116 karma · joined June 14, 2022
Can I steal this? It's so on-point and I've seen it many, many times throughout the course of my career. There's been a few truly brilliant managers and principal engineers I've had the good fortune to work under, but for the vast majority of upper level leadership this tracks.
Perhaps if you're comparing it to other industries, but compared to tech's own (recent) past, it's most definitely not "incredibly strong".
Not trying to be snarky, but have you actively searched for a role recently, say in the last 2 months or so? Recruiters reach out far less frequently now on LinkedIn, the common theme even among many experienced engineers these days is instant rejections, or if not that, then being rejected after goin through the final round. Very few are able to land well paying, interesting roles within weeks (or a month at most) of starting their search like they were able to even as recently as a year ago.
It's still possible to find work, but you'll quite likely have to accept a lateral move (at best) or accept a pay cut these days if you've been laid off.
Where are they going? Genuinely curious. Where outside of the US are SV caliber devs getting paid even more than they'd be getting paid here?
In this market? I'm skeptical. I'm sure some fraction of them can do so at equivalent or higher pay, but the tech market at the moment is quite soft and I wouldn't be surprised this was taken into account and served as another motivation for this move from MS.
Yes, exactly. Other companies like Jane Street definitely exist in the finance space and pay really well but collectively hire far fewer engineers than FAANG + FAANG-like companies do. The thing I like about them though is that most of the time their comp is all cash (salary + bonus) so you don't have to wait around for anything to vest before you can move on, if you so desire.
Sacked?! If you think the only time people switch jobs in the tech industry is when they get sacked, with all due respect, you know nothing about the tech industry, and your views and understanding about most corporate jobs today is most likely very, very outdated.
Every 2 decades?! I'd say it's more like every 2-3 years.
Also I'm not sure the salaries are "outrageous" except for a select few devs working at FAANGs, and those only make up a small fraction of all developers out there. The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working.
It's definitely on you as the job-seeker to ensure that the role is an actual fit on multiple levels, but there's certainly recruiters out there that can be unscrupulous and will deliberately steer you towards roles that may not be in your best interests. Over my ~13 year career in the industry I've encountered some great recruiters but for every one good one, I'd say about 3-4 were just in it to collect their commission/fee/etc and move on to the next. Issues I've had to deal with:
1) People using recruiting simply as a stepping stone to something else - these types had no incentive to ensure long term job-seeker satisfaction and would often try really hard to get me to accept a role even if it was far below my acceptable comp range or in an area I didn't have much interest in, because they were desperate to meet their billing quota or whatever for the quarter
2) Some would neglect to mention things such as high churn (due to poor management or overworked staff), boring work (maintaining legacy systems with little to no greenfield dev involved) etc and instead only focus on the positives
Essentially, their loyalty lies with those paying them, and it's worth keeping this in mind anytime you find yourself working with a 3rd party recruiter. Those that've been in the industry for a while probably already know this, but for newcomers or those that just haven't worked much with them, these are important things to be aware of.
I should highlight however that there's some upsides too, the biggest one being the ability to bypass the usual hiring pipeline since the recruiter has a working relationship with the hiring manager.
1) The dichotomy between frontend vs backend dev evaporates entirely. Because GPT-x can churn out code so quickly, all devs will be expected to be fullstack and the job breakdown will be more like 20-30% coding (assisted by these tools) with the rest of the time spent on higher level concerns like architecture, security (and perhaps lots of meetings...) etc.
2) The vast majority of dev jobs simply get folded into business functions. So your product managers, accountants, etc will increasingly be expected to do prompt engineering work as part of the job. This change will probably take a while to happen and needs more work to occur on hooking up these tools to other tools like compilers and whatnot, but I'm pretty sure startups will emerge to tackle this. Companies that aren't developing any real tech as their main product/service simply won't need many devs anymore, although they might keep a few on staff here and there just in case the others need someone to step in from time to time. The only places that will need sizable numbers of actual devs will be the ones building brand new software - think new database sytems, compilers, device drivers, OS kernel work etc. - basically the really cutting edge stuff for which original research + thinking is needed. Since these tools tend to be trained on existing knowledge out there I'm not sure if they can be used to build brand new technologies from scratch... at least for now. But who knows what future iterations of these tools will lead to!
I changed my location back to the west coast where I'm currently located, and the drop in messages has been noticeable. So I'm inclined to believe that the west coast tech scene (what I consider "new" tech) has been hit harder. On the east coast there's still a decent amount of tech openings in finance, defense, and other old school/traditional industries.
Good luck!
I would not at all be surprised if these large firms hired consultants from places like McKinsey to come by and analyze the work their IT staff is involved in to see how tools like GPT-4 could be leveraged to "streamline" (aka reduce the headcount of) these orgs, and then dramatically restructured them based on their findings. The only thing keeping many of these folks around is the political clout of their managers and department heads.
You didn't mention it in your post, but are you only looking for remote roles or roles in your city? You might have more luck if you broadened the search geographically, assuming moving is a viable option for you at this time. Also consider roles in more traditional industries like finance, insurance etc. - the work + stack might not be as glamorous and most likely won't pay FAANG level salaries (some hedge funds notwithstanding, perhaps), but it's something to consider.