BBC: Big Tech jobs have lost their glamour
bbc.com
bbc.com
Sure there’s exceptions everywhere, but unless you’re self employed and contract in other industries, tech is still where it’s better.
NDIS work also pays similar to construction.
You will struggle to find tech wages that match that for the majority of available work. Techs over saturated with employees and as software improves you need less workers to do more IT work erryday. Meanwhile it still takes the same amount of workers to lay a slab or stand a house frame as it did 20 years ago.
I think construction is an underrated profession by a lot of folks in the U.S, but it doesn't really compare to software for effort vs. reward. It's a favorable alternative for folks who would otherwise work retail or push paper around in non-tech office jobs.
Most offers peaked at 85k. I did a half dozen interviews and had a few offers. Got a good mate who is a data analyst with a fair wack of experience, he struggles to find much available at 120k per annum let alone higher.
Job security in IT hasn't been great to me either. Prior to starting my own company I never had a role last >12 months due to some external factor deleting my job(e.g. company loses support contract). Meanwhile the whole time I've had constant offers to get back into construction. I'm not ticketed or anything I'm just reliable and turn up.
IT is even worse, I work for a company that has >10K employees and we have 50 external IT staff which seems to be enough. The cattle side has won over in the "Pet vs cattle" analogy. After the initial setup, most SMEs will have a guy who comes in once a week.
I've done outside work in Australia and Canada, -40C and +40C, and remote IT not only pays better but means I live in a city and am walking distance from 4+ coffee shops and lunch options.
That said, if I could make IT wages bartending I'd totally be slinging drinks. Hard work, margins on booze are better than food but still tight, and brutal on your liver...
$200k AUD roles are rare in Australia. They do exist but hard to come by.
Most $200k+ AUD devs I know will be working at Atlassian, Amazon, Goggle, not many options in AU, tech is quite narrow, not much variety. It’s also the RSU’s that push them in to the $200k+ bracket.
For "big tech" in Australia, ~$160k is pretty much the starting compensation for graduate/entry level SWEs.
The grass might seem greener on the other side (like that "if architects had to work like programmers" article the other day), but there really isn't any industry that's as easy to work in and high paying as tech is. That might be a bubble that'll pop eventually (I suspect it might) but right now that's the reality.
Maybe we should just accept that these are just jobs, and no glamour is necessary -- so maybe big tech jobs losing it is not the worst thing. Let the talent spread and create more "glamorous" jobs.
As long as that remains true, tech will remain a hot industry.
The ability to spend almost no money to generate ridiculously high margins (50-70%) is hard to beat. The only similar industry is Finance, but that is heavily gatekept due to the limited need for staffing.
I especially have the feeling that - while being in AI - leadership simply jumped too early on that train and now has teams full of people knowing that every project is set up for failure…
If I am going to build important features and services, constantly improve my own and engineering skills, know our systems through and through, be on-call, deal with cross team issues, fix bugs, mentor juniors, and essentially keep everything running day in, day out - the least I can expect from management is to be on my side and not be my adversary. As long as this relationship is adversarial - as it is in big tech - I couldn't care less about the job, the managers, the services. For all I care, it can all sink.
(no need for BBC in the title)
Over the last ten years I have watched the number of PMs and middle managers explode across the industry. Executives from other industries have crept in, bastardized agile, commoditized developer work, and began micromanaging everything. You get to build less cool stuff - there's less opportunity for achievement or advancement. So now these jobs are not much different than garden variety white collar work.
I think there are a variety of valid reasons: The market capital that created unicorns is gone - and with high interest rates comes risk aversion. The NYTimes decision to adopt an anti-tech editorial policy changed public perception. Pushes for diverse hiring practices clashed with tech's original meritocracy structure. Increasing regulation. The age of the average coder has gone up and so the corps have matured too.
But more than anything, I think it comes down to nature abhorring a vacuum. The other corporations in our economy are mired by risk-averse gatekeeping admins and executives - it was only a matter of time before enough consultants and management firms made their way into the building.
The "move fast and break things" culture of tech was what changed public perception. The NYT was just a manifestation of that change.
Amazon and Google and Apple all still have extremely high public perception of their brands, despite only receiving negative national press, so it's hard to pin this as a reason that people wouldn't want to work at these places. But I think it's contributed to places like Google transitioning from being open and publicly glowing places to work, to circle their wagons and becoming more private and cagey with their employees.
Hell, right now the NYT Technology page is full of puff pieces entirely uncritical of tech, despite the massive layoffs and ethical issues of AI.
And the only sources for the supposed policy are two "journalists" who have never actually worked for the NYT.
You're seriously making the contention that Apple, in the US, has only received 'negative national press' ???