Tech jobs remain a good bet despite mass layoffs in Silicon Valley
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I know folks without a college degree that started as tech support reps who worked their way up to senior roles in big tech that make multiples more than most physicians I know or others that had to go down a rigid path to get to where they are.
The industry favors eager people who are hungry to continually learn and grow. While there can be short term bumps in the road, those that fit these characteristics have and will continue to do extremely well.
I know a few as well ... but that was decade(s) ago. I'm not sure the industry is still as hurdle-able as it once was.
This is not a problem and has never been a problem. Some of the best developers that I've worked with have absolutely no interest in turning on a computer when they leave work.
I've seen it many times and continue to see it.
This is still definitely possible, with a caveat that it just might not be as doable right at this specific point in time (given layoff waves and recession and all).
There's a certain mental agility which comes with youth which makes for good coders. I haven't met anyone who learned to program late who had the same. Over time, it gets replaced with depth, maturity, and experience, so people who start in tech do okay older. However, people who come in late have neither of those. Everyone I've seen try to make the hop late-career felt clumsy at programming, and at the same time, inexperienced.
It wasn't a failure due to age discrimination, although goodness knows that exists too. It was a failure due to simply not being able to become any good.
This isn't to say it's not worth doing, especially for people with a different prior skill set. An experienced teacher who learns just a little bit of programming can become awesome at ed-tech. An experienced biologist who learns a little bit of biology can do product work or manage a team of programmers for a biotech. Virtually any discipline with a little bit of programming becomes an awesome combo.
Everyone I know who is older and already in the industry, is having a bad time trying to change jobs.
If I get fired or laid off, I will probably try to open a restaurant instead of looking for another tech job.
Hang in there! I'm a firm believer there's more of a 'cost bias' then an 'age bias' and if your on the side of the shop that brings in revenue, age isn't an issue...
Quite likely these older, experienced devs are either moving into management, or own their own consulting/contracting business, rather than be hired as an IC.
The problem with the current way large FAANG hierarchical pay structure is that ic have a ceiling in compensation.
It's crappy answer to age discrimination, but people pivoting can leave less relevant experience off of resumes. I've done that.
Took me a about three weeks to get two offers, but ended up going with a third that paid a bit less, but would let me learn some new skills.
"The industry favors eager people who are hungry to continually learn and grow. While there can be short term bumps in the road, those that fit these characteristics have and will continue to do extremely well."
That wasn't my experience.
The people you describe making so much money are statistical outliers who got lucky.
I'd love to live in whatever bubble you do. All I'd have to do to make stupid level of money is be myself (enjoy learning and growing) and it would easily happen...
"And also fyi if you actually enjoy learning and growing you wouldn't sound so bitter about not making stupid amounts of money"
FYI these aren't mutually exclusive. You can enjoy learning and growing while being bitter about getting screwed over. And it's not bitter to point out to other people that initial comment about just learning and growing being enough to easily reach top 5% income is a lie.
Technology has no age limits, educational requirements, no government enforced credentials or inspections required, no apprenticeship or residency requirements, no significant union presence, no commonality for time in title, no professional tests to pass, and a trivially small tool investment cost.
You can plausibly learn the craft to an employable level with just internet access, a couple hundred bucks in computer hardware, an insatiable amount of curiosity and desire to build things and the right personality match against the interview team. It's not a guarantee but the barriers to entry are laughably nonexistent compared to many careers.
An easy way to look at this is how many real estate agents could be devs vs how many devs could be agents...
Tech can also have tons of regulatory requirements for the product or business but almost none exist for the employees themselves in the majority of jobs. You can hire a whole team of convicted felons that have never written a line of code into your software department, hand out the associate software engineer title to them and still pass most compliance, regulatory and audit requirements. It would probably be a dumb decision but nothing will stop me from calling them software developers and paying them as such and these roles are common (even if they don't pay entry level FAANG wages, they certainly pay living wages).
That doesn't make writing software easy, and doing nothing to set yourself up for success is going to lead to failure, stalling and washing out most of the time, but it's effectively a walk-on playing field of meritocracy in most cases.
Meritocracies don't exist, only the illusion for those that benefit.
Yes, it seems you're using the lowest theoretical barriers. That's fine. I'm talking about the common practical barriers. Of course our conclusions will differs.
What we are discusing is the distorted view in the original comment. The original comment was comparing the top earners of one field to the median earners for another. It would be better to compare the medians. For example median dev salary is about $110k. Median physician salary is about $205k. So no, these are not comparably paying jobs. And one does not "easily" earn more than a physician simply by enjoying learning.
Your bitterness is completely blinding you.
Thanks!
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
Sorting by annual income, software developers are surrounded by more highly credentialed career options that are much harder to get into or are surrounded by similar paying roles that much more sparsely available per capita.
Had that person used nurses, PAs, etc, then they would have been correct. Those do have training requirements and make similar money.
FYI, that's the mean annual income. I'm talking about median (use the median hourly wage column).
That's an interesting point, but what to the distributions look like? For devs there's evidence it might be bimodal [0].
Isn't the majority of COL housing? Of course, with a mortgage, you actually build equity into an asset (the house) that you can later resell.
From my experience, SV caliber devs command SV comp pretty much worldwide.
Glassdoor or salary surveys aren't the most reliable source of information for outliers. There's a proportion of devs that are flying completely under the radar and who are completely invisible to most local companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0]. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally). When hiring is red hot, they might completely disappear from the hiring pool by junior year.
[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
What I've also been told is that due to the legal complexity of hiring international folks remotely, a lot of the people working remotely for US companies are legally contractor in their home country (so they would be reported in the local stats as self-employed and not necessary in the same category as other software devs).
Definitely.
> In my average non-coastal metro area, all the nice homes in the nice areas are owned by classes of people like lawyers and doctors, not software developers.
Is the area benefiting from brain gain or suffering from brain drain?
To become a physician requires on the order of half a million dollars in tuition not to mention the lost opportunity cost of around 8-10 years.
It's tough to say but being a dev likely pays off all things considered.
But yes, I agree that being a programmer is better from an opportunity cost perspective. What I'm disagreeing with is the claim that devs make the same as docs. When looking at the medians, it's closer to half. If they had compared to to nurses or PAs, then it would be more appropriate.
There's no free lunch.
Were those in the comment? Seems these would be more than just enjoying learning and growing.
I might be getting there now. That wasn't the case in the past. Office politics and poor management ruined me early in my career. I'm just a burnt out low performer now. I have seen many others who also fall into the category of enjoying learning and growing (and higher performing than I was) who are not making $150k. Remeber, the national median dev salary is about $110k. So most devs by definition are making substantially less than the numbers claimed. I guarantee many of them also enjoy learning and growing.
That means everything you do should have the goal of landing a higher paying job. Instead of studying things you find interesting, focus on learning skills that are frequently mentioned in job postings. Learning how to make your own compiler, for example, might not be the most profitable investment of your time.
To a salary-maximizer, work is simply a way to improve their resume. Before committing to a project, consider whether talking about that project will help you in an interview.
Most importantly, to make more money you need to constantly apply to better jobs even if you already have a high paying job you are happy with. This is where the majority fail, as most people won't apply for other jobs unless they are unemployed or unhappy. Some people are so deluded that they think they can get a better salary through promotions, simply by working hard at their current job, rather than through job hopping.
I personally know multiple people that transitioned into IT well into their 30s, from a variety of professional backgrounds.
They might not be employed at a FAANG making 500k a year, but they make enough money to live comfortably. Certainly above average for the rest of the population.
Easy? I don't like to undervalue other people's achievements, so I wouldn't call it easy. They certainly put their fair share of elbow grease into it. But it was not an unreasonable, insurmountable difficulty.
I do want to add that in my 30s I'm seeing my mental abilities diminish pretty rapidly, so I don't know how long I can keep doing this. I've also seen people switch to other careers as they get old because they can't handle it anymore. So it seems to go both ways.
Maybe you're current job is making you annoyed which is making you less productive?
I've come to realize when this is happening to me and just move. Might be worth interviewing to see if anything takes your fancy.
How "later"? Age discrimination seems somewhat problematic in tech.
Edit: Two other "old" replies pop up at the same time.
It was supposed to be a happy, feel-good article. Don't let messy reality intrude.
That's not likely to be possible anymore. Microsoft's net income went 9x in the last two decades. Apple's 475x. I don't think this kind of growth is going to continue.
I've seen it time and time again, what the tech industry really craves is very detail oriented people who can communicate and who are proactive (i.e., if they see that something has fallen on the floor, they pick it up, they don't just assume someone else will). That said, as easy as it is to conceptualize those qualities, they are quite rare in my experience. Can't say how, as a software engineer, it's been extremely disappointing to see so many product managers who don't seem to understand that having a detailed knowledge of their product at the lowest levels is a requirement for the job.
I transitioned into programming as an older worker and it was really easy. It's much easier to be a successful programmer than a successful scientist.
Also I don't think that ageism in tech is a thing. The reason that there are very few older workers is because the number of jobs is increasing exponentially (doubling every 5 years since the 60s). All of those new jobs have to be filled with inexperienced people who are mostly young.
But seriously - I learned HTML on AOL when I was 13 and dropped out of community college (where they were teaching Java and assembly).
I’m glad I had the very basic post-high school experience but much of what I know I was self taught as the technology came out.
I’m no electrical engineer and while I have a basic understanding of how transformers work I’m not about to revolutionize AI.
That being said I’ve been successful enough without incurring the debt of a bachelors degree while still making a lower (for HN) 6 figure salary.
Cost of entry is lower for tech (compared to some of the other fields mentioned here) and I’ve been able to pivot/expand into different areas within tech by continuing to teach myself with real world experiences.
It’s hard to let some rando on the street revolutionize healthcare/finance/whatever “established” system because they don’t get rebuilt every ~5 years.
I think we're mostly worried about not finding jobs that were as lucrative as they have been in the last years.
But it’s considered “tech” at least by NPR.
That said, i dont advocate for lowering salaries in general.
COL adjustments are HR policy, not laws.
SV caliber talent typically don't get those, wherever they end up working from.
We're talking about federal jobs. Compensation is infact laid out in regulation. Stuff like a GS15 step 10 (top) has a set base number, but is then adjusted for duty location.
I'm not from US or another international tech hub, I work remotely as a freelancer from the Italian country side.
Still, I make 93k, which puts me 4 times above the italian average. I'm in the top 1% globally, top 2% in Italy/Europe.
Not that I care much that I'm richer, but to reiterate that I care to struggle less for money than the average worker which was the best financial part of being in tech.
Going back to the median is not an appealing option to be honest.
Also, it's crazy that anyone would complain about that salary. By any metric $125k is more than enough money for a decent living.
Incorrect. Most people I know in this industry never lived in SF and make well over that amount. Putting in some time on the West Coast is not a bad idea though - doesn’t have to be SF.
Will an individual who has the appropriate qualifications and experience find that tech jobs are harder to find, less stable, and less well compensated than they were 5 years ago? Yes, absolutely!
But will that same individual find that tech jobs are harder to find, less stable, and less well compensated than jobs in another industry right now? If so, which industry?
When even "the rich people" with "all the right stuff" can get laid off, people have Big Feels.
Whoever thought that didn't work during 2001 or 2008, or has a short memory.
Lots of people have skewed perspectives.
Industry / Company / Place where people make lots of money firing people = lots of clicks.
the same way advertisement upholds political correctness and same-thinking and make criticism harder, based solely on self interest and "not being demonetized by youtube", a journalist having clicks as the only metric will benefit whoever can spend money not caring for clicks to push an agenda to select the click-driving crisis du jour.
Remember that careers last 30 years, and if you're the average engineer, you're more likely to fall into the 80% of the pareto half than the 20%. Can you be confident that AI won't displace you in 10, 15, or even 20 years?
This doesn't apply to Stanford grads destined for high-tech roles in FAANG tier companies. I'm taling about the Idaho State grads who will work for IBM and Accenture and likely won't make the $500k salaries to retire from their tech roles in 10 years.
1) No, but I am nonetheless skeptical of AI-takeover in general — I'm in the wait-and-see camp and so wouldn't be put off by the might-happens.
2) If one were AI-alarmist, is there any profession you can be confident will not be displaced by AI in 10, 15, or even 20 years?
3) Confession: I'm retired and no longer have any skin in the game.
Many; Dentists, people that fix your AC, electricians, etc, etc.
In the trades themselves, we've been doing this for centuries... have a master mason supervise the journeyman masons supervising the manual day labor. AI will not be able to compete with experienced personnel. In that field they've already dumbed down the entry level requirement to "pick up a brick and move it there" and it can't go much lower.
On the other hand, if I were manufacturing survey equipment I'd worry about AR goggles as the competition.
Do I think white collar jobs go first, yes. also, the dynamics who buys all the stuff that blue collars workers install and build? without a white collar workforce the demand for that goes way down, and the supply of workers goes up.
Not saying it's going to happen just think other jobs aren't that far behind.
With the exception of law, automation has already arrived in all of these fields (to accounting first, 1-2 generations ago) and there are now more people in each field rather than less.
Answering my own question: each has a comfortable regulatory moat and competent professional society to defend it.
Same for accounting and TurboTax.
Indigenous Ranger [1]
[1] https://www.niaa.gov.au/indigenous-affairs/environment/indig...
As long as we have human using computers, we'll have more skill humans helping the humans.
We were told that inventing web search engines and giving kids ipads would completely eliminate IT. We see how that turned out LOL.
From a financial standpoint, as long as the top 1% of "IT skills" population can make the other 99% of the company more than 1% more profitable, they'll never get fired, well, completely anyway. At big companies its a pretty low bar to surpass, and small companies can contract with MSPs.
From a cultural / psychology standpoint, its pretty deeply ingrained that some folks are dumb/lazy/ignorant and thats OK, some folks have intense learned helplessness as a character trait, and some folks get really excited about forcing others to "do their work for them" WRT primate dominance. We as a culture will never avoid the appeal of BYOD, even with a miracle of 100% BYOD in IT, we as a culture would STILL hire cloud admins just so the job can be delegated if nothing else.
The pay in IT in most of the country is ... microscopic compared to software dev. New grads or people with nothing but an A+ are not getting new Stanford grad software dev salaries, its more like $22 to $25/hr in most of the country for a new help desk jockey. And it's pretty boring work for 99% of the employees 99% of the time. However, if chatgpt can fizzbuzz better than humans, doing "IT stuff" beats starvation for us computer people.
Its also worth pointing out that AI as a tool is just biased single answer web search. Web search more or less resulted in more employment. Seems likely this variation on the theme will result in more employment.
We have no way of knowing what this tech will be like in 15 years.
The iPhone was released about 15 years ago. Even the most prescient of us couldn’t have predicted how fundamentally that would change life, culture, work and business.
Any career with strong regulation is going to take longer to automate. Hands-on work as well.
For example, there is strong regulation preventing computers from practicing driving/trucking/delivery, law, medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, and certified engineering
Also, build me a robot that can do the following. I'll wait: construction, woodworking, metalworking, glassblowing, painting (painting houses), electricking, plumbing, delivery, service industry, cooking.
Yes it can write very short snippets that often make sense, but in no way can understand requirements, do debugging or maintain existing code.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-watch-first-d...
This place needs to change its name to LudditeNews.
The belief is that new means of production should be embraced, owned, and operated by workers to benefit the many and not just the few exploitative capitalists (which are those who own means of production).
Instead of exploiting lay-offs and long shifts, and disregarding safety to save the capitalist money, the factory would instead be built and operated for the benefit of workers and society, prioritizing safety and sharing shorter shifts among a larger workforce to preserve jobs.
From a socialist/communist perspective machine taxes and UBI are like cheap bribes to avoid the issue and preserve the exploitative system in place. The luddites probably would have felt the same had they been offered a pity sum or machine tax from factory owners to "offset" their condition.
If I wasn't scared before, I'm even less scared now.
But if all you do is write trivial code anyone can learn to write in 1 week, with extremely detailed instructions, perhaps your job is in danger indeed. That's not what a software engineer does anyway.
It improved drastically in quality within 4 months, yet for some reason, the nex 10 years will see 0 progress in a field with literally tens of billions and intellectual capital flowing in.
Not bad news for anyone involved in this work, though. That period is when the real business and societal changes happen. It’s also when most of the money gets made.
People and businesses need time to test new technology and adapt it so that it works reliably for their specific use cases. GPT and other LLMs are no exception.
That might not be a threat to you if you’re a 35 year old developer, but if you’re an 18 year old exiting high school, there’s a non zero chance that by the time you’re 35 - 17 years - the tech will be good enough to replace you.
There's a few layers that make me not worried:
- automation will shift jobs
- an engineer is a generally smart employee (yes, even the average engineers), so the company will be a sinking ship if they have to eliminate jobs and get rid of people instead of moving smart people around
- even if you do end up jobless, as a generally smart person, you can learn a new skill. Plus, now AI can help you learn more quickly.
The catch is, of course, predicting which next job won't be replaced by AI.
If you're the type of person to worry, you'll always find something to worry about.
Not talking about FAANG positions (or salaries) of course, more run-of-the-mill roles that companies struggle to fulfill.
Now a year later, I'm trying for a new job again and I hardly hear from recruiters, and I actually have to apply for jobs. It's a huge contrast from this time last year and it makes me regret waiting.
Side Note: Having seen other coworkers move on and knowing what I know now, I've realized I was more than ready to get a new job a year ago, I just lacked the confidence to keep trying. Hopefully this serves to motivate others paralyzed by imposter syndrome.
Combined with talent hoarding the whole thing became a luxury companies can’t afford without free money from either investors or the fed.
Even with all this cutting, headcount is still growing. But it’s harder than ever for the entry level guys. Painting a rosy picture here is wrong.
Before you say that's not possible, remember that chatGPT (GPT-3.5) went live in November 2022, and GPT-4 went live in March 2023.
10-15 years is a long time in tech. The iPhone is barely 15 years old.
I'll be very, very surprised if the growth rate doesn't accelerate from here.
It depends on what improved GPT-4 relative to 3. If it was adding more data, then we'd expect progress to speed up in the short-term and then come to a screeching halt as we run out of text.
If it was algorithmic/model improvements then it could be much quicker to improve or much slower.
I think the big problem is that nobody (except Open-AI) knows what GPT-4 does and how it does it, so it's hard to predict.
I'm generally a fan of a naive model given the uncertainties around this, hence my prediction of three years.
How would this all go if it is necessary to start rationing access to AWS, Azure and GCP, driving up the cost of hosting applications on them to the point that only well funded organizations can continue doing so? What percentage of "Tech jobs" are in companies that exist at the whim of a couple shareholders or poorly funded organizations that are unlikely to withstand 3000% cloud price increases? (Spoiler: MOST.) Was any of this discussed by NPR?
What could cause such a black swan event? Does NPR want us to even think about the possibility of the sudden "closure" of certain fabs in Taiwan and Shenzen (making the chip shortage a semi-permanent event)? https://nypost.com/2023/04/26/us-to-send-nuclear-submarine-t...
Nobody in Tech has time for NPR, there are a million YouTube videos to watch, websites, podcasts and Safari books to read, plus management of your personal life and ACTUAL Sphere of Influence. The best you can do is vote for someone who you (not NPR, not Communist-controlled social media platforms or the revolving door of bloviators on TV) think is able to effectively manage issues in a way that will bring about the best economic outcome for you and everyone you know. https://youtu.be/bPpcfH_HHH8
Did you have a growth business that’s going to be 50% bigger in 10 years? A few years ago that would sound not-amazing but reasonable. Today that’s nothing. You can get that kind of returns from bonds with like zero risk.
Firms therefore prioritize savings like they haven’t done in years.
From what I can see, GPT-4 is incredibly useful but you have to be very careful to lead it in the correct direction otherwise it produces bad outputs. I say this as somebody that probably uses it every 10 minutes. Do you think that it will stop making errors of judgment and be able to behave as an agent soon?
I've not encountered anything yet that gives me faith in that, other than hype about it increasing in ability exponentially which seems unlikely.
Do you feel like your ability to produce correct output with GPT improved with practice? If so, then eventually you might reach a point where you get 99.99% accuracy with it, and this can easily 10x your productivity.
If that is what they are "seeing" then based on their collective track record it is almost certain to not happen.
Good professionals are being hit by these layoffs, but I suspect the vast majority create little to no value for their employers.
Meta / Google employees 2019: 44k / 118k
Meta / Google employees 2022: 86k / 190k
Even after these layoffs virtually all companies retain way more employees than they had three years ago.