Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow [audio]
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I suspect an H1B decision reduction is a step in the correct direction here, but
Already being changing. Singapore is now exempt. As more palms are greased, I am sure more exemptions will follow.
https://www.visaverge.com/visa/singapore-citizens-exempt-fro...
Where I use to work, there were a few people, not many, working there from Singapore. Most were from India and China.
The H1B1 has been around for over 20 years now. It's just... something that exists. These are concessions that a large country like the US can easily give in bilateral agreements to small countries because demographic issues owing to immigration are not likely owing to how small these countries are to begin with. It's not something possible for countries like India, China, Indonesia, etc.
I think this is a terrible idea that only helps those like your friends: people that got into tech because of job prospects but never cared about the field.
It's going to hurt American IT companies and in the end all IT workers if the field becomes less competitive and more mediocrity will survive.
Well, it will also help the tens of thousands let go from top tech companies over the last two years, many of which do care about the field. I can assure you the fact that someone has an H1B says almost nothing about how much they 'care about the field'.
There is no degree that guarantees success, no job that lasts forever, and no guru with the secret to happiness. You've just got to be clever and adaptable and stay on your toes.
No one in modern society is completely helpless or lone wolf unless they truly want to believe that.
If jobs were guaranteed regardless of demand, allocation of labor would be less efficient, and we’d all be poorer on average.
Indeed. All it takes is a world government and tight surveillance and enforcement and for sure human behavior can be controlled.
Still, who controlls the controller?
I'd at least have expected some more original retorts than just canned slogans though.
There Is No Alternative
I merely replied to the very orignal and never tried out approach of "controlling the economy" indeed with the standard response. If you are willing to debate alternatives for real, I am all ear. But yes, totalitarian approaches I will not like.
I am not even disputing what you have stated as a possibility. It is just, there are other possibilities. Maybe the Government Pension Fund of Norway is a good counter example to what you propose?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
Governments influence economics all the time in subtle and not so subtle ways.
They do. Influence, but not control.
So .. au contraire.
The demand to just "control" the market is a really low effort populistic approach to me, that refuses to analyse deeper.
Economy is made up of people. Who have a free will and act out of various motives. So if one instance is controlling the economy it means this instance is controlling all the free will of those people. History shows it can be done, but for a hefty price and I was born into such an experiment I consider failed all in all.
So I am not a free market fanatic, but I see the growing authorian tendencies very critical.
Btw. next time you come to criticize me, maybe check the guidelines yourself first.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Unless it's my life, then it's different.
>No thanks, actually. I’m pretty happy with the status quo.
Ok don't come crying when things change and you're no longer on top.
It isn’t the weather.
Any kind of increase in "worker power" during Covid was promptly erased by inflation. It was a media meme and never existed.
Pre-covid Walmart used to pay $7.25/hr, now it’s $15-$20.
They were never paid as low as $7.25/hr.
> The lowest wage workers have seen large gains.
Again, statistically, nationwide false.
Only because we've allowed society to make it so, to treat people as things to be used and consumed for money's benefit.
Society doesn't have to be this way, though the current system has apologists skilled (and not so skilled) at making it seem so.
The problem with all engineering is that stuff gets built, and, once it is built, you don't need all the engineers that built it anymore. Things then get into the 'cottage industry phase'. Ecommerce is fascinating in this regard. Being able to sell stuff online was a goldmine at the start, with every business needing to get online to sell their products and services. However, platforms such as Shopify, Etsy and Amazon came along and companies ditched their expensive programmers to use the new SaaS platforms for ecommerce.
Video games and anything 3D entered the 'cottage industry phase' a long time ago and the same with social media things, the infrastructure is built and those in the game just play musical chairs going from one gig to another, with relatively few openings for new people.
Outsourcing due to globalisation comes into it, why pay for programmers in a Western city when you can move the operation to Eastern Europe or India? Undoubtedly this is a factor, however, there comes a time when everything is consolidated and just built.
Compare with the build out of networks in the Nortel days. If you knew how to do things with fibre optic splitters and big boxes with lots of lights on them then everything was golden, whilst the boom lasted. But then everything was built and it entered 'cottage industry phase'.
If the president, media, teachers, influencers, the richest people on the planet, and my parents say it? I probably would. I think it's disingenuous to imply this wasn't strongly recommended as the ideal way to get a high paying job straight out of college that only improves over time.
Where is this inferred?
The point was that Big Tech wanted more competition in the labor market to drive down programmer wages.
As they have demonstrated time and time again, the CFOs at "Big Tech" companies abhor paying programmers what they are worth. They do not care that they make $1 million in profit for your work, they hate that they pay you $300k, and they are willing to do anything (including multiple cases of illegal conspiracy) to pay you less than that.
I think hiring is less bleak here on the east coast.
Software Developers in most of these large companies are underpriced.
You’re not going to convince me that $300k is underpriced, that’s doctor/lawyer pay without having to spend 10 years in med school. Dev salaries are a bubble.
A dev can make a product that a billion people use.
But every one can.
The reason that companies pay engineers more than in other industries/countries, is that in general companies in other industries/countries don’t make nearly as much as SV companies.
The implicit contract goes as follows: You pay ~50,000 engineers around $400,000/year, and you essentially get a money printer and get to be one of the richest people in the world. Who wouldn’t take that trade?
In general, you can’t do that in any other country or industry.
They make money through monopoly effects on their social networks and ad platforms. They need some devs to build/maintain that platform of course, but devs are not as core to their business as they think they are. The monopoly status is the money printer.
Once you have a monopoly it becomes less necessary to do anything, which is maybe where we find ourselves today.
How many years of learning at home good developers needs?
Yeah, and also the perception that they were some of the last good jobs left. IIRC, other areas of the middle class have been declining for a long time.
Even using $300k as an example of a programmer getting ripped off relative to their worth -few industries afford opportunities to make anywhere near that much money. The median US pay is ~$40k.
If you ever get a chance to hear the C suite talk to an audience that's not primarily engineers, this is exactly how they think.
Remeber their job for which they get paid more in one year than you will in several life times is to make those numbers go up.
If you were getting paid that much, what wouldn't you be willing to do, say or believe?
If more and more people are capable of delivering high quality software, but the demand for it doesn't increase at the same rate, then it should be worth less.
Furthermore, hirers aren't evil people for wanting to pay less, any more than job seekers are evil people for wanting to get paid more, or shoppers are evil people for wanting discounts. The supply side is always going to want higher prices, and the demand side is always going to want lower.
Quite apart from the fact that in the jobs 'market', one side is forced to participate, else they starve.
Market pressures for thee, but not for me.
Big tech are among the top tier businesses. So I don't think it's fair to compare them to average employees. Rule #1 if you want to do well in the market is not to commoditize yourself, and average employees are commodities: people who slot into job titles with almost no differentiation between others competing for the same job title.
It's more accurate to big tech to top tier employees. Your execs, your staff engineers, your top sales talent, your startup founders who get acquired. Just like big tech, these people have a lot of negotiating power, tons of options, sometimes multiple clients, and often a nest egg so they can take time off work and be picky.
Your other points about differentiation are especially valid, now, but the great mass of people have limited capability there. Should they just starve?
In my amateur opinion, the compensation for each particular job is highly dependent on the historical accidents and unrelated political and economical events, and the rate of quality code (or whatever other end product/service) is a distant secondary factor in that.
(Hint, it's not all it's cracked up to be either.)
Sounds about right in terms of importance to society
Maybe surveillance, data collection and targeted ads is not a realistic "business model" long term. ZIRP ends, reality hits. Big Tech has to cut costs and employees are a big cost, especially overpaid ones ("tech" employees believed they were assets, now they know the truth)
Silicon Valley is betting the farm on "AI". The Hail Mary
If uneployment for recent biology grads at 3% is "not looking good" then for recent computer science grads at more than 6% unemployment, things are looking much worse
Why? They just took the classes and expected a cushy job.
I, on the other hand, worked on lots of my own projects and contributed to open source. I had a job lined up after graduation and haven't been out of work since.
Most of them got out of tech completely.
You can't just expect to follow a list of pre-written steps and then get rich from it. Life has never worked this way, but people continue to expect it.
That said, there's still something to be said for the fact that this is the only field that requires so much outside work, constant upskilling, etc.
Becoming a SWE is hard and it was never easy. You needed projects, internships, hundreds of hours invested in interview prep, aggressive networking and, even after all that, excellent luck. It is not something that naturally follows a CS degree. Maybe it does for the kids at the Stanfords and MITs (who, might I remind you, have already won wars to even get there). Not for the average Joe Jr from University of Flyover State.
Nowadays, how well you grind Leetcode is the most important test of your employability.
I'm not sure why they're not available immediately. It can't take that long to format and correct Whisper output.
<https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pfx.vpixl.com...> (MP3)
> As the industry embraces A.I. coding tools, computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs.
It seems this rarely gets discussed in the media though. As you said, AI gets more readership attention. I also get the impression people feel there's something culturally offensive about discussing off-shoring.
That was Joe Biden, talking to coal miners.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47...
Retraining programs have received bipartisan support.
The U.S. Department of Labor announced a fund of nearly $5 million for working training programs in Appalachia earlier this year.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently announced $2 million in funding from the National Dislocated Workers fund, and Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced a fund of more than $1 million from the same fund.
It's a cultural thing. The USA never has and probably never will really value technical talent.
"Noone gets paid until something gets sold".
It never occurred to them that nothing gets sold until something gets built. They just took that part for granted.
Engineering often views their role as taking in specs and outputting product with little regard to whether or not the product is actually worth buying.
Sales views customers as a resource to exploit rather than an entity to serve.
Both sides have gotten so far and lazy from American hegemony that it’s no surprise China has usurped the US.
China has usurped the US because a handful of businessmen decided to personally make money over several decades by basically exporting capability and know-how for modest short-term profits, and the Chinese government was far-sighted enough to help them and make sure they got the better end of the bargain (over the long term).
The lazy and incompetent western worker trope is just BS to justify this destructive enrichment strategy.
Culturally, the country derided blue collar work for a long time. The fact that everyone should attend college and strive for white collar work was unquestioned orthodoxy.
Ultimately, this cultural mindset led to the commoditization of society. Everything was a resource to be managed and optimized. Efficiency was paramount. And this viewpoint wasn’t just espoused by the capitalist class, it was shared by our “brightest” academic minds. Nobel laureate economists (e.g. Paul Krugman) told the public how great globalization would be because it increased economic efficiency.
What was missed in all this is that not everything is a resource that can be managed in a spreadsheet, CRM, or JIRA tracker. Delivering value is an art. It requires skills honed through practice and taste that comes from appreciation of craft. Culturally, we’ve lost appreciation for the process of creation. We want to be fat and lazy and do our “important” jobs and get paid. But that won’t work for long.
> Culturally, the country derided blue collar work for a long time. The fact that everyone should attend college and strive for white collar work was unquestioned orthodoxy.
I'd bet much of that attitude (at least in the masses) was driven by offshoring. Why go into blue collar work when sooner or later the plant's going to get sent overseas? If you're selling offshoring, you've got to weaken the opposition by denigrating the assets you're sending a way, and you've gotta offer some glimmer of hope to the people you're disrupting (and that hope can he a college degree and a white collar job).
> Ultimately, this cultural mindset led to the commoditization of society. Everything was a resource to be managed and optimized. Efficiency was paramount. And this viewpoint wasn’t just espoused by the capitalist class, it was shared by our “brightest” academic minds. Nobel laureate economists (e.g. Paul Krugman) told the public how great globalization would be because it increased economic efficiency.
Personally, I consider those guys to be the businessmen's lackeys.
Just a counterpoint, the federal government started guaranteeing student loans in the 60s. There was clearly a pre-offshoring push for a more educated populace.
Never dealt with salespeople before?
You don’t have to look hard for examples of sales promising things that engineering then has to try and deliver. I think Dilbert comics from the 90s rang that bell nearly every week.
China is ruled by engineers. And their leadership has correctly identified the weaknesses of our approach and are working to exploit them and demonstrating significant success at doing so.
In 64 critical technology driven areas, China now leads the USA is all but 7. The data is available for all to see and from multiple sources. And unfortunately, name calling and denial won't change it.
https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper...
https://www.techspot.com/news/97802-china-leads-us-37-out-44...
In the 90s they innovated lethal injection drugs.