ask for dumb invert binary tree like questions. It is most likely that person who interviews you is lazy or does not want to hire you but have no choice but to interview you.
I beleive pair programming interviews are the best. As they can be 1) Time limited so you don't take home and waste your time. 2) Can be a portion of a real world problem.
I've literally never seen this happen in real life.
Just the average graduate who got a degree and then a low effort job that put to sleep the little he knew from college.
I've seen countless especially in consulting.
Yet I've never seen this. At least, not with the market I work in. Perhaps in other markets.
> I've seen countless especially in consulting.
How is that relevant to SWE?
One of my friends has worked at the same place for 10+ years, dodging several layoffs. When he talks about layoffs it seems pretty random who gets the stick.
He doesn't have the complete picture though, so they might very well be great developers, but still underperforming...
And, of course, the idea that every leader even has a reasonable idea of their developers' performance. They don't. And they protect or punish people for all sorts of reasons, often unrelated to performance.
Because it mostly is.
People get laid off from low impact projects/teams. People working on higher profile, more important projects get to stay, even if they're objectively worse than those who got laid off.
There are obviously exceptions, like strict "lay off 10% of all teams" type of layoffs, or a family business firing everyone who's not family, or Elon Musk firing anyone who disagrees with him.
Wow is this true? If so, I'm extremely surprised it is this low. No wonder Elon could cut 80% of jobs and everything would keep ticking along.
You understand theres tons of underlying systems like payroll, insurance, legal issues, severance packages, government filings that happen when you either hire or fire someone?
Although the US don't seems to have a lot of these 'worker's rights' so I guess I don't really know (/s).
Many people would call Amazon a tech company - but they employ a lot of customer service folks, warehouse workers, and delivery drivers. Most people would call Facebook a tech company - but they employ a lot of content moderators and ad sales people. And so on. Most people would call Apple a tech company - but they have people staffing their retail stores and repairing broken laptops. And so on.
Not every business can be run like Google, with zero customer support and zero service delivery :)
This makes software roles much more impacted than 20%.
Also the weird split between software engineers and application developers or web developers ?
Yes it suggests these stats are meaningless, and only provided to fit the 'developers are doomed, don't be asking to for a raise now' narrative.
Just another part of the inflation-reduction and capital-clawing-back-labor-power plan.
This seems more like an issue in tech hubs or in primarily software companies.
What does it look like for all the software developers in the IT departments in non-software companies?
Ninja edit: The company I worked for did layoff (around 2008) but that was more of a scare tactic which I ended up leaving the company over.
The problem of course comes when someone who just learnt how to cook their first omelette feels ballsy enough to apply to a michelin restaurant as head chef ... and the hiring manager can't tell the difference.
Hell, I'd have every plumber and electrician that came to work on my house ask which programming language they should learn. It was viral.