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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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%".
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 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.
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.
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!”
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
>“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.
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.
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.
> [...] “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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I like to play both sides: I solve the problem I create. :)
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.
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%".
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.
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".
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Damn, I was in middle school when Y2K happened so did I join the tech industry in free fall in 2012?
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.
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.
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...
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.
>“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.
This probably means there's a competitive advantage to tackle non short term ambitious innovations which everyone else is cutting away as fat.
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.
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.
> [...] “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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
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
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.
So what JavaScript framework do I need to learn?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
This seems silicon valley based. To me the real good times everywhere else ended in the early 90s.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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