During ZIRP the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business, leading to entire careers being built around and rewarded for the wrong outcomes. People have built entire careers while completely missing/ignoring why they're doing the job and how their work is supposed to fit and contribute to the overall business - because in a lot of cases there was never a viable business to begin with, and the founders themselves were playing the "career startup founder" card and enjoying the mismatched incentives set up by a distorted funding market.
Now we're seeing a readjustment as the "free money" is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands.
The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant.
This isn't to say it's anyone's fault - I don't blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it's a game and plan your exit. The danger is that there's an entire generation that started their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.
> the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business
I've found that even when we were incentivized via direct & simple profit sharing mechanisms, we still struggled with the appropriate focus and urgency. You'd think additional piles of money based upon # of customers coming in the door would provoke substantially more activity.
Money is a huge distraction. The most successful phases of my career have involved putting the customer absolutely first and looking at the money as a causal event based upon a job well done. I've never looked at a direct deposit into my bank account and felt the kind of rush of happiness I get when I see a customer reply that an issue is resolved to their satisfaction.
Stock and equity just aren’t great at motivating employees.
If you’re at a small and pre-public startup, your decisions and effort can directly affect product success BUT the equity is only theoretically valuable someday in the distant future so you ignore it.
If you’re public and getting stock/rsus, your company is likely large enough that there’s nothing you can do single-handedly to affect the price.
Plus, stock price doesn't necessarily reflect (or isn't directly proportional to) positive business outcomes. Even if it was a great motivating tool, you would only motivate employees to do whatever pumped the stock price, not necessarily to solve underlying business problems.
Stock and equity aren't really formotivating employees. They're for attracting employees, and then aligning their goals with those of the shareholders.
The first software startup I worked at didn't give out equity, and when the sales guys closed big deals with aggressive delivery timelines we hated it because it just meant more work for us. Many of my teammates passive aggressively dragged their feet, but if we'd had equity we would've been high-fiving the sales guys after landing big clients.
> The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver.
But are companies adjusting their hiring process to find career problem solvers? Or are they still looking for buzzword-spewing leetcode solvers? If you ask candidates who have interviewed recently, they'll probably tell you that companies are going even more extreme towards the leetcode side.
Is anyone actually hiring, or succeeding in hiring? I see the hiring market being completely fucked for the past couple years with lots of fraud happening on both sides - whether it's ghost positions that are never intended to be filled, or monkeys LLM'ing (or I guess we call it "vibe coding" now) their way through interviews, which just makes the interviews even harder to a level even seasoned engineers now need to cheat or be left behind.
It's become a market for lemons, with no good solutions. The problem is that it fundamentally requires a lot of manpower to accurately assess someone's experience (whether you use LC or just an open-ended whiteboard exercise) and companies who hire have only so many engineer-hours to dedicate to interviewing and the amount of inbound candidates exceeds that by orders of magnitude.
The way I see it, a lot of companies realized they have the staff they need and hiring more through "normal" channels is impossible due to the above - so either they don't need to hire more, or they hire informally through back-channels and word of mouth (because the front door is being DDoS'd).
The only way to win is not to play - the "front door" and typical hiring process is no longer possible unless you are a big name and have somehow publicly demonstrated your skills (past product launch, etc) in a way that can be verified in 5 minutes. For the rest of us, it's mostly a sales and networking game, and leveraging human & in-person relationships that are (for now) still immune to LLMs and hordes of boiler rooms spamming every single job with fake (but plausible) resumes.
It's funny because more than anything I would say the people that were most misaligned with the outcomes of the business are actually most of the engineering leaders I have worked with.
The amount of short-termism and chasing press releases and caring about what your golf buddies think really clogged up a lot of companies, and it doesn't feel like THAT part is changing anytime soon, zirp or no zirp.
Capital often outstrips actual business acumen as a factor in the success of a business. That's partly because we live in a world where word of mouth, reviews, online presence, etc. are all commodified, partly because tech (like the Industrial Revolution before it) has greatly increased the growth potential and concentration of capital, partly because of investors actively intervening to ensure the success of their other investments, partly because of increasing and increasingly-naked corruption, and partly because of the importance of network effects. (I don't know which of these factors is the most important.)
The more important capital becomes relative to the actual functioning of a product, the more disconnected from reality a business can (perhaps must) get. Their actual business becomes selling a pitch to investors, not selling SaaS, because their actual product is investor returns, not long-term viability or value. And because a big part of that pitch to investors is the rockstar founding team, founders have to (or at least feel they have to) do the golf-buddy shit. It's literally their job, or at least, they think it is.
Post-ZIRP doesn't kill that because capital being scarce just increases demand for it even more.
Probably the best comment overall. Many people assume that because ZIRP was unhealthy, present situation returns us to being practical, down to earth, and caring more about engineering that the buzz. It's not what I see around myself, and not what I'm reading either. If anything, businesses become less interested in engineering quality, and there is probably less understanding than ever about how to make a good business out of engineering.
It happened at every level - software engineers optimized for career outcomes which meant accumulating the right buzzwords. Managers optimized for their own career outcomes which meant increasing their number of direct reports. Engineering leaders optimized for their own buzzwords which means org-level complexity and a steady stream of (self-inflicted) problems to solve and brag about on their engineering blog to attract even more software engineers, and executives/founders merely optimize for securing the next funding round (because there is no and was never a viable business there to begin with), which is easier to do if you're seen as solving hard problems (even if they are self-inflicted), and investors happily oblige because they had no other choice in this distorted market.
Note that incentive mismatch at the middle-management level happens everywhere to this day and isn't strictly a ZIRP-induced phenomenon, but most real businesses that need to earn a profit thus have a natural cap on how much inefficiency they can support. In ZIRP however, the complete lack of any requirement to make profit (in some cases because the business is never viable and its sole purpose is to give a good lifestyle and resume to everyone involved) exacerbated the problem.
The end of ZIRP is necessary for us to return to economic reality. As Henry Hazlitt explains in "Economics in One Lesson," proper capital allocation is fundamental to a healthy economy. During the ZIRP era, market signals were distorted, which led companies to invest in frivolous projects, creating enormous bureaucracies and god knows how many bullshit jobs. Real economic growth requires solving meaningful problems, which in turn creates genuinely meaningful work for us techies. So, I guess it's good that "good times" are over.
Totally believe in this in my current company. It’s allegedly tech but it’s in a blue collar field and led my domain people, not tech people. Since its inception, the company was subsidized by the parent company. Now that PE owns it and there’s a mandate to make money, it can’t.
A major, major problem are engineers that have zero vision of the big picture. I get a ticket, I work on it, I go home. My most senior engineer on the team never met a deadline in his life. I own an integration product and found out last week two other products I integrate with were about to ship without testing my product. They tested on laptops. I dove in to an analysts ticket with him to figure out why he blew the timeline he committed to. Turns out he was trying to reverse engineer a database instead of just asking another team. “You think I’m going to get any answers from those fuckers?” He asked me when I drilled him.
All these people are still, to this day, protected be the President. He views domain knowledge as being more important than shipping products.
> A major, major problem are engineers that have zero vision of the big picture. I get a ticket, I work on it, I go home.
I don't disagree with you, and ... isn't that true for most employees, in whatever technical or non-technical role, in all industries?
In my experience, it is. Even if the rare rank-and-file employee wanted to think about the big picture, they are never rewarded for doing so, and would be smacked down for acting in support of the big picture if it involved disobeying their chain of command. After a few years of this, you can see why they prefer to stick to the assigned job description.
In your last line, "President" presumably refers to the head of your company. But think about US Federal employees today - should they act in service of the Constitution, or obey Trump's orders? (If they don't obey Trump's orders, they will be fired.)
It is leadership’s responsibility to make sure the labor they’re allocating is going towards the big picture. If it’s going straight into the trash, that’s not the labors fault - they do what they’re told.
You hit the nail on the head, it’s a problem of incentives. Software engineers don’t HAVE a career. There’s little to no mobility and they understand they will be struck down as soon as the company can. Often even if the company is pulling revenue.
Do that across the entire industry for two decades and the labor catches on. People job hop because every company ever has told them to job hop. Not explicitly told them, but told them via their actions.
This can be changed but the reality is the leadership doesn’t give two fucks about engineers. They don’t want their opinions, they want code monkeys. So, code monkeys they get.
> My most senior engineer on the team never met a deadline in his life.
I went over this sentence a few times before it started making sense. Noting this for others who run into it.
What's meant is that the most senior engineer fails to complete tasks on time, as opposed to never having to deal with deadlines (cf. "I never met a problem I couldn't solve").
I initially read "has never met a deadline in his life" as meaning they had never had a task with a deadline. I'm assuming they also read it that way at first, so they're clarifying for anyone else who did the same.
Can you clarify, are you sympathetic of the person who thinks they wouldn't get an answer from the other team, or are you saying the person was wrong to not just ask the other team?
Asking since I've been in the situation many a time where the other team is too busy to reply in a timely fashion, and/or they don't even know the answers to my question, so I end up having to reverse engineer it.
I mean, he called the other engineers "those fuckers."
I was definitely not sympathetic. I was pretty livid, however, context is necessary.
This person didn't even try. Engineers at this company rarely ask for help from other teams or collaborate. Management has talked the talked, but there is no walk to actually take down these silos. I pointed him at product and BA people that offered to help, but he didn't ask them, either. Instead, he thought he could reverse engineer it, which probably took 3x longer than it should.
You're joking but with the layoffs and all, there must be pressure to clean up the (self-inflicted) problems created by previous teams of architecture astronauts and get the complexity down to a level that the new, reduced headcount can wrangle.
Sorry, but this denigrating about leetcoders just strikes me as delusional in a different way. The people that I know that spend a lot of time doing leetcoding and learning new tech are 1. Also really good at general programming, and 2. In the top 20% of actual enthusiasm for their job. If these people cant find jobs reliably, what should you actually do to have a decent shot at getting hired? We can't just tell everyone "just make sure youre in the top 2%".
My point is that LeetCode and buzzwords became the unofficial benchmark for a software engineer during the distorted/ZIRP era. You had to be good at it to get in, and once in you could just coast your way through, not that anyone would mind because so many of your peers and superiors are doing the same thing and none of it matters as the company itself may be coasting on investor money and never intending on making a profit.
Unfortunately, LeetCode skills and "architecture astronomy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut) are a very poor proxy for actually driving profit. This doesn't mean a LeetCoder (for fun or to play the game - as long as they understand it is a game) can't also be a good contributor in today's market, but their value would come more from experience solving actual business problems and ability to collect/define/argue requirements and then translate them into a system (which may or may not even be code - sometimes a Google Form is all that's needed) rather than whether they know LeetCode.
When it comes to solving business problems and actually driving profit, programming in abstract terms (the kind that LeetCode and most interview processes select for) is worthless - LLMs can do it just fine. The hard part is understanding/fleshing out the business requirements (including being aware of what you don't know, and planning for that or seeking outside help), refining your solution with the relevant stakeholders, and being aware of high-level constraints including regulatory requirements, security, etc. Once you have a good enough specification, programming it is the generally the easy part.
No, they can't. They can (sometimes) bang out a frontend app or some CRUD service, but if that's all the code you write you should not be a senior engineer.
The process of writing a specification and the process of implementing it tend to have a ton of overlap in the real world. There's no way to actually define one in a vacuum, despite almost every PM I've ever met pretending otherwise.
I was talking purely about those abstract interview questions where the full problem can be summarized in a few lines and the expected solution is ~50 lines max. I've just tried with Claude 3.7 and it's produced a seemingly plausible solution at the "word finder" problem (2D grid of letters - given a word, return if it's present in the grid as a series of adjacent cells in any direction).
I agree that they're far from taking our jobs, which is my point - those interview questions are absolutely not representative of what we really do and optimize for the wrong outcome.
Fair enough, but my bet is that even trivially recontextualizing an interview question is enough to wreck an LLM's performance.
If you change the "find a word in a grid of letters" question to a "find a Collatz sequence in a grid of numbers" question, does it still work? As an interviewer, I would expect a qualified candidate to spend maybe an extra 5-10 minutes asking clarifying questions and understanding the difference between the two.
Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what?
End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales. Most ICs are never going to be in a position where the CEO is going to listen to them about what product we should develop and be given the time and resources to investigate that stuff.
Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers who clearly don’t work on product facing work. It’s a bit ridiculous.
I see the era of permanent tech employment as coming to an end, and tech will have to transition to being closer to a trade. You don't expect to pay builders/plumbers/architects/electricians and keep them around forever after your house is built right? You will at best only need them occasionally on a one-off basis for any fixes or alternations.
A properly designed tech solution (aka, not one designed to pad a resume) for upkeep should only require a small fraction of the manpower needed to originally build it. I expect companies keeping in-house "skeleton crews" to run things and handle maintenance and small changes, with larger ones being done by a (potentially returning) cast of contractors who come in on a project basis.
So the solution for permanent employment would be to either join one of those skeleton crews or join an agency/consultancy. Otherwise, the only way out is freelance and curating your own client portfolio. Maybe you can partner with others and form a coop to have more manpower and handle bigger projects - essentially building your own agency.
> Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers
My assertion is that engineers who want to succeed in the current market will need to know enough infra/sysadmin to support their solution, or farm it out to someone who will. If they don't, someone else will outcompete them.
Infra is also a huge breeding ground for resume padding and architecture astronomy (and there were no incentives to discourage it - in fact cloud providers are still laughing all the way to the bank). It doesn't inherently mean all that complexity was necessary. So I expect "infra" specialization to become a nicher skill, one or permanent skeleton/maintenance crews or hyperscalers who actually need the complexity.
> who clearly don’t work on product facing work
I'm intentionally being vague when I talk about "solutions" and solving business problems. I do not mean it should be an app, a product or even have a UI. A cron job running a shell script to copy files from one place to another may very well be the right solution to some business requirements. Infra engineers would be a perfect fit for problems that don't involve significant UI work (I myself prefer those as I hate frontend with a passion).
I think the era of high specialization in tech might be in decline; tools are good enough and hardware is good enough and the field is mature enough that most business problems can be solved just fine by a generalist (bringing in specialists on an ad-hoc basis when needed) - or otherwise they'll get outcompeted by someone who can.
> I'm intentionally being vague when I talk about "solutions" and solving business problems. I do not mean it should be an app, a product or even have a UI. A cron job running a shell script to copy files from one place to another may very well be the right solution to some business requirements.
Completely true, but instead this would be an event-driven serverless microservice that does some complex ETL thing to move files between three S3 buckets before landing in a "data lake" where analysts run three queries a month.
(I've seen many of these exact scenarios)
Upthread regarding astronauts is absolutely correct---there's been years and years of incentives to create messes like this, and yes, cloud providers absolutely facilitate this, and in many cases are the direct cause.
Your argument is basically “we’re all going to be outsourced by Indians.”
Your EU-centric view of how contracting works (probably more due to labor laws than anything else) isn’t an accurate assessment of how Silicon Valley is going to work.
Outsourcing has its place and a lot of gruntwork/ongoing maintenance is fine for it. Post-ZIRP it turns out the true value of software is a lot lower than previously thought, and for a lot of solutions, Indians is all they can afford (because the alternative might be to pay someone to do it by hand).
Where outsourcing fails is primarily when business & domain knowledge is required - outsourcers will obviously not be aware of internal company processes or even the target market for the required solution (just like we would be bad fits for trying to spec out a product targeting the Indian banking market for example).
So I see the industry and market readjusting to the true value of software, and as a result people will pick a mix of high-value implementation work (where local domain knowledge is required) and boring/maintenance gruntwork, or get outcompeted by those who can (and this is a global market, so you are competing with Indians(.
I'm not advocating for one way or the other btw, I have no skin in this game (technically trying to push people into freelancing and consultancy works against me). But I'm just trying to be realistic - the tech comp during the ZIRP era was never going to last, and even if ZIRP continued, more and more people entering tech means comp is still bound to decrease. You can either remain in denial hope those jobs come back, or plan for the worst.
The true value of software, post-ZIRP, is still obvious for the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They print cash.
Yes, ZIRP increased tech comp. It did not magically inflate the value of software, which is always directly assessed against what people actually find useful.
The value of most software for most companies has a limit, pushed down both by supply of software engineering labor and that manual labor is actually quite cheap and your software must inherently cost less than what it would to just pay a human to do it.
There are always outliers obviously - whether it's the adtech giants being in the right place at the right time, or niche industries (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it), but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
> The value of most software for most companies has a limit, pushed down both by supply of software engineering labor and that manual labor is actually quite cheap and your software must inherently cost less than what it would to just pay a human to do it.
Software, in the limit, is FREE. It gets written once for a finite cost and then can be copied ad infinitum. Even stratospheric labor costs are acceptable because of this.
> (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it)
But the cost to develop a piece of software (or anything, really) has nothing whatsoever to do with its value!
Avionics software is expensive not because it's inherently more complicated (high-quality OSS hobbyist implementations like Ardupilot exist for free), but because it has to undergo system integration tests because of FAA regulations.
And, despite lower pay for avionics engineers, the value to the end users of quality avionics is literally the difference between life and death.
> but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Where do you get this idea? Tech, as a whole, is a wildly profitable sector of the economy. It is a primary driver of US GDP growth and productivity [1].
> Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
I get that ZIRP is ideologically unpopular, I really do. You can only see so many "Uber but for dogs" startups get multimillion dollar funding rounds before you get cynical.
That being said, interest rates have been falling for centuries [2]. Low interest rates are a fundamental reflection of a society that's gotten better at allocating investments efficiently.
It turns out that software, because of the whole "zero marginal cost" thing, is a spectacularly efficient investment.
We've been telling plenty of other professions/people that, "make sure you're in the top 2%" as a society forever? That's part of the problem, we need to make sure that if someone is part of the 86% then they also can afford a house, feed themselves and their family etc etc
This is a really good point that honestly I've been neglecting considering. I try to help and push my friends to be better than most (because honestly most are quite lazy and entitled) but still you can't ignore the societal ramifications of most people getting less than they expect.
If you read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter, published at the end of the depression and during WW2, most of his predictions were spot on economically besides solving the housing problem.
There was a housing problem then too that he thought would be solved in time by the market. He thought we would see something like assembly line, prefabricated housing at some point that would drive down prices.
What I suspect is that once people own real estate, the last thing they want is something that drives prices down and everyone making the decisions needed to solve this problem owns real estate. That plus the margins won't be that high so you have to do large volume and the red tape is too much to be able to do that at scale. So instead of we do nothing and we will keep doing nothing for another 100 years.
It feels emotionally true because when I buy many terabytes of high quality SSD, I have no preference to "keep the valuation" of my SSD investment, I just want more faster for cheaper! If the price goes down tomorrow and my friend gets in for less than I just paid, it's not screwing me over. In fact I'm probably buying more on the future so I love the increased supply!
This is not true at all for housing lol. As someone who bought Manhattan real estate, I can feel the shitty incentives every day, and it's really destructive of a system.
Top 2% maybe not. But top 10%? In a lot of economies the property ponzi scheme has reached such levels that even a top-10% salary is barely enough to actually afford decent accommodation (and employers collude with real estate interests with things like RTO/etc meaning you need that accommodation and don't have cheaper alternatives).
In almost every major city in the US, a regular old “senior” enterprise dev with 5-7 years of experience should be making at least twice the median wage for the city.
Can I offer a contrarian point of view? Tech is still a great place to work.
Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption.
The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs.
The hardware platforms we're coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace.
I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I'm not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.
> Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
> The tooling we have now is amazing,
Yes, although it's not necessarily a blessing but a curse. Being amazing means maturity. Being mature meaning stalled marginal return. Stalled marginal returns means no growth. No growth means no meaningful projects. I missed the 2000s, when there were so many low-hanging fruits. We had multiple competing KV stores in development, multiple stream processing frameworks, multiple ML frameworks, multiple query engines. Heck, even multiple programming languages for data analytics.
> Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
Other jobs are getting fucked much more severely. Most industries have bled their labor dry, to the bones. There’s nothing left, they’ve solve the optimization problem of moving as much money as possibly away from them.
Tech is still working on that optimization problem.
It's heavily company/team/manager specific, but you are absolutely correct. I've seen a lot of disillusioned peers leave the industry pretty much since COVID, and they came back after a small break because it's the best of all alternatives.
I think a lot of my peers didn't really understand what working was, and really bought into a lot of the BS. The last few years have been a reality check for us all.
My current employer (big tech) is the best I've ever had. The internal tooling is amazing and works well, access to powerful development hardware is straightforward and everything just works, expensing things required for my job is not a hassle. Yes, there may be a lot of annoying process and it can take a long time to get the 20 approvals you need to deploy a code change, but in all, I've never had it so good. I've seen what it's like in startups and medium sized companies, and it would take a lot of convincing to go back.
Then I see coworkers who have only ever been in this environment. This was their first job out of undergrad, and they've never seen the shit you have to deal with at other companies. They get frustrated at the trivial little things here and decide, "I'm going to quit and go to a small or medium sized company" where there's less bureaucracy or where they can have a bigger "impact" or whatever. Then they get to their new company and HR tosses them a half-working workstation and a dirty used mouse as "onboarding". And they realize they don't have the massive build infrastructure they took for granted or a dedicated build/release team. They don't have robust performance and crash metrics dashboards, and they don't have automatic code bisecting tools to find the change that caused the error. They don't even have a QA team! They don't have continuous builds or maybe they don't even have functional source control or a reliable internet connection. No free food, no massage chairs, no flexible work hours, they have to fill out a time sheet now and maybe even have to clock in and out for bathroom breaks (yes, I've worked at a shitty software company where they made engineers clock in and out).
A lot of these guys realize what they had and boomerang right back after a year or so of this. And now that we are in a bear market and hiring is getting tough, I wouldn't count on the ability to just waltz back in anymore...
A lot of people I know in SV are quitting as 60 hours is being normalized and they’re getting treated like they should be grateful. I know, I know, 60 hours is just what it takes to “focus” as that’s what the working world is like, or some other nonsense coming from the cult of overwork, which seems to be the tone being set.
In my first job at a fancy tech company in the Bay Area, I saw more free food and drinks than I've ever seen outside of a grocery store. It was crazy. 30 different kinds of beers. Free drinks, snacks, lunch.
I jokingly said out loud, "what did we do to deserve this?". A coworkers overheard and replied, "speak for yourself".
It’s funny how impressed people are by food and beverages. Let’s be super conservative and say it was only for a mere 20 people. What percentage of wages do you think is being spent on that stuff?
Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
I don't think it's the literal spending money on snacks that impresses people; it's more about the thought behind doing that.
For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy.
The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
Not only that, but if the company once had these things, and then took them away, it might be the wake-up call that snaps an otherwise satisfied employee out of his complacency and cause him to start looking around where the grass might be greener. Steve Blank wrote about this in [1]. Congratulations, you saved a couple of hundred dollars but caused three good employees to leave.
Yeah free food is a really good way to spend money on your employees. Just the cost of people walking to get food makes it worthwhile to provide on site.
I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday.
Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
> The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.
Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%.
A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
This kind of math betrays a total lack of understanding of the way businesses earn money. With vanishingly few exceptions, no one developer makes the company $500m, and this is trivially testable with a quick thought exercise:
Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year?
Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev.
This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer.
So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
>So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
I see where you're coming from but I think you're missing the fact that large projects have lots of bullshit work that requires high skill but is technically lower value. There is a lower bound to what people will accept, as people with marginally better skills get lucky enough to get highly-visible and much more highly compensated roles. The pay stratification you wish for is already built in, and the average just reflects the fact that these companies DO make enough money to have competitive pay rates.
That framing doesn't change my logic at all: replace the direct earning of $N/year with the probability of earning $N/year and the same logic still applies. An employee doesn't contribute the probability, an employee working within the Google system contributes the probability. The system is doing the bulk of the work, and the per-employee probabilities of earning all that money are dramatically smaller in any other system.
The very well-compensated early employees, leaders, and executives, working together as a team to create something that was greater than the sum of the parts. The average Googler in 2025 wasn't even on the team that created the initial system, they're a cog in a machine that someone else designed years ago. A very well paid cog.
It's not lol. It's more akin to construction. If you need 100 people to do a job in a given amount of time, you might be able to get it done with 99 people without issue. But that one person might have had an insight that would save you a lot of money overall. And if you kept getting rid of people, at some point the others will not be able to pick up the slack and might even ruin the project unwittingly.
Okay, you're right, I grabbed the wrong number. Sub in $1.5m/year or $500m/5 years and replace "bottom line this year" with "bottom line over the next 5 years".
The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
First of all, Pareto Principle, so some employees contribute a ton and many contribute less. Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't. The general solution is to go into management (more visibility and no cap on comp), or to create (or join) your own startup (which doesn't have a rigid interview process and you can use "references"). Which many do given how many startups exist in the Bay Area. Companies also may give out large bonuses in RSUs to keep those employees.
> First of all, Pareto Principle, so some employees contribute a ton and many contribute less.
Correct. But with very few exceptions I don't believe that any one person contributes $500m in value over 5 years.
> Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
In aggregate, yes. But it's the systems that aggregate the contributions of the employees and turn them into profits.
> As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't.
I'm assuming you mean omniscient, and no, I'm not assuming omniscience because I'm not actually talking about a company's ability to attribute value creation, I'm talking about the employee's ability to attribute it. Any random Google employee who thinks that they contributed $500m over 5 years can't just pick up their laptop and go work for a startup and expect that startup to make $500m over the next 5 years. It's not happening. The only way that their project made $500m was as a project embedded in the enormous money-making system that is Google, and absent that system they don't make that much money for the company.
And as the CEO he's one of the few people who can reasonably make the claim that he's instrumental in creating the money-making system that is Google. We can argue about whether or not that perception is accurate in his case, but CEO pay being totally out of line with most employee compensation is based on the idea that I'm talking about: the system makes money, employees contribute to the system, and the more systemic your role is the greater your contribution to the system.
I'm not interested in engaging with you further because you've now twice ignored the main point of my argument in favor of nitpicks and out of context quotes asserting that I said things I didn't say. There's no point in engaging with that style of argument. Have a nice day.
The main point of your argument is materially different if you mean $500m or $1.5m. I agree there's no point in responding if you're just going to flip flop to whichever is more convenient to that particular response and then get upset when called out for it. Either make a consistent argument or deal with it when called out.
edit: There's also a material difference between no one, a few, many and the majority. You made a specific claim that no employee provides more then $1.5m of value. I disproved that with Google's own comp. Not my problem you're butt hurt about being called out for being wrong with quotes you said yourself.
Their special skill is ensuring they are the place where all ad money goes by being better at getting eyeballs for that money and being better at targeting ads to those eyeballs. Many many many companies have tried to usurp one or both sides of that without success.
You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
The above comment also completely sidesteps the monopolist and regulatory capture factors in difficulty to usurp Google, and thus incorrectly implies that a level playing field exists.
The problem is nobody knows if they are really better at targeting ads. They say so, of course, but who could prove it? Google is the main player in the ad industry and when they say that they are the best, everybody hears them. If a small player tried to say so, nobody would be aware of that, even if they were right.
Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect?
Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting."
> Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world?
You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
> Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting."
Again: inertia and network-effect.
> It's a massive success as a company.
Undoubtedly. And they appear to be great at not failing. Like any bureaucracy, that works until it doesn't. What new markets have they created or taken over in the past 10 years?
Google’s economic model has been like that for decades and it’s paying for my early retirement. Being “exploited” in this way is nice work if you can get it. The companies with narrow profit margins don’t pay nearly so well.
Labour doesn't make money until the labour is already provided, so how much money labour can produce is an unknown until hindsight is available. An established company with a stable business can make some pretty reasonable forecasts, but when it comes to startups and other new business ventures one is ultimately straight up guessing.
Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
I worked at Facebook for half a decade during its golden period and there were a lot of people who shared your sentiment.
…in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?”
This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs.
Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
my reply to you would’ve been: “oh, not much, we just made the founder the richest most powerful man on this planet. Right now he’s probably on a giant island in hawaii which he wholly owns, in a €200mm mansion, having an orgy with 25 escorts, while on lsd. Oh, right now he just took the jet, one of 6 €50mm jets he owns, to fly to the coast of italy. there, he will fly his giant helicopter to land on his giant 3 floor yatch with 3 pools where he will fuck 30 more chicks at once. But yeah, we get extra free food for having contributed to that”.
The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.
In a lot of cases, the companies leverage a large chunk of their employees' time to make very hefty returns. It's the least they can do. As someone who runs a company now (having been an employee previously), it is obvious to me that the cost of providing food is a rounding error in the overall company budget, and is well worth it, if it keeps people happy.
10 years ago I was at an “innovation lab” of a big HR tech company that gave out free lunches and snacks. The best explanation I heard was a coworker originally from the big boring corporate HQ who said basically this is a software petting zoo for big investors to look at. “Good code monkey, here’s a banana!”
I've always felt that the moral panic about food perks in Tech was weird. That's not free, it's part of your salary. Sure, you can't buy index funds with Pineapples but at the end of the day it's still remuneration.
The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
It's because there's a story that a lot of laborers (and capital owners) want to believe, that capitalism is a great meritocracy, and the rewards of it are based on one's moral fiber, instead of purely a function of every individual's leverage effect on the returns on capital/labor.
Watching the Bay Area from over the Atlantic was always a very bewildering experience. I honestly think you guys now get something closer to the reality of European startups, where we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€!
The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
> we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€!
Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!).
(The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)
The replies are hilariously illustrative of your point. Why do you guys keep working for theese evil capitlists taking away the bilions of value you generate and leaving you with pitiful hundreds of thousands (+free snacks)? You should start a cooperative or something.
They got free snacks in exchange for labor utilized to capture billions of dollars of market value, which will generate cash flows far into the future. You need to understand the game you are playing.
Can I offer a different perspective of providing drinks and food at the office?
Add to that coffee places and more on the company campus.
In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on.
I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.
Your salary is not about moral desserts but about how much value or money you bring to someone else.
That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
I think the good times are still on for anyone who continues to focus on the customer and their experience.
From the perspective of the typical software engineer's salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow.
I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also significantly more rewarding to work with.
I have been working in IT for over 30 years. What is happening is not new. Late 1999 was a very go-go time, early 2022 was a very go-go time. Alternatively, things were dead in 1991, in 2001, in 2009. Things were briefly dead in some ways for some people in spring/summer 2020 when Covid hit. 2022 went from go-go in the spring and summer to massive FAANG layoffs in November. Massive FAANG layoffs continue into early 2023, and things have kind of been stagnant since them. Things seem to have gotten worse at the beginning of this year, although it varies, some people with certain AI-related skills are doing well.
In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well.
Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).
Well, as another "OG", I'll give you a contrary opinion.
Yes, absolutely, business cycles come and go. But I think there is a really large shift in the overall "technology mindset", and this is something that does feel very new.
I would say that from at least the 70s (just using that because it's my birth decade) up until the mid 2010s or so, pretty much everyone viewed technology as the main driver for societal progress. Sure, there were definitely scary parts of technology (leaded gas, nuclear weapons), but people still felt overall that improvements in technology would lead to improvements in people's lives.
I'm not so sure that optimism exists anymore, nor do I necessarily think it should. I see so much of the tech industry not focused on how to improve people's lives with technology, but on things like how can we addict people to dopamine spikes, or how can we insert ourselves as an intermediary that vacuums up all the profit due to many technologies' natural tendency toward monopoly. I see technology as the primary cause of what I consider the slowly increasing societal disintegration that is happening across many countries.
Even with technology like AI which I think has a huge potential to aid humanity, my greater fear is that it will just lead to much greater concentration of wealth and power and the expense of everyone else.
For sure, part of my pessimism probably comes from the timeline of my career, which started during the extreme optimism of the 90s, when we all thought that the Internet was going to democratize societies even more and that it was going to "bring us all together". When you feel like the opposite happened, it can be tough to come to terms with that.
post-WW2 optimism that is now dying off with the last of the Greatest Generation and their kids, the Boomers.
by the 1970s the post-WW2 boom was over and the 80s were full of doom and gloom -- and then tech exploded and there was all this new growth. but now capitalism did what it does and we're back to the 80s again, this time with China instead of Japan.
As someone who remembers the 80s quite well, I think it's a giant mistake to just say this is some kind of cyclical, "Oh, it's like the 80s again" moment.
While I don't want to delve too much into politics, I think the situation at the moment in the US is without precedent at least since the Civil War. And the tech situation is far, far different. I know a lot of people seem to think that folks who point out societal concerns with tech are "Luddites", and love to give (IMO very poor) analogies like "it's just like buggy whip manufacturers!", but I think we're at a point where tech, either now or very shortly in the future, will start to kill off more jobs than it creates (and, if you think about it, in some sense that is actually the point of many technologies), and modern society is far from figuring out how to function if most people can't make a living by selling their labor.
Again, I totally agree that on one hand there are standard business cycle forces at play, but there are other longer term forces that have been building steam for decades, and I think it's a mistake to confuse these two things.
I'd say the good times have just moved around a bit, there's always demand for smart/experienced STEM folk. What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). But there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.
A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.
> What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area).
Did they? Because Google and Facebook revenues are still growing and at ATH. What happened is that they decided to divert more of that juice to their investors rather than their developers.
Leadership think developers no longer matter and they'll be able to replace them with AI in a couple years. So they are firing them all and spending all their money on AI. If you think they can't be that stupid and irresponsible, remember who took all the hiring decisions during COVID.
to some degree, yes. everyone is holding their breath for AI.
but WFH is also here to stay, and COVID proved it worked alright. not great, but alright, and alright is usually enough. been seeing an awful lot of job ads in Croatia, for example.
if AI won't eat it, send it to Mexico City or India or Eastern Europe on the cheap. you don't need a rockstar QA team you just need them to be mostly competent, and they cost 50% less than Big US City talent.
They control their markets, exhibit broad capture of regulatory and standards bodies, and have established authoritarian control of the American state.
Sure, it's a conspiracist's "they," but society and freedom have become as awful as the most obnoxious, strident, and hysterical /. poster's predictions during the DoubleClick acquisition a quarter of a century ago.
Cui bono? Is it the finance ghouls whose ideological and economic lineage continues unbroken through Nazi-advocacy, the Business Plot, and American chattel slavery? Would we face a brighter future if the late 20th century tech industry had collectively rejected the vision of a future based on a panopticon used to generate authoritarian algorithmic control of humanity?
How many acai bowls and fancy cars was the future worth? Are we all complicit, or merely automatons whose lack of agency absolves us of the moral implications of the sum of our collective purpose?
Today's media environment is an atrocious indictment of the world built upon networked computing's awesome power to transform humanity. We have the power to uplift all life in harmony with the bounteous and breathtaking miracle of our beautiful planet. We have built a world of nightmares.
Look into profitable companies not focusing on software: Walmarts and homebuilders, Toyotas and medical device makers, miners and electric utilities and so on. All of them need software to run their businesses.
Classic stuff that impacts all of us (feel free to add/remove to the list),
AI (bringing intelligence to the real world), green tech (solar/evs/power electronics etc), defense, aerospace (sat constellations etc), industrial automation, smart agriculture, government etc.
The tech industry is based on copying the cool kids. Once Google and Meta started laying off, startups started laying off random people because it was cool. When Apple created the worst keyboard on earth (the arrow buttons squished together in a square) all other brands followed. Apple stopped squishing the arrow keys together but the rest still didn't notice. If someone "cool" thinks AI will replace engineers, all companies will follow blindly.
I find it weird how Elon's firing 50% of twitter is rarely brought up. Even the linked article's reference only mentions the layoffs starting jan 2023...
Genuinely don't think it was the end of the ZLB or Covid. The good times began declining well before that, when MBAs reached critical mass. Interest rates may have accelerated this, but it was always inevitable. When serious money starts getting made, a bunch of spreadsheet jockeys who've never shipped a product in their lives show up, blame engineers for declining quality, and "solve" the problem by
1. imposing more process,
2. diverting hiring budget to managers and PMs, and
3. making everyone take some snake oil training courses (run by some consulting firm staffed by people who last shipped something in the early naughts)
Then the middle management culture gets entrenched and metastasizes. ICs get swept aside (they're just infinitely replaceable "resources" of course), and the engineering culture starts to atrophy and die.
Then new companies come up and make a splash because they don't have any of that crap, and talent goes to them, and the cycle begins anew.
Not trying to throw shade on the article because I think its worth reading, but also important to note that the "good times" he's describing in tech never really existed to begin with for most people working in the tech industry or doing software development generally.
I'm not going to ascribe it to "FAANG" as the freedoms he's describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn't really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry.
Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don't pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.
Yeah, I worked for relatively normal companies as a dev from 2013 to now most of the benefits were normal across the company apart from choice of machine and I guess going to a conference but my current employer doesn't offer that.
This has happened a few times, even in my career. I doubt we'll break that cycle in the near term. We're going on 50 years where tech was like this.
Any time you have an industry can go from zero to world player in a decade or less is going to attract this kind of boom-bust cycle. Companies get overzealous about the land grab, hire too much, are careless with their money. Then the correction comes. It lasts a few years, and then it's back to boom times. Interest rates were certainly part of the equation this time, but back in the dotcom boom, e.g. US mortgages were running around 8%.
If people would stop playing the gold rush an invest in building products that people like and will use long term, we might instead flatten the peaks and the troughs into a more sustainable work environment. Don't see that happening.
I would add a point 4 to the "job of software engineering"
4. Even if the value you provide is measurably great and your manager(s) love you, in a sufficiently large company you are still just a row in a spreadsheet, and you may be terminated at any time independent of the quality of your work/output.
There's definitely a silver lining in that being a software engineer at a normal-ish company feels more satisfying now. Being more focused and KPI-driven has some upsides.
Some pressure to ship and to work on the things your customers actually need keeps you honest. It's satisfying to work on things which make a short term difference to the bottom line because you know at least someone cares. In contrast to working on a speculative side project which may never see the light of day.
I've come to believe this is just a legitimate personality difference. I really struggle to find joy when I'm working on something that I question the usefulness of. But I've worked with many people who find the work itself joyful and don't mind that at all.
That's not my problem at all. I can't work on something I don't see as useful, that's the whole reason I started programming in the first place. But building useful things is not what most software companies are up to these days, far from it.
Working at larger companies during zirp seemed high risk because the odds of getting stuck on a company side project were high. I was always wondering "is my team actually doing enough to not get fired?"
That seems to be happening less now. It's easier to know where you stand.
Yeah, worrying about getting fired isn't very helpful.
But selling out isn't either.
Programmers should be left enough space to do their thing well, that's the only way to build great software. Which was the entire point of Agile before it was corrupted into Scrum.
Hmm, is the argument that it's a generational problem?
Maybe it is, but I find it strange that nobody seems to care that visiting a page downloads 100s of MBs of packages that clogs the browser. Or, that latencies in backend replies can go into multiple 10s of seconds, etc.
Back in the day, we had to make sure the software ran on less performant computers and we painstakingly analyzed memory allocations and checking the run times of requests, etc. We also had to make sure that the software baked onto CDs worked, there was no multi GB downloads after install possible.
I, for one, would still like that to be the case for the software I use and would still prefer to have the time to do this for the projects I work on.
Well, not OP, but there's definite degradation in software quality and attention to detail.
Some is due to Scrum. It's actually not the fault of the methodology but that it's been half implemented by companies that did waterfall before. You are expected to finish a feature in a sprint, but you have no connection to speak to the stakeholders/customers.
The other things are these KPIs, and unsurprisingly, the bean counters behind them don't care about refactoring or addressing tech debt.
In a sense, yes, we need to focus on delivering value but it's much more chaotic now, so it's very difficult to deliver performant features that deliver also what was expected.
There's no appreciation of skills anymore, of quality; it's all about generating features as effectively as possible. No room for creativity/trial and error.
It's like working at a factory, pushing a button as fast as humanly possible.
And coders are treated like button pushers as a consequence.
You're making it sound like plumbers are a lesser thing. You sound like you're one of those people who compare what AI does to what human junior engineers do or should be treated like (which is surprisingly a lot of people here on HN)
In many places in the US you might find it hard to get a plumber to even return your calls or come out to your house for a smaller job, since the good ones have as much work as they could ever want. Not a perfect comparison since plumbers tend not to work for giant companies that can lavish them with perks, but there are parallels in in-demand skilled labor getting to set some of their own rules.
Plumbers are paid quite well and they deal with actual, literal shit. It is not glamorous work, but I would have to guess there is likely less disillusionment and burnout in plumbing overall compared to software.
I have family that work in trades and this is just not true at all.
They are literally focused on retirement, pension and next time off once past the apprentice stage.
Why? Because the work is terrible. Really demanding physical work in terrible conditions. Unimaginable really for anyone who works remote.
Then it just gets worse as you get older and your body breaks down. Then your really just holding on to get to retirement and that pension so you can finally relax and enjoy life without doing this awful job before you die.
No thanks. I am so glad I didn't go down that path. The romanticization of the trades on here is completely delusional. I think it is just the level of being disconnected from physical labor most are on here. Physical labor is not fun when your young and just gets harder and harder with age.
aye this one. got a lot of fam in welding and carpentry.
good money. uncle who is a welder has travelled all over working different gigs. got certified to do underwater welding, too, which is terrifying for a lot of reasons. but it's hell on the eyes, joints, and the UV can even cause skin cancer.
other fam in carpentry make good money. north of 6 figures, and that was in 2010. but it's demanding: show up at 6am, haul things and hammer all day, crawl around in weird angles, and do it all in -5C or +35C.
both eventually tapped out after ~25-30 years. one ran the business in the office and the other just got a job in home depot. meanwhile I'll probably program until I can't sit upright -- could be coding in the retirement home, as long as me brain works.
I haven't but I believe that if it makes them better at their job they would be treated so. most plumbers are independent freelancers and for them that's a rock star way to live
I have compared AI to junior engineers a few times. Not in terms of treatment, but in terms of output quality. Is there a better analogy I should prefer? Or if my thinking is horribly wrong, I'd love a different perspective to think on.
True I understand that. Digital plumbing is not a lesser thing. It's part of the job. Software engineering is done better when being "pampered" regardless if it's plumbing or rocket science. If companies want to stop pampering then sit back and watch. Bad software will be noticed
And while some of the "pampering" is excessive, an awful lot of it is just "giving your valuable employees, the ones who actually do all the work that makes you money, a good place to work that's conducive to creative work and solid work-life balance."
Like...being bought the best equipment for the job they're doing? Making high-quality foods available on-site? Even something as simple as having great desk chairs, I can say from frustrating personal experience, can make a huge difference.
My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.
This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.
Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
This matches my experiences. I see a lot of side projects being dropped. I’ve been hired (as an external consultant / developer) to maintain some of these side projects while their core developers are either fired, let go, left or are put on their main projects.
It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah
Just give it 3-4 years. Many of these "side-projects" are powering quite a portion of the web and elsewhere. Software requires maintenance, bug fixing, updates, etc...
> Providing value to the company gets you rewarded
This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.
Consider what companies are launching these days and the talent they need to do it. It's AI companies, it's hardware, it's hard science. It's fewer Uber for pet grooming. There's less appetite for investing in the latter companies and _normal_ software developers are less useful for the former. Yes, ZIRP has contributed, but there are wider economic and social issues that are above my pay grade at play.
The safest space continues to be distributed systems and systems programming in general IMO. You'll still find work at hyperscalers. You'll still find work in the new spaces. Until AI can operate these systems, there'll be a spot for us bit janitors for a little while longer.
I'm an engineer at a large tech company. I am by all means considered a successful engineer. I am actively looking for a way to exit the field, and am assuming that in a few years my career options will be vastly diminished. I am worried about ageism, and can already feel it in my early 30s. Its certainly become more up or out
A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously. Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
It's always a struggle to land leadership or niche top-seniority gigs. It doesn't matter how awesome you are. They're not commodified swap-in staff roles, and there are not a lot of them, and your friend is probably looking for a quality organization too (or leaders in shabby ones won't touch this resume).
Your friend is just encountering the reality that there will be a search phase after the end of any high-seniority professional job, plan for it.
No from the 2010-2022 period, this wasnt the case. You could find a ton of very high paying roles, or atleast get interviews for them. There is a serious vibe shift. Also, 500k isnt that senior
You've defined the market as four companies (FAANG - 1) and roles representing <1% of their highest performers. Yes, they have roles and maybe even openings, but no reason to think there would be an immediate match for anyone but a superstar.
> Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
The problem here is that the dollar has devalued so far to the point where it is close to worthless, especially with rising house prices across the country.
This is why $200k - $500k seems to be "not enough" in the US due to its cost of living and at the same time it isn't sustainable for Amazon or Google to pay at that rate.
Really, this the hallmarks of a crash that is waiting to happen and it was never going to last.
Yeah I think the dollar has been completely decimated. There is nowhere to hide, assets are no longer ripping, but cost of living is higher than ever. For a family that wants to be upper middle class, 500k really is not that much, if you want to save and live comfortably/go on vacations, drive a nice car.
>For a family that wants to be upper middle class, 500k really is not that much, if you want to save and live comfortably/go on vacations, drive a nice car.
That might be true for Bay Area. What about other states, Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Montana etc. ?
I am not from US, but I don't get why tech companies can only have offices in Bay Area.
My negative opinion based on experience working with the stereotype that fits your friend is they are only valuable in a massive company. 8/10 phd holders I have worked with couldn’t actually do hands on work. So where do people who just want to think, talk and write about work without being able to actually ship provide value on the order of $250/hr?
I understand that going to 200k after your whole standard of living has been built around 500k is pretty difficult, but objectively speaking: half of America is living in metro areas right? Most of them are managing without making nearly three times the median income.
Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe? Here in the Netherlands (one of the wealthiest nations in the world) even just 100k is aspirational for most higher paid jobs.
People in the major cities practically live in their own society in America.
$200k is a huge amount of money in most of America based on geography.
In the major cities though it is not just the cost of living but the feeling of being wealthy is all relative to those around you. In the major cities there are people with huge amounts of wealth so $200k year is not going to feel wealthy at all. Of course, no one is actually just scraping by on white bread and ramen noodles making $200k unless they are terrible with money. More like you can only eat out X number of times a week instead of having a personal chef. The person making $200k also probably not much different in ability than the person with the personal chef and private jet so not only do you not feel wealthy but might even feel like you are getting shorted. Of course, if you did have the personal chef and private jet you would face the same problem but at a higher level.
This isnt really accurate. If you want to live in an upper middle class neighborhood, and save money, with kids, 200k is peanuts. Sorry, it is. Upper middle class needs both parents working at 200k, which itself is really a middle class existence.
What do you consider an “upper middle class lifestyle”. In 2020, I was living in the burbs of Atlanta in the good school system with a 3200 square foot house that I had built in 2016, one teenager in the house, three cars making less than $200K combined and we weren’t eating hot pockets everyday
> Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe?
Yes.
In my family I am under employed and my wife is an elementary teacher. Health insurance for us costs $800 every month. A car is required and so is the gas to drive it. We have two 7 year old Toyotas and insurance on them is $100 a month.
It’s a lot more overhead and risk mitigation compared to the better nations like yours that care for their people.
> A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously.
Tragic! Meanwhile those of us who do this because they "like tech" (read: it's the only thing I can or will do for a living) will continue to be happy scraping by on the insulting pay of.... (checks notes) $200k/year. You can't even afford to have your balls shaved and sucked every morning with that kind of pay! Even worse, how can you impress your wealthy parents, friends, friends' parents and romantic partners without a job that pays enough for the morning balls treatment? What's the point of getting a PhD when you have ball stubble? Dear lord, you might have to go find work in another field (adios vampire, you won't be missed here).
Honestly , I think people will misjudge me when I say this , but these reasons are the reason why I am frugal.
My economic condition can change drastically , it just depends on the market , how is your "friend" entitled to 150-200K ? Because of our "expectations" (Amazon , google are the best companies so "best" + phd , phd means you are in academia so more "smarter")
But our "expectations" are now changing , mine certainly changed , but instead of panicking (because lets be honest? whats the point of panicking?)
We can try to be frugal. We can try to live in a way where my salary doesn't really matter that much , I can live off of any salary but the only difference b/w big salary and low salary might be the fact that your savings increase which you invest in things like index funds (boglehead investing) and the only difference it makes is on what age you can retire (thus , being a point on ageism)
I might also think that after a age , person can get a little less ambitious and more rigid , so more flexibility early on (in mid 30's) can be absolutely great but for that you need good saving habits / being frugal in your 20's.
I also believe that frugality is sometimes seen as not being ambitious or I live life only once and for that I have to say that I agree , I am frugal mostly because I have seen / just feel this tingle for spending money where my mind .
Of course , you don't have to be frugal over like a $ , but just changing your mindset & hobbies from being materialistic to non materialistic and being satisfied .
What I personally can't be is a frugal who constantly switches / worries about light bulbs / appliances just to save 2 cents or people who don't eat outdoor to save money (unless its in literally 5 star and I also believe that going to dine in full time also sucks , I just like to eat burgers , pizzas , chips etc. but some people can be really that level of frugal .
I just want to have a decent life reading good books with emergency funds and funds invested. I would try to maximize my income , but I wouldn't chase it as my ultimate goal , the ultimate number.
I might earn less but if I am working on one of my passion ideas on some company , I am down.
The times for "resume driven development" are over, yes. And I'd argue that's a good thing - there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database" or whatnot, with hype chasers forcing developers to reinvent the wheel and make all sorts of basic errors that other mature tech has long since passed again.
Maybe the industry can now focus on making the hype tech of the last 20 years finally somewhat stable and secure again before the next boom-bust iteration hits...
None of that is happening. The hype is now around generative AI, a prototype tech whose main benefits to the end user are still largely speculative. (At least with the gig economy, consumers can get cheap rides and food deliveries. At least with social media, they could share cat videos.) I am dubious that the industry is any more interested in making hype AI any more stable or secure than they did prior waves of hype tech.
>there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database"
Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved? You can make money by developing a database that solves some problems, saving time and money for lots of people and companies. "Hot" doesn't make money, otherwise people posting here daily "I rewrote X in Rust" would be rich.
> Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved?
Unless you're building the next Facebook or other billion users scaled service, mysql or postgresql will be more than enough for everything, at least until you hit 100k-1M users. And by that point you have enough real-world experience to accurately judge your needs and if you need to roll your own stuff.
As for distributed data - RDS and a multi region database has that problem solved. Unless you're a real time bidding ad broker, your app can get away with a few milliseconds of replication latency.
> Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved?
What do you need it for? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. What I see is that this sort of thing is only needed when you are planning to have the next facebook/reddit/etc type of business.
I write line of business software for different SMEs, and I have not yet found a need for anything more than a beefy server/VPS.
Even companies with 100k employees each using the same piece of software does not need anything "distributed", if you're even a little careful with read-only replicas, some caching of state, etc.
You want to geolocate nearer to some users? For the reddit/facebook type of business, sure, good idea.
For the majority of software, why would you? That webapp functions only slightly degraded when used from the other side of the world.
The only missing bit around COVID was that the cost of the economic policies which were implemented by governments caused an inevitable interest rate increase.
Sure, we can argue that the response to COVID was planned in a certain way on purpose and that powerful hands could have used another excuse to get to where we are now (just press more the pedal on government spending, illegal immigration, wars, green policies) - but that's what happened.
I think the article is mostly spot on. Software engineering got detached from business goals, then forced business goals to move its way in the easy money times. The advice to software engineers to focus on building what executives request instead of trying to tell executives what must be built is good.
The only thing I do not agree with is over focusing on ZIRP. Money pumping into the economy can have other forms and switched from monetary (bank lending) to fiscal (government printing) with quantitative easing strategies. Some beneficiaries changed, software is a step or two lower on that ladder, but we are still in the "plentiful money" state if you check world or your country M2 levels. And a lot of that money eventually pumps tech. The real sobering (when it is critical to be a key contributor to a profitable business or have an FU path thought through) starts when pumps inflating M2 stop. My 2c.
I've been aware of the ZIRP phenomenon and potential things that might happen when it ends since 2017. I prepared myself to slowly add more skills (finance, writing, management, etc). All this was while I continued to be a full-time dev.
The problem for me has been that nobody outside of myself is OK with me taking any other role, either within the company I work for, or as someone looking for a fresh new role. When I ask why, it's always been a variant of "oh, you're more valuable to us as an engineer".
Now with the advent of LLMs and bullshit experts talking about AI taking over everyone's roles, neither do people want me to remain an engineer (I quit in frustration a few months ago), nor do they want me to be anything else (even when I have skills directly relevant for other types of jobs). It's frustrating to keep on trying to switch when nobody's taking the bait.
This will not be popular, but I think the real problem with tech these days: too many software engineers.
Used to be just 40k comp sci graduates in the US per year, now it’s 150k plus and growing. Everyone wants tech money, but nobody wants to write all this damn code.
We have people in this industry who have no real love or passion for the engineering and the science, and soon they will become the majority. Vibe coders and prompt kiddies are not satire, they are a real thing. A lot of incoming graduates would not consider this field if it wasn’t for the money and remote work opportunities. They are not like the true enthusiasts who would still be doing this even if it didn’t pay well. We need to gatekeep harder. Crush people in interviews, make it damn near impossible to get in a company unless you really want it. Redirect people to other careers like finance or sales and marketing.
> [...] “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives
It’s not much of a mission statement! Certainly nothing on “making the world a better place”. But it has the comforting solidity of the truth. The good thing about the music finally stopping is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s going to stop.
An interesting side effect is that the tech industry is rapidly losing the "good guys" image it had in wider society for a long time (with a little help from Elon and friends, but certainly they aren't the only reason).
If both devs and users are realizing that the "make the world a better place" spiel had always been a marketing lie that was kept up as long as there was spare money for it, maybe we could now also start thinking how to really make the world a better place.
I believe this guy's analysis misses the point. My perspective is shaped by having navigated multiple market bubbles and three significant tech recessions – 2000, 2008, and 2022-2025.
The core issue, consistently, is the imbalance between supply and demand within the high-quality SWE talent pool. We witnessed hiring bubbles in 1999 and 2021 precisely because the demand for skilled SWEs far outstripped the available supply.
Essentially, major tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) appear to have miscalculated the sustained need for SWEs during the peak of the WFH trend. They subsequently found themselves with a surplus of talent relative to the number of compelling new projects.
A similar dynamic occurred during the dot-com boom, where companies aggressively pursued web developers. The perceived ROI, often reflected in inflated company valuations rather than immediate profits, justified each hire at the time.
The crucial question is the ROI of each incremental hire. If it remains strictly positive, robust hiring will follow. Currently, this condition is not met, particularly within large tech firms.
Looking ahead, a market equilibrium will eventually be reached. A sustained oversupply of new graduates entering the field will undoubtedly face employment challenges. Conversely, a decrease in the supply of qualified SWEs will likely lead to a stabilization, and potentially an increase, in their perceived value.
Notice how all the coasters at big tech companies are now being called in and with RTO policies? This is what we have here.
The "good times" where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a >$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over.
Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care.
These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash.
There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.
The presumption that RTO is driving the wave of 'we need to be profitable' is myopic. The article rightly attributes it to financial liquidity. RTO is more expensive for most companies than remote which is often overlooked.
Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related.
The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created.
The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days.
There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
>“Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives
If you are a software leader, work on discovering and filling customer needs. Filling those will boost both your success and the company's success.
Executives at most companies rarely do anything other than figure out how to get a bigger paycheck. They have no clue about, nor do they try to discover, customer needs; but they have and aggressively acquire a strong sense of their upchain's needs.
This means a software leader who does basic research on customer needs is the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind at most companies.
> After ten years of their opinion being consulted on big company decisions, they’re trying to hold on to that power.
I feel this one. I've been doing this for twenty years, and we get listened to the least now of any point in my career. Rather than what we build being a conversation about what's possible, we get told what to build and have to push back when the requirements are impossible.
The opportunity cost is just silly. So many times we could build something better than the requirements but it's not worth the effort to try to get it through the bureaucracy.
It makes sense that there was a flood of folks coming in as they saw that it look like the place to be if you wanted to be in the good times... then you layer in interest rates. Good Times Never Last Forever
Great article that summarizes a few important truths.
I'm hoping that some of the good news is:
* If you care about focusing on business success, and requirements descending from that, then you'll gradually have more company, and fewer people working against you.
* If your experience extends beyond the crazy Potemkin Village investment scam period of tech, or you otherwise have experience working business-focused, then hopefully that will soon be widely recognized as positive signal for hiring (as it used to be, and is, in many sane fields).
For me, delivering value is acquiring new skills which I can use to augment my existing skills. Beside backend development (my main skill) and frontend, I am trying to learn more devops/infrastructure, a bit of data engineering, more cloud specific functionality and some people management.
I think there is some value to be had in "jack of all trades, master of one" strategy. If I would be an employer, I would hire someone like me. :)
> throwing money at their software engineers (in the form of paid trips, in-house chefs, and huge comp packages)
That really was never that common, though, and reserved for a very small subset of programmers even where it did happen. I’ve been coding since 1992 and all the jobs I’ve had have been regular corporate type jobs, with a steadily (but not life changing) raising salary.
1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining.
2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer...
In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.
Been in the industry for 20 years. Things are always up and down.
Honestly I prefer the leaner times. Less clowns trying to cash in and more focus of engineering value, as it should be.
I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.
> I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.
Indeed. The proliferation of highly immature developer tools, web framework hype, entitlement and coasting is what we have been left with.
There needs to be a brutal crash to test them. "Vibe coding" is another example of the bullshit that has come out of another bubble waiting to collapse.
I feel like this observation only applies to a section of the industry (in America). I never worked in the Valley or the Bay, just slogging away out in the Midwest, and it has always been nose to the grindstone, always executive and bottom line -lead, and none of the latitude or pampering mentioned here.
> I think a lot of software engineers right now are planting their feet and refusing to change.
That's not a good thing, in general, if you are in technology. We always need to be learning and moving forward. A lot of times, in my experience, it's extremely humbling, because I find out that what I know is no longer relevant. I'm 63, and still need to learn new stuff, every day.
I know that he's talking about culture, as opposed to knowledge, but I think they inform each other. If we allow ourselves to ossify in one context, it just moves over into the other.
I spent most of my career at a company that treated me like just another schlub. They were a hardware company, and I'm not sure if hardware engineers were ever treated like software engineers, so I am unfamiliar with free barista bars and tropical offsites. I was just another cubicle Dilbert.
Low interest rates primarily means low interest rates for the government, which the central bank implements by simply buying their national bonds at rates much lower than the rest of the world would tolerate. This sucks up the supply of low-risk low-reward debt that would normally attract a lot of investors. With that supply all bought up those investors are then forced into higher risk instruments like equities, which pushes up the value of stocks (not coincidentally, the kind of investment that Congress tend to have a lot of). High valued equity means greater rewards for startup investing, and so capital diverts there.
So it's all based on pushing investors around against their will, more or less.
Sure, I get that: when zero risk returns are low (or zero), investors must take on more risk.
I don't think this explains why the "good times are over" however. I think that is more related to supply / demand. Supply was low for a while as tech was seen as a dead-end in the early 0s due to outsourcing. In the mid 2010s the opposite was true - tech was seen as essentially the only viable career so lots of people went into it. Now we have the perfect storm of natural oversupply and the threat of AI.
I think the situation will eventually reverse but it will take quite a while.
I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve the other four, even if they don't have much to do day to day.
In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies.
This allowed "free" side projects and cool stuff, too.
But as always, it's time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we're past the maxima.
PSA: It looks like more-comments-than-upvotes tends to make posts fall off the front page. If this is true, then, if you think the TFA and/or comments are important, then upvote the post first. (Don't just comment, and then forget to upvote.)
Yeah 2008 was much worse than today, effecting all sectors and all industries, especially anything related to the real estate industrial complex.
In my opinion, things in software engineering are stagnant right now. No doubt there was a significant downturn in 2023-2024. At least at the moment no one really seems to be hiring.
I was working through those times and share that sentiment. 2000 was apparently bad for Silicon Valley in particular, but, being outside of that, I don't remember any noticeable effects. 2008 was the App Store gold rush. That was quite possibly the best time in tech I have seen despite what was going on the non-tech economy.
Times are tough now but still, I hope we never have to go back to a 0% interest environment. It was a nightmare. It only created the illusion of abundance and opportunities but in reality only pure speculation was rewarded. I'm exhausted from running on that hamster wheel. I'd rather do something really difficult and really struggle but at least get somewhere eventually, little by little... Rather than the endless cycles of false hope and disappointment of the past decade. It's like having a carrot always dangling right in front of your face. Success always appears very close but in reality, it'd be easier to just go straight for a different carrot perched atop mount everest.
If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today.
When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.
This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.
If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.
> The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.
I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era.
Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken.
My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.
During ZIRP the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business, leading to entire careers being built around and rewarded for the wrong outcomes. People have built entire careers while completely missing/ignoring why they're doing the job and how their work is supposed to fit and contribute to the overall business - because in a lot of cases there was never a viable business to begin with, and the founders themselves were playing the "career startup founder" card and enjoying the mismatched incentives set up by a distorted funding market.
Now we're seeing a readjustment as the "free money" is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands.
The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant.
This isn't to say it's anyone's fault - I don't blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it's a game and plan your exit. The danger is that there's an entire generation that started their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.
> the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business
I've found that even when we were incentivized via direct & simple profit sharing mechanisms, we still struggled with the appropriate focus and urgency. You'd think additional piles of money based upon # of customers coming in the door would provoke substantially more activity.
Money is a huge distraction. The most successful phases of my career have involved putting the customer absolutely first and looking at the money as a causal event based upon a job well done. I've never looked at a direct deposit into my bank account and felt the kind of rush of happiness I get when I see a customer reply that an issue is resolved to their satisfaction.
Stock and equity just aren’t great at motivating employees.
If you’re at a small and pre-public startup, your decisions and effort can directly affect product success BUT the equity is only theoretically valuable someday in the distant future so you ignore it.
If you’re public and getting stock/rsus, your company is likely large enough that there’s nothing you can do single-handedly to affect the price.
Plus, stock price doesn't necessarily reflect (or isn't directly proportional to) positive business outcomes. Even if it was a great motivating tool, you would only motivate employees to do whatever pumped the stock price, not necessarily to solve underlying business problems.
Stock and equity aren't really formotivating employees. They're for attracting employees, and then aligning their goals with those of the shareholders.
The first software startup I worked at didn't give out equity, and when the sales guys closed big deals with aggressive delivery timelines we hated it because it just meant more work for us. Many of my teammates passive aggressively dragged their feet, but if we'd had equity we would've been high-fiving the sales guys after landing big clients.
More money to spend - less time at work. I’d rather spend all my time sailing than coding.
You’re well supported by research on this [1]. TLDW:
- More money leads to more output for physical tasks
- More money leads to worse results for cognitive tasks
What does move the needle:
- Pay people enough so they’re not thinking about the money
- Desire for autonomy, mastery, impact
[1] https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc
> The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver.
But are companies adjusting their hiring process to find career problem solvers? Or are they still looking for buzzword-spewing leetcode solvers? If you ask candidates who have interviewed recently, they'll probably tell you that companies are going even more extreme towards the leetcode side.
Is anyone actually hiring, or succeeding in hiring? I see the hiring market being completely fucked for the past couple years with lots of fraud happening on both sides - whether it's ghost positions that are never intended to be filled, or monkeys LLM'ing (or I guess we call it "vibe coding" now) their way through interviews, which just makes the interviews even harder to a level even seasoned engineers now need to cheat or be left behind.
It's become a market for lemons, with no good solutions. The problem is that it fundamentally requires a lot of manpower to accurately assess someone's experience (whether you use LC or just an open-ended whiteboard exercise) and companies who hire have only so many engineer-hours to dedicate to interviewing and the amount of inbound candidates exceeds that by orders of magnitude.
The way I see it, a lot of companies realized they have the staff they need and hiring more through "normal" channels is impossible due to the above - so either they don't need to hire more, or they hire informally through back-channels and word of mouth (because the front door is being DDoS'd).
The only way to win is not to play - the "front door" and typical hiring process is no longer possible unless you are a big name and have somehow publicly demonstrated your skills (past product launch, etc) in a way that can be verified in 5 minutes. For the rest of us, it's mostly a sales and networking game, and leveraging human & in-person relationships that are (for now) still immune to LLMs and hordes of boiler rooms spamming every single job with fake (but plausible) resumes.
It's funny because more than anything I would say the people that were most misaligned with the outcomes of the business are actually most of the engineering leaders I have worked with.
The amount of short-termism and chasing press releases and caring about what your golf buddies think really clogged up a lot of companies, and it doesn't feel like THAT part is changing anytime soon, zirp or no zirp.
It's not just golf buddies - it's investors.
Capital often outstrips actual business acumen as a factor in the success of a business. That's partly because we live in a world where word of mouth, reviews, online presence, etc. are all commodified, partly because tech (like the Industrial Revolution before it) has greatly increased the growth potential and concentration of capital, partly because of investors actively intervening to ensure the success of their other investments, partly because of increasing and increasingly-naked corruption, and partly because of the importance of network effects. (I don't know which of these factors is the most important.)
The more important capital becomes relative to the actual functioning of a product, the more disconnected from reality a business can (perhaps must) get. Their actual business becomes selling a pitch to investors, not selling SaaS, because their actual product is investor returns, not long-term viability or value. And because a big part of that pitch to investors is the rockstar founding team, founders have to (or at least feel they have to) do the golf-buddy shit. It's literally their job, or at least, they think it is.
Post-ZIRP doesn't kill that because capital being scarce just increases demand for it even more.
Probably the best comment overall. Many people assume that because ZIRP was unhealthy, present situation returns us to being practical, down to earth, and caring more about engineering that the buzz. It's not what I see around myself, and not what I'm reading either. If anything, businesses become less interested in engineering quality, and there is probably less understanding than ever about how to make a good business out of engineering.
It happened at every level - software engineers optimized for career outcomes which meant accumulating the right buzzwords. Managers optimized for their own career outcomes which meant increasing their number of direct reports. Engineering leaders optimized for their own buzzwords which means org-level complexity and a steady stream of (self-inflicted) problems to solve and brag about on their engineering blog to attract even more software engineers, and executives/founders merely optimize for securing the next funding round (because there is no and was never a viable business there to begin with), which is easier to do if you're seen as solving hard problems (even if they are self-inflicted), and investors happily oblige because they had no other choice in this distorted market.
Note that incentive mismatch at the middle-management level happens everywhere to this day and isn't strictly a ZIRP-induced phenomenon, but most real businesses that need to earn a profit thus have a natural cap on how much inefficiency they can support. In ZIRP however, the complete lack of any requirement to make profit (in some cases because the business is never viable and its sole purpose is to give a good lifestyle and resume to everyone involved) exacerbated the problem.
The end of ZIRP is necessary for us to return to economic reality. As Henry Hazlitt explains in "Economics in One Lesson," proper capital allocation is fundamental to a healthy economy. During the ZIRP era, market signals were distorted, which led companies to invest in frivolous projects, creating enormous bureaucracies and god knows how many bullshit jobs. Real economic growth requires solving meaningful problems, which in turn creates genuinely meaningful work for us techies. So, I guess it's good that "good times" are over.
Totally believe in this in my current company. It’s allegedly tech but it’s in a blue collar field and led my domain people, not tech people. Since its inception, the company was subsidized by the parent company. Now that PE owns it and there’s a mandate to make money, it can’t.
A major, major problem are engineers that have zero vision of the big picture. I get a ticket, I work on it, I go home. My most senior engineer on the team never met a deadline in his life. I own an integration product and found out last week two other products I integrate with were about to ship without testing my product. They tested on laptops. I dove in to an analysts ticket with him to figure out why he blew the timeline he committed to. Turns out he was trying to reverse engineer a database instead of just asking another team. “You think I’m going to get any answers from those fuckers?” He asked me when I drilled him.
All these people are still, to this day, protected be the President. He views domain knowledge as being more important than shipping products.
> A major, major problem are engineers that have zero vision of the big picture. I get a ticket, I work on it, I go home.
I don't disagree with you, and ... isn't that true for most employees, in whatever technical or non-technical role, in all industries?
In my experience, it is. Even if the rare rank-and-file employee wanted to think about the big picture, they are never rewarded for doing so, and would be smacked down for acting in support of the big picture if it involved disobeying their chain of command. After a few years of this, you can see why they prefer to stick to the assigned job description.
In your last line, "President" presumably refers to the head of your company. But think about US Federal employees today - should they act in service of the Constitution, or obey Trump's orders? (If they don't obey Trump's orders, they will be fired.)
I agree, this is true of every employee.
It is leadership’s responsibility to make sure the labor they’re allocating is going towards the big picture. If it’s going straight into the trash, that’s not the labors fault - they do what they’re told.
You hit the nail on the head, it’s a problem of incentives. Software engineers don’t HAVE a career. There’s little to no mobility and they understand they will be struck down as soon as the company can. Often even if the company is pulling revenue.
Do that across the entire industry for two decades and the labor catches on. People job hop because every company ever has told them to job hop. Not explicitly told them, but told them via their actions.
This can be changed but the reality is the leadership doesn’t give two fucks about engineers. They don’t want their opinions, they want code monkeys. So, code monkeys they get.
> My most senior engineer on the team never met a deadline in his life.
I went over this sentence a few times before it started making sense. Noting this for others who run into it.
What's meant is that the most senior engineer fails to complete tasks on time, as opposed to never having to deal with deadlines (cf. "I never met a problem I couldn't solve").
Deadlines is always about time, or i'm missing something? Did you maybe confuse with dead end?
I initially read "has never met a deadline in his life" as meaning they had never had a task with a deadline. I'm assuming they also read it that way at first, so they're clarifying for anyone else who did the same.
It's both.
He has deadlines. He just chooses to ignore them and has never faced any consequences.
Can you clarify, are you sympathetic of the person who thinks they wouldn't get an answer from the other team, or are you saying the person was wrong to not just ask the other team?
Asking since I've been in the situation many a time where the other team is too busy to reply in a timely fashion, and/or they don't even know the answers to my question, so I end up having to reverse engineer it.
I mean, he called the other engineers "those fuckers." I was definitely not sympathetic. I was pretty livid, however, context is necessary.
This person didn't even try. Engineers at this company rarely ask for help from other teams or collaborate. Management has talked the talked, but there is no walk to actually take down these silos. I pointed him at product and BA people that offered to help, but he didn't ask them, either. Instead, he thought he could reverse engineer it, which probably took 3x longer than it should.
I like to play both sides: I solve the problem I create. :)
You're joking but with the layoffs and all, there must be pressure to clean up the (self-inflicted) problems created by previous teams of architecture astronauts and get the complexity down to a level that the new, reduced headcount can wrangle.
I've done exactly this. Got a 5-figure AWS bill down to 3-figure, and 40 devs down to 2. Didn't happen soon enough though.
A truth bomb if I ever saw one - thanks for articulating this so clearly
Sorry, but this denigrating about leetcoders just strikes me as delusional in a different way. The people that I know that spend a lot of time doing leetcoding and learning new tech are 1. Also really good at general programming, and 2. In the top 20% of actual enthusiasm for their job. If these people cant find jobs reliably, what should you actually do to have a decent shot at getting hired? We can't just tell everyone "just make sure youre in the top 2%".
My point is that LeetCode and buzzwords became the unofficial benchmark for a software engineer during the distorted/ZIRP era. You had to be good at it to get in, and once in you could just coast your way through, not that anyone would mind because so many of your peers and superiors are doing the same thing and none of it matters as the company itself may be coasting on investor money and never intending on making a profit.
Unfortunately, LeetCode skills and "architecture astronomy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut) are a very poor proxy for actually driving profit. This doesn't mean a LeetCoder (for fun or to play the game - as long as they understand it is a game) can't also be a good contributor in today's market, but their value would come more from experience solving actual business problems and ability to collect/define/argue requirements and then translate them into a system (which may or may not even be code - sometimes a Google Form is all that's needed) rather than whether they know LeetCode.
When it comes to solving business problems and actually driving profit, programming in abstract terms (the kind that LeetCode and most interview processes select for) is worthless - LLMs can do it just fine. The hard part is understanding/fleshing out the business requirements (including being aware of what you don't know, and planning for that or seeking outside help), refining your solution with the relevant stakeholders, and being aware of high-level constraints including regulatory requirements, security, etc. Once you have a good enough specification, programming it is the generally the easy part.
> LLMs can do it just fine.
No, they can't. They can (sometimes) bang out a frontend app or some CRUD service, but if that's all the code you write you should not be a senior engineer.
The process of writing a specification and the process of implementing it tend to have a ton of overlap in the real world. There's no way to actually define one in a vacuum, despite almost every PM I've ever met pretending otherwise.
> No, they can't
I was talking purely about those abstract interview questions where the full problem can be summarized in a few lines and the expected solution is ~50 lines max. I've just tried with Claude 3.7 and it's produced a seemingly plausible solution at the "word finder" problem (2D grid of letters - given a word, return if it's present in the grid as a series of adjacent cells in any direction).
I agree that they're far from taking our jobs, which is my point - those interview questions are absolutely not representative of what we really do and optimize for the wrong outcome.
Fair enough, but my bet is that even trivially recontextualizing an interview question is enough to wreck an LLM's performance.
If you change the "find a word in a grid of letters" question to a "find a Collatz sequence in a grid of numbers" question, does it still work? As an interviewer, I would expect a qualified candidate to spend maybe an extra 5-10 minutes asking clarifying questions and understanding the difference between the two.
Are you advocating for everyone to create their own SaaS here or what?
End of the day, most engineers need to join employers. We can’t have 10M+ different SaaS out there and each engineer develops their own personal brand of it. That’s not how software scales. Most ICs are never going to be in a position where the CEO is going to listen to them about what product we should develop and be given the time and resources to investigate that stuff.
Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers who clearly don’t work on product facing work. It’s a bit ridiculous.
I see the era of permanent tech employment as coming to an end, and tech will have to transition to being closer to a trade. You don't expect to pay builders/plumbers/architects/electricians and keep them around forever after your house is built right? You will at best only need them occasionally on a one-off basis for any fixes or alternations.
A properly designed tech solution (aka, not one designed to pad a resume) for upkeep should only require a small fraction of the manpower needed to originally build it. I expect companies keeping in-house "skeleton crews" to run things and handle maintenance and small changes, with larger ones being done by a (potentially returning) cast of contractors who come in on a project basis.
So the solution for permanent employment would be to either join one of those skeleton crews or join an agency/consultancy. Otherwise, the only way out is freelance and curating your own client portfolio. Maybe you can partner with others and form a coop to have more manpower and handle bigger projects - essentially building your own agency.
> Your assertion doesn’t even acknowledge infra engineers
My assertion is that engineers who want to succeed in the current market will need to know enough infra/sysadmin to support their solution, or farm it out to someone who will. If they don't, someone else will outcompete them.
Infra is also a huge breeding ground for resume padding and architecture astronomy (and there were no incentives to discourage it - in fact cloud providers are still laughing all the way to the bank). It doesn't inherently mean all that complexity was necessary. So I expect "infra" specialization to become a nicher skill, one or permanent skeleton/maintenance crews or hyperscalers who actually need the complexity.
> who clearly don’t work on product facing work
I'm intentionally being vague when I talk about "solutions" and solving business problems. I do not mean it should be an app, a product or even have a UI. A cron job running a shell script to copy files from one place to another may very well be the right solution to some business requirements. Infra engineers would be a perfect fit for problems that don't involve significant UI work (I myself prefer those as I hate frontend with a passion).
I think the era of high specialization in tech might be in decline; tools are good enough and hardware is good enough and the field is mature enough that most business problems can be solved just fine by a generalist (bringing in specialists on an ad-hoc basis when needed) - or otherwise they'll get outcompeted by someone who can.
> I'm intentionally being vague when I talk about "solutions" and solving business problems. I do not mean it should be an app, a product or even have a UI. A cron job running a shell script to copy files from one place to another may very well be the right solution to some business requirements.
Completely true, but instead this would be an event-driven serverless microservice that does some complex ETL thing to move files between three S3 buckets before landing in a "data lake" where analysts run three queries a month.
(I've seen many of these exact scenarios)
Upthread regarding astronauts is absolutely correct---there's been years and years of incentives to create messes like this, and yes, cloud providers absolutely facilitate this, and in many cases are the direct cause.
Yeah, this doesn’t really land.
Your argument is basically “we’re all going to be outsourced by Indians.”
Your EU-centric view of how contracting works (probably more due to labor laws than anything else) isn’t an accurate assessment of how Silicon Valley is going to work.
> we’re all going to be outsourced by Indians
Outsourcing has its place and a lot of gruntwork/ongoing maintenance is fine for it. Post-ZIRP it turns out the true value of software is a lot lower than previously thought, and for a lot of solutions, Indians is all they can afford (because the alternative might be to pay someone to do it by hand).
Where outsourcing fails is primarily when business & domain knowledge is required - outsourcers will obviously not be aware of internal company processes or even the target market for the required solution (just like we would be bad fits for trying to spec out a product targeting the Indian banking market for example).
So I see the industry and market readjusting to the true value of software, and as a result people will pick a mix of high-value implementation work (where local domain knowledge is required) and boring/maintenance gruntwork, or get outcompeted by those who can (and this is a global market, so you are competing with Indians(.
I'm not advocating for one way or the other btw, I have no skin in this game (technically trying to push people into freelancing and consultancy works against me). But I'm just trying to be realistic - the tech comp during the ZIRP era was never going to last, and even if ZIRP continued, more and more people entering tech means comp is still bound to decrease. You can either remain in denial hope those jobs come back, or plan for the worst.
The true value of software, post-ZIRP, is still obvious for the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They print cash.
Yes, ZIRP increased tech comp. It did not magically inflate the value of software, which is always directly assessed against what people actually find useful.
The value of most software for most companies has a limit, pushed down both by supply of software engineering labor and that manual labor is actually quite cheap and your software must inherently cost less than what it would to just pay a human to do it.
There are always outliers obviously - whether it's the adtech giants being in the right place at the right time, or niche industries (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it), but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
> The value of most software for most companies has a limit, pushed down both by supply of software engineering labor and that manual labor is actually quite cheap and your software must inherently cost less than what it would to just pay a human to do it.
Software, in the limit, is FREE. It gets written once for a finite cost and then can be copied ad infinitum. Even stratospheric labor costs are acceptable because of this.
> (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it)
But the cost to develop a piece of software (or anything, really) has nothing whatsoever to do with its value!
Avionics software is expensive not because it's inherently more complicated (high-quality OSS hobbyist implementations like Ardupilot exist for free), but because it has to undergo system integration tests because of FAA regulations.
And, despite lower pay for avionics engineers, the value to the end users of quality avionics is literally the difference between life and death.
> but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.
Where do you get this idea? Tech, as a whole, is a wildly profitable sector of the economy. It is a primary driver of US GDP growth and productivity [1].
> Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.
I get that ZIRP is ideologically unpopular, I really do. You can only see so many "Uber but for dogs" startups get multimillion dollar funding rounds before you get cynical.
That being said, interest rates have been falling for centuries [2]. Low interest rates are a fundamental reflection of a society that's gotten better at allocating investments efficiently.
It turns out that software, because of the whole "zero marginal cost" thing, is a spectacularly efficient investment.
1: https://cpram.com/fra/en/individual/publications/megatrends/...
2: https://www.nber.org/digest/202212/real-interest-rate-declin...
Or you know, you can just change jobs. The average tenure for software developers at any one job is less than 3 years.
I do work in consulting. But it’s by far not the only way.
We've been telling plenty of other professions/people that, "make sure you're in the top 2%" as a society forever? That's part of the problem, we need to make sure that if someone is part of the 86% then they also can afford a house, feed themselves and their family etc etc
This is a really good point that honestly I've been neglecting considering. I try to help and push my friends to be better than most (because honestly most are quite lazy and entitled) but still you can't ignore the societal ramifications of most people getting less than they expect.
If you read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Schumpeter, published at the end of the depression and during WW2, most of his predictions were spot on economically besides solving the housing problem.
There was a housing problem then too that he thought would be solved in time by the market. He thought we would see something like assembly line, prefabricated housing at some point that would drive down prices.
What I suspect is that once people own real estate, the last thing they want is something that drives prices down and everyone making the decisions needed to solve this problem owns real estate. That plus the margins won't be that high so you have to do large volume and the red tape is too much to be able to do that at scale. So instead of we do nothing and we will keep doing nothing for another 100 years.
Yeah that's a really good analysis.
It feels emotionally true because when I buy many terabytes of high quality SSD, I have no preference to "keep the valuation" of my SSD investment, I just want more faster for cheaper! If the price goes down tomorrow and my friend gets in for less than I just paid, it's not screwing me over. In fact I'm probably buying more on the future so I love the increased supply!
This is not true at all for housing lol. As someone who bought Manhattan real estate, I can feel the shitty incentives every day, and it's really destructive of a system.
This has nothing to do with earning a livable wage. It’s not like the top 2% are only earning enough to barely get by.
Top 2% maybe not. But top 10%? In a lot of economies the property ponzi scheme has reached such levels that even a top-10% salary is barely enough to actually afford decent accommodation (and employers collude with real estate interests with things like RTO/etc meaning you need that accommodation and don't have cheaper alternatives).
In almost every major city in the US, a regular old “senior” enterprise dev with 5-7 years of experience should be making at least twice the median wage for the city.
Which just means the housing prices can increase to match. Where else are people going to go?
Can I offer a contrarian point of view? Tech is still a great place to work.
Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption.
The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs.
The hardware platforms we're coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace.
I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I'm not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.
> Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.
Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
> The tooling we have now is amazing,
Yes, although it's not necessarily a blessing but a curse. Being amazing means maturity. Being mature meaning stalled marginal return. Stalled marginal returns means no growth. No growth means no meaningful projects. I missed the 2000s, when there were so many low-hanging fruits. We had multiple competing KV stores in development, multiple stream processing frameworks, multiple ML frameworks, multiple query engines. Heck, even multiple programming languages for data analytics.
> Agreed. Amazingly good, in fact. Sometimes I wonder how we can sustain such level of amazing income
Other jobs are getting fucked much more severely. Most industries have bled their labor dry, to the bones. There’s nothing left, they’ve solve the optimization problem of moving as much money as possibly away from them.
Tech is still working on that optimization problem.
It's heavily company/team/manager specific, but you are absolutely correct. I've seen a lot of disillusioned peers leave the industry pretty much since COVID, and they came back after a small break because it's the best of all alternatives.
I think a lot of my peers didn't really understand what working was, and really bought into a lot of the BS. The last few years have been a reality check for us all.
My current employer (big tech) is the best I've ever had. The internal tooling is amazing and works well, access to powerful development hardware is straightforward and everything just works, expensing things required for my job is not a hassle. Yes, there may be a lot of annoying process and it can take a long time to get the 20 approvals you need to deploy a code change, but in all, I've never had it so good. I've seen what it's like in startups and medium sized companies, and it would take a lot of convincing to go back.
Then I see coworkers who have only ever been in this environment. This was their first job out of undergrad, and they've never seen the shit you have to deal with at other companies. They get frustrated at the trivial little things here and decide, "I'm going to quit and go to a small or medium sized company" where there's less bureaucracy or where they can have a bigger "impact" or whatever. Then they get to their new company and HR tosses them a half-working workstation and a dirty used mouse as "onboarding". And they realize they don't have the massive build infrastructure they took for granted or a dedicated build/release team. They don't have robust performance and crash metrics dashboards, and they don't have automatic code bisecting tools to find the change that caused the error. They don't even have a QA team! They don't have continuous builds or maybe they don't even have functional source control or a reliable internet connection. No free food, no massage chairs, no flexible work hours, they have to fill out a time sheet now and maybe even have to clock in and out for bathroom breaks (yes, I've worked at a shitty software company where they made engineers clock in and out).
A lot of these guys realize what they had and boomerang right back after a year or so of this. And now that we are in a bear market and hiring is getting tough, I wouldn't count on the ability to just waltz back in anymore...
A lot of people I know in SV are quitting as 60 hours is being normalized and they’re getting treated like they should be grateful. I know, I know, 60 hours is just what it takes to “focus” as that’s what the working world is like, or some other nonsense coming from the cult of overwork, which seems to be the tone being set.
> AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption
... such as destroying what's left of the entry to junior-level job market. And perhaps in the near future, mid-level too.
In my first job at a fancy tech company in the Bay Area, I saw more free food and drinks than I've ever seen outside of a grocery store. It was crazy. 30 different kinds of beers. Free drinks, snacks, lunch.
I jokingly said out loud, "what did we do to deserve this?". A coworkers overheard and replied, "speak for yourself".
The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.
It’s funny how impressed people are by food and beverages. Let’s be super conservative and say it was only for a mere 20 people. What percentage of wages do you think is being spent on that stuff?
Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
I don't think it's the literal spending money on snacks that impresses people; it's more about the thought behind doing that.
For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy.
The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
Not only that, but if the company once had these things, and then took them away, it might be the wake-up call that snaps an otherwise satisfied employee out of his complacency and cause him to start looking around where the grass might be greener. Steve Blank wrote about this in [1]. Congratulations, you saved a couple of hundred dollars but caused three good employees to leave.
1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Yeah free food is a really good way to spend money on your employees. Just the cost of people walking to get food makes it worthwhile to provide on site.
Coffee even more so.
I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday.
Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
> The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.
Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%.
A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
This kind of math betrays a total lack of understanding of the way businesses earn money. With vanishingly few exceptions, no one developer makes the company $500m, and this is trivially testable with a quick thought exercise:
Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year?
Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev.
This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer.
So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
>So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
I see where you're coming from but I think you're missing the fact that large projects have lots of bullshit work that requires high skill but is technically lower value. There is a lower bound to what people will accept, as people with marginally better skills get lucky enough to get highly-visible and much more highly compensated roles. The pay stratification you wish for is already built in, and the average just reflects the fact that these companies DO make enough money to have competitive pay rates.
The logic around which you base your entire argument is completely flawed.
Firing an employee most likely won't reduce the bottom line.
But every employee is a chance to increase it by creating a new project/product etc.
So firing would reduce the probability of a new idea generating an increase to the bottom line.
That framing doesn't change my logic at all: replace the direct earning of $N/year with the probability of earning $N/year and the same logic still applies. An employee doesn't contribute the probability, an employee working within the Google system contributes the probability. The system is doing the bulk of the work, and the per-employee probabilities of earning all that money are dramatically smaller in any other system.
Who do you think built that system
The very well-compensated early employees, leaders, and executives, working together as a team to create something that was greater than the sum of the parts. The average Googler in 2025 wasn't even on the team that created the initial system, they're a cog in a machine that someone else designed years ago. A very well paid cog.
Is hiring in tech like buying lottery tickets? 99% of hires will be duds, 1% will bring you $100m in profits?
It's not lol. It's more akin to construction. If you need 100 people to do a job in a given amount of time, you might be able to get it done with 99 people without issue. But that one person might have had an insight that would save you a lot of money overall. And if you kept getting rid of people, at some point the others will not be able to pick up the slack and might even ruin the project unwittingly.
I'd answer but it seems you didn't read the first part of what I wrote or even the second part (I never said 500m/year). So not much point.
Okay, you're right, I grabbed the wrong number. Sub in $1.5m/year or $500m/5 years and replace "bottom line this year" with "bottom line over the next 5 years".
The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
First of all, Pareto Principle, so some employees contribute a ton and many contribute less. Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't. The general solution is to go into management (more visibility and no cap on comp), or to create (or join) your own startup (which doesn't have a rigid interview process and you can use "references"). Which many do given how many startups exist in the Bay Area. Companies also may give out large bonuses in RSUs to keep those employees.
> First of all, Pareto Principle, so some employees contribute a ton and many contribute less.
Correct. But with very few exceptions I don't believe that any one person contributes $500m in value over 5 years.
> Second of all, having been in tech individual employees do drive projects that wouldn't have happened without them for a decent amount of time. In aggregate that moves the bottom line a ton
In aggregate, yes. But it's the systems that aggregate the contributions of the employees and turn them into profits.
> As for your second point, that's a straw men argument that assumed companies are omnipotent. The employees who drive the bottom line cannot truly prove this to a new employer so their value is diluted by those who don't.
I'm assuming you mean omniscient, and no, I'm not assuming omniscience because I'm not actually talking about a company's ability to attribute value creation, I'm talking about the employee's ability to attribute it. Any random Google employee who thinks that they contributed $500m over 5 years can't just pick up their laptop and go work for a startup and expect that startup to make $500m over the next 5 years. It's not happening. The only way that their project made $500m was as a project embedded in the enormous money-making system that is Google, and absent that system they don't make that much money for the company.
Doesn't Sundar pull down $250MM / yr?
And as the CEO he's one of the few people who can reasonably make the claim that he's instrumental in creating the money-making system that is Google. We can argue about whether or not that perception is accurate in his case, but CEO pay being totally out of line with most employee compensation is based on the idea that I'm talking about: the system makes money, employees contribute to the system, and the more systemic your role is the greater your contribution to the system.
Just to be clear, your assertion was that NO EMPLOYEE contributes more than $1.5m/year to the company.
> no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company
> Sub in $1.5m/year
Are you standing by that or is your new assertion now that no employee contributes $500m but that many do contribute $1.5m/year?
The back and forth is getting a bit confusing so trying to make sure we're on the same page.
edit: You do realize that a non-trivial number of employees including ICs are paid more than $1.5m/year. So even Google disagree with your assertion.
I'm not interested in engaging with you further because you've now twice ignored the main point of my argument in favor of nitpicks and out of context quotes asserting that I said things I didn't say. There's no point in engaging with that style of argument. Have a nice day.
The main point of your argument is materially different if you mean $500m or $1.5m. I agree there's no point in responding if you're just going to flip flop to whichever is more convenient to that particular response and then get upset when called out for it. Either make a consistent argument or deal with it when called out.
edit: There's also a material difference between no one, a few, many and the majority. You made a specific claim that no employee provides more then $1.5m of value. I disproved that with Google's own comp. Not my problem you're butt hurt about being called out for being wrong with quotes you said yourself.
Their special skill is being in the place where all the ad money goes.
Their special skill is ensuring they are the place where all ad money goes by being better at getting eyeballs for that money and being better at targeting ads to those eyeballs. Many many many companies have tried to usurp one or both sides of that without success.
You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
Usurping a popular thing is difficult, because you don't have its one important quality that attracts everybody: popularity.
The above comment also completely sidesteps the monopolist and regulatory capture factors in difficulty to usurp Google, and thus incorrectly implies that a level playing field exists.
The problem is nobody knows if they are really better at targeting ads. They say so, of course, but who could prove it? Google is the main player in the ad industry and when they say that they are the best, everybody hears them. If a small player tried to say so, nobody would be aware of that, even if they were right.
Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect?
Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting."
> Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do?
So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world?
You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
> Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting."
Again: inertia and network-effect.
> It's a massive success as a company.
Undoubtedly. And they appear to be great at not failing. Like any bureaucracy, that works until it doesn't. What new markets have they created or taken over in the past 10 years?
Google’s economic model has been like that for decades and it’s paying for my early retirement. Being “exploited” in this way is nice work if you can get it. The companies with narrow profit margins don’t pay nearly so well.
> But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable
Your compensation is dominated by the function of supply of and demand for labor, not how much the company makes from your labor.
Isn't demand a function of how much the company makes from your labour?
Labour doesn't make money until the labour is already provided, so how much money labour can produce is an unknown until hindsight is available. An established company with a stable business can make some pretty reasonable forecasts, but when it comes to startups and other new business ventures one is ultimately straight up guessing.
Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
Or maybe not exploiting society/privacy/attention to make that much.
It is hard to get a man to understand that which his salary depends on him not understanding.
-Upton Sinclair
I would suggest rethinking that.
Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". It isn't due to the "brilliance" of their engineers.
>Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers".
Google is like a reverse Robin Hood. It steals data from the users. The customers are the ones buying that data.
So if they have a 2% profit margin on 1.5 million that’s $300K in profit…
Your point being? The profit margin is after employee compensation.
Would you invest in something with a 2% profit margin?
I worked at Facebook for half a decade during its golden period and there were a lot of people who shared your sentiment.
…in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?”
This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs.
Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
my reply to you would’ve been: “oh, not much, we just made the founder the richest most powerful man on this planet. Right now he’s probably on a giant island in hawaii which he wholly owns, in a €200mm mansion, having an orgy with 25 escorts, while on lsd. Oh, right now he just took the jet, one of 6 €50mm jets he owns, to fly to the coast of italy. there, he will fly his giant helicopter to land on his giant 3 floor yatch with 3 pools where he will fuck 30 more chicks at once. But yeah, we get extra free food for having contributed to that”.
It wasn't a profitable company.
The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.
Shouldn't you be happy you help poor boss to barely make ends meet?
In a lot of cases, the companies leverage a large chunk of their employees' time to make very hefty returns. It's the least they can do. As someone who runs a company now (having been an employee previously), it is obvious to me that the cost of providing food is a rounding error in the overall company budget, and is well worth it, if it keeps people happy.
Entitlement is one thing; companies acting like they give a shit about employees was pretty nice though, I for sure miss it.
10 years ago I was at an “innovation lab” of a big HR tech company that gave out free lunches and snacks. The best explanation I heard was a coworker originally from the big boring corporate HQ who said basically this is a software petting zoo for big investors to look at. “Good code monkey, here’s a banana!”
I think I just learned why Amazon gives out free bananas now!
I've always felt that the moral panic about food perks in Tech was weird. That's not free, it's part of your salary. Sure, you can't buy index funds with Pineapples but at the end of the day it's still remuneration.
The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
It's because there's a story that a lot of laborers (and capital owners) want to believe, that capitalism is a great meritocracy, and the rewards of it are based on one's moral fiber, instead of purely a function of every individual's leverage effect on the returns on capital/labor.
Watching the Bay Area from over the Atlantic was always a very bewildering experience. I honestly think you guys now get something closer to the reality of European startups, where we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€!
The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
> we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€!
Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!).
(The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)
The replies are hilariously illustrative of your point. Why do you guys keep working for theese evil capitlists taking away the bilions of value you generate and leaving you with pitiful hundreds of thousands (+free snacks)? You should start a cooperative or something.
SWE created billions of dollars of value for $300k/yr paychecks.
They got free snacks in exchange for labor utilized to capture billions of dollars of market value, which will generate cash flows far into the future. You need to understand the game you are playing.
Can I offer a different perspective of providing drinks and food at the office? Add to that coffee places and more on the company campus.
In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on.
I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.
Your salary is not about moral desserts but about how much value or money you bring to someone else.
That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
I never understood the excitement over "free food" or "ping pong tables." as perks.
I'd rather have better compensation and sensible vacation / work-life balance policies, be treated as a professional, and make my own sandwich..
I think the good times are still on for anyone who continues to focus on the customer and their experience.
From the perspective of the typical software engineer's salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow.
I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also significantly more rewarding to work with.
I have been working in IT for over 30 years. What is happening is not new. Late 1999 was a very go-go time, early 2022 was a very go-go time. Alternatively, things were dead in 1991, in 2001, in 2009. Things were briefly dead in some ways for some people in spring/summer 2020 when Covid hit. 2022 went from go-go in the spring and summer to massive FAANG layoffs in November. Massive FAANG layoffs continue into early 2023, and things have kind of been stagnant since them. Things seem to have gotten worse at the beginning of this year, although it varies, some people with certain AI-related skills are doing well.
In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well.
Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).
This is what I come to HN for. The perspective of OGs mean you can see patterns where the rest of us are too zoomed in to notice (or even know).
Well, as another "OG", I'll give you a contrary opinion.
Yes, absolutely, business cycles come and go. But I think there is a really large shift in the overall "technology mindset", and this is something that does feel very new.
I would say that from at least the 70s (just using that because it's my birth decade) up until the mid 2010s or so, pretty much everyone viewed technology as the main driver for societal progress. Sure, there were definitely scary parts of technology (leaded gas, nuclear weapons), but people still felt overall that improvements in technology would lead to improvements in people's lives.
I'm not so sure that optimism exists anymore, nor do I necessarily think it should. I see so much of the tech industry not focused on how to improve people's lives with technology, but on things like how can we addict people to dopamine spikes, or how can we insert ourselves as an intermediary that vacuums up all the profit due to many technologies' natural tendency toward monopoly. I see technology as the primary cause of what I consider the slowly increasing societal disintegration that is happening across many countries.
Even with technology like AI which I think has a huge potential to aid humanity, my greater fear is that it will just lead to much greater concentration of wealth and power and the expense of everyone else.
For sure, part of my pessimism probably comes from the timeline of my career, which started during the extreme optimism of the 90s, when we all thought that the Internet was going to democratize societies even more and that it was going to "bring us all together". When you feel like the opposite happened, it can be tough to come to terms with that.
I am a bit younger and not a computer tech person per se but I agree completely.
post-WW2 optimism that is now dying off with the last of the Greatest Generation and their kids, the Boomers.
by the 1970s the post-WW2 boom was over and the 80s were full of doom and gloom -- and then tech exploded and there was all this new growth. but now capitalism did what it does and we're back to the 80s again, this time with China instead of Japan.
As someone who remembers the 80s quite well, I think it's a giant mistake to just say this is some kind of cyclical, "Oh, it's like the 80s again" moment.
While I don't want to delve too much into politics, I think the situation at the moment in the US is without precedent at least since the Civil War. And the tech situation is far, far different. I know a lot of people seem to think that folks who point out societal concerns with tech are "Luddites", and love to give (IMO very poor) analogies like "it's just like buggy whip manufacturers!", but I think we're at a point where tech, either now or very shortly in the future, will start to kill off more jobs than it creates (and, if you think about it, in some sense that is actually the point of many technologies), and modern society is far from figuring out how to function if most people can't make a living by selling their labor.
Again, I totally agree that on one hand there are standard business cycle forces at play, but there are other longer term forces that have been building steam for decades, and I think it's a mistake to confuse these two things.
I'd say the good times have just moved around a bit, there's always demand for smart/experienced STEM folk. What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). But there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.
A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.
> What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area).
Did they? Because Google and Facebook revenues are still growing and at ATH. What happened is that they decided to divert more of that juice to their investors rather than their developers.
Maybe the Iron Law of Oligarchy [0] finally caught on?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
Agreed, it's bizarre what's happening there. Perhaps a bellweather that something deeper than interest rates (which have been dropping) is going on.
Leadership think developers no longer matter and they'll be able to replace them with AI in a couple years. So they are firing them all and spending all their money on AI. If you think they can't be that stupid and irresponsible, remember who took all the hiring decisions during COVID.
to some degree, yes. everyone is holding their breath for AI.
but WFH is also here to stay, and COVID proved it worked alright. not great, but alright, and alright is usually enough. been seeing an awful lot of job ads in Croatia, for example.
if AI won't eat it, send it to Mexico City or India or Eastern Europe on the cheap. you don't need a rockstar QA team you just need them to be mostly competent, and they cost 50% less than Big US City talent.
They control their markets, exhibit broad capture of regulatory and standards bodies, and have established authoritarian control of the American state.
Sure, it's a conspiracist's "they," but society and freedom have become as awful as the most obnoxious, strident, and hysterical /. poster's predictions during the DoubleClick acquisition a quarter of a century ago.
Cui bono? Is it the finance ghouls whose ideological and economic lineage continues unbroken through Nazi-advocacy, the Business Plot, and American chattel slavery? Would we face a brighter future if the late 20th century tech industry had collectively rejected the vision of a future based on a panopticon used to generate authoritarian algorithmic control of humanity?
How many acai bowls and fancy cars was the future worth? Are we all complicit, or merely automatons whose lack of agency absolves us of the moral implications of the sum of our collective purpose?
Today's media environment is an atrocious indictment of the world built upon networked computing's awesome power to transform humanity. We have the power to uplift all life in harmony with the bounteous and breathtaking miracle of our beautiful planet. We have built a world of nightmares.
At least the hungry part will be easy after everyone is out of their jobs.
> there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.
Like what (except AI of course)? I am not working in ad tech, but it doesn't feel good either.
Look into profitable companies not focusing on software: Walmarts and homebuilders, Toyotas and medical device makers, miners and electric utilities and so on. All of them need software to run their businesses.
Classic stuff that impacts all of us (feel free to add/remove to the list),
AI (bringing intelligence to the real world), green tech (solar/evs/power electronics etc), defense, aerospace (sat constellations etc), industrial automation, smart agriculture, government etc.
[dead]
The tech industry is based on copying the cool kids. Once Google and Meta started laying off, startups started laying off random people because it was cool. When Apple created the worst keyboard on earth (the arrow buttons squished together in a square) all other brands followed. Apple stopped squishing the arrow keys together but the rest still didn't notice. If someone "cool" thinks AI will replace engineers, all companies will follow blindly.
I find it weird how Elon's firing 50% of twitter is rarely brought up. Even the linked article's reference only mentions the layoffs starting jan 2023...
Genuinely don't think it was the end of the ZLB or Covid. The good times began declining well before that, when MBAs reached critical mass. Interest rates may have accelerated this, but it was always inevitable. When serious money starts getting made, a bunch of spreadsheet jockeys who've never shipped a product in their lives show up, blame engineers for declining quality, and "solve" the problem by
1. imposing more process,
2. diverting hiring budget to managers and PMs, and
3. making everyone take some snake oil training courses (run by some consulting firm staffed by people who last shipped something in the early naughts)
Then the middle management culture gets entrenched and metastasizes. ICs get swept aside (they're just infinitely replaceable "resources" of course), and the engineering culture starts to atrophy and die.
Then new companies come up and make a splash because they don't have any of that crap, and talent goes to them, and the cycle begins anew.
Not trying to throw shade on the article because I think its worth reading, but also important to note that the "good times" he's describing in tech never really existed to begin with for most people working in the tech industry or doing software development generally.
I'm not going to ascribe it to "FAANG" as the freedoms he's describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn't really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry.
Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don't pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.
Yeah, I worked for relatively normal companies as a dev from 2013 to now most of the benefits were normal across the company apart from choice of machine and I guess going to a conference but my current employer doesn't offer that.
This has happened a few times, even in my career. I doubt we'll break that cycle in the near term. We're going on 50 years where tech was like this.
Any time you have an industry can go from zero to world player in a decade or less is going to attract this kind of boom-bust cycle. Companies get overzealous about the land grab, hire too much, are careless with their money. Then the correction comes. It lasts a few years, and then it's back to boom times. Interest rates were certainly part of the equation this time, but back in the dotcom boom, e.g. US mortgages were running around 8%.
If people would stop playing the gold rush an invest in building products that people like and will use long term, we might instead flatten the peaks and the troughs into a more sustainable work environment. Don't see that happening.
I would add a point 4 to the "job of software engineering"
4. Even if the value you provide is measurably great and your manager(s) love you, in a sufficiently large company you are still just a row in a spreadsheet, and you may be terminated at any time independent of the quality of your work/output.
Stay ready to interview.
There's definitely a silver lining in that being a software engineer at a normal-ish company feels more satisfying now. Being more focused and KPI-driven has some upsides.
I'm curious: more satisfying how exactly?
Because from what I can see it's been quite a downhill ride since Y2k. To the extent that many who used to love the work just can't do it anymore.
Some pressure to ship and to work on the things your customers actually need keeps you honest. It's satisfying to work on things which make a short term difference to the bottom line because you know at least someone cares. In contrast to working on a speculative side project which may never see the light of day.
I've come to believe this is just a legitimate personality difference. I really struggle to find joy when I'm working on something that I question the usefulness of. But I've worked with many people who find the work itself joyful and don't mind that at all.
That's not my problem at all. I can't work on something I don't see as useful, that's the whole reason I started programming in the first place. But building useful things is not what most software companies are up to these days, far from it.
Working at larger companies during zirp seemed high risk because the odds of getting stuck on a company side project were high. I was always wondering "is my team actually doing enough to not get fired?"
That seems to be happening less now. It's easier to know where you stand.
Yeah, worrying about getting fired isn't very helpful.
But selling out isn't either.
Programmers should be left enough space to do their thing well, that's the only way to build great software. Which was the entire point of Agile before it was corrupted into Scrum.
I think part of it is that Y2K was 25 years ago now, and a lot of the devs working at that time are now 50-60-70 years old.
Hmm, is the argument that it's a generational problem?
Maybe it is, but I find it strange that nobody seems to care that visiting a page downloads 100s of MBs of packages that clogs the browser. Or, that latencies in backend replies can go into multiple 10s of seconds, etc.
Back in the day, we had to make sure the software ran on less performant computers and we painstakingly analyzed memory allocations and checking the run times of requests, etc. We also had to make sure that the software baked onto CDs worked, there was no multi GB downloads after install possible.
I, for one, would still like that to be the case for the software I use and would still prefer to have the time to do this for the projects I work on.
I mean, it sort of is.
Older, more experienced people tend to have more integrity. We're not as easily bullied into fulfilling whatever business goals at whatever cost.
What, in your opinion, has been going downhill? Is it all the agile stuff, or something else? Serious question, quite curious.
Well, not OP, but there's definite degradation in software quality and attention to detail.
Some is due to Scrum. It's actually not the fault of the methodology but that it's been half implemented by companies that did waterfall before. You are expected to finish a feature in a sprint, but you have no connection to speak to the stakeholders/customers.
The other things are these KPIs, and unsurprisingly, the bean counters behind them don't care about refactoring or addressing tech debt.
In a sense, yes, we need to focus on delivering value but it's much more chaotic now, so it's very difficult to deliver performant features that deliver also what was expected.
Mostly everything.
There's no appreciation of skills anymore, of quality; it's all about generating features as effectively as possible. No room for creativity/trial and error.
It's like working at a factory, pushing a button as fast as humanly possible.
And coders are treated like button pushers as a consequence.
Damn, I was in middle school when Y2K happened so did I join the tech industry in free fall in 2012?
I would say yes, pretty much, from my experience.
I started working at my first startup in 1998.
Good grief SMH
There has been a large influx of new software developers over the last 15 years. All fighting for the jobs, which lower their value to employers.
They found out that most of us are just plumbers, most of the time. And on top of that LLMs can do soft plumbing just fine.
You're making it sound like plumbers are a lesser thing. You sound like you're one of those people who compare what AI does to what human junior engineers do or should be treated like (which is surprisingly a lot of people here on HN)
Not what I said. Have you ever seen plumbers being treated as rock stars?
And maybe I even implied that software engineers are the lesser thing here, because LLMs can't do hard plumbing yet.
In many places in the US you might find it hard to get a plumber to even return your calls or come out to your house for a smaller job, since the good ones have as much work as they could ever want. Not a perfect comparison since plumbers tend not to work for giant companies that can lavish them with perks, but there are parallels in in-demand skilled labor getting to set some of their own rules.
Plumbers are paid quite well and they deal with actual, literal shit. It is not glamorous work, but I would have to guess there is likely less disillusionment and burnout in plumbing overall compared to software.
I have family that work in trades and this is just not true at all.
They are literally focused on retirement, pension and next time off once past the apprentice stage.
Why? Because the work is terrible. Really demanding physical work in terrible conditions. Unimaginable really for anyone who works remote.
Then it just gets worse as you get older and your body breaks down. Then your really just holding on to get to retirement and that pension so you can finally relax and enjoy life without doing this awful job before you die.
No thanks. I am so glad I didn't go down that path. The romanticization of the trades on here is completely delusional. I think it is just the level of being disconnected from physical labor most are on here. Physical labor is not fun when your young and just gets harder and harder with age.
aye this one. got a lot of fam in welding and carpentry.
good money. uncle who is a welder has travelled all over working different gigs. got certified to do underwater welding, too, which is terrifying for a lot of reasons. but it's hell on the eyes, joints, and the UV can even cause skin cancer.
other fam in carpentry make good money. north of 6 figures, and that was in 2010. but it's demanding: show up at 6am, haul things and hammer all day, crawl around in weird angles, and do it all in -5C or +35C.
both eventually tapped out after ~25-30 years. one ran the business in the office and the other just got a job in home depot. meanwhile I'll probably program until I can't sit upright -- could be coding in the retirement home, as long as me brain works.
I haven't but I believe that if it makes them better at their job they would be treated so. most plumbers are independent freelancers and for them that's a rock star way to live
> Have you ever seen plumbers being treated as rock stars?
There will always be a need for many people to do plumbing work. Can we say that about software engineering?
Many people worked on vanity/side projects of some corporations. And those jobs are gone, since there's not so much free money anymore.
I have compared AI to junior engineers a few times. Not in terms of treatment, but in terms of output quality. Is there a better analogy I should prefer? Or if my thinking is horribly wrong, I'd love a different perspective to think on.
They mean it as an analogy in the sense of digital plumbing.
True I understand that. Digital plumbing is not a lesser thing. It's part of the job. Software engineering is done better when being "pampered" regardless if it's plumbing or rocket science. If companies want to stop pampering then sit back and watch. Bad software will be noticed
And while some of the "pampering" is excessive, an awful lot of it is just "giving your valuable employees, the ones who actually do all the work that makes you money, a good place to work that's conducive to creative work and solid work-life balance."
Like...being bought the best equipment for the job they're doing? Making high-quality foods available on-site? Even something as simple as having great desk chairs, I can say from frustrating personal experience, can make a huge difference.
insert I'm The Captain Now meme
My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.
This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.
Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
This matches my experiences. I see a lot of side projects being dropped. I’ve been hired (as an external consultant / developer) to maintain some of these side projects while their core developers are either fired, let go, left or are put on their main projects.
It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah
Just give it 3-4 years. Many of these "side-projects" are powering quite a portion of the web and elsewhere. Software requires maintenance, bug fixing, updates, etc...
I am aware, I've been hired to maintain these things.
> Providing value to the company gets you rewarded
This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.
Consider what companies are launching these days and the talent they need to do it. It's AI companies, it's hardware, it's hard science. It's fewer Uber for pet grooming. There's less appetite for investing in the latter companies and _normal_ software developers are less useful for the former. Yes, ZIRP has contributed, but there are wider economic and social issues that are above my pay grade at play.
The safest space continues to be distributed systems and systems programming in general IMO. You'll still find work at hyperscalers. You'll still find work in the new spaces. Until AI can operate these systems, there'll be a spot for us bit janitors for a little while longer.
I'm an engineer at a large tech company. I am by all means considered a successful engineer. I am actively looking for a way to exit the field, and am assuming that in a few years my career options will be vastly diminished. I am worried about ageism, and can already feel it in my early 30s. Its certainly become more up or out
A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously. Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
> is struggling to find a job
It's always a struggle to land leadership or niche top-seniority gigs. It doesn't matter how awesome you are. They're not commodified swap-in staff roles, and there are not a lot of them, and your friend is probably looking for a quality organization too (or leaders in shabby ones won't touch this resume).
Your friend is just encountering the reality that there will be a search phase after the end of any high-seniority professional job, plan for it.
No from the 2010-2022 period, this wasnt the case. You could find a ton of very high paying roles, or atleast get interviews for them. There is a serious vibe shift. Also, 500k isnt that senior
You've defined the market as four companies (FAANG - 1) and roles representing <1% of their highest performers. Yes, they have roles and maybe even openings, but no reason to think there would be an immediate match for anyone but a superstar.
> 500k isnt that senior
> Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
The problem here is that the dollar has devalued so far to the point where it is close to worthless, especially with rising house prices across the country.
This is why $200k - $500k seems to be "not enough" in the US due to its cost of living and at the same time it isn't sustainable for Amazon or Google to pay at that rate.
Really, this the hallmarks of a crash that is waiting to happen and it was never going to last.
Yeah I think the dollar has been completely decimated. There is nowhere to hide, assets are no longer ripping, but cost of living is higher than ever. For a family that wants to be upper middle class, 500k really is not that much, if you want to save and live comfortably/go on vacations, drive a nice car.
>For a family that wants to be upper middle class, 500k really is not that much, if you want to save and live comfortably/go on vacations, drive a nice car.
That might be true for Bay Area. What about other states, Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska, Montana etc. ?
I am not from US, but I don't get why tech companies can only have offices in Bay Area.
You just need to get out of your bubble.
The median household income is $80K. Those people aren’t homeless and starving
Reality tells me that a crash is still waiting to happen.
My negative opinion based on experience working with the stereotype that fits your friend is they are only valuable in a massive company. 8/10 phd holders I have worked with couldn’t actually do hands on work. So where do people who just want to think, talk and write about work without being able to actually ship provide value on the order of $250/hr?
Yeah im not saying anything about value of work output, just the change in the market
They'll become lawyers, as the lord intended them to be.
I understand that going to 200k after your whole standard of living has been built around 500k is pretty difficult, but objectively speaking: half of America is living in metro areas right? Most of them are managing without making nearly three times the median income.
Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe? Here in the Netherlands (one of the wealthiest nations in the world) even just 100k is aspirational for most higher paid jobs.
People in the major cities practically live in their own society in America.
$200k is a huge amount of money in most of America based on geography.
In the major cities though it is not just the cost of living but the feeling of being wealthy is all relative to those around you. In the major cities there are people with huge amounts of wealth so $200k year is not going to feel wealthy at all. Of course, no one is actually just scraping by on white bread and ramen noodles making $200k unless they are terrible with money. More like you can only eat out X number of times a week instead of having a personal chef. The person making $200k also probably not much different in ability than the person with the personal chef and private jet so not only do you not feel wealthy but might even feel like you are getting shorted. Of course, if you did have the personal chef and private jet you would face the same problem but at a higher level.
This isnt really accurate. If you want to live in an upper middle class neighborhood, and save money, with kids, 200k is peanuts. Sorry, it is. Upper middle class needs both parents working at 200k, which itself is really a middle class existence.
What do you consider an “upper middle class lifestyle”. In 2020, I was living in the burbs of Atlanta in the good school system with a 3200 square foot house that I had built in 2016, one teenager in the house, three cars making less than $200K combined and we weren’t eating hot pockets everyday
> Also: is America just vastly more expensive than Europe?
Yes.
In my family I am under employed and my wife is an elementary teacher. Health insurance for us costs $800 every month. A car is required and so is the gas to drive it. We have two 7 year old Toyotas and insurance on them is $100 a month.
It’s a lot more overhead and risk mitigation compared to the better nations like yours that care for their people.
>for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
That is true in US. In Europe having a PhD and working for Google and Amazon never meant being payed huge sums.
This is why I have 10-12 years outgoings sitting in the bank.
I make way above market rates for my area currently, but I don't have to be worried about getting laid off.
And as my salary went up i made sure my life style didn't.
Tragic! Meanwhile those of us who do this because they "like tech" (read: it's the only thing I can or will do for a living) will continue to be happy scraping by on the insulting pay of.... (checks notes) $200k/year. You can't even afford to have your balls shaved and sucked every morning with that kind of pay! Even worse, how can you impress your wealthy parents, friends, friends' parents and romantic partners without a job that pays enough for the morning balls treatment? What's the point of getting a PhD when you have ball stubble? Dear lord, you might have to go find work in another field (adios vampire, you won't be missed here).
they could probably make more angel investing.
how so?
Honestly , I think people will misjudge me when I say this , but these reasons are the reason why I am frugal.
My economic condition can change drastically , it just depends on the market , how is your "friend" entitled to 150-200K ? Because of our "expectations" (Amazon , google are the best companies so "best" + phd , phd means you are in academia so more "smarter")
But our "expectations" are now changing , mine certainly changed , but instead of panicking (because lets be honest? whats the point of panicking?) We can try to be frugal. We can try to live in a way where my salary doesn't really matter that much , I can live off of any salary but the only difference b/w big salary and low salary might be the fact that your savings increase which you invest in things like index funds (boglehead investing) and the only difference it makes is on what age you can retire (thus , being a point on ageism)
I might also think that after a age , person can get a little less ambitious and more rigid , so more flexibility early on (in mid 30's) can be absolutely great but for that you need good saving habits / being frugal in your 20's.
I also believe that frugality is sometimes seen as not being ambitious or I live life only once and for that I have to say that I agree , I am frugal mostly because I have seen / just feel this tingle for spending money where my mind .
Of course , you don't have to be frugal over like a $ , but just changing your mindset & hobbies from being materialistic to non materialistic and being satisfied .
What I personally can't be is a frugal who constantly switches / worries about light bulbs / appliances just to save 2 cents or people who don't eat outdoor to save money (unless its in literally 5 star and I also believe that going to dine in full time also sucks , I just like to eat burgers , pizzas , chips etc. but some people can be really that level of frugal .
I just want to have a decent life reading good books with emergency funds and funds invested. I would try to maximize my income , but I wouldn't chase it as my ultimate goal , the ultimate number. I might earn less but if I am working on one of my passion ideas on some company , I am down.
The times for "resume driven development" are over, yes. And I'd argue that's a good thing - there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database" or whatnot, with hype chasers forcing developers to reinvent the wheel and make all sorts of basic errors that other mature tech has long since passed again.
Maybe the industry can now focus on making the hype tech of the last 20 years finally somewhat stable and secure again before the next boom-bust iteration hits...
None of that is happening. The hype is now around generative AI, a prototype tech whose main benefits to the end user are still largely speculative. (At least with the gig economy, consumers can get cheap rides and food deliveries. At least with social media, they could share cat videos.) I am dubious that the industry is any more interested in making hype AI any more stable or secure than they did prior waves of hype tech.
>there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database"
Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved? You can make money by developing a database that solves some problems, saving time and money for lots of people and companies. "Hot" doesn't make money, otherwise people posting here daily "I rewrote X in Rust" would be rich.
> Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved?
Unless you're building the next Facebook or other billion users scaled service, mysql or postgresql will be more than enough for everything, at least until you hit 100k-1M users. And by that point you have enough real-world experience to accurately judge your needs and if you need to roll your own stuff.
As for distributed data - RDS and a multi region database has that problem solved. Unless you're a real time bidding ad broker, your app can get away with a few milliseconds of replication latency.
> Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved?
What do you need it for? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. What I see is that this sort of thing is only needed when you are planning to have the next facebook/reddit/etc type of business.
I write line of business software for different SMEs, and I have not yet found a need for anything more than a beefy server/VPS.
Even companies with 100k employees each using the same piece of software does not need anything "distributed", if you're even a little careful with read-only replicas, some caching of state, etc.
You want to geolocate nearer to some users? For the reddit/facebook type of business, sure, good idea.
For the majority of software, why would you? That webapp functions only slightly degraded when used from the other side of the world.
Good article!
The only missing bit around COVID was that the cost of the economic policies which were implemented by governments caused an inevitable interest rate increase.
Sure, we can argue that the response to COVID was planned in a certain way on purpose and that powerful hands could have used another excuse to get to where we are now (just press more the pedal on government spending, illegal immigration, wars, green policies) - but that's what happened.
This probably means there's a competitive advantage to tackle non short term ambitious innovations which everyone else is cutting away as fat.
The article needs as much stronger premise. Employees being pampered and investment money flowing freely are not strictly connected.
Employees being pampered with high wages, benefits, and extra perks like free meals has everything to do with talent scarcity.
The only reason these extravagances are being cut is because tech employees aren't in the same level of demand. That may (or may not) change.
I think the article is mostly spot on. Software engineering got detached from business goals, then forced business goals to move its way in the easy money times. The advice to software engineers to focus on building what executives request instead of trying to tell executives what must be built is good.
The only thing I do not agree with is over focusing on ZIRP. Money pumping into the economy can have other forms and switched from monetary (bank lending) to fiscal (government printing) with quantitative easing strategies. Some beneficiaries changed, software is a step or two lower on that ladder, but we are still in the "plentiful money" state if you check world or your country M2 levels. And a lot of that money eventually pumps tech. The real sobering (when it is critical to be a key contributor to a profitable business or have an FU path thought through) starts when pumps inflating M2 stop. My 2c.
I've been aware of the ZIRP phenomenon and potential things that might happen when it ends since 2017. I prepared myself to slowly add more skills (finance, writing, management, etc). All this was while I continued to be a full-time dev.
The problem for me has been that nobody outside of myself is OK with me taking any other role, either within the company I work for, or as someone looking for a fresh new role. When I ask why, it's always been a variant of "oh, you're more valuable to us as an engineer".
Now with the advent of LLMs and bullshit experts talking about AI taking over everyone's roles, neither do people want me to remain an engineer (I quit in frustration a few months ago), nor do they want me to be anything else (even when I have skills directly relevant for other types of jobs). It's frustrating to keep on trying to switch when nobody's taking the bait.
This will not be popular, but I think the real problem with tech these days: too many software engineers.
Used to be just 40k comp sci graduates in the US per year, now it’s 150k plus and growing. Everyone wants tech money, but nobody wants to write all this damn code.
We have people in this industry who have no real love or passion for the engineering and the science, and soon they will become the majority. Vibe coders and prompt kiddies are not satire, they are a real thing. A lot of incoming graduates would not consider this field if it wasn’t for the money and remote work opportunities. They are not like the true enthusiasts who would still be doing this even if it didn’t pay well. We need to gatekeep harder. Crush people in interviews, make it damn near impossible to get in a company unless you really want it. Redirect people to other careers like finance or sales and marketing.
> [...] “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives
It’s not much of a mission statement! Certainly nothing on “making the world a better place”. But it has the comforting solidity of the truth. The good thing about the music finally stopping is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s going to stop.
An interesting side effect is that the tech industry is rapidly losing the "good guys" image it had in wider society for a long time (with a little help from Elon and friends, but certainly they aren't the only reason).
If both devs and users are realizing that the "make the world a better place" spiel had always been a marketing lie that was kept up as long as there was spare money for it, maybe we could now also start thinking how to really make the world a better place.
I believe this guy's analysis misses the point. My perspective is shaped by having navigated multiple market bubbles and three significant tech recessions – 2000, 2008, and 2022-2025.
The core issue, consistently, is the imbalance between supply and demand within the high-quality SWE talent pool. We witnessed hiring bubbles in 1999 and 2021 precisely because the demand for skilled SWEs far outstripped the available supply.
Essentially, major tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) appear to have miscalculated the sustained need for SWEs during the peak of the WFH trend. They subsequently found themselves with a surplus of talent relative to the number of compelling new projects.
A similar dynamic occurred during the dot-com boom, where companies aggressively pursued web developers. The perceived ROI, often reflected in inflated company valuations rather than immediate profits, justified each hire at the time.
The crucial question is the ROI of each incremental hire. If it remains strictly positive, robust hiring will follow. Currently, this condition is not met, particularly within large tech firms.
Looking ahead, a market equilibrium will eventually be reached. A sustained oversupply of new graduates entering the field will undoubtedly face employment challenges. Conversely, a decrease in the supply of qualified SWEs will likely lead to a stabilization, and potentially an increase, in their perceived value.
Notice how all the coasters at big tech companies are now being called in and with RTO policies? This is what we have here.
The "good times" where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a >$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over.
Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care.
These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash.
There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.
The presumption that RTO is driving the wave of 'we need to be profitable' is myopic. The article rightly attributes it to financial liquidity. RTO is more expensive for most companies than remote which is often overlooked.
Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related.
The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created.
The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days.
There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
>“Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives
If you are a software leader, work on discovering and filling customer needs. Filling those will boost both your success and the company's success.
Executives at most companies rarely do anything other than figure out how to get a bigger paycheck. They have no clue about, nor do they try to discover, customer needs; but they have and aggressively acquire a strong sense of their upchain's needs.
This means a software leader who does basic research on customer needs is the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind at most companies.
> After ten years of their opinion being consulted on big company decisions, they’re trying to hold on to that power.
I feel this one. I've been doing this for twenty years, and we get listened to the least now of any point in my career. Rather than what we build being a conversation about what's possible, we get told what to build and have to push back when the requirements are impossible.
The opportunity cost is just silly. So many times we could build something better than the requirements but it's not worth the effort to try to get it through the bureaucracy.
It makes sense that there was a flood of folks coming in as they saw that it look like the place to be if you wanted to be in the good times... then you layer in interest rates. Good Times Never Last Forever
Great article that summarizes a few important truths.
I'm hoping that some of the good news is:
* If you care about focusing on business success, and requirements descending from that, then you'll gradually have more company, and fewer people working against you.
* If your experience extends beyond the crazy Potemkin Village investment scam period of tech, or you otherwise have experience working business-focused, then hopefully that will soon be widely recognized as positive signal for hiring (as it used to be, and is, in many sane fields).
For me, delivering value is acquiring new skills which I can use to augment my existing skills. Beside backend development (my main skill) and frontend, I am trying to learn more devops/infrastructure, a bit of data engineering, more cloud specific functionality and some people management.
I think there is some value to be had in "jack of all trades, master of one" strategy. If I would be an employer, I would hire someone like me. :)
You forgot to mention outsourcing. Everyone always forgets massive outsourcing post-Covid.
Go to any tech company job site and youll see many of the engineering jobs are non US.
It may have been good times for software engineers, but arguably a lot of harm has been done to society thanks to disruption and blitz scaling culture
> throwing money at their software engineers (in the form of paid trips, in-house chefs, and huge comp packages)
That really was never that common, though, and reserved for a very small subset of programmers even where it did happen. I’ve been coding since 1992 and all the jobs I’ve had have been regular corporate type jobs, with a steadily (but not life changing) raising salary.
For those that need a translation....
1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining.
2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer...
In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.
So what JavaScript framework do I need to learn?
Been in the industry for 20 years. Things are always up and down.
Honestly I prefer the leaner times. Less clowns trying to cash in and more focus of engineering value, as it should be.
I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.
> I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.
Indeed. The proliferation of highly immature developer tools, web framework hype, entitlement and coasting is what we have been left with.
There needs to be a brutal crash to test them. "Vibe coding" is another example of the bullshit that has come out of another bubble waiting to collapse.
I feel like this observation only applies to a section of the industry (in America). I never worked in the Valley or the Bay, just slogging away out in the Midwest, and it has always been nose to the grindstone, always executive and bottom line -lead, and none of the latitude or pampering mentioned here.
Not sure if typo:
> Tech companies were thus incentivized to (a) hire like crazy, and (b) do a lot of low-risk high-reward things, even if that ends up wasting money.
"...HIGH-risk high-reward..." would make more sense in the context.
It's the economy, stupid.
The good times will continue as soon as money does the same.
COVID-19 pandemic led to a shortage of developers, which in turn drove up salaries, and companies are now trying to reverse this trend.
> I think a lot of software engineers right now are planting their feet and refusing to change.
That's not a good thing, in general, if you are in technology. We always need to be learning and moving forward. A lot of times, in my experience, it's extremely humbling, because I find out that what I know is no longer relevant. I'm 63, and still need to learn new stuff, every day.
I know that he's talking about culture, as opposed to knowledge, but I think they inform each other. If we allow ourselves to ossify in one context, it just moves over into the other.
I spent most of my career at a company that treated me like just another schlub. They were a hardware company, and I'm not sure if hardware engineers were ever treated like software engineers, so I am unfamiliar with free barista bars and tropical offsites. I was just another cubicle Dilbert.
I don't know if interest rates can explain everything. It isn't like start ups are being funded by taking loans out at the bank.
The actual path is more indirect.
Low interest rates primarily means low interest rates for the government, which the central bank implements by simply buying their national bonds at rates much lower than the rest of the world would tolerate. This sucks up the supply of low-risk low-reward debt that would normally attract a lot of investors. With that supply all bought up those investors are then forced into higher risk instruments like equities, which pushes up the value of stocks (not coincidentally, the kind of investment that Congress tend to have a lot of). High valued equity means greater rewards for startup investing, and so capital diverts there.
So it's all based on pushing investors around against their will, more or less.
Sure, I get that: when zero risk returns are low (or zero), investors must take on more risk.
I don't think this explains why the "good times are over" however. I think that is more related to supply / demand. Supply was low for a while as tech was seen as a dead-end in the early 0s due to outsourcing. In the mid 2010s the opposite was true - tech was seen as essentially the only viable career so lots of people went into it. Now we have the perfect storm of natural oversupply and the threat of AI.
I think the situation will eventually reverse but it will take quite a while.
They are. The wealthy take low interest loans out on their assets to invest in more assets
I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve the other four, even if they don't have much to do day to day.
In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies.
This allowed "free" side projects and cool stuff, too.
But as always, it's time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we're past the maxima.
>I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve
Is there an actual reputable source that says this? For me I've only seen it asserted without evidence in comment sections.
It's been a while. I need to dig my history. If I can find the link, and it's alive, I'll link it here.
PSA: It looks like more-comments-than-upvotes tends to make posts fall off the front page. If this is true, then, if you think the TFA and/or comments are important, then upvote the post first. (Don't just comment, and then forget to upvote.)
so weird to see people blogging about how great tech has been throughout their whole career because they weren't yet working in 2008 or 2000
Yeah 2008 was much worse than today, effecting all sectors and all industries, especially anything related to the real estate industrial complex.
In my opinion, things in software engineering are stagnant right now. No doubt there was a significant downturn in 2023-2024. At least at the moment no one really seems to be hiring.
I was working through those times and share that sentiment. 2000 was apparently bad for Silicon Valley in particular, but, being outside of that, I don't remember any noticeable effects. 2008 was the App Store gold rush. That was quite possibly the best time in tech I have seen despite what was going on the non-tech economy.
This seems silicon valley based. To me the real good times everywhere else ended in the early 90s.
Times are tough now but still, I hope we never have to go back to a 0% interest environment. It was a nightmare. It only created the illusion of abundance and opportunities but in reality only pure speculation was rewarded. I'm exhausted from running on that hamster wheel. I'd rather do something really difficult and really struggle but at least get somewhere eventually, little by little... Rather than the endless cycles of false hope and disappointment of the past decade. It's like having a carrot always dangling right in front of your face. Success always appears very close but in reality, it'd be easier to just go straight for a different carrot perched atop mount everest.
Good riddance. I for one look forward to real technology becoming valued again, not digital rent seeking.
Let’s build something useful and amazing that elevates the human experience, rather than sucking the last drop of dopamine out of consumers.
Nonsense, programming still pays amazing salaries for the work. I earn almost as much as an MP, and I have 1000th of the responsibility.
The job market also seems to be totally fine if you're experienced, based on the amount of LinkedIn recruiter messages I get.
none of the newer kids or managment now care about actual software engineering, unit testing or any such stuff.
In many ways it's the same as it ever was.
If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today.
When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation.
This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed.
If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches.
> The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing.
I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era.
Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken.
My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.
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