Comment by jordanb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordanb | Hacker News Reader

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My opinion there are five things going on:

1) Tech hasn't really innovated since the smart phone era. VR and web3 didn't work out. All the covid B2C subscription stuff didn't work out. Big data and SaaS only partially worked out. AI is pretty transparently a pump and not many people are investing in headcount for it.

2) Interest rates raise the risk-free rate of return so there's less impetus to dump money into speculative investments in chase of yield. This affects startups but less so established companies who don't need to raise.

3) There's a massive offshoring push right now. Bigger than I've seen since the early 2000s. Lots of organizations are making it basically impossible to open a req in a western office while also actively moving roles offshore.

4) There's a big push from the ownership/investor class for labor discipline. There's a feeling that industry workers got too comfortable during the Covid boom and started making demands.

5) People actually getting displaced by AI is marginal to non-existent as far as I've seen, but I've seen plenty of managers using it as an excuse for workforce reduction "we're going to fire 10 percent of you because you should all be using AI to be more productive."

As a long time JavaScript developer your first bullet point is wrong. Yes, tech stopped innovating but not because of empty marketing gimmicks like Web3.

Tech stopped innovating because they stopped training developers. They attempted to turn developers into plug and play commodities via open source and large frameworks. It spectacularly backfired over the course of about 15 years.

So you have a fleet of developers utterly reliant on colossal tech stacks that cannot pivot and otherwise cannot program. Not only do the people cost more over time but the products became insanely large slow never ending debt machines.

Now the game is to off set those super expensive shitty developers with AI. It’s probably going to work because the code is was so bad and AI is already doing a better job with the framework nonsense. The problem there is that it will be bots writing bad software, possibly better than the people but still bad, talk to other bots.

> Tech stopped innovating because they stopped training developers. They attempted to turn developers into plug and play commodities via open source and large frameworks. It spectacularly backfired over the course of about 15 years.

Most of the previous innovators and wannabes of 15 years ago (HN users) are still alive and should be eager to innovate now that the market and audience is so much bigger. But we all got too domesticated by big tech. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta revenue is money lost by millions of developers.

Agreed with 1 and 4 the most. Almost everything that needs to be built digitally, has been built. Could stuff be improved? Of course, but many big companies, their growth will come from product and marketing, not technical improvements/new features, etc. Additionally, I think executives may be realizing that smaller, tighter, focused teams often outperform massive headcounts - i.e. "nine women, 1 month" staffing

As far as "too comfortable," absolutely. Those "follow me for my day at X" videos drive everyone insane. Workers insisting on remote. Multiple remote jobs. The fact that people who had it pretty good weren't satisfied and insisted on posting all of this publicly, embarrassing their employers, making work look more like a spa or daycare -- all you can say to them is, you did this to yourself.

> 3) There's a massive offshoring push right now. Bigger than I've seen since the early 2000s. Lots of organizations are making it basically impossible to open a req in a western office while also actively moving roles offshore.

This is it, basically. COVID showed the world that a whole lotta things could be remote. Industries that might have balked at the idea 5 years ago are now onboard.

Automation and AI aren't helping, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to 120k new CS grads a year -- on top of outsourcing.

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