Almost 200k Job Cuts in Tech Pushes New Grads to Wall Street
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This led to an influx of people who would otherwise have gone into banking or consulting or other careers similarly targeted as “elite” professions when graduating from college and to an influx of people from those professions into tech.
I think it bodes well for the sector to have less of this prestige seeking- not because these folks aren’t talented, but because rebalancing the overall tech workforce towards a mix of talent is probably more healthy for people who value working in tech because it’s an area of genuine interest for them.
The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech.
The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs.
Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps".
The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.
I think tech is currently undergoing a long overdue culling period. I recall one in 2001ish and in 2008ish. All the people who got into it because of the money and don't particularly care for it will move on. Some people who do care for it will also get culled. It's not pretty.
One of the things that annoyed me about this field is the obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. Sometimes a job is just a job.
I got into it for the passion, but I don't have it as much as I did. I can't imagine doing something else like marketing or accounting though.
>obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects.
That's most corporate places, especially in sales. One of the funniest takes is Step Brothers, "it's the Catalina wine mixer!"
I really loved tech. For about a decade I truly loved every day of work. Then I got really worn out and it took me almost 5 years to work through it. Part of this low point was a point of terrible health (mostly caused by my job and stress). When I came back out of it, I considered leaving the field, but stayed in it for the money.
I was in a management position at this point. I could go into a different field and start over, but I'd probably end up working my way up to management eventually too and its really all the same at that point. You are managing people and processes. So I might as well do that with the tech spin on it.
The obsession with over-manufactured enthusiasm is one I really laugh at now that I look back on my career. I realized that most of us in tech will work on boring stuff. I can't even tell what I am working on anymore, to the point that it is almost comical. I could be building self-driving cars or cloud billing portals. At the end of the day, you are fixing bugs or improving performance or polishing my tiny grain of sand in the huge sculpture that these platforms have become. When you are working on large-scale complex platforms nobody really understands how it all works. There is no magic, even when working on "sexy" projects. I've worked on exciting projects and boring projects and the day-to-day experience is exactly the same.
Pro Tip: "Boring" projects tend to pay better, and since its the same work and same day-to-day experience, take the boring projects. You also tend to find fewer sensationalized colleagues on those projects.
Look at it this way:
Your boring, cushy tech job only exists because the industry as a whole is grossly inefficient.
That's why so many people are doing nearly the same thing, over and over and over, day after day.
If it wasn't for that inefficiency you would need to find other work, and it would probably be a lot more difficult than your current job.
So, glass half full.
I don't live to work anymore, I work to live.
I still get stellar marks at work, i know my shit and i'm good at it. But the illusion has worn off for me. It's just a job. I meet deadlines, but I also push back on deadlines that require crunch time or weekend work. I push back on weekend or late time work completely now. I'm not embarrassed anymore to say "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week".
My job is a means for providing for a comfortable retirement, and a comfortable life. I enjoy tech, but I enjoy my hobbies more. My hobbies keep me healthy and happy, work doesn't do either of those two things. Work is work, that's fine. But let's call it what it is. Let's not forget to live too.
Balls the size of spacehoppers. I love it.
Unfortunately FAANG rating systems aren't great and often reward vanity projects going nowhere over the work keeping the company afloat, so I entirely believe that's possible even while having good ratings.
There is no way these two things aren't connected.
And since they are the majority they get to decide. And they decide to choose mediocrity. Consoling themselves that "good code isn't that important", "I'll do it next week", and other excuses.
I’ve worked with plenty of people like you and some of them wouldn’t know a good product if it smacked them in the face. Most products don’t need more engineering capabilities, they need people involved with excellence in multiple skills.
Apple is an embodiment of this. None of their engineering is bleeding edge but they make categorically redefining products. People that nerd out over something like Linux wouldn’t get it.
By the way you are talking, no, you have not worked with people like me. Most products are garbage because of poor planning, poor market research and bad/rushed engineering.
Tell me you don't know anything about Apple without telling me that you don't know anything about Apple. A lot of their engineering is absolutely bleeding edge. Right now I am working on improving/adding features to a real time ray tracing renderer that works at 30+ fps on the latest iPhones 14 Pro. Most people's desktop PCs cannot do real time ray tracing and yet Apple does it on a phone. But I guess that is not bleeding edge...
I say this after doing SW development for a few decades. You can't count on "passion," "rockstars" or "10x developers." You can only count on the slogs who show up, do a good job and go home.
I feel we hit a crescendo with the post pandemic bubble and fed pumping money, that's when tech usage globally was of course at it's highest, but also like the sheer number of people using it everyday was massive(maybe 50-75%+ of the world). And it arguably "ate" or saved the world during the pandemic. It's fascinating, and now we're entering another cycle maybe after a brief respite, with LLMs.
I made sure not to mention that I was in a top tier guild getting server firsts. I didn’t want to come off as to weird. I mean I have three computers and seven monitors on my desk, but one have to know when to draw the line.
It felt like that, but I suspect it’s not really true.
I think it's moving more towards how engineering (mechanical, ee, etc, not software) is seen. It's a skilled and respected job that pays decent, but at the end of the day it's just another job. There will always be mechanical engineers and software engineers who LOVE it and tinker all through the night after work, but that's becoming less and less then norm for software.
My old roommate was a mech engineer who designed lighting fixtures, didn't love his job, but it paid decent enough, and the company needed an ME to design them. There are plenty of "lighting fixtures" that need to be built in the software world.
Try closer to 1%. The vast majority of us are just making software to make businesses chug along
Rapidly emerging profitable technologies create fortunes and the elites chase the fortunes. There's no conceptual difference between the iPhone and the steam engine or steel mill in this regard.
Such classist BS exploits manual labor.
We’re just perpetuating empowering the lazy. It makes the screeching about social programs seem hilarious since being a bank CEO is not biology sustaining work. It’s historical barnacle. History we hallucinate since we were never there. We’re more like LLMs than we want to admit
Is there some other definition?
16 years isn't a whole lot of time in the field, but it's enough to have watched the expectations of SWE roles expand, and the demands of dumping ops ontop of an already complex job do take their tole. My original comment was tongue in cheek, but late night fixes, pages, opsing, ontop of day to day development is a recipe for burnout when you add partners and kids into the mix.
> most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and
> go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc)
If someone becomes an SRE because they don't like programming, they're going to be in for a big surprise when they discover how much quality time they're about to share with the unshare(2) manpage.
Imo, tech is still a great place to be. But we all need to raise the bar for hires.
I don't think much has changed in the attractiveness--it has been a high-paying field for fifty-years now. The sexiness comes and goes with the cycle.
And tech is cyclical on about 10-15 year cycles or so, and we have hit a downturn after a long upturn. Maybe AI will be the next uptick. Or maybe VR. Hard to predict. But I'm pretty sure it will happen.
None of the existing methods e.g. leetcode work well, so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend. Something you'd likely have been exposed to in CS102 type stuff.
> so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend
There are too many good candidates so you're having to... flog them harder?
God, tech hiring is weird. People in other sectors of the economy look at me like I've just announced that I have cancer, when I explain what the tech interview world looks like.
Programmers catch a lot of shit for being immature or unprofessional, but I think tech management deserves a harder look, when it comes to those things.
Thus, in lieu of a standardized framework we have to invent our own.
I very much agree though, the avg. CRUD shop could probably just ask Fizzbuzz and have the same outcome as these gauntlets.
The FAANGs and similar could easily have created such a thing, and driven wide adoption of it. They find some other value in their very-expensive process, or they'd have gotten rid of it with the snap of their fingers, if that were the only reason.
I suspect it's mainly to do with reducing turnover and, therefore, suppressing wages among their workers. Yes, despite those wages already being quite high. Wouldn't be the first time they've done it. "Solving" the problem would be trivial and relatively cheap, compared to the current processes, but it'd come at the cost of making it easier for employees to jump ship for more $$$, and none of them want that.
Why do the rest do it? Cargo-culting, mostly.
Right secondary school grades + near perfect exams -> Right Undergraduate
Right undergraduate + LeetCode (basically an exam) -> Big Tech job " + Case interview prep -> High paying entry level management consulting job " + Right connections -> High paying entry level wall-st job " + High LSAT -> Right Law School -> High-paying BigLaw job " + High MCAT -> Right Med School -> Right Residency -> High Paying Physician Job
If you notice, tech (Googles of the World and elite startups) have now fallen inline with the path for other white-shoe industries.
FWIW, I know at least a few people from memory that had non-technical undergraduates (usually economics) but are excellent at studying for exams. Sure enough, they did enough LeetCode they could get a job at Meta or similar. Ask them what actually happens in a CPU or similar technical question and you get a blank stare.
Where the hell did you go to school? When I did CS102, they were talking about linked lists and recursion. I would love to have seen device drivers, but when I was in school, everything was way more academic and impractical than that.
I am really curious to know what school has a cs 102 level class that teaches you writing a device driver?
I could perhaps see this as part of Operating systems class, where you just learned about how kernels works using a minimal OS (like xv6).
but that example you gave based on the expectation you mentioned are very extreme. This is why its hard to find talnet to hire.
History is a flat circle.
My last company was chock-full of Ivy league/Stanford/Berkeley/etc graduates with almost none being the type who actually is interested in technology. About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years. I will also say that parental pressure had a big part. Why spend 10 years of your life to be a doctor when you can make more money in big tech?
It also became fashionable for people to pivot out of high-finance or management consulting (traditional white-shoe industries) and into corporate development roles at hot companies.
I blamed it on Virginia tech’s football team making it to championships that year (1999). Oh well, still got to work with famous professors and got a very good head start on my career through my Alma mater
I think my class was the last to graduate from arts/sciences, the CS dept was moved into the engineering college.
I'm always kind of curious about these folks. Do they not communicate amongst themselves? It would seem that 50% aspiring to be product managers could not be statistically possible.
I feel like if I walked into a service bay of a dealership and asked the mechanics working on vehicles, there is no way 1/2 of them would try and claim they expect to be service advisor in 2 years.
1. The coat-rider who sees everyone doing and how can the consensus be wrong. If you read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, the first few chapters document his experience at Princeton in the early 80s. It's just the fashionable thing to do.
2. The ones that hope to pivot somewhere in year 2-3 to Private Equity or the Hedge fund space. After a few more years, your hours and stress dramatically improve and you earn life-changing amounts of money (1M+ USD) on a yearly basis if you are good. Very few make it this far though. Many burn out and end up in other corporate finance roles.
Group 1 moved to tech and will slowly move back to high-finance.
Everyone else was in it because computers paid well.
Not to say that people didn’t work hard or eventually become skilled. Just that money was the driving force more than anything.
probably about 10 years ago big tech got added to this list. not sure exactly why. maybe they just got big enough to start doing serious campus recruiting.
I noticed it around 25 years ago.
But I understand there have been phases of go-to prestige job that a certain class went through. Techbro didn't immediately displace, say, investment banking bro, or management consulting bro.
This is especially interesting given that Americans used to mock nerds in pop culture and in schools.
A trajectory question that always puzzles me is how fast can we really supply software engineers. Is software engineering like other ordinary white-collar jobs where supply is as elastic as it can be, or software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent? I draw this question from personal observation, so it's definitely not scientific: China has been big on math education. Math whiz kids are honed like superheroes in China. Teachers and parents put great pressure on students to excel at maths. Yet in the end, only a small percentage of students can truly learn high-school math or entry-level college math. If software engineering is like math, then the supply will stay tight until the demand drops, and techies will continue enjoying good pay after the recession.
They end up in medicine, consulting, engineering, manufacturing, academic research, Wall Street, etc and often switch whole industries mid-career too.
But this is also a byproduct of many tech companies valuing plumbing over good engineering and accepting or ignoring the cost.
But yes, I've met so many boot campers easily outperform their ivy college senior because the second one didn't care, barely worked and completed his daily tasks in one hour.
But in the end the first one churned more code, learned more about the business and people and was miles ahead in efficiency.
I don't think I've ever seen it. Maybe it's a location/caliber thing, where in some "best cost locales" there's a big brain drain to the valley. We just flat out stopped interviewing bootcamp grads at some point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low.
At one point, the most notorious bootcamp, Lambda (or Bloom Tech, they had to change names a few times to avoid litigation), was desperate enough they would "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And this was pre-pandemic when hiring was at it's peak.
In such an environments education doesn't really make much of a difference when you're gluing APIs together. The biggest difference between workers productivity really becomes just straight up dependent on focus and professionalism.
People that are too skilled and educated for the job often go lazy mode and do their tasks quickly and then mind their own business and their motivation goes to hell. It is very simple for bootcampers to be more productive just by being focused and professional. In the long run bootcampers also tend to learn more about the business and have a higher impact.
Point is, in most jobs your skills are in the long run secondary to your willingness to learn and do stuff. The fact that people have done tons of algo exercises or system design is quite irrelevant when your job is writing forms, lists or connecting services to databases. It's no rocket science.
> secondary to your willingness to learn and do stuff. The fact that people have done tons of algo exercises or system design is quite irrelevant when your job is writing forms, lists or connecting services to databases. It's no rocket science.
Isn't that a good demonstration that someone can learn (mastering algorithms and data structures) more than rote-learning a framework?
My previous company was involved in 3 to 6 months bootcamps and had the option to be the first to make offers to the best students. This put us in an advantageous position.
2 of the 5 we hired I think were already leaning to write software before starting the bootcamp (as in genuinely being interested in the field and having programmed some hobbyist stuff), 3 did not have such an experience.
All but one turned to be great additions, that one kept struggling but we knew he was weak since the beginning. The two hobbyists both turned great. But by far the best was a girl with no previous experience.
I was able to help her grow and push her to be curious all time to understand the whys. This combined with her huge drive, focus, and professionalism turned her in 18 months since starting to be one of the best devs in the entire org made of 100 devs. She just churned code (quality one), reviews and solved problems one after the other all day. I have been trying to convince her to join my current company 24/7 for a long time.
On the other hand many better programmers just didn't care. They spent days playing console or pc games, and just did subpar work enough to close their daily tasks asap. Hard to fire these people under Italian law, but they represented the overwhelming majority of devs.
Now, I understand this is anecdotak, the pool of talent was like a pyramid in the bootcamp, and the weakest or average ones weren't great, but the top and most motivated where better coworkers and juniors than most engineers I've met.
Hope this gives my opinion a context.
> On the other hand many better programmers just didn't care. They spent days playing console or pc games, and just did subpar work enough to close their daily tasks asap. Hard to fire these people under Italian law, but they represented the overwhelming majority of devs.
What's interesting here to consider is Italy's market for engineers.
I've met a lot of talented Italian engineers here in the valley, so the local market might already have suffered significant brain drain.
Frankly I think its much simpler. Its a high income to effort career.
But even if we do think this is good because it weeds out people worried about prestige, why stop at 200k layoffs. Why not more? You probably don’t really want that.
I think it's fair to say that product owners and UI designers are tech workers too, but maybe the issue is that "tech industry/worker" is way too broad of a term. Especially when a lot of these roles are extremely new to humanity (engineering and doctor/healer have been around for thousands of years whereas a marketer is barely over a 100 years old).
This suggests you may be off by a few millenia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_marketing
I lean towards the "people have been people since there were people" side of the debate and assume there has been marketing since at least the invention of agriculture and its resultant ability to allow humans to make a living doing something other than calorie acquisition.
But the examples in your wiki page show just that, really neat stuff. Thanks for sharing.
I don't understand the reasoning behind it beyond blatant ignorance, or perhaps that they have a dislike for silicon valley types and get satisfaction out of demeaning the job role in some way by making engineers out to be as "easily dispensable" as everyone else. It's bizarre. I guess, whatever generates the most clicks.
> The latest round of layoffs at Facebook parent company Meta is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/21/23692515/tech-worke...
They are pivoting hard from VR to AI.
Artificial Life.
Zero of these people have been let go because of ai yet vox is peddling this myth. How long until vox takes vice’s path?
The market is still incredibly strong for SV caliber devs, and I see no signal it's going to slow down. If anything, it kept compensation for engineers from cratering by propping up the stocks.
[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...
Perhaps if you're comparing it to other industries, but compared to tech's own (recent) past, it's most definitely not "incredibly strong".
Not trying to be snarky, but have you actively searched for a role recently, say in the last 2 months or so? Recruiters reach out far less frequently now on LinkedIn, the common theme even among many experienced engineers these days is instant rejections, or if not that, then being rejected after goin through the final round. Very few are able to land well paying, interesting roles within weeks (or a month at most) of starting their search like they were able to even as recently as a year ago.
It's still possible to find work, but you'll quite likely have to accept a lateral move (at best) or accept a pay cut these days if you've been laid off.
That's not different than pre-layoffs.
The overwhelming majority of applicants are not qualified, or are "tech adjacent" applying for SWE to try to get "a foot in the door" (I kid you not, it happens).
Because class warfare and hate drive clicks and reads. Now who else to hate if not those members of society that earned what should be normal pay? Isnt that more entertaining than hating on those who earn billions, pay little tax, drive inflation up and make us poorer by the day?
You know, the good old pity worker against worker.
As a PM, these days never existed. All of the high TC PMs are technical PMs, like myself, who have an engineering background. I was in Eng for more than a decade before I became a PM. MBAs turned PMs never commanded as high of compensation as technical PMs as ICs at any tech company. Technical PMs are in the same salary bands as Eng, non-technical PMs are generally 1 level or half step below in the bands.
There's way too many people that get their impression about what PMs do from "Day in the Life" TikTok videos made by non-technical associate PMs who are a couple years out of college and basically doing the easiest pieces of things.
But generally, salaries at tech companies weren't as high then. My salary in the late 80s as a PM with engineering work experience and a couple of masters degrees was the equivalent of about $120K today in a major tech hub.
This is pretty much the same now. I am on a ~40 person Product team and only a small number of people do not have a technical background. The vast majority of IC PMs at higher seniority have a technical background. Most MBAs you meet in tech companies are people who were technical and went back to school, although there are a few PMs that are more focused on business analysis and marketing side (sometimes categorized as PMMs or Outbound PMs in some companies) and these folks tend to be less technical, but also doing less technical work, so that's perfectly okay.
I'm curious how representative that sample is.
A few months ago the AI startup I worked at pivoted and laid off 15%. AFAIK the majority of us, all very technical, are still looking for work.
Note: My situation may be a little niche. I live in the middle-of-nowhere, USA, so I'm trying to restrict my search to remote jobs. That rules out most of finance, and many Alphabet-related jobs. I really, really hope I don't need to move my family to find decent work.
Is this not still the case? Investment banks and hedge funds were full of EE majors back when I was there, and most banks have significant software operations.
Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735>
It's not like it's certain anywhere but, as the article says, the equation has changed both respect to total comp (especially because of stock) and perceived job stability. And I suspect that a lot of people weren't that set on Big Tech aside from the compensation and lifestyle.
I'm nearly two decades into the software dev industry now and working in a FAANG. I use "working" loosely as I've completely gone into quiet quitting mode for the last 5 months or so. I hate this job, I hate this company, I hate this industry. I can count on one hand the number of times in my career that I actually enjoyed working on a particular project and those were exclusively lone-wolf risks I took to advance myself (thankfully they paid off).
I'm only doing this to support my family. There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours. Thankfully I'm able to stave off depression with hobbies and other interests.
I've preferred working tech support. I've preferred low-end service jobs.
But those pay shit, so here I am.
I think I might really enjoy & be good at product management, but breaking in without lucking into a role at an existing employer is tricky. Keeping an eye out for opportunities—I definitely do not want to still be killing Jira tickets and fighting broken tools and bad SDKs when I'm in the last third of my career. Started out ambivalent, and have grown to hate it.
[EDIT]
> There is not a single day where I don't dread sitting down in this fucking chair and staring at a screen for 8 hours.
Oh, yeah, and this resonates, in particular. If not for having a family, I'd be out already. Find something with much lower pay but a quick little well-defined, "person asks for thing, I deliver, they're happy" reward loop, ideally with as little glowing-screen time involved as possible, and go back to having, like, any energy at the end of the day. All that extra money would not be worth staying in this industry, if it were just me (also I'd have a whole lot more saved up for early semi-retirement by now if nobody else needed any of it, LOL)
25 years later I'm a still working in software (though not on the web), and my motivation for doing so has changed very little.
I have friends who are doctors.....their work doesn't feel meaningful. They are constantly pressured to move from patient to patient like they are cattle.
Friend is a pharmacist, she stands 12 hours a day. She he is forced to go in sick. She gets written up for being late.
Many teachers hate their jobs, they are underpaid and have to deal with all kinds of good/shitty kids.
Chef? Seriously do some snooping around subreddits/message boards for these professions. You will quickly realize how corporations can make any "meaningful" job a drag and unhealthy.
Programming can be extremely meaningful. You can create great things that help society. However, many of those projects won't pay for themselves. So, if I company wants to pay me over six figures to write some code, I will gladly take it.
Plus, I am a nerd, I like building stuff, sheds, racing sims, tinkering on bikes, cars and computers. My ability to tinker with computers, write queries and programming can allow other people to do their jobs. Imagine a health system without a computer.
Maybe to you, but not necessarily other people. There are likely people in any role that feel the work is meaningful and fulfilling, and others who do not.
Yep, doctors stopped being in charge of healthcare entities (hospitals, clinics) and now their work conditions suck. And not just during residency, any more.
> Friend is a pharmacist, she stands 12 hours a day. She he is forced to go in sick. She gets written up for being late.
If there's one thing that would be a shock to life-long programmers, it's how just one tiny step down the in-demand ladder (I'd write "social status", but we don't actually have any of note [doctors do, but fat lot of good that did them when the capitalists finally got ahold of them], rather, we're just in-demand) means operating under management conditions we'd find intolerable. No last-minute-notice skipping out for an hour to take your dog to the vet or whatever, certainly. That kind of shit's reserved for the top half of management, in most other environments.
> Many teachers hate their jobs, they are underpaid and have to deal with all kinds of good/shitty kids.
I don't think any teacher I know would advise anyone to become a teacher. Work environment is shit, the amount of time you get to spend on the part that's why anyone wants to do teaching keeps dropping, parents are jerks with too much time on their hands, admin's the most shockingly-stupid set of people with advanced degrees ever assembled (and a bad case of petty-dictator syndrome), pay & benefits have been slowly (or, recently, not-so-slowly) falling relative to the rest of the economy for at least a couple decades, and half the voters hate you for no good reason. Do. Not. Do. It. [EDIT: Oh, and that describes a decent school district. The bad ones are all that plus a whole pile of nightmarish crap, on top]
I have three friends who are anesthesiologists and they are all generally meh about it. They treat it like being a mechanic.
There’s always a flip side to being a helper like a doctor too - not everyone survives surgery. The thing they don’t tell you about doing that emotional labor is that it’s poorly compensated and exhausting and so people tend to dissociate and become less and less compassionate the longer they do it just as a self defense mechanism.
I know a number of lawyers who find their work intensely meaningful and are willing to put up with the bull shit despite the challenges.
I can think of examples of people in my life who have these professions on either side of the coin (find it meaningful, find it a drag, whatever).
I'm a programmer and find it meaningful. I also know people who are programmers and hate it. In fact, I've also worked as a chef and a teacher. I found there to be both satisfying and unsatisfying things about each of these jobs.
Clearly, different people find different work meaningful.
Having a small percentage of the jobs in society be sufficiently well compensated is a sure path to a large number of people being unsatisfied in their careers.
Not sure why you feel I was being hostile towards you. You seem to be really getting defensive in almost aggressive manner.
Yeah but normalisation usually involves deflating people's pay instead of increasing that of "Doctor? Teacher? Nurse? Public defender? Chef?". A very odd wish to be honest.
But it would appear that there is effort being made to “correct” it:
> The Federal Reserve should refrain from raising interest rates too fast in the name of controlling inflation. Even a “mild” recession resulting from these actions will do significant harm to low-wage workers and their families.
1) How personally validating a job is to a person
2) How valuable the job is to society at large.
To see how those might decouple, consider Superman continuously turning a crank to provide limitless energy for society (credit: SMBC [0]). Fabulously valuable to society, extremely lacking in personal validation for superman.
In general, you'd expect salary to correlate with 2, and inversely correlate with 1, since the sense of validation is in effect part of the compensation you're getting from a job. It also seems pretty common to (IMO wrongly) think that 1 and 2 are tightly coupled: the jobs that produce the greatest societal value are the ones that feel the most personally validating. But that's just because modern society is far more complicated than our brains were evolved to handle. Identifying the actual value of a job requires following a complex chain of incentives and value production through the vast networks of businesses and organizations that comprise our world.
Sadly for those instincts, it is probably true that a programmer writing a piece of code that makes $business_process_c56_2 0.1% more efficient, which is then run billions upon billions of times is actually producing more value in net than a teacher who changes the lives of O(1000) kids over their lifetime.
[0]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2305
Who still thinks this? There is very little correlation between "hard work" and income.
Also true from my 16 years experience in tech. May be not hard work as in amount of hours spent, but quality of result certainly correlates with compensation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-us-still-believes-in-hard-wor...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/views-of-the...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2022/06/29/stuck-on-...
Some specific research looks at "earnings elasticity" between generations:
>> While faith in the American Dream is deep, evidence suggests that the United States lacks policies to ensure the opportunities that the dream envisions. According to the data, there is considerably more mobility in most other developed economies.
https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...
We can conclude there are many factors involved besides a general attitude of "hard work".
Said he'd go to colleges to speak after each book came out. Students saw his books as opportunities, not a warning as intended. Q&A was always "so, where to you think the next boom is?"
He's very grim about it.
Until supply meets demand, this will continue but I guess the trend is abating or maybe it's just the possible recession for now. Though in the future it will be a mix of incumbents plugging all the vertical holes plus LLMs offering a horizontal suite of products, and then the market calibrating to the new supply.
Eventually though, it feels like majority of the knowledge jobs will be replaced and there would be the need for whole new tier of jobs, and hobbies that people pursue, with a UBI floor.
What?