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Comment by idkwhattocallme | Hacker News Reader

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock. Plus hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout. The market only valued company growth, not efficiency. But the market always capitulates to value (over time). When that happens all those overlay hires will get axed. Both companies have since laid off 10K+. AI was the scapegoat. But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.

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This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hired now are in people who were in those "adjacent" roles - think agile coaches, TPMs, etc. (but I have a ton of sympathy for these folks - many of them worked hard for years and built their skills - but these roles were always somewhat "optional").

I'd also highlight that beyond over-hiring being responsible for the downturn in tech employment, I think offshoring is way more responsible for the reduction in tech than AI when it comes to US jobs. Video conferencing tech didn't get really good and ubiquitous (especially for folks working from home) until the late teens, and since then I've seen an explosion of offshore contractors. With so many folks working remotely anyway, what does it matter if your coworker is in the same city or a different continent, as long as there is at least some daily time overlap (which is also why I've seen a ton of offshoring to Latin America and Europe over places like India).

Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions.

Both sides of the aisle retreated from domestic labor protection for their own different reasons so the US labor force got clobbered.

I am VERY pro-immigration. I do have concerns about the H1B program though. IMO it's not great for both immigrant workers, as well as non-immigrant workers because it creates a class of workers for whom it's harder to change employers which weakens their negotiation position. If this is the case for enough of the workforce it artificially depresses wages for everyone. I want to see a reform that makes it much easier for H1B workers to change employers.

In context of tech, H1B is great for the money people in the US and India. It suppresses wages in both countries and is a powerful plum for employee “loyalty”. There’s a whole industry of companies stoking the pipeline of cheap labor and corrupting the hiring process.

In big dollar markets, the program is used more for special skills. But when a big bank or government contractor needs marginally skilled people onshore, they open an office in Nowhere, Arizona, and have a hard time finding J2EE developers. So some company from New Jersey will appear and provide a steady stream of workers making $25/hr.

The calculus is that more H1=less offshore.

The smart move would be to just let skilled workers from India, China, etc with a visa that doesn’t tie them to an employer. That would end the abusive labor practices and probably reduce the number of lower end workers or the incentive to deny entry level employment to US nationals.

H1-B also makes CS masters programs a cash cow for US schools.

How does H1B suppress wages in India?

All those people skilled enough to get hired in the US (for massive increase in wages) don’t try to get similar positions in India, thus, nobody has to compete to pay for them.

I don't think so. You can argue emmigration takes away supply in the labor side. Why would prices go down? Quite the contrary. I don't think it necessarily raises salaries in India though, because that market seems to have a hard cap somewhere around 36k/year but it sure does opens up positions for newcomers.

Because it surpresses wages in the US, so Indian employers do not need to offer as much compensation to keep local workers who are considering emigrating.

I want to use you as a bit of a sounding board, so don't take this as negative feedback.

The problem is that the left, which was historically pro-labor, abdicated this position for racial reasons, and the right was always about maximizing the economic zone.

I saw a report recently about the political left in Denmark, who are basically one of the the only progressive movements in countries that understood what it takes to maintain support, and hence Denmark has had much less of a rise in support for far right parties than other countries in the world. Here's an article, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/magazine/denmark-immigrat....

Basically, progressives in Denmark have argued for very strict immigration rules, the essential argument being that Denmark has an expensive social welfare state, and to get the populace to support the high taxes needed to pay for this, you can't just let anyone in who shows up on your doorstep.

The American left could learn a ton of lessons from this. I may loath Greg Abbott for lots of reasons, but I largely support what he did bussing migrants to NYC and other liberal cities. Many people in these cities wanted to bask in the feelings of moral superiority by being "sanctuary cities", but public sentiment changed drastically when they actually had to start bearing a large portion of the cost of a flood of migrants.

Is there a reason social benefits must be available to immigrants? It seems like those could result be tied to citizenship or something like a minimum amount of lifetime taxes someone most have paid.

I mostly agree with you, but i think there’s something you got wrong. The democrat establishment didn’t abdicate their pro-labor position for reasons of racial equity- this was only ever a cover story.

The real reason is that they are totally beholden to powerful business interests that benefit from mass immigration, and the ensuing suppression of American labor movements. The racial equity bit is just the line that they feed to their voters.

I think the problems are more complex and much harder to fix and more depressing. The actual policies by the Democratic party have been "pro-worker". Biden was strongly pro-union. I am hard pressed to think of any policy by the Biden administration that was focused on racial issues. However, it seems like the perception of the Democratic party is largely mixed in with leftists who don't even like the party.

I think the real problem is that the median voter is either unable to, has no time to or no interest to understand basic economics and second-order consequences. We see this on both sides of the aisle. Policies like caps on credit card interest rates, rent control or no tax on tips are very, very popular while also being obviously bad after thinking about it for just 1 minute.

This is compounded by there being relatively little discussion of policies like that. They get reported on but not discussed and analyzed. This takes us back to your point about the perception of the Democratic party. The media (probably because the median voter prefers it) will instead discuss issues that are more emotionally relatable, like the border being "overwhelmed", trans athletes, etc. which makes it less likely to get people to think about economic policy.

This causes a preference for simple policies that seem to aim straight for the goal. Rent too high? Prohibit higher rent! Credit card fees too high? Prohibit high fees! Immigrants lower wages? Have fewer immigrant!

Telling the median voter that H1-B visa holders are lowering wages due to the high friction of changing sponsors and that the solution is to loosen the visa restrictions is gonna go over well with much of the electorate. Even only the portion of initial problem statement will likely reach most voters in the form of "H1-B visas lower wages". Someone who will simply take that simplified issue and run with cutting down further on immigration will be much more likely to succeed with how public opinion is currently formed.

All this stuff is why I love learning about policy and absolutely loath politics.

I’ve read some analysis than many swing voters supported Trump because they were unhappy with the economic situation, not due to culture wars. In their minds, and words, Trump may change at least something while democrats will certainly change nothing. Whatever pro-labor policies Biden had they didn’t move the needle.

What do you think of that?

I think that all statistics show us that the economy was very strong, especially compared to other countries. We did the impossible and had a soft landing. However, we also learned that the public prefers unemployment over inflation, even if real wages go up. People see their wage increases as earned even if it's just a market adjustment.

Further, I'm very disappointed that the median voter doesn't seem to understand or care about the policies they vote for. Tariffs and deportations are recipes to cause more inflation, yet here we are.

Employment-based immigration policy just isn't controversial outside of very specific bubbles. Everyone who's considered the problem seriously, left and right, realizes that the H1B system is bad a point-based system is the way to go, which is why it's been part of every immigration reform proposal for over a decade with essentially no controversy. If this were the only aspect of immigration issues, or if people felt it was important enough to pull it out of broad immigration reform, it would pass in a heartbeat.

Japan will let everyone that can get a job in (and is willing to do the immigration process for them). This seems like a perfectly fair way to do things. If you don’t have a job, and can’t find a new one in 3-6 months, you have to leave again.

Don’t understand why other countries make it harder.

Japan (the country) doesn't do this. You still need a company to sponsor you and not every company can.

Because other countries are not Japan, and if, say, the US were to pursue a similar policy, they would receive over 200 million immigrant workers and near-zero employment among the native population in the first two years

Switzerland is the same. By far the best implemented immigration policies in whole Europe, if only Germany and France egos would step down a notch, acknowledge their mistakes and take an inspiration from clearly way more successful neighbour. They have 3x more immigration than next country and it just works, long term.

EU would flourish economically and there would be no room for ultra conservative right to gain any real foothold (which is 95% just failed immigration topic just like Brexit was).

Alas, we are where we are, they slowly backpedal but its too little too late, as usually. I blame Merkel for half of EU woes, she really was a horrible leader of otherwise very powerful nation made much weaker and less resilient due to her flawed policies and lack of grokking where world is heading to.

Btw she still acknowledges nothing and keeps thinking how great she was. Also a nuclear physicist who turned off all existing nuclear plants too early so Germany has to import massive amount of electricity from coal burning plants. You can't make it up.

First, I assume you are talking about highly skilled immigration to Switzerland. Does Swiss immigration policy also apply to non-highly skilled immigration? (Leave aside refugees for this discussion.)

How does Switzerland keep local companies from hiring workers on low wages to compete against locals? How do they police it?

Does Switzerland not take any refugees?

Yes, some, but those are very different from economical migrants and their numbers compared to those migrants are small

What do you think caused the very high numbers of refugees in other European countries? I thought they were all supposed to be refugees from war and not economic refugees. In fact I thought economic refugees were just economic migrants and not something European countries let in under refugee rules.

The big difference that's been highly relevant recently (https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/un-criticises-restrict...) is the application of asylum rules to civil war. You only have a right to international asylum if you can't find refuge in your home country - but what does "can't" mean, precisely, when your country is split into multiple warring factions along hazy front lines? There's a lot of room for interpretation.

Can you give more details here? I don't fully understand your post.

Immigration based on “I have someone willing to pay me to work” (and go through the immigration process) is essentially unlimited. Immigration based on “I’m a poor refugee, please help me” is nearly nonexistent (helps they’re an island).

Nah Japan rejects a lot of people even for work visas, also the requirements for maintaining the work visa can be extremely burdensome. You are underplaying the amount of bureaucratic hurdles that the average person will in fact face.

This nation has always taken in at least some percentage of less well off immigrants. It's against tradition to do otherwise. I don't see why we should render the second category non-existent, or why that is some inherent good that everyone should agree to be the case? Am I allowed to believe otherwise?

My understanding is that Bernie Sanders used to say that mass immigration was a "Koch brothers thing" and his tune on this has since changed to align with "progressive" ideas, but I might be mistaken.

I already know that the right-wing supports h1bs, Trump himself said so.

He recently addressed Congress and brought up the abuse of H1B such as for entry level accounting positions. The program was to meet shortages for highly skilled positions. Now its being abused to cheat new grads out of jobs and depress wages

Even in his most immigration-skeptical era (https://www.computerworld.com/article/1367869/bernie-sanders...), Sanders always acknowledged that some companies genuinely need a skilled immigration program to hire the global best and brightest. And note his line about "offshore outsourcing companies"; the issue's become even less controversial now that the balance of H1B sponsors is shifting towards large American tech companies who genuinely pay market rate.

What if tech roles at big tech roles actually paid more like the same prestigious firms in finance in nyc?

People in tech are so quick to shoot themselves in the foot.

Not sure what you're aiming to get out of this comparison. Software engineers make quite a bit more at prestigious tech companies than they do at prestigious finance firms in NYC, and prestigious finance firms in NYC extensively recruit people from outside the US. Even if you want to compare engineers in tech to bankers in finance, I'm not sure Goldman is paying all that much better than OpenAI these days.

Why do people think Goldman pays software developers so well? They do not. They pay whatever is required compared to their competition (mostly other ibanks). There is a tiny sliver (less than 5%) of the dev staff who work in front office and are called "Strats". (Some other banks have "Strats" [Morgan?] or put you into a quant team to pay you more [JPM/UBS/etc].) They make about 25-50% more money compared to vanilla software devs in the IT division.

The job of the high paid people in finance at prestigious firms is to look nice in an expensive suit. Know many people in tech with those qualifications?

I'd be good at it but I won't get hired cause I didn't go to the right boarding school.

Tech has its barriers too. Most people I've met in tech come from relatively rich families. (Families where spending $70k+/yr on college is not a major concern for multiple kids - that's not normal middle class at all even for the US)

Regarding the first sentence, it is already true for software developers. You can (and probably will) make more money at FAANG compared to global ibanks in NYC.

I don't really think that is what's being discussed here.

Even literal Nazis were exempted from immigration controls on the basis of extreme merit.

>Trump himself said so

TACO Trump himself said he'd reveal his health care plan in two weeks, many many years ago, many many times. But then he chickened out again and again and again and again and again. So that the buk buk buk are you talking about?

was the left ever truly anti-immigration? I genuinely ask. Because the last leftwing explicitly pro-union movement I can remember was the late 90s/2000s anti-globalists, the ones that used to protest the G7 summits and the like. But they were in favor of immigration, so it always seemed contradictory. Anyway, it's not like the right doesn't have its own equally contradictory positions.

amen! that will never happen though, nothing ever happens here that helps the workers and whatever rights we have now are slowly dwindling (immigrants or otherwise…)

  > nothing ever happens here that helps the workers and whatever rights we have now are slowly dwindling

its almost as if we need a 'workers party' or something... though i'd imagine first-past-the-post in the u.s makes that difficult.

I agree with all of that. I've seen employers treat workers with H1B visas as slaves, basically. Local employees had a pretty decent work-life balance, but H1B employees got calls at 8PM on a Friday night to add a feature. And why not? What were they going to do quit (and have, what is it, something like 48 hours to get out of the country)?

I felt enormous sympathy for my coworkers here with that visa. Their lives sucked because there was little downside for sociopathic managers to make them suck.

Most frustrating was when they were doing the same kind of work I was doing, like writing Python web services and whatnot. We absolutely could hire local employees to do those things. They weren't building quantum computers or something. Crappy employers gamed the system to get below-market-rate-salary employees and work them like rented mules. It was infuriating.

It sucks that people are treated that way.

While working at Google I worked with many many amazing H1B (and other kinds) visa holders. I did 3 interviews a week, sat on hiring committees (reading 10-15 packets a week) and had a pretty good gauge of what we could find.

There was just no way I could see that we could replace these people with Americans. And they got paid top dollar and had the same wlb as everyone else (you could not generally tell what someone’s status was).

I fully, completely support the idea of visa programs running like that. If you want to pay top dollar for someone with unique skills to move here and help build our economy, I am fully behind this.

But wanna use it as a way to undercut American jobs with 80-hour-a-week laborers, as I've personally witnessed? Nah.

My criticisms against the H1B program are completely against the companies who abuse it. By all means, please do use it to bring in world-class scientists, researchers, and engineers!

This was true up until pretty recently. CS has come to be seen as a “prestigious” degree, and SWE as a “prestigious” career. Lots of kids who, 10 years ago, would have studied law, medicine, finance, or hard sciences, are studying CS. At my alma mater, CS is the largest major by a huge margin. The result of all this is there is a massive supply of smart and capable American citizens with formal training trying to break in to the job market, with limited success, due in no small part to the labor oversupply caused by immigration.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jamesfobrien_tech-jobs-have-d...

If the foreign candidates were so much superior than locally born candidates as you explained, why not just open a campus in that country and thus save the best employees from having to uproot from their native culture?

Good question. In many cases they did. The Zurich office has people from all over Europe.

But, for existing teams they wanted (reasonably) to avoid splitting between locations. So you need someone local.

I think the real reason for hiring locally is both that communication works better, and that the higher ups don't want to give the impression that their jobs could also be outsourced.

Time zones can be a real issue even with remote work. There are of course also arguments for in-person collaboration.

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads

One theory is that the benefit they might be providing over domestic "grads" is lack of prerequisites for promotion above certain levels (language, cultural fit, and so on). For managers, this means the prestige of increased headcount without the various "burdens" of managing "careerists". For example, less plausible competition for career-ladder jobs which can then be reserved for favoured individuals. Just a theory.

I think that would backfire as the intrinsic culture of the company changes as it absorbs more people. Verticals would form from new hires who did manage to get promoted

It's also not correct to view people as atomized individuals. People band together on shared culture and oftentimes ethnicity.

Which is exactly what has happened. Anyone in the industry for 15 years can easily see this.

I will admit that this is the most plausible explanation of this phenomenon that explains the benefit to managers I have read on this issue so far.

Putting aside economic incentives, which the wealthy were eager to reap, the vast majority of the technical labor force in this country came and still comes from (outside of SF) a specific race and we have huge incentives that literally everyone reading this has brushed up against, whether in support or against, to alter that racial makeup.

Obviously the only real solution to creating an artificial labor shortage is looking externally from the existing labor force. Simply randomly hiring underserved groups didn't really make sense because they weren't participants.

Where I work, we have two main goals when I'm involved in the technical hiring process: hire the cheapest labor and try to increase diversity. I'm not necessarily against either, but those are our goals.

Careerists: What does this term mean?

People more concerned about getting a promotion than they are taking pride in doing quality work that makes a difference. Corporate rubrics for promotion have little to do with doing great work and careerists focus heavily on playing these stupid games set up by HR execs.

Former President Obama (of the US) calls this a "false choice". Can you be both focused on the next promotion and providing lots of value in your current role? I think the answer is yes. Of course, there are people whom seem to produce nothing, but get promoted... in the case of software engineers, they are mostly promoted on the principle of "competance" -- You are a good software dev... so now your run this team (regardless if they are a good manager!).

It's also worth noting that it's almost entirely native born Americans that are pushing back against nepotism. Extreme nepotism is still the norm (an expectation even) in most South and East Asian cultures. And it's quite readily acknowledged if you speak to newer hires who haven't realized yet that it is best kept quiet.

It's a hard truth for many Americans to swallow, but it is the truth nonetheless.

Not to say there isn't an incredible amount of merit... but the historical impact of rampant nepotism in the US is widely acknowledged, and this newer manifestation should be acknowledged just the same.

I was working at a SoCal company a couple years ago (where I’m from), and we had a lot of Chinese and Indian folks. I remember cracking up when one of the Indian fellows pulled me aside and asked me where I was from, because I sounded so different with my accent and lingo. He thought I was from some small European country, lol.

Just to note interpersonally I find pretty much any group to be great on average but being a participant of US labor and sympathetic to other US laborers this is clearly not something I can support.

You can’t support having a good enough relationship with coworkers from outside of your country that you can relate cheerful anecdotes about them?

The language I use being from southern California has, on more than one occasion, sparked conversation about it.

Sorry, dude, it's like, all I know.

My opinion is that off-shore teams are also going to be some of the jobs more easily replaced, because many of these are highly standardized with instructions due to the turnover they have. I wouldn’t be surprised if these outsourcing companies are already working toward that end. They are definitely automating and/or able to collect significant training data from the various tools they require their employees to use for customers.

> The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with.

I hear this argument where I live for various reasons, but surely it only ever comes down to wages and/or conditions?

If the company paid a competitive rate (ie higher), locals would apply. Surely blaming a lack of local interest is rarely going to be due to anything other than pay or conditions?

The company having access to the global labor force is the problem we're explicitly discussing. This isn't seen as something desirable by US workers.

I was born in NC, and I mostly have experienced the large amount of immigration as a positive. Most of the people I grew up were virulently anti-intellectuals, mocking math and science learning, and most of them have gone on to be realtors and business folks, bankers even. All the people I've met from China or South Asia (the two demographics I work most closely worth) value learning and science and math - not as some "lets have STEM summer camps" but when they meet some new 8 year old will ask them to solve some math problems (like precisely 1 of my kids' dozens of relatives).

I enjoy meeting the very smart people from all sorts of backgrounds - they share the values of education and hard work that my parents emphasized, and they have an appreciation for what we enjoy as software engineers; US born folks tend to have a bit of entitlement, and want success without hard work.

I interview a fair number of people, and truly first rate minds are a limited resource - there's just so many in each city (and not everyone will want to or be able to move for a career). Even with "off-shoring" one finds after hiring in a given city for a while, it gets harder, and the efficient thing to do is to open a branch in a new city.

I don't know, perhaps the realtors from my class get more money than many scientists or engineers, and certainly more than my peers in India (whose salaries have gone from 10% of mine to about 40% of mine in the past decade or two), but the point is the real love of solving novel problems - in an industry where success leads to many novel problems.

Hard work, interesting problems, and building things that actual people use - these are the core value prop for software engineering as a career; the money is pretty new and not the core; finding people who share that perspective is priceless. Enough money to provide a good start to your children and help your family is good, but never the heart of the matter.

Money is absolutely the heart of the matter for employees and employers. I think it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise.

We all get 5 conspiracy theories before we advance from "understandably suspicious, given the complexity of the modern world" to "reliable tinfoil purchasers", and one of mine is that the prevalence of Indian execs and, to a lesser extent, Indian and Chinese workers in tech is a backdoor concession to countries who could open a demographic can of whoop-ass on us if they really wanted to. We let them bleed off the ambitious intellectuals who could become a political issue for their elite, and ours get convenient scapegoats for why businesses can't hire, train, and pay domestic workers well. As far as top men are concerned, it's a good deal.

Nadella ascending to the leadership of Micro"I Can't Believe It's Not Considered A State-Sponsored Defense Corp"soft is what got my mildly xenophobic (sorry) gears turning.

Edited:

Actually disregard, this isn’t worth it, but I don’t grant any freebies.

Well, now I'm curious.

I mean, aren't 3 out of 8 humans from India or China? If the company is big enough to appeal to a global applicant pool its a bit expected.

It’s presumably (from context) a company campus in the US that they’re taking about. I wouldn’t expect 3 of 8 legally authorized to work in the US people to be Chinese or Indian combined.

Other than a few international visitors, I’d expect the makeup to look like the domestic tech worker demographics rather than like the global population demographics.

Also, anyone who has worked in these companies also know it’s much larger than 3 out of 8… comical to act like it’s only 3/8.

I estimate AWS engineering is maybe 80% Indian and another 10% Chinese. Less at higher levels though.

It always blows my mind that 75% of H1B admittance is Indian. Then you live in SFBA for 10 years and it's not really a surprise anymore.

Certain suburbs of Seattle (Redmond, bothell) are pretty much entirely Indian

I think most software companies hire from computer science graduates from US colleges. It’s likely that international students makes up a large percentage of these graduates.

I’m realizing that 100% of all product managers I have ever worked with were just ZIRP-PMs.

I have never once worked with a product manager who I could describe as “worth their weight in gold”.

Not saying they don’t exist, but they’re probably even rarer than you think.

first job out of college i was one of these pms. luckily i figured it out quickly and would spend maybe 2 hours a day working, 6 hours a day teaching myself to program. i cant believe that job existed and they gave it to me. one of my teammates was moved to HR and he was distraught over how he actually had work to do

I worked at a small company with more PMs than developers. It was incredible how much bull it created.

My theory for these PM's is its basically a cheap way to take potential entrepreneurs off the market. Its hard to predict if a startup will succeed but one genre of success is having a Type A "fake it till you make it" non technical cofounder who can keep raising long enough to get product market fit.

These types all go to the same schools and do really well, interview the same, and value the prestige of working in big tech. So it's pretty easy to identify them and offer them a great career path and take them off the market.

Technical founders are way trickier to identify as they can be dropouts, interview poorly, not value the prestige etc.

How are TPMs optional? In my experience they provide more value than PMs that don't understand technology.

Perhaps the terminology differs between companies, but in my experience TPM means technical program manager. For large projects they were responsible for creating project Gantt charts, identify blockers early, and essentially "greasing the wheels" between disparate teams.

Again, IMO the good ones added a lot of value by making sure no balls got dropped, which is easy to do with large, multi-team projects. Most of them, though, did a lot of just "status checks" and meeting updates.

I suspect that these "AI layoffs" are really "interest rate" layoffs in disguise.

Software was truly truly insane for a bit there. Straight out of college, no-name CS degree, making $120, $150k (back when $120k really meant $120k)? The music had to stop on that one.

Yeah, my spiciest take is that Jr. Dev salaries really started getting silly during the 2nd half of the 2010s. It was ultimately supply (too little) and demand (too much) pushing them upward, but it was a huge signal we were in a bubble.

As someone who entered the workforce just after this, I feel like I missed the peak. A ton if those people got boatloads of money, great stock options, and many years of experience that they can continue to leverage for excellent positions.

I joined in 2018.

Honestly it was 10 years too late. The big innovations of the 2010 era were maturing. I’ve spent my career maintaining and tweaking those, which does next to zero for your career development. It’s boring and bloated. On the bright side I’ve made a lot of money and have no issues getting jobs so far.

I think my career started in 2008? That was a great time to start for the purpose of learning, but a terrible one for compensation. Basically nobody knew what they were doing, and software wasn’t the ticket to free money that it became later yet.

data engineering was free money for nothing at all circa 2014, they got paid about 1.5x a fullstack application developer for .5x the work because frontend/ui work was considered soft, unworthy

there’s always interesting work out there. It just doesn’t always align with ethical values, good salary, or work life balance. There’s always a trade off.

For example think of space x, Waymo, parts of US national defense, and the sciences (cancer research, climate science - analyzing satellite images, etc). They are doing novel work that’s certainly not boring!

I think you’re probably referring to excitement and cutting edge in consumer products? I agree that has been stale for a while.

Don't worry, there is always another bubble on the horizon

The irony now is that 120k is basically minimum wage for major metros (and in most cases that excludes home ownership).

Of course, that growth in wages in this sector was a contributing factor to home/rental price increases as the "market" could bear higher prices.

I feel that saying "120k is basically minimum wage for major metros" is absurd. As of 2022, there are only three metro areas in the US that have a per capita income greater than $120,000 [1] (Bay Area and Southwest Connecticut). Anywhere else in the US, 120k is doing pretty well for yourself, compared to the rest of the population. The average American working full time earns $60k [2]. I'm sure it's not a comfortable wage in some places, but "basically minimum wage" just seems ignorant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

I disagree. Your data doesnt make the grandparent's assertion false. Cost of living != per capita or median income. Factoring in sensible retirement, expensive housing, inflation, etc, I think the $120k figure may not be perfect, but is close enough to reality.

Since when "minimum wage" means "sensible retirement" ?

More like it means ending up with government-provided bare minimum handouts to not have you starve (assuming you somehow manage to stay on minimum wage all your life).

We agree, minimum wage doesnt mean that. And in a large metro area, that's why $120k is closer to min wage than a good standard of lliving and building retirement.

Absolutely absurd. I lived in NYC making well less than that for years and was perfectly comfortable.

The "min wage" of HN seems to be "living better than 98% of everyone else"

Adjusted for inflation? Without (crippling) debt accrual and adequate emergency fund, retirement, etc? Did you have children or childcare expenses? These all knock on that total compensation quickly these days, which is the main argument in this particular thread of replies.

No to kids, yes to everything else (except debt, did have lots of school loans)

Correct, I mean in the sense of "living a standard of life that my parents and friends parents (all of very, very modest means) had 20 years ago when I was a teenager."

I mean a real wage associated with standards of living that one took for granted as "normal" when I was young.

It actually is basically minimum wage for major metros.

If I took a job for ~100k in Washington, I'd live worse than I did as a PhD student in Sweden. It would basically suck. I'm not sure ~120k would make things that different.

Yep exactly. I mean "maintaining a basic material standard of living that even non 'high-earners' had twenty years ago"

The erosion of the standard of living in the US (and the West more broadly) is not something to be ignored in any discussion of wages.

CoL in London or Dublin is comparable to much of the US, but new grad salaries are in the $30-50k range.

The issue is salary expectations in the US are much higher than those in much of Western Europe despite having similar CoL.

And $120k for a new grad is only a tech specific thing. Even new grad management consultants earn $80-100k base, and lower for other non-software roles and industries.

I've seen recently an open position for senior dev with 60k salary and hybrid 3 days per week in London. Insane!

Yep. And costs are truly insane in Greater London. Bay Area level housing prices and Boston level goods prices, but Mississippi or Alabama level salaries.

But that's my point - salaries are factored based on labor market demands and comparative performance of your macroeconomy (UK high finance and law salaries are comparable with the US), not CoL.

> Boston level goods prices

I’ve never been to Boston. Why are the prices high there?

They keep throwing the tea in the harbah

I mean, seeing an open position does not equal that position ever being filled. It can also likely be a fake position, trying to create the "we are growing and hiring!" impression, or mandated by law to be there, but made artificially worse, because they have someone internally, that they want to move to the position.

>but new grad salaries are in the $30-50k range

But in UK an Ireland they get free healthcare, paid vacation, sick leave and labor protections, no?

The labor protections are basically ignored (you will be expected to work off the clock hours in any white collar role), and the free healthcare portion gets paid out of employer's pockets via taxes so it comes out the same as a $70-80k base (and associated taxes) would in much of the US.

There's a reason you don't see new grad hiring in France (where they actually try to enforce work hours), and they have a subsequently high youth unemployment rate.

Though even these new grad roles are at risk to move to CEE, where their administrations are giving massive tax holidays on the tune of $10-20k per employee if you invest enough.

And the skills gap I mentioned about CS in the US exists in Weatern Europe as well. CEE, Israel, and India are the only large tech hubs that still treat CS as an engineering disciple instead of as only a form of applied math.

> The labor protections are basically ignored (you will be expected to work off the clock hours in any white collar role),

I happen to have a sibling in consulting who was seconded from London to New York for a year, doing the same work for the same company, and she found the work hours in NY to be ludicrously long (and not for a significant productivity gain: more required time-at-desk). So there are varying levels of "expected to work off the clock hours".

What is the difference between treating CS as an engineering discipline vs a branch of applied math?

(According to this guy apparently) low level vs algorithms focus. CE or CS basically.

> free healthcare

I pay over 40% effective tax rate. Healthcare is far from free.

But your health problems won't bankrupt you or make you homeless I presume.

The vast majority of Americans, who carry health insurance, also will not be bankrupted by health problems. Though they will earn far greater amounts of money for their families by working in the US compared to the UK.

Maybe the EU is different but in the US there's no software engineering union. Our wages are purely what the market dictates.

Think they're too high? You're free to start a company and pay less.

Yeah 120k is the maximum I have earned over 20 years in the industry. I started off circa. 40k maybe that's 70k adj for inflation. Not in US.

It’s always going to be difficult to compare countries. Things like healthcare, housing, childcare, schooling, taxes and literally every single thing are going to differ.

The arbitrage is when you are young and healthy get that US salary and save then retreat home in your 40s and 50s. Stay healthy of course.

Lots of tech folks get burnt out without knowing it. If you're tired all the time drastically alter your diet, it could change your life for the better.

To what?

That really only happened in HCOL areas.

HCOL wasn't the driver though. It is abundance of investment and desire to hire. If the titans could collude to pay engineer half as much, they would. They tried.

Sure, but there was a massive concentration of such people in those areas.

I've worked at smaller companies where half the people in the meetings were just there because they had nothing else to do. Lots of "I'm a fly on the wall" and "I'll be a note taker" types. Most of them contributed nothing.

The first mistake is thinking that contribution must be in the form of output instead of ingestion. Of course meetings aren't often the most efficient form of doing so. More being forced to listen (at least officially) so there isn't an excuse.

This is true, but generally speaking there should be more people "producing" than "ingesting." This is often not the case. Most meetings are useless, and this has become much worse in modern times. Example: agile "scrum" and its daily stand ups, which inevitably turn into status reports.

At some point in the 2000's, every manager decided they needed weekly 1:1's, resulting in even more meetings. Many of these are entirely ineffective. As one boss told me, "I've been told I need to have 1:1's, so I'm having them!" I literally sat next to him and talked every day, but it was a good time to go for coffee...

My friend's company (he was VP of Software & IT at a non-tech company) had a habit of meetings with no particular agenda and no decisions that needed making. Just meeting because it was on the calendar, discussing any random thing someone wanted to blab about. Not how my friend ran his team but that was how the rest did.

Then they had some disappointing results due to their bad decision-making elsewhere in the company, and they turned to my friend and said "Let's lay off some of your guys."

It is almost like once a company gets rolling, there is sufficient momentum to keep it going even if many layers aren't doing very much. The company becomes a kind of meta-economic zone where nothing really matters. Politics / fights emerge between departments / layers but has nothing to do with making a better product / service. This can go on for decades if the moat is large enough.

> I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend.

Some managers read Dilbert and think it's intended as advice.

AI has been also consuming Dilbert as part of its training...

Worse yet, AI has been consuming Scott Adams quotes as part of its training...

"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams

"Women define themselves by their relationships and men define themselves by whom they are helping. Women believe value is created by sacrifice. If you are willing to give up your favorite activities to be with her, she will trust you. If being with her is too easy for you, she will not trust you." -Scott Adams

"Nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people. That’s a hate group." -Scott Adams

"Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed." -Scott Adams

"I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black Americas because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. ... The only outcome is that I get called a racist." -Scott Adams

>Worse yet

Should have been 'better still'.

Thank you!!! It's so awesome when an unrepentant racist piece of shit chimes in to perfectly prove my point!

I swear, folks: dennis_jeeves2 is not my sock puppet, the way Scott "plannedchaos" Adams is his own sock puppet and biggest fan.

Scott Adams Poses as His Own Fan on Message Boards to Defend Himself:

https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...

>Dilbert creator Scott Adams came to our attention last month for the first time since the mid to late '90s when a blog post surfaced where he said, among other things, that women are "treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone."

>Now, he's managed to provoke yet another internet maelstorm of derision by popping up on message boards to harangue his critics and defend himself. That's not news in and of itself, but what really makes it special is how he's doing it: by leaving comments on Metafilter and Reddit under the pseudonym PlannedChaos where he speaks about himself in the third person and attacks his critics while pretending that he is not Scott Adams, but rather just a big, big fan of the cartoonist.

>And what makes it really, really special is the level of spectacular ego and hilarious self-congratulation suddenly on display in the comments when you realize they were written by Scott Adams' number one fan... Scott Adams. [...]

"Hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout"

Which is the sole reason automation will not make most people obsolete until the VP level themselves are automated.

No, not if the metric by which VPs get clout changes.

That metric is evaluated deep in the human psyche.

The more cloud spend the better. Take 10% of it as a bonus?

It's about to change to doing more with less headcount and higher AI spend

Automation is just one form of "face a sufficiently competitive marketplace such that the company can no longer tolerate the dead-weight loss of their egos".

I don’t doubt there’s a lot of knowledge workers who aren’t adding value.

I’m worried about the shrinking number of opportunities for juniors.

I agree with this, but I still think that offshoring is much more responsible for this than AI.

I have definitely seen real world examples where adding junior hires at ~$100k+ is being completely forgone when you can get equivalent output from someone making $40k offshore.

To the contrary - they were providing value to the VP who benefitted from inflated headcount. That's "real value", it's just a rogue agent is misaligned with the company's goals.

And AI cannot provide that kind of value. Will a VP in charge of 100 AI agents be respected as much as a VP in charge of 100 employees?

At the end of the day, we're all just monkeys throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith we constructed. But we're not going to stop throwing bones in the air!

True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.

> Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes

The data does not support this. The businesses with the highest market caps are the ones with the highest earnings.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Sort by # of employees and you get a list of companies with lower market caps.

Google/Facebooks earnings are so high they can afford to be wildly wasteful with headcount and still be market leaders

Those two are perfect examples of burning insane amounts of money and still showing profits beyond that... Whole metaverse investment. And all the products that Google has abandoned. Even returning all the payments like Stadia...

If you sort by number of employees you get companies where those employees aren't in R&D divisions.

Their comment reads to me as if businesses hire employees (regardless of the work they do, since we are discussing employees that don't do anything) because investors consider employees as R&D (even useless ones).

Either way, there is no data I have seen to suggest market cap correlates with number of employees. The strongest correlation I see is to net income (aka profit), and after that would be growing revenues and/or market share.

Not so fun in real life but I kind of like this as a video game concept

LGR - Afterlife - PC Game Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azFNwF6fa0

Afterlife (video game)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(video_game)

We really oughta work on setting up systems that don’t waste time on things like this. Might be hard, but probably would be worth the effort.

Just curious, did you put yourself in the superfluous category either time?

Ultimately (and sadly) yes. While I never habitually or intentionally attended meetings to just look busy, I did work on something I knew had a long shot of creating value for the business. I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. I left both on my own accord seeing the writing on the wall.

> I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted.

You said you were at large companies, so this is a hard call to make. A lot of large companies work on lots of small products knowing they probably won't work, but one of them might, so it's still worth it to try. It's essentially the VC model.

Half of everyone at most large companies could be retired with no significant impact to the company's ability to generate revenue. The problem has always been figuring out which half.

Whenever I think about AI and labor, I can't help thinking about David Graeber's [Bullshit Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs).

And there's multiple confounding factors at play.

Yes, lots of jobs are bullshit, so maybe AI is a plausible excuse to downside and gain efficiency.

But also the dynamic that causes the existence of bullshit jobs hasn't gone away. In fact, assuming AI does actually provide meaningful automation or productivity improvemenet, it might well be the case that the ratio of bullshit jobs increases.

Its hard to automate something that is hard to define, so I see the productive jobs/workers being punished by AI moreso than those jobs. Generally I see anecdotally:

- Value creators (i.e. the ones historically carrying companies with the 80%/20% rule) generally are the ones cautious and/or fearful of AI. The ones that carried most of the company. Their output is measurable and definable so able to be automated.

- The people in the jobs you mention in your post conversely are usually the ones most excited about AI. The ones in meetings all day, in the corporate machine. By definition their job is already not well defined anyway - IMV this is harder to automate. They are often there for other reasons other than "productive output" - e.g. compliance, nepotism, stakeholder management, etc.

Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?

People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it.

Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut line, and we just didn't have enough people to do them.

I don't know where all these companies are that have half their staff "not doing anything productive" but I've never worked at one.

What's more likely? 1. Companies are (for reasons unknown) hiring all these people and not having them do anything useful, or 2. These people actually do useful things, but HN commenters don't understand those jobs and simply conclude they're doing nothing?

All of the big software companies are like the parent describes, in most of their divisions.

Managers always want more headcount. Bigger teams. Bigger scope. Promotions. Executives have similar incentives or don’t care. That’s the reason why they’re bloated.

Have you heard of Twitter? 80-90% reduction in numbers, visible effects to the user (resulting from the headcount cuts, not the politics of the owner)? Pretty much zero.

That’s a difficult example. I don’t think anyone would reasonably expect the engineering artifact twitter.com to break. But the business artifact did break. At least to a reasonable degree. The Ad revenue is still down (both business news and the ads I’m experiencing are from less well resourced brands). And yes, that has to do with “answering emails with poop emojis” and “laying off content checkers”

Bad part is all those guys attending meetings start feeling important. They start feeling like they are doing the job.

I’ve seen those guys it is painful to watch.

I've said this many times, that the abundance and wealth of the tech industry basically provided vast amounts of Universal Basic Income to a variety of roles (all of agile is one example). We're at a critical moment where we actually have to look at cost-cutting on this UBI.

"my VP more headcount and therefore more clout"

This had me thinking, how are they going to get "clout", by comparing AI spending?

Agree, but two questions:

First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR perspective (to me anyway).

Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly media and FUD inventing the correlation.

the one does actually sound worse because... it's actually worse. it clarifies that the companies themselves were playing games with people's livelihoods because of the potential for profit.

whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much harder to assign blame to company leadership.

I'd read the first as adjusting to market demand, not playing with people's lives. If if were construed as playing with lives, that could apply to basically any investment.

Agreed. You could make the case that employment in general is playing with someone’s life.

isn't the scapegoat he or she who gets sacrificed? I think engineers are that

Turns out 50% of white collar jobs are just daycare for adults.

Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic?

Because they don't have to do that. They could just operate at max efficiency all the time.

Instead, they spread the wealth a bit by having bullshit jobs, even if the existence of these jobs is dependent on the market cycle.

> Does anyone else think the fact that companies hire superfluous employees (i.e. bullshit jobs) is actually fantastic?

I do.

It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever.

I'm a person that would be hypothetically supportive of something like DOGE cuts, but I'd rather have people earning a living even with Soviet-style make work jobs than unemployed. I don't desire to live in a cutthroat "competitive" society where only "talent" can live a dignified life. I don't know if that's "wealth distribution" or socialism or whatever; I don't really care, nor make claim it's some airtight political philosophy.

  > It's much more important that people live a dignified life and be able to feed their families than "increasing shareholder value" or whatever.

its just my intuition, but talking to many people around me, i get the feeling like this is why people on both "left" and "right" are in a lot of ways (for lack of a better word) irate at the system as a whole... if thats true, i doubt ai will improve the situation for either...

tech bros think not only that that system is good, but that they'd be the winners

I think the more optimistic interpretation would be that companies eliminating bullshit jobs would provide signal on which jobs aren’t bullshit, and then individuals and the job prep/education systems could align to this.

That’s very optimistic! I don’t fully agree with it, but I certainly know some very intelligent people that I wish were contributing more to the world than they do as a pawn in a game of corporate chess.

> But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.

I think quotes around "real value" would be appropriate as well. Consider all the great engineering it took to create Netflix, valued at $500b - which achieves what SFTP does for free.

Netflix's value comes from being convenient and compatible with the copyright system in a way sharing videos P2P definitely isn't.

I'm not advocating for p2p, but rather drawing attention to the word "value" and what it means to create it. For example, would netflix as a piece of software hold any value if the company were to suddenly lose all its copyrights and IP licenses? Whereas something like an operating system or excel has standalone utility, netflix is only as valuable as its IP. The software isn't designed to create value, but instead to fully utilize the value of a piece of property. It's an important distinction to keep in mind especially when designing such software. Now consider that in the streaming world there isn't just netflix, but prime, Hulu, HBO, etc. Etc.

The parent comment was complaining about certain employees contributions to "real value" or lack thereof. My question is, how do you ascertain the value of work in this context where the software isn't what's valuable but the IP is, and further how do justify working on a product thats already a solved problem and still refer to it as "creating 'real' value"?

And their increasingly restrictive usage policies are basically testing how important the 'convenient' piece is.

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