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Comment by twojobsoneboss | Hacker News Reader

Do you think it’s gonna get better or is this the new norm?

I can’t help shake the feeling it’s the latter - rates might be higher for longer and tons of companies have jumped on the south-america/eastern-eu hiring bandwagon

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As a 15 year JavaScript developer who knows. The profession, if you can even call it that, is extremely immature. Most of the people doing this work are extremely overpaid and deliver very little at poor quality. At some point employers are likely to expect a better ROE, but until then there is a tremendous level of insecurity and poor performance in that line of work.

I can see, moving into the future, employers no longer wanting to easily hire unqualified people. That will mean great disruptions for the people currently performing the work.

Sorry though revenue per employee is still massive for a lot of companies. The folks who own the companies are even more overpaid. Also the insecurity really does reduce quality when you have people performing what used to be 3 peoples roles and everyone who’s left is told to tighten their belts (read: burnout within a few years)

For almost all large employers that make primary use of JavaScript as a core component of their business there are only two revenue streams: e-commerce and ad impressions. The margins and overhead per developer employee are dramatically lower in e-commerce than for business primarily reliant on ad revenue. The reason for that distinction is that developers are always a cost center while the money makers are always sales, but in ad revenue based businesses those lines are blurred and ad based business scale their revenue disproportionately to their headcount far more so than e-commerce.

As a result developers in e-commerce type businesses tend to reach compensation caps faster than employees in ad revenue type businesses. What is counter-intuitive about that is that the user facing code from ad revenue type businesses tends to be extremely low quality compared to equivalent code from e-commerce type businesses, because that code more directly impacts user engagement on the e-commerce side and user engagement is more critical for sales conversion on the e-commerce side. I am not saying the code on the e-commerce side is great either.

There's the zero-interest-rate era and the post-zero-interest-rate era. I think there's still going to be adjustments to come, and it will get a little better as orgs get more used to working in a PZIR environment, but I don't think it'll ever be like the peak ZIR hiring situation unless we get back down to zero interest rates.

Hard to say. I think there will always be new companies that need good programmers but there was such a glut hired during there pandemic there might be more cuts needed.

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