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Comment by ulizzle | Hacker News Reader

I like to code but what a terrible career. Guess who didn’t get laid off?

Those who don’t know how to code

I dislike Google and Amazon as much as the next guy (which is a lot), but - why do you believe software developers get cut so much less often than other kinds of employees?

Also, the condescending tone is unbecoming.

I’m a little bummed so my tone isn’t the best. I apologize for that

Software developers get cut more often because we don’t think about work politics. It’s one of those classic mistakes

You two appear to be taking past each other?

I haven't been keeping my finger on the pulse of the issue recently, but in prior rounds of layoffs, engineering had been much less impacted than sales, marketing, HR etc.

It’s all pretty much the same right now. But I’m also posting in a bad mood so it’s likely my fault. Economic turmoils. One day thing will turn around but for now, it’s a minefield no matter where you are

Do software developers get cut more often? My impression was that it was the opposite.

The article literally says Snap dropped 20 product managers...

I was always under the impression the significant majority of PMs of companies like that were either also software engineers themselves or at least knew enough about it to capably pretend to be one on a good day. Is that not the case?

With luck they were devs before but it's all but a given.

People who can’t code don’t get promoted to PMs or any sort of engineering manager because it’s too easy to lie

Eventually they all forget how to to (I did too) so that’s why it’s important to stay hands-on

Not necessarily. A PM should understand the sorts of things that SEs could do, but there are several PMs who can't code themselves, but could say what are important features that the product should have.

Plenty of people who code get laid off. SDETS/automation QA engineers are software engineers, but aren't treated as such.

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