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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas.

But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.

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My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway.

Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.

What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability?

I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.

the near term is not an issue, because most ai code is still reviewed by experienced engineers with experience. the problem comes in the future where junior engineers who never acquired enough experience to handle engineering problems

Ain’t nobody reviewing the majority of vibe coded output.

In the mature service I worked on, adding new code was “templatized”, you had to add feature flags, logs etc which didn’t vary much no matter which feature it was. The business logic was also not that complex, I can see AI tools one-shotting that and it indeed is a productivity boost. You would be surprised to know that most work was exactly this, writing rather mundane code. Majority of the time was spent coordinating with “stakeholders” (actually more like gate keepers) and testing code (our testing infrastructure was laborious). This was at MSFT. There are lot of teams that are innovating at the frontier (mine wasn’t, at-least not technically), I don’t know how AI tools work in those situations.

I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days.

I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.

Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.

Claude Code is similar. It's fairly clean for AI coding standards but it's also most likely much, much bigger than what it should be for what it does.

Tech debt and maintainability were important because time was of the essence in another era. If the cycles get compressed by say 95%, to hell with it, just trash the old and write everything from scratch, start from a clean slate each time?

That may be good enough for consumer facing systems. Rewrites seldom go well for enterprise systems of record because the code embodies a lot of undocumented but critical requirements. If you start vibe coding from a clean slate then all of that knowledge is lost and you've created an even bigger problem.

I don't think that needs to be true either anymore. Exhaustive specifications and comprehensive test suites are easily created now too. That's why I think software engineering will not go away, it will just change drastically.

It will change and most likely for worse. The new applications will be even buggier and worse than what we have now.

And worst possible outcome for the working class of humans is that we end up with AIs as our managers, being told to do what the AI recommends no matter what, or being in some way suborned to the AI.

So fix a system's known bugs by creating an entirely new system with a fresh set of unknown bugs?

That's what I'm expecting will happen, yes. My point further is that I believe it's a road to nowhere. It will be costly in time and money, and result in people involved not knowing what's going on in the project more than ever. The last point going unnoticed by the management of course, as they rarely know the project to begin with anyway.

> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value.

"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.

But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

At MSFT, Product Managers were Technical Program Managers. Yes, a good PM is a joy to work with.

>But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

Yeah but it's not easy do distinguish those from the snake oil salesmen who are just good at smooth talking during the interviews.

Pretty easy. Get them to talk about a project they've managed and start poking holes. Who was on the team? How did they organize meetings? What were the bottlenecks? How well did everyone get along? What did they do to help grease the gears? Did they have to change the process? How did they like the software? Which software did they use? Did they have to administer it themselves? How did they deal with management changes / team changes / tons of support requests / issues in production? Where did they draw the line between PM work and engineering work?

From witching other managers, and via LLMs, you can literally learn and interview prep for all those questions on and lie. It's not difficult.

Well if they’ve learned that much it’s a good thing.

The remaining piece is to speak with some personal references to verify they did some real work.

>The remaining piece is to speak with some personal references to verify they did some real work.

Not a thing where I am. You can BS your way in these jobs and so many people did.

There's no LEETCODE for management positions, just bullshitting smooth-talk and using your connections (nepotism).

Well, quite frankly, you work in a shitty place then that doesn't know how to competently interview for these positions.

There are real differences in the knowledge and work behavior of great PMs and the bullshitters, and it's usually not that hard to tease out the bullshit in an interview if you know what you're doing.

>Well, quite frankly, you work in a shitty place then that doesn't know how to competently interview for these positions.

I was talking about a country, not a workplace, and franky, so what? I can't change that. What I can do, is tell you how it is, and how the system gets exploited.

If you live in some magic utopia where things are different(the US maybe?), good for you, but this information doesn't change anything for me where I live.

Best I can do is adapt and exploit the system in my favor as well if I can the same the rest do, otherwise I get left behind by the unscrupulous clueless scammers who do.

People have a very difficult time keeping their story together, especially when they're asked a couple of questions that interview prep didn't cover.

Beyond that though, there's the probation period. If they can't do the job, they're supposed to be let go before they become permanent.

Trouble I see from most interviewers is a tendency of asking questions with a "right" answer. Those tend to be a lot easier to game. They then fallback on sorting applicants by pedigree - the old, "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM" method.

Then, they come back and rant about how PM's are trash, and Agile is trash, etc. etc.

> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.

I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.

Within 18 months I was unemployed.

There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.

But it all came back, and more.

The number of tech employees worldwide in 2026 is probably 2x or more compared to 2001. Maybe even 3x. Things are not the same.

also add in that the single largest source of tech growth in the last 3 years has been building tools that will obliterate the need for tech employees.

replacing SRE-4s with AI is the point

I'm not at all saying that tech is somehow "dead". What I am saying is that many of the non-engineering roles that were popular in tech over the past 15-20 years are either going away or will continue with vastly reduced numbers of people. If you're someone who did agile training for the past 15 years and are now in your 40s and were laid off, I sincerely doubt you'll be able to get a job as an agile coach before the end of your career that pays as much as in the 2015-2020ish timespan.

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