The good times in tech are over
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Now we're seeing a readjustment as the "free money" is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands.
The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant.
This isn't to say it's anyone's fault - I don't blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it's a game and plan your exit. The danger is that there's an entire generation that started their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.
The amount of short-termism and chasing press releases and caring about what your golf buddies think really clogged up a lot of companies, and it doesn't feel like THAT part is changing anytime soon, zirp or no zirp.
Note that incentive mismatch at the middle-management level happens everywhere to this day and isn't strictly a ZIRP-induced phenomenon, but most real businesses that need to earn a profit thus have a natural cap on how much inefficiency they can support. In ZIRP however, the complete lack of any requirement to make profit (in some cases because the business is never viable and its sole purpose is to give a good lifestyle and resume to everyone involved) exacerbated the problem.
Capital often outstrips actual business acumen as a factor in the success of a business. That's partly because we live in a world where word of mouth, reviews, online presence, etc. are all commodified, partly because tech (like the Industrial Revolution before it) has greatly increased the growth potential and concentration of capital, partly because of investors actively intervening to ensure the success of their other investments, partly because of increasing and increasingly-naked corruption, and partly because of the importance of network effects. (I don't know which of these factors is the most important.)
The more important capital becomes relative to the actual functioning of a product, the more disconnected from reality a business can (perhaps must) get. Their actual business becomes selling a pitch to investors, not selling SaaS, because their actual product is investor returns, not long-term viability or value. And because a big part of that pitch to investors is the rockstar founding team, founders have to (or at least feel they have to) do the golf-buddy shit. It's literally their job, or at least, they think it is.
Post-ZIRP doesn't kill that because capital being scarce just increases demand for it even more.
There was a housing problem then too that he thought would be solved in time by the market. He thought we would see something like assembly line, prefabricated housing at some point that would drive down prices.
What I suspect is that once people own real estate, the last thing they want is something that drives prices down and everyone making the decisions needed to solve this problem owns real estate. That plus the margins won't be that high so you have to do large volume and the red tape is too much to be able to do that at scale. So instead of we do nothing and we will keep doing nothing for another 100 years.
It feels emotionally true because when I buy many terabytes of high quality SSD, I have no preference to "keep the valuation" of my SSD investment, I just want more faster for cheaper! If the price goes down tomorrow and my friend gets in for less than I just paid, it's not screwing me over. In fact I'm probably buying more on the future so I love the increased supply!
This is not true at all for housing lol. As someone who bought Manhattan real estate, I can feel the shitty incentives every day, and it's really destructive of a system.
Unfortunately, LeetCode skills and "architecture astronomy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut) are a very poor proxy for actually driving profit. This doesn't mean a LeetCoder (for fun or to play the game - as long as they understand it is a game) can't also be a good contributor in today's market, but their value would come more from experience solving actual business problems and ability to collect/define/argue requirements and then translate them into a system (which may or may not even be code - sometimes a Google Form is all that's needed) rather than whether they know LeetCode.
When it comes to solving business problems and actually driving profit, programming in abstract terms (the kind that LeetCode and most interview processes select for) is worthless - LLMs can do it just fine. The hard part is understanding/fleshing out the business requirements (including being aware of what you don't know, and planning for that or seeking outside help), refining your solution with the relevant stakeholders, and being aware of high-level constraints including regulatory requirements, security, etc. Once you have a good enough specification, programming it is the generally the easy part.
End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales. Most ICs are never going to be in a position where the CEO is going to listen to them about what product we should develop and be given the time and resources to investigate that stuff.
Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers who clearly don’t work on product facing work. It’s a bit ridiculous.
A properly designed tech solution (aka, not one designed to pad a resume) for upkeep should only require a small fraction of the manpower needed to originally build it. I expect companies keeping in-house "skeleton crews" to run things and handle maintenance and small changes, with larger ones being done by a (potentially returning) cast of contractors who come in on a project basis.
So the solution for permanent employment would be to either join one of those skeleton crews or join an agency/consultancy. Otherwise, the only way out is freelance and curating your own client portfolio. Maybe you can partner with others and form a coop to have more manpower and handle bigger projects - essentially building your own agency.
> Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers
My assertion is that engineers who want to succeed in the current market will need to know enough infra/sysadmin to support their solution, or farm it out to someone who will. If they don't, someone else will outcompete them.
Infra is also a huge breeding ground for resume padding and architecture astronomy (and there were no incentives to discourage it - in fact cloud providers are still laughing all the way to the bank). It doesn't inherently mean all that complexity was necessary. So I expect "infra" specialization to become a nicher skill, one or permanent skeleton/maintenance crews or hyperscalers who actually need the complexity.
> who clearly don’t work on product facing work
I'm intentionally being vague when I talk about "solutions" and solving business problems. I do not mean it should be an app, a product or even have a UI. A cron job running a shell script to copy files from one place to another may very well be the right solution to some business requirements. Infra engineers would be a perfect fit for problems that don't involve significant UI work (I myself prefer those as I hate frontend with a passion).
I think the era of high specialization in tech might be in decline; tools are good enough and hardware is good enough and the field is mature enough that most business problems can be solved just fine by a generalist (bringing in specialists on an ad-hoc basis when needed) - or otherwise they'll get outcompeted by someone who can.
Your argument is basically “we’re all going to be outsourced by Indians.”
Your EU-centric view of how contracting works (probably more due to labor laws than anything else) isn’t an accurate assessment of how Silicon Valley is going to work.
Outsourcing has its place and a lot of gruntwork/ongoing maintenance is fine for it. Post-ZIRP it turns out the true value of software is a lot lower than previously thought, and for a lot of solutions, Indians is all they can afford (because the alternative might be to pay someone to do it by hand).
Where outsourcing fails is primarily when business & domain knowledge is required - outsourcers will obviously not be aware of internal company processes or even the target market for the required solution (just like we would be bad fits for trying to spec out a product targeting the Indian banking market for example).
So I see the industry and market readjusting to the true value of software, and as a result people will pick a mix of high-value implementation work (where local domain knowledge is required) and boring/maintenance gruntwork, or get outcompeted by those who can (and this is a global market, so you are competing with Indians(.
I'm not advocating for one way or the other btw, I have no skin in this game (technically trying to push people into freelancing and consultancy works against me). But I'm just trying to be realistic - the tech comp during the ZIRP era was never going to last, and even if ZIRP continued, more and more people entering tech means comp is still bound to decrease. You can either remain in denial hope those jobs come back, or plan for the worst.
Yes, ZIRP increased tech comp. It did not magically inflate the value of software, which is always directly assessed against what people actually find useful.
There are always outliers obviously - whether it's the adtech giants being in the right place at the right time, or niche industries (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it), but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
Software, in the limit, is FREE. It gets written once for a finite cost and then can be copied ad infinitum. Even stratospheric labor costs are acceptable because of this.
> (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it)
But the cost to develop a piece of software (or anything, really) has nothing whatsoever to do with its value!
Avionics software is expensive not because it's inherently more complicated (high-quality OSS hobbyist implementations like Ardupilot exist for free), but because it has to undergo system integration tests because of FAA regulations.
And, despite lower pay for avionics engineers, the value to the end users of quality avionics is literally the difference between life and death.
> but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Where do you get this idea? Tech, as a whole, is a wildly profitable sector of the economy. It is a primary driver of US GDP growth and productivity [1].
> Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
I get that ZIRP is ideologically unpopular, I really do. You can only see so many "Uber but for dogs" startups get multimillion dollar funding rounds before you get cynical.
That being said, interest rates have been falling for centuries [2]. Low interest rates are a fundamental reflection of a society that's gotten better at allocating investments efficiently.
It turns out that software, because of the whole "zero marginal cost" thing, is a spectacularly efficient investment.
1: https://cpram.com/fra/en/individual/publications/megatrends/...
2: https://www.nber.org/digest/202212/real-interest-rate-declin...
I do work in consulting. But it’s by far not the only way.
Completely true, but instead this would be an event-driven serverless microservice that does some complex ETL thing to move files between three S3 buckets before landing in a "data lake" where analysts run three queries a month.
(I've seen many of these exact scenarios)
Upthread regarding astronauts is absolutely correct---there's been years and years of incentives to create messes like this, and yes, cloud providers absolutely facilitate this, and in many cases are the direct cause.
No, they can't. They can (sometimes) bang out a frontend app or some CRUD service, but if that's all the code you write you should not be a senior engineer.
The process of writing a specification and the process of implementing it tend to have a ton of overlap in the real world. There's no way to actually define one in a vacuum, despite almost every PM I've ever met pretending otherwise.
I was talking purely about those abstract interview questions where the full problem can be summarized in a few lines and the expected solution is ~50 lines max. I've just tried with Claude 3.7 and it's produced a seemingly plausible solution at the "word finder" problem (2D grid of letters - given a word, return if it's present in the grid as a series of adjacent cells in any direction).
I agree that they're far from taking our jobs, which is my point - those interview questions are absolutely not representative of what we really do and optimize for the wrong outcome.
If you change the "find a word in a grid of letters" question to a "find a Collatz sequence in a grid of numbers" question, does it still work? As an interviewer, I would expect a qualified candidate to spend maybe an extra 5-10 minutes asking clarifying questions and understanding the difference between the two.
I've found that even when we were incentivized via direct & simple profit sharing mechanisms, we still struggled with the appropriate focus and urgency. You'd think additional piles of money based upon # of customers coming in the door would provoke substantially more activity.
Money is a huge distraction. The most successful phases of my career have involved putting the customer absolutely first and looking at the money as a causal event based upon a job well done. I've never looked at a direct deposit into my bank account and felt the kind of rush of happiness I get when I see a customer reply that an issue is resolved to their satisfaction.
If you’re at a small and pre-public startup, your decisions and effort can directly affect product success BUT the equity is only theoretically valuable someday in the distant future so you ignore it.
If you’re public and getting stock/rsus, your company is likely large enough that there’s nothing you can do single-handedly to affect the price.
The first software startup I worked at didn't give out equity, and when the sales guys closed big deals with aggressive delivery timelines we hated it because it just meant more work for us. Many of my teammates passive aggressively dragged their feet, but if we'd had equity we would've been high-fiving the sales guys after landing big clients.
- More money leads to more output for physical tasks
- More money leads to worse results for cognitive tasks
What does move the needle:
- Pay people enough so they’re not thinking about the money
- Desire for autonomy, mastery, impact
A major, major problem are engineers that have zero vision of the big picture. I get a ticket, I work on it, I go home. My most senior engineer on the team never met a deadline in his life. I own an integration product and found out last week two other products I integrate with were about to ship without testing my product. They tested on laptops. I dove in to an analysts ticket with him to figure out why he blew the timeline he committed to. Turns out he was trying to reverse engineer a database instead of just asking another team. “You think I’m going to get any answers from those fuckers?” He asked me when I drilled him.
All these people are still, to this day, protected be the President. He views domain knowledge as being more important than shipping products.
I went over this sentence a few times before it started making sense. Noting this for others who run into it.
What's meant is that the most senior engineer fails to complete tasks on time, as opposed to never having to deal with deadlines (cf. "I never met a problem I couldn't solve").
He has deadlines. He just chooses to ignore them and has never faced any consequences.
I don't disagree with you, and ... isn't that true for most employees, in whatever technical or non-technical role, in all industries?
In my experience, it is. Even if the rare rank-and-file employee wanted to think about the big picture, they are never rewarded for doing so, and would be smacked down for acting in support of the big picture if it involved disobeying their chain of command. After a few years of this, you can see why they prefer to stick to the assigned job description.
In your last line, "President" presumably refers to the head of your company. But think about US Federal employees today - should they act in service of the Constitution, or obey Trump's orders? (If they don't obey Trump's orders, they will be fired.)
It is leadership’s responsibility to make sure the labor they’re allocating is going towards the big picture. If it’s going straight into the trash, that’s not the labors fault - they do what they’re told.
You hit the nail on the head, it’s a problem of incentives. Software engineers don’t HAVE a career. There’s little to no mobility and they understand they will be struck down as soon as the company can. Often even if the company is pulling revenue.
Do that across the entire industry for two decades and the labor catches on. People job hop because every company ever has told them to job hop. Not explicitly told them, but told them via their actions.
This can be changed but the reality is the leadership doesn’t give two fucks about engineers. They don’t want their opinions, they want code monkeys. So, code monkeys they get.
Asking since I've been in the situation many a time where the other team is too busy to reply in a timely fashion, and/or they don't even know the answers to my question, so I end up having to reverse engineer it.
This person didn't even try. Engineers at this company rarely ask for help from other teams or collaborate. Management has talked the talked, but there is no walk to actually take down these silos. I pointed him at product and BA people that offered to help, but he didn't ask them, either. Instead, he thought he could reverse engineer it, which probably took 3x longer than it should.
But are companies adjusting their hiring process to find career problem solvers? Or are they still looking for buzzword-spewing leetcode solvers? If you ask candidates who have interviewed recently, they'll probably tell you that companies are going even more extreme towards the leetcode side.
It's become a market for lemons, with no good solutions. The problem is that it fundamentally requires a lot of manpower to accurately assess someone's experience (whether you use LC or just an open-ended whiteboard exercise) and companies who hire have only so many engineer-hours to dedicate to interviewing and the amount of inbound candidates exceeds that by orders of magnitude.
The way I see it, a lot of companies realized they have the staff they need and hiring more through "normal" channels is impossible due to the above - so either they don't need to hire more, or they hire informally through back-channels and word of mouth (because the front door is being DDoS'd).
The only way to win is not to play - the "front door" and typical hiring process is no longer possible unless you are a big name and have somehow publicly demonstrated your skills (past product launch, etc) in a way that can be verified in 5 minutes. For the rest of us, it's mostly a sales and networking game, and leveraging human & in-person relationships that are (for now) still immune to LLMs and hordes of boiler rooms spamming every single job with fake (but plausible) resumes.
Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption.
The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs.
The hardware platforms we're coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace.
I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I'm not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.
I think a lot of my peers didn't really understand what working was, and really bought into a lot of the BS. The last few years have been a reality check for us all.
Then I see coworkers who have only ever been in this environment. This was their first job out of undergrad, and they've never seen the shit you have to deal with at other companies. They get frustrated at the trivial little things here and decide, "I'm going to quit and go to a small or medium sized company" where there's less bureaucracy or where they can have a bigger "impact" or whatever. Then they get to their new company and HR tosses them a half-working workstation and a dirty used mouse as "onboarding". And they realize they don't have the massive build infrastructure they took for granted or a dedicated build/release team. They don't have robust performance and crash metrics dashboards, and they don't have automatic code bisecting tools to find the change that caused the error. They don't even have a QA team! They don't have continuous builds or maybe they don't even have functional source control or a reliable internet connection. No free food, no massage chairs, no flexible work hours, they have to fill out a time sheet now and maybe even have to clock in and out for bathroom breaks (yes, I've worked at a shitty software company where they made engineers clock in and out).
A lot of these guys realize what they had and boomerang right back after a year or so of this. And now that we are in a bear market and hiring is getting tough, I wouldn't count on the ability to just waltz back in anymore...
Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
> The tooling we have now is amazing,
Yes, although it's not necessarily a blessing but a curse. Being amazing means maturity. Being mature meaning stalled marginal return. Stalled marginal returns means no growth. No growth means no meaningful projects. I missed the 2000s, when there were so many low-hanging fruits. We had multiple competing KV stores in development, multiple stream processing frameworks, multiple ML frameworks, multiple query engines. Heck, even multiple programming languages for data analytics.
Other jobs are getting fucked much more severely. Most industries have bled their labor dry, to the bones. There’s nothing left, they’ve solve the optimization problem of moving as much money as possibly away from them.
Tech is still working on that optimization problem.
... such as destroying what's left of the entry to junior-level job market. And perhaps in the near future, mid-level too.
I jokingly said out loud, "what did we do to deserve this?". A coworkers overheard and replied, "speak for yourself".
The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.
Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%.
A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". It isn't due to the "brilliance" of their engineers.
Google is like a reverse Robin Hood. It steals data from the users. The customers are the ones buying that data.
You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect?
Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
> Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world?
You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
Again: inertia and network-effect.
> It's a massive success as a company.
Undoubtedly. And they appear to be great at not failing. Like any bureaucracy, that works until it doesn't. What new markets have they created or taken over in the past 10 years?
-Upton Sinclair
Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year?
Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev.
This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer.
So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't. The general solution is to go into management (more visibility and no cap on comp), or to create (or join) your own startup (which doesn't have a rigid interview process and you can use "references"). Which many do given how many startups exist in the Bay Area. Companies also may give out large bonuses in RSUs to keep those employees.
Correct. But with very few exceptions I don't believe that any one person contributes $500m in value over 5 years.
> Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
In aggregate, yes. But it's the systems that aggregate the contributions of the employees and turn them into profits.
> As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't.
I'm assuming you mean omniscient, and no, I'm not assuming omniscience because I'm not actually talking about a company's ability to attribute value creation, I'm talking about the employee's ability to attribute it. Any random Google employee who thinks that they contributed $500m over 5 years can't just pick up their laptop and go work for a startup and expect that startup to make $500m over the next 5 years. It's not happening. The only way that their project made $500m was as a project embedded in the enormous money-making system that is Google, and absent that system they don't make that much money for the company.
> no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company
> Sub in $1.5m/year
Are you standing by that or is your new assertion now that no employee contributes $500m but that many do contribute $1.5m/year?
The back and forth is getting a bit confusing so trying to make sure we're on the same page.
edit: You do realize that a non-trivial number of employees including ICs are paid more than $1.5m/year. So even Google disagree with your assertion.
edit: There's also a material difference between no one, a few, many and the majority. You made a specific claim that no employee provides more then $1.5m of value. I disproved that with Google's own comp. Not my problem you're butt hurt about being called out for being wrong with quotes you said yourself.
Firing an employee most likely won't reduce the bottom line.
But every employee is a chance to increase it by creating a new project/product etc.
So firing would reduce the probability of a new idea generating an increase to the bottom line.
I see where you're coming from but I think you're missing the fact that large projects have lots of bullshit work that requires high skill but is technically lower value. There is a lower bound to what people will accept, as people with marginally better skills get lucky enough to get highly-visible and much more highly compensated roles. The pay stratification you wish for is already built in, and the average just reflects the fact that these companies DO make enough money to have competitive pay rates.
Your compensation is dominated by the function of supply of and demand for labor, not how much the company makes from your labor.
Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.
Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday.
Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy.
The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
…in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?”
This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs.
Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!).
(The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)
The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
I'd rather have better compensation and sensible vacation / work-life balance policies, be treated as a professional, and make my own sandwich..
In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on.
I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.
From the perspective of the typical software engineer's salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow.
I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also significantly more rewarding to work with.
In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well.
Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).
Yes, absolutely, business cycles come and go. But I think there is a really large shift in the overall "technology mindset", and this is something that does feel very new.
I would say that from at least the 70s (just using that because it's my birth decade) up until the mid 2010s or so, pretty much everyone viewed technology as the main driver for societal progress. Sure, there were definitely scary parts of technology (leaded gas, nuclear weapons), but people still felt overall that improvements in technology would lead to improvements in people's lives.
I'm not so sure that optimism exists anymore, nor do I necessarily think it should. I see so much of the tech industry not focused on how to improve people's lives with technology, but on things like how can we addict people to dopamine spikes, or how can we insert ourselves as an intermediary that vacuums up all the profit due to many technologies' natural tendency toward monopoly. I see technology as the primary cause of what I consider the slowly increasing societal disintegration that is happening across many countries.
Even with technology like AI which I think has a huge potential to aid humanity, my greater fear is that it will just lead to much greater concentration of wealth and power and the expense of everyone else.
For sure, part of my pessimism probably comes from the timeline of my career, which started during the extreme optimism of the 90s, when we all thought that the Internet was going to democratize societies even more and that it was going to "bring us all together". When you feel like the opposite happened, it can be tough to come to terms with that.
by the 1970s the post-WW2 boom was over and the 80s were full of doom and gloom -- and then tech exploded and there was all this new growth. but now capitalism did what it does and we're back to the 80s again, this time with China instead of Japan.
While I don't want to delve too much into politics, I think the situation at the moment in the US is without precedent at least since the Civil War. And the tech situation is far, far different. I know a lot of people seem to think that folks who point out societal concerns with tech are "Luddites", and love to give (IMO very poor) analogies like "it's just like buggy whip manufacturers!", but I think we're at a point where tech, either now or very shortly in the future, will start to kill off more jobs than it creates (and, if you think about it, in some sense that is actually the point of many technologies), and modern society is far from figuring out how to function if most people can't make a living by selling their labor.
Again, I totally agree that on one hand there are standard business cycle forces at play, but there are other longer term forces that have been building steam for decades, and I think it's a mistake to confuse these two things.
A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.
Like what (except AI of course)? I am not working in ad tech, but it doesn't feel good either.
AI (bringing intelligence to the real world), green tech (solar/evs/power electronics etc), defense, aerospace (sat constellations etc), industrial automation, smart agriculture, government etc.
Did they? Because Google and Facebook revenues are still growing and at ATH. What happened is that they decided to divert more of that juice to their investors rather than their developers.
but WFH is also here to stay, and COVID proved it worked alright. not great, but alright, and alright is usually enough. been seeing an awful lot of job ads in Croatia, for example.
if AI won't eat it, send it to Mexico City or India or Eastern Europe on the cheap. you don't need a rockstar QA team you just need them to be mostly competent, and they cost 50% less than Big US City talent.
Sure, it's a conspiracist's "they," but society and freedom have become as awful as the most obnoxious, strident, and hysterical /. poster's predictions during the DoubleClick acquisition a quarter of a century ago.
Cui bono? Is it the finance ghouls whose ideological and economic lineage continues unbroken through Nazi-advocacy, the Business Plot, and American chattel slavery? Would we face a brighter future if the late 20th century tech industry had collectively rejected the vision of a future based on a panopticon used to generate authoritarian algorithmic control of humanity?
How many acai bowls and fancy cars was the future worth? Are we all complicit, or merely automatons whose lack of agency absolves us of the moral implications of the sum of our collective purpose?
Today's media environment is an atrocious indictment of the world built upon networked computing's awesome power to transform humanity. We have the power to uplift all life in harmony with the bounteous and breathtaking miracle of our beautiful planet. We have built a world of nightmares.
1. imposing more process,
2. diverting hiring budget to managers and PMs, and
3. making everyone take some snake oil training courses (run by some consulting firm staffed by people who last shipped something in the early naughts)
Then the middle management culture gets entrenched and metastasizes. ICs get swept aside (they're just infinitely replaceable "resources" of course), and the engineering culture starts to atrophy and die.
Then new companies come up and make a splash because they don't have any of that crap, and talent goes to them, and the cycle begins anew.
I'm not going to ascribe it to "FAANG" as the freedoms he's describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn't really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry.
Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don't pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.
Any time you have an industry can go from zero to world player in a decade or less is going to attract this kind of boom-bust cycle. Companies get overzealous about the land grab, hire too much, are careless with their money. Then the correction comes. It lasts a few years, and then it's back to boom times. Interest rates were certainly part of the equation this time, but back in the dotcom boom, e.g. US mortgages were running around 8%.
If people would stop playing the gold rush an invest in building products that people like and will use long term, we might instead flatten the peaks and the troughs into a more sustainable work environment. Don't see that happening.
4. Even if the value you provide is measurably great and your manager(s) love you, in a sufficiently large company you are still just a row in a spreadsheet, and you may be terminated at any time independent of the quality of your work/output.
Stay ready to interview.
Because from what I can see it's been quite a downhill ride since Y2k. To the extent that many who used to love the work just can't do it anymore.
That seems to be happening less now. It's easier to know where you stand.
But selling out isn't either.
Programmers should be left enough space to do their thing well, that's the only way to build great software. Which was the entire point of Agile before it was corrupted into Scrum.
Some is due to Scrum. It's actually not the fault of the methodology but that it's been half implemented by companies that did waterfall before. You are expected to finish a feature in a sprint, but you have no connection to speak to the stakeholders/customers.
The other things are these KPIs, and unsurprisingly, the bean counters behind them don't care about refactoring or addressing tech debt.
In a sense, yes, we need to focus on delivering value but it's much more chaotic now, so it's very difficult to deliver performant features that deliver also what was expected.
There's no appreciation of skills anymore, of quality; it's all about generating features as effectively as possible. No room for creativity/trial and error.
It's like working at a factory, pushing a button as fast as humanly possible.
And coders are treated like button pushers as a consequence.
Maybe it is, but I find it strange that nobody seems to care that visiting a page downloads 100s of MBs of packages that clogs the browser. Or, that latencies in backend replies can go into multiple 10s of seconds, etc.
Back in the day, we had to make sure the software ran on less performant computers and we painstakingly analyzed memory allocations and checking the run times of requests, etc. We also had to make sure that the software baked onto CDs worked, there was no multi GB downloads after install possible.
I, for one, would still like that to be the case for the software I use and would still prefer to have the time to do this for the projects I work on.
Older, more experienced people tend to have more integrity. We're not as easily bullied into fulfilling whatever business goals at whatever cost.
I started working at my first startup in 1998.
Like...being bought the best equipment for the job they're doing? Making high-quality foods available on-site? Even something as simple as having great desk chairs, I can say from frustrating personal experience, can make a huge difference.
And maybe I even implied that software engineers are the lesser thing here, because LLMs can't do hard plumbing yet.
They are literally focused on retirement, pension and next time off once past the apprentice stage.
Why? Because the work is terrible. Really demanding physical work in terrible conditions. Unimaginable really for anyone who works remote.
Then it just gets worse as you get older and your body breaks down. Then your really just holding on to get to retirement and that pension so you can finally relax and enjoy life without doing this awful job before you die.
No thanks. I am so glad I didn't go down that path. The romanticization of the trades on here is completely delusional. I think it is just the level of being disconnected from physical labor most are on here. Physical labor is not fun when your young and just gets harder and harder with age.
good money. uncle who is a welder has travelled all over working different gigs. got certified to do underwater welding, too, which is terrifying for a lot of reasons. but it's hell on the eyes, joints, and the UV can even cause skin cancer.
other fam in carpentry make good money. north of 6 figures, and that was in 2010. but it's demanding: show up at 6am, haul things and hammer all day, crawl around in weird angles, and do it all in -5C or +35C.
both eventually tapped out after ~25-30 years. one ran the business in the office and the other just got a job in home depot. meanwhile I'll probably program until I can't sit upright -- could be coding in the retirement home, as long as me brain works.
There will always be a need for many people to do plumbing work. Can we say that about software engineering?
Many people worked on vanity/side projects of some corporations. And those jobs are gone, since there's not so much free money anymore.
My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.
This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.
Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah
This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.
The safest space continues to be distributed systems and systems programming in general IMO. You'll still find work at hyperscalers. You'll still find work in the new spaces. Until AI can operate these systems, there'll be a spot for us bit janitors for a little while longer.
A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously. Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
It's always a struggle to land leadership or niche top-seniority gigs. It doesn't matter how awesome you are. They're not commodified swap-in staff roles, and there are not a lot of them, and your friend is probably looking for a quality organization too (or leaders in shabby ones won't touch this resume).
Your friend is just encountering the reality that there will be a search phase after the end of any high-seniority professional job, plan for it.
My economic condition can change drastically , it just depends on the market , how is your "friend" entitled to 150-200K ? Because of our "expectations" (Amazon , google are the best companies so "best" + phd , phd means you are in academia so more "smarter")
But our "expectations" are now changing , mine certainly changed , but instead of panicking (because lets be honest? whats the point of panicking?) We can try to be frugal. We can try to live in a way where my salary doesn't really matter that much , I can live off of any salary but the only difference b/w big salary and low salary might be the fact that your savings increase which you invest in things like index funds (boglehead investing) and the only difference it makes is on what age you can retire (thus , being a point on ageism)
I might also think that after a age , person can get a little less ambitious and more rigid , so more flexibility early on (in mid 30's) can be absolutely great but for that you need good saving habits / being frugal in your 20's.
I also believe that frugality is sometimes seen as not being ambitious or I live life only once and for that I have to say that I agree , I am frugal mostly because I have seen / just feel this tingle for spending money where my mind .
Of course , you don't have to be frugal over like a $ , but just changing your mindset & hobbies from being materialistic to non materialistic and being satisfied .
What I personally can't be is a frugal who constantly switches / worries about light bulbs / appliances just to save 2 cents or people who don't eat outdoor to save money (unless its in literally 5 star and I also believe that going to dine in full time also sucks , I just like to eat burgers , pizzas , chips etc. but some people can be really that level of frugal .
I just want to have a decent life reading good books with emergency funds and funds invested. I would try to maximize my income , but I wouldn't chase it as my ultimate goal , the ultimate number. I might earn less but if I am working on one of my passion ideas on some company , I am down.
Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe? Here in the Netherlands (one of the wealthiest nations in the world) even just 100k is aspirational for most higher paid jobs.
Yes.
In my family I am under employed and my wife is an elementary teacher. Health insurance for us costs $800 every month. A car is required and so is the gas to drive it. We have two 7 year old Toyotas and insurance on them is $100 a month.
It’s a lot more overhead and risk mitigation compared to the better nations like yours that care for their people.
$200k is a huge amount of money in most of America based on geography.
In the major cities though it is not just the cost of living but the feeling of being wealthy is all relative to those around you. In the major cities there are people with huge amounts of wealth so $200k year is not going to feel wealthy at all. Of course, no one is actually just scraping by on white bread and ramen noodles making $200k unless they are terrible with money. More like you can only eat out X number of times a week instead of having a personal chef. The person making $200k also probably not much different in ability than the person with the personal chef and private jet so not only do you not feel wealthy but might even feel like you are getting shorted. Of course, if you did have the personal chef and private jet you would face the same problem but at a higher level.
The problem here is that the dollar has devalued so far to the point where it is close to worthless, especially with rising house prices across the country.
This is why $200k - $500k seems to be "not enough" in the US due to its cost of living and at the same time it isn't sustainable for Amazon or Google to pay at that rate.
Really, this the hallmarks of a crash that is waiting to happen and it was never going to last.
That might be true for Bay Area. What about other states, Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Montana etc. ?
I am not from US, but I don't get why tech companies can only have offices in Bay Area.
The median household income is $80K. Those people aren’t homeless and starving
> A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously.
That is true in US. In Europe having a PhD and working for Google and Amazon never meant being payed huge sums.
I make way above market rates for my area currently, but I don't have to be worried about getting laid off.
And as my salary went up i made sure my life style didn't.
Maybe the industry can now focus on making the hype tech of the last 20 years finally somewhat stable and secure again before the next boom-bust iteration hits...
Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved? You can make money by developing a database that solves some problems, saving time and money for lots of people and companies. "Hot" doesn't make money, otherwise people posting here daily "I rewrote X in Rust" would be rich.
Unless you're building the next Facebook or other billion users scaled service, mysql or postgresql will be more than enough for everything, at least until you hit 100k-1M users. And by that point you have enough real-world experience to accurately judge your needs and if you need to roll your own stuff.
As for distributed data - RDS and a multi region database has that problem solved. Unless you're a real time bidding ad broker, your app can get away with a few milliseconds of replication latency.
What do you need it for? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. What I see is that this sort of thing is only needed when you are planning to have the next facebook/reddit/etc type of business.
I write line of business software for different SMEs, and I have not yet found a need for anything more than a beefy server/VPS.
Even companies with 100k employees each using the same piece of software does not need anything "distributed", if you're even a little careful with read-only replicas, some caching of state, etc.
You want to geolocate nearer to some users? For the reddit/facebook type of business, sure, good idea.
For the majority of software, why would you? That webapp functions only slightly degraded when used from the other side of the world.
The only missing bit around COVID was that the cost of the economic policies which were implemented by governments caused an inevitable interest rate increase.
Sure, we can argue that the response to COVID was planned in a certain way on purpose and that powerful hands could have used another excuse to get to where we are now (just press more the pedal on government spending, illegal immigration, wars, green policies) - but that's what happened.
Employees being pampered with high wages, benefits, and extra perks like free meals has everything to do with talent scarcity.
The only reason these extravagances are being cut is because tech employees aren't in the same level of demand. That may (or may not) change.
The only thing I do not agree with is over focusing on ZIRP. Money pumping into the economy can have other forms and switched from monetary (bank lending) to fiscal (government printing) with quantitative easing strategies. Some beneficiaries changed, software is a step or two lower on that ladder, but we are still in the "plentiful money" state if you check world or your country M2 levels. And a lot of that money eventually pumps tech. The real sobering (when it is critical to be a key contributor to a profitable business or have an FU path thought through) starts when pumps inflating M2 stop. My 2c.
The problem for me has been that nobody outside of myself is OK with me taking any other role, either within the company I work for, or as someone looking for a fresh new role. When I ask why, it's always been a variant of "oh, you're more valuable to us as an engineer".
Now with the advent of LLMs and bullshit experts talking about AI taking over everyone's roles, neither do people want me to remain an engineer (I quit in frustration a few months ago), nor do they want me to be anything else (even when I have skills directly relevant for other types of jobs). It's frustrating to keep on trying to switch when nobody's taking the bait.
Used to be just 40k comp sci graduates in the US per year, now it’s 150k plus and growing. Everyone wants tech money, but nobody wants to write all this damn code.
We have people in this industry who have no real love or passion for the engineering and the science, and soon they will become the majority. Vibe coders and prompt kiddies are not satire, they are a real thing. A lot of incoming graduates would not consider this field if it wasn’t for the money and remote work opportunities. They are not like the true enthusiasts who would still be doing this even if it didn’t pay well. We need to gatekeep harder. Crush people in interviews, make it damn near impossible to get in a company unless you really want it. Redirect people to other careers like finance or sales and marketing.
It’s not much of a mission statement! Certainly nothing on “making the world a better place”. But it has the comforting solidity of the truth. The good thing about the music finally stopping is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s going to stop.
An interesting side effect is that the tech industry is rapidly losing the "good guys" image it had in wider society for a long time (with a little help from Elon and friends, but certainly they aren't the only reason).
If both devs and users are realizing that the "make the world a better place" spiel had always been a marketing lie that was kept up as long as there was spare money for it, maybe we could now also start thinking how to really make the world a better place.
The core issue, consistently, is the imbalance between supply and demand within the high-quality SWE talent pool. We witnessed hiring bubbles in 1999 and 2021 precisely because the demand for skilled SWEs far outstripped the available supply.
Essentially, major tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) appear to have miscalculated the sustained need for SWEs during the peak of the WFH trend. They subsequently found themselves with a surplus of talent relative to the number of compelling new projects.
A similar dynamic occurred during the dot-com boom, where companies aggressively pursued web developers. The perceived ROI, often reflected in inflated company valuations rather than immediate profits, justified each hire at the time.
The crucial question is the ROI of each incremental hire. If it remains strictly positive, robust hiring will follow. Currently, this condition is not met, particularly within large tech firms.
Looking ahead, a market equilibrium will eventually be reached. A sustained oversupply of new graduates entering the field will undoubtedly face employment challenges. Conversely, a decrease in the supply of qualified SWEs will likely lead to a stabilization, and potentially an increase, in their perceived value.
The "good times" where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a >$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over.
Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care.
These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash.
There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.
Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related.
The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created.
The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days.
There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
If you are a software leader, work on discovering and filling customer needs. Filling those will boost both your success and the company's success.
Executives at most companies rarely do anything other than figure out how to get a bigger paycheck. They have no clue about, nor do they try to discover, customer needs; but they have and aggressively acquire a strong sense of their upchain's needs.
This means a software leader who does basic research on customer needs is the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind at most companies.
I feel this one. I've been doing this for twenty years, and we get listened to the least now of any point in my career. Rather than what we build being a conversation about what's possible, we get told what to build and have to push back when the requirements are impossible.
The opportunity cost is just silly. So many times we could build something better than the requirements but it's not worth the effort to try to get it through the bureaucracy.
I'm hoping that some of the good news is:
* If you care about focusing on business success, and requirements descending from that, then you'll gradually have more company, and fewer people working against you.
* If your experience extends beyond the crazy Potemkin Village investment scam period of tech, or you otherwise have experience working business-focused, then hopefully that will soon be widely recognized as positive signal for hiring (as it used to be, and is, in many sane fields).
I think there is some value to be had in "jack of all trades, master of one" strategy. If I would be an employer, I would hire someone like me. :)
Go to any tech company job site and youll see many of the engineering jobs are non US.
That really was never that common, though, and reserved for a very small subset of programmers even where it did happen. I’ve been coding since 1992 and all the jobs I’ve had have been regular corporate type jobs, with a steadily (but not life changing) raising salary.
1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining.
2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer...
In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.
Honestly I prefer the leaner times. Less clowns trying to cash in and more focus of engineering value, as it should be.
I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.
Indeed. The proliferation of highly immature developer tools, web framework hype, entitlement and coasting is what we have been left with.
There needs to be a brutal crash to test them. "Vibe coding" is another example of the bullshit that has come out of another bubble waiting to collapse.
> Tech companies were thus incentivized to (a) hire like crazy, and (b) do a lot of low-risk high-reward things, even if that ends up wasting money.
"...HIGH-risk high-reward..." would make more sense in the context.
The good times will continue as soon as money does the same.
That's not a good thing, in general, if you are in technology. We always need to be learning and moving forward. A lot of times, in my experience, it's extremely humbling, because I find out that what I know is no longer relevant. I'm 63, and still need to learn new stuff, every day.
I know that he's talking about culture, as opposed to knowledge, but I think they inform each other. If we allow ourselves to ossify in one context, it just moves over into the other.
I spent most of my career at a company that treated me like just another schlub. They were a hardware company, and I'm not sure if hardware engineers were ever treated like software engineers, so I am unfamiliar with free barista bars and tropical offsites. I was just another cubicle Dilbert.
Low interest rates primarily means low interest rates for the government, which the central bank implements by simply buying their national bonds at rates much lower than the rest of the world would tolerate. This sucks up the supply of low-risk low-reward debt that would normally attract a lot of investors. With that supply all bought up those investors are then forced into higher risk instruments like equities, which pushes up the value of stocks (not coincidentally, the kind of investment that Congress tend to have a lot of). High valued equity means greater rewards for startup investing, and so capital diverts there.
So it's all based on pushing investors around against their will, more or less.
I don't think this explains why the "good times are over" however. I think that is more related to supply / demand. Supply was low for a while as tech was seen as a dead-end in the early 0s due to outsourcing. In the mid 2010s the opposite was true - tech was seen as essentially the only viable career so lots of people went into it. Now we have the perfect storm of natural oversupply and the threat of AI.
I think the situation will eventually reverse but it will take quite a while.
In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies.
This allowed "free" side projects and cool stuff, too.
But as always, it's time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we're past the maxima.
Is there an actual reputable source that says this? For me I've only seen it asserted without evidence in comment sections.
In my opinion, things in software engineering are stagnant right now. No doubt there was a significant downturn in 2023-2024. At least at the moment no one really seems to be hiring.
Let’s build something useful and amazing that elevates the human experience, rather than sucking the last drop of dopamine out of consumers.
The job market also seems to be totally fine if you're experienced, based on the amount of LinkedIn recruiter messages I get.
If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today.
When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.
This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.
If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.
> The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.
I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era.
Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken.
My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.