Comment by oldpersonintx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldpersonintx | Hacker News Reader

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The end of ZIRP is the tip of the iceberg

1. Consolidation. There will be fewer and more powerful tech companies in the future and they will grow and profit as they shrink their headcount. The belief that profits and growth = jobs will soon be recognized as twentieth century thinking.

2. Automation. Spiffy tools, reuse, AI...no matter how you slice it, your skills are getting pushed into the shared stack every day.

3. Internationalization. You might be surprised to find out that there are React coders in South America that have all the right tats and piercings, read HN and Blind, bang on leetcode...and will work for 1/5 what you will.

The only question is how many people leaving tech presently will never be able to get back in, or maybe they just realize driving a Fedex truck for the same money is less stressful.

Also don't be too spooked by layoffs so far, its just beginning in tech and finance and this wave still hasn't hit the huge cohort of permanently cashflow-negative startups somehow still clinging to life...they will ALL be gone.

To balance this, particularly your last paragraph I have the opposite viewpoint. The US government had ppp loans that were forgiven completely that effectively paid companies per employee. There was no reason not to over hire for a long period of time. We have a correction but that seems to be it. Even now the quarterly earnings statements have lines that they expect headcount to grow in future quarters (meta for example stated this bluntly in their Q3 report). So while cash flow negative startups with no future will close that's it. The market is starting to come back and this was really an understandable blip.

> To balance this, particularly your last paragraph I have the opposite viewpoint. The US government had ppp loans that were forgiven completely that effectively paid companies per employee. There was no reason not to over hire for a long period of time.

PPP loans were based on 2019's average monthly payroll[1]. They did not have an effect on hiring decisions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program#Lo...

> The US government had ppp loans that were forgiven completely that effectively paid companies per employee.

The US government also has federal prosecutors actively investigating fraudulent PPP loans, so don't expect this gravy train to come round again.

I'd like to see more brilliant minds from tech explore other industries, especially the trades. It is incredibly difficult to find competent and trustworthy tradespeople at a reasonable price today. There is so much that a former SWE could bring to the table that doesn't necessarily mean being the tradesperson themselves (though that would be great). The trades desperately need manpower on all fronts.

The trades are underpaid. If you have other options why would you tear your body up so people can get services "at a resonable price"? Think about how people in the trades feel seeing people who work from home make multiples of their pay.

I'm not sure what you're advocating for here. There are many brilliant people doing trades work. Just as there are many brilliant people teaching, or digging ditches, or tending bar, or working as security guards, or...

Talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.

> I'd like to see more brilliant minds from tech explore other industries, especially the trades. It is incredibly difficult to find competent and trustworthy tradespeople at a reasonable price today.

Ok so your pitch is that other people (not you) should go into "the trades" and charge less than the people who are there now?

Wanna give us an example of what a "trade" is, what you're being charged for it, and how much you'd like to pay?

Sounds great if there’s some way to raise compensation for tradespeople to the level it should be at, considering how critical they are to modern society.

Why don't you set an example for everyone and go into a trade then?

Actually doing it is of course only for other people.

Yes, I think South/Central America technology is coming in big. Personally I am learning Spanish finally.

It comes with a fraction of the confusion from offshoring to APAC wrt timezones, business culture, language barriers, and so on.

companies are finding out that people who are paid 1/5 tend to do much less work and draw out contracts. I have seen many projects grind to a halt working with international 3rd party vendors.

Something that may help defend against #2, if perhaps only temporarily, is to move to niches of software engineering that are more difficult to automate and have higher bars to entry. Things like kernel code, GPU drivers, embedded work, etc are much less LLM-friendly than say Wordpress plugins.

Actually, I've had ChatGPT write some simple embedded code and it did a pretty good job.

1. Consolidation. There will be fewer and more powerful tech companies in the future

There is no evidence or reason to expect this to be true. The evidence points to the opposite, such as https://www.axios.com/2023/06/01/sp500-tech-companies-stock-...

Yeah exactly if anything we're seeing the beginning of the disintegration of the big monoliths (Google at least) who hoovered up everything in their path.

VC investment has ebbed, that's true. But maybe it will encourage businesses with a more solid path to revenue --even self-bootstrapped -- less hype, and more practical product oriented engineering. We can hope.

I do think a lot of us may end up out of work. Myself included, maybe.

What evidence is this?

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