In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home.

Sure, things felt a bit crazy, but I remember thinking how lucky I was to land in tech as a career and that it was hard to see a future any time soon where the world wouldn't value tech workers highly.

Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have.

We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years and now we see this dramatic turnaround in hiring which will likely make it significantly harder to get a good tech job in the near future.

And in addition to this we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months.

It doesn't help that I'm going through a lot in my personal life at the moment too, but I've never felt so vulnerable about what the future holds.

I guess I should just be grateful that we had a good run while it lasted, but it's hard to think like that when people depend on you to have things figured out.

Anyway, I hope everyone involved in these layoffs lands on their feet.

The good news is that what came after that contraction was a huge wave of innovation that became known as Web 2.0. Most of the unicorns you're familiar with today came out of that period. Keep your chin up and you'll see.

When you pull up the financials for many newly IPO'd companies you'll see that many of them have questionable ability to ever generate profit, and most certainly not at the size they are at. However all of them have pretty healthy cash reserves from the (obviously overvalued) IPOs they just went through.

Facebook/Meta was the poster-child for "don't worry about profit, just worry about growth!" For years it was assumed that Facebook proved this strategy made sense, but even today we're seeing this giant falter. Even if Facebook pulls it off, it doesn't mean that many of the "growth is all that matters!" startups following in its shadow will.

We'll see companies fail, but this bubble will take a lot longer to unwind than the dotcom bubble.

I think Uber might be a better example of the strategy you're referring to.

So far this is nothing like that from what I can tell. People are taking longer to land positions and at least some of the highest compensation will be very hard to come by, but there seem to be lots of positions. They may just be in insurance companies rather than prestigious tech companies.

In my case, I had worked for a computer company as a product manager (with some coding on the side) and then an IT industry analyst--and there was very little in that vein.

I also did a little HTML/JavaScript and Perl.

I graduated in 1996 and while I did take classes in FORTRAN and COBOL, I also took a class in C.

I learned C++, Microsoft technologies (MFC, COM, etc$ VB6 and SQL on the job as well as HTML, JavaScript and Perl from the O’Reilly series of books by 2000.

It's absolutely not true that getting a job in tech, in general, wasn't a big deal in the early 2000s.

>Back then...

Oh wait...

So, no, in general terms there were no easy money then compared to today (or the years up to today).

But sure, a lot of the money that was around at that time went into IT/dotcom companies instead of into other sectors.

about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100 (thats maybe 1 in 1000 cvs)

> Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have.

how long you have to do what? to learn? to make money? you will find a way to make money, i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine, some times you have to steal some bread, but its not the end of the world, and you have a life time to learn.

just don't stress too much, tech has ebbs and flows, your job does not define you.

It seemed fairly obvious from the GP: How long they have before they get laid-off and struggle to find employment in the technology industry.

> i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine

I've lived on $0 a day, seeing as I've literally been homeless and dead broke in my life, but today I have a demanding career, a spouse, children, dogs, a home, etc., and all of them are massively dependent on me.

I don't think I'm personally at-risk of losing my job today but, like the GP, I also have to regularly engage with my brain to keep my anxiety about the future of the technology industry at bay.

edit/ And that's just me, I'm a US citizen and CBP can't come deport me because my Visa expired. There are other things at stake here for a lot of people beyond the simple act of earning an income.

Having six months of outflows liquid in a special savings account goes a long way for peace of mind.

This is an unreasonable fear. If your job can be automated, you should be out of work. If you are delivering actual value, you will always have opportunities.

Someone is still going to be doing the automating. Computers can't think.

Many people can relate to that.

On a more serious note, there is not much we can do about all this, really. We neither have the complete picture nor know what hides behind the corner. So relaxing a bit (while still taking the time to learn some new skills...) is not bad advice.

> Amazon is undergoing the largest layoffs in company history after it went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Why would a company entertain demands of Spoiled Tech Dudes Union, whose work can be performed by people overseas equipped with ChatGPT for a fraction of cost?

This could be not too distant the future, if IT workers decide to unionize

This isn't to suggest there's no other factors, but monetary policy is a major driving force in the boom/bust cycle.

Here in the UK the unions are medium-strong and haven't prevented self checkouts, ticket sellers being replaced with machines, etc.

What you need is strong labor laws. A universal three or six month notice period in favour of the employee would do wonders to prevent overhiring and overfiring.

Future benefits of technology will primarily be enjoyed by the 1% with the other 99% becoming poorer and working (hours wise) more.

The history of technology & capitalism is quite the reverse.

A few years back, a steamboat from the 1850s was discovered buried in the muck in the Missisoupi. Archeologists rushed to dig it up and discover what it was carrying. They had the same notion you did. They were shocked that the steamboat was not carrying luxury items at all. It was loaded to the gills with manufactured stuff for ordinary folks. Things like factory made shoes, textiles, tools, pots, pans, dishes, bottled food, nails, hardware, etc.

You see the same thing today with, for example, the iphone. That machine was made for everyone, not just the 1%. And it made Apple the richest company in the world.

Look at what wealthy tech companies make - they make stuff for ordinary people.

Umm, what?

The iPhone is meant to be a status symbol, not "for everyone".

The next generation will have a lower quality of life than ours. They will have less wealth, they will work more, they will experience less.

Just looking back to 2003 compared to now and there’s so much more information and opportunity compared to 20 years ago. It’s not uniform and there are certainly some parts worse (housing) but I think that just the example of smart phones shows a huge leap of businesses and life improvements available now. I expect improvements to be available 20 years from now.

For who? Real wages have been falling for decades. 'Quality of life' is amorphous. Do we have a higher quality of life than people did 20 years ago? We're fatter, we have less wealth, we spend more time commuting, it's basically impossible to buy a house for most people.

I'd disagree with your assessment that we are better off than we were in 2003.

Somebody gets to pay for this:

https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...

and it's gonna be you and me.

I think it’s a transitional economic force though. Like it works for getting super poor, super inefficient systems up to moderate and then starts scooping up and concentrating.

I feel like being able to complain about capitalism is a luxury created by capitalism and people who are too poor complain about other things (like starving to death). Similarly to the shift from dying from infectious disease to dying from chronic disease due to eliminating or reducing preventable disease. It’s not that vaccines cause cancer and diabetes, it’s that vaccines stop people dying earlier of vaccine preventable diseases.

I appreciate that capitalism has been better than any of its competitors in every case to date in raising living standards. There's no question.

But I still think it isn't equipped to handle automation and AI on a very large scale. If I'm right it'll become painfully obvious as soon as something approaching or close-enough to AGI appears. And the trajectory we're on seems to make that appear to be something we'll see in the 2020s rather than the 2100s or beyond as I previously thought.

If by 2029 90% of the knowledge work humans do today can be done more cheaply by a LLM, that's a tremendous shock to the system. Especially if they'll be able to start to write code efficiently and create new AI models to solve problems, we could rapidly see easier problems like self-driving cars solved in a few years. Which leaves as available human jobs "politician" (presumably robots are banned from holding office) as well as any forms of skilled and unskilled manual labor that require walking around. If computer vision etc become good enough it's not hard to conceive of a bipedal android that can do tasks like build houses, deliver packages from a truck, etc.

In this situation, the vast majority of Americans would not have "jobs" in that no business wants their labor when a machine is cheaper and better. Capitalism dictates that those 90% starve. See the problem?

Note: I'm not saying the above will come true. Just that if the technology part does come through, I'm arguing capitalism as-is simply will not work anymore. And the breakdown would hurt everyone. The wealthy won't have any consumers to sell to when all consumers are unemployed.

Capitalism works imho because of scarcity. When 'labor' isn't really scarce anymore due to AI, that is a fundamental change that is bound to totally transform the game. It's like playing Mario Bros with gravity turned to 10000% so you can't jump. The game controls and level design then no longer make sense.

I'd encourage you to read up more on current affairs! Capitalism is global. How happy do you think impoverished people in Vietnam are? How about people exposed to toxic chemicals for their entire lives?

Your understanding of capitalism is based on a 50 year blip. You should read up on your history.

Capitalism is not why they are exposed to toxic chemicals as you say. It's the corruption...which won't be solved if we are using some other system.

I lived in Vietnam for a couple of years, very recently. I could drive around with no license and pay police officers some cash if I got caught. Sometimes they would shake people down when they were low on money, especially around Chinese new year. This was also in a big city.

I also wonder what your alternative would be? Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit. Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).

It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.

It's not corruption. It's capitalism. Who do you think funds the corruption in Vietnam? Don't look to closely at Nike or Apple's connections in SE Asia.

Vietnam was just an example. Capitalism firms expose billions of people all over the world to unsafe conditions to maximize profit, even in the United States and Europe.

> Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit.

Your post reads like every conservative in existance. It's not capitalism's fault! It's just everything that exists in a capitalist system!

>Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).

I'm not sure why you are rambling about communism or socialism. You understand that there are a lot of economic and societal theories in the world. You don't have to buy into binary narratives.

>It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.

It's funny how many privileged people refuse to acknowledge the huge amount of human suffering caused by capitalism.

If you look at Vietnam before capitalism and after. It's a big difference. But I don't think you care about this.

Why do you think children have to work in these countries? If not for companies like Nike, they would have nothing and no ability to feed their family because of the government in power.

You are the privileged one. Not understanding actual human suffering.

All systems contain human suffering. Capitalism allows for actual freedom.

You still haven't given me an example of a better system.

Fun fact: "The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")" [0]

Both Blanc and Proudhon were socialists.

Further more, I would argue that kindness and sexual intercourse have been responsible for more human happiness than our current economic system, although it's possible that by "everything else" you meant "any other economic system", in which case maybe you would have a point, with the caveat that perhaps more primitive economies (your stereotypical 'merry band of hunter gatherers') would have, on average, healthier and happier inhabitants.

Or that 'socialist' Danes tend to be much happier than 'capitalist' Americans.

Or that with the regulatory capture of most industries by big company lobbying, our current economic system would more correctly be described as corporatism, where the means of production are owned not by individuals but by corporations.

And you could also argue that the North Korea/USSR were less happy than Western countries due to democratic, liberal governments being nicer than authoritarian ones.

^_^

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

Tech workers are the most privileged class of workers in the whole world. No one will take you seriously when you say these things. Also the metaphor doesn’t make sense. I wish we could keep this Reddit style, front page politics off our tech website.

Which is why it only takes a layoff or threat of layoff for many of them to feel like the world is ending. Not to minimize the impact that a layoff can have on someone.

HN is not just a "tech website". Never has been. You seem to not understand what hacker means.

I learned this because it almost happened to me. I learned about it after a lot of phone calls to the insurance company piecing together this rarely talked about possibility.

Generally if you want gov assistance in the US, you pretty much need to be poor for a full calendar year, plus about 4 months.

Also, in CA, you can make an "urgent" application and be enrolled within 2 days. I requires some pressing medical problem, but that doesn't have to be life or death.

It's really not. Also no asset test so you can have a nice house and $100,000 and you still qualify as if you were utterly broke.

i know you're exaggerating but it doesn't change that dev is extremely saturated.

and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.

ask someone how 'typing in a textarea in hackernews' works, and you will be surprised (just an example because thats what i am doing right now haha)

> and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.

of course, who said its going to be easy, my point was, it will be bad for a bit, then good for a bit and so on, it just happens that the youngsters now have only seen the good bit, and are freaking out because they think their job is who they are.

I had this vision when I got into computers that I'd be working with a lot of people who like and regularly use computers. No. I work with a bunch of people that heard computers were a good gig that paid well and got a degree that makes them useful in one very very specific area or at least seem useful in that area while they frustrate everyone around them until we get the email about how great it's been "accomplishing so much with" us but they've accepted a management role somewhere else.

There are some solid folks out there, but the ratio is indeed bad.

I've known maybe a dozen engineers who could describe the entire boot sequence all the way to the server being ready to receive a request, at a level where they could debug each stage and independently fill in the gaps. Same for the "enter text in hackernews textbox" or any of the other widely known full stack tasks.

I could tell you how I might build one of those but I'll inevitably be missing some associated detail.

I got a new position about 9 months ago, at a company that's not taking the current economic environment with much grace. Over the past 9 months the workplace has changed pretty drastically from what originally drew me here, so I'm looking for something new. (Which pains me, because I generally do not "job hop" like this, but most jobs also don't bait-and-switch like this)

I've gotten zero replies so far. There's a striking lack of "interesting" jobs to do on the market right now, and I'm shocked at the lack of interest I'm getting when I find them given my skillet, if I may be so bold. I think it's just a REALLY bad market out there.

To be fair, a lot of this may be due to lack of organizational knowledge transfer. I might be able to map a network drive at home, but I'd need someone to tell me what the location and stuff is if it's a pretty-existing drive at work.

But then again, maybe I'm one of the shitty developers you're talking about. I know I'm a low performer.

Windows, Linux, macOS? NFS, Samba, etc…? Simple folder share or are there AD credentials involved. We haven’t touched on what’s available in the cloud like efs.

There is so much now, that’s it’s hard to know it all. What they should be able to do is have some idea on what to google for.

How does it work (or rather, what answer are you expecting from this question, from an interviewer standpoint)? I'd say something like, your keyboard sends an input event for each key that's captured by the OS, then translated to a letter, then transmitted to the application, in this case the browser. Or I guess the browser might also capture the key event and translate it itself rather than the letter (which would be how key rebindings work in online IDEs).

I've honestly interviewed developer candidates that didn't know what an operating system was. I asked this person what their favorite OS was and they answered "MS Excel". I politely asked them if that was an operating system and they declined to change their answer. Sure, at some point you might consider Excel an "OS" but I don't think they were thinking that deeply. Yes, the pool is that shallow, or at least it was back in the late 90's.

It is wonderful that we now live in a world of highly portable development where you don’t need to get into the nitty gritty to do basic things, but you’re missing out too much detail here.

You know when you write a web app, when you start it, you need to bind to a port? Guess what provides that port? What does it mean to “provide a port”? How does it physically work? How does this differ on Linux vs BSD vs Windows? Are there reasons you should care?

You know when you write a mobile app you need to use public apis to do things like draw to the screen or get user input? Guess what provides those apis? How do these APIs differ from OS to OS? What’s missing that you always reach for? How does local storage work? Or a remote API call work?

And then arguably the internet itself - and I mean it in the sense of the RFCs that define the behaviour - is an OS in itself. When you type something into your browser location bar and hit enter you start a chain of processes that involve DNS resolvers, root servers and registries, multiple routing algorithms (at different levels of the stack from Ethernet or wifi up to BGP), get invoked as your packets try to find their way to their destination, and the replies try to move their way back. Way, way below the HTML and CSS is this monster of dependencies. How does all that work? Why is it built that way? What are the failure modes and can you mitigate them?

These questions are rhetorical but they are meant to provoke a little nudge of curiosity: there is a rich, deep vein of thought that has gone into every corner of that experience, and knowing a little more about it will allow you to develop better software higher up the stack.

And honestly, even though I have worked mostly in the web app sphere for 20 years, if somebody just hand waves it all away in an interview, I know there is a lot of training we will need to do to get them to a level where they can successfully debug 100% of the issues we will see in production (and therefore reduce the chances of me getting paged).

It’s not a red flag, but if somebody walks in just as good everywhere else and is locked and loaded on this, I’m inclined to hiring them instead.

It would take a curious person a few weeks at a couple of hours a day to learn enough about this stuff to be able to talk to it and apply that knowledge. Meeting candidates who have never even thought about it is frustrating.

I have also never had an interviewer seem to want that level of detail. It probably depends on the job and the interviewer.

I am a little skeptical that there is a large enough pool of people out there who can meaningfully compare Linux vs a closed source OS like Windows, other than maybe current or former Microsoft employees. But I agree with your overall point that comparative knowledge is good.

I still struggle to find an accurate and complete single sentence definition, for if I were asked "what is an OS" in an interview though. Maybe I am being too pedantic and the best answer is just to start listing the parts or functions of an OS.

I'm seeing mid-level backend devs making 350k who e.g. don't know what SQL indexes are. These people are going to get cut, I'm a lot less worried for people who know what they're doing.

Yo where is this? I am not making anywhere near that and am pretty confident in those kind of skills.

It's not, 100's "applied" on LinkedIn's job ad mean nothing when the most applicants can't even explain a for loop.

Maybe big tech / FAANG, but not at all the other companies that still struggle to fill positions. I can find front end people with some work, native mobile is impossible, backend is hit and miss.

That's what worries me. There was a time when I could write low level C and even some assembly. Similarly there was a time when I could explain the ins and outs of IP packets and routing. However, none of that is what the market wanted and I don't remember any of that anymore.

Heck, with most of my work involving running around trying to hold understaffed systems together and juggle the unreasonable demands of management; I don't even have the programming/web development skills that I used to.

This is very reminiscent of the dotcom bubble. If you knew how to turn a computer on you could get a relatively high paying tech job.

The quality of tech talent has dropped significantly in recent years, even (maybe especially?) among the leetcode grinding crowd. Software engineers have already replaced themselves with AI by turning into interviewing machines that know how to survive in a large tech company but if asked to build and ship a product from nothing would be completely frozen.

I really miss programming in the post-dotcom shadow. Most people in tech where in it because they loved writing code and solving hard technical problems. TC was literally not a term at that point, virtually nobody had RSUs, comp was fine but nothing amazing. There were plenty of jobs that paid better than writing software so all the people looking for a quick buck fled there and left coders alone.

Fizzbuzz basically just tests you know how to use a conditional, do division/mod, and print to console.

I'd argue someone who cannot do those three things has no business applying for a dev job, regardless of how many times one actually needs to fizzbuzz in 'the real world.'

No, fizzbuzz test rote learning and it mainly serves to game the hiring system.

It weeds out people who can't write code at all.

Yes, tons of them do apply for dev jobs.

Wrong. Fizzbuzz is the epitome of a hiring test that is gamed by rote learning and adds absolutely nothing in terms of decisive info on wether s candidate is competent or not.

Your argument is like arguing in favour of using hello word in as many languages as possible and then claim that there is no need to memorize them because that's the point of the question.

The concept of FizzBuzz? If you are a programmer you should be able to write a simple program with arithmetic and string manipulation. There's no reason an interviewer needs to ask exactly the FizzBuzz - but just something a bit like it. Asking the exact question from the blog is pretty lazy anyway.

For the love of god, please Google what fizzbuzz is.

People who need to memorize a solution to that have no business coding.

Yes, please do google what fizzbuzz is. You'll eventually stumble upon resources on how to memorize fizzbuzz, which is such a Hallmark of the test that it's even explicitly mentioned in the C2 wiki on fizzbuzz.

Its so far from anything useful I've done.

By now surely there's a Python module for it anyway!

Either you're really, really crappy at filtering resumes and other pre-interview signalling - or you're exaggerating.

For some, it's the boot sequence of a PC. For others, it's the Liskov Substitution Principle. For others, it might precise definitions of all the database transaction or normalization levels.

That is - pieces of genuinely useful knowledge, to be sure. Stuff we probably should have been exposed to at least once. But also stuff that, once we've gotten the basic point - is easy to slip out of our muscle memory over the years.

Especially as we end up doing, you know, real work for real people. And we start to develop genuine technical horse sense that goes beyond the ability to memorize (and retain for years and years) zillions of verbal definitions for things.

No doubt they exist - but they aren't 99 percent of all resume-screened applicants. Let alone co-workers.

Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck.

Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig.

The vast majority of over-hiring was with engineering-adjacent roles, think project managers, recruiters, hr, etc.

I had multiple job openings for my team throughout the pandemic and I dont think that people who are not constantly exposed to the hiring side really understand how wonky things were.

You had this confluence of both whole sectors of the economy completely shutting down and tech experiencing a big boom. This caused A LOT of people to try to make a transition to tech.

I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc.

Most of these people are not going to make it in the industry long term (assuming they ever even got the first job). I wasn't around during the dotcom boom but I read stories about people landing six figure jobs because they learned HTML. Landing a 6 figure job by going to a 6 month React bootcamp is the modern day equivalent of that. Most of the 1999 HTML guys are no longer around. The bubble popped, the tech jobs were less plentiful and they moved on. I suspect the same will be true for most of the JS bootcampers.

It's almost as if you couldn't seriously be hired at a law firm after a 90 day Law bootcamp. Shocking.

I'm just angry at the people who run these bootcamps and lure "students" into cutting them big checks, promising them 70-80K jobs that never materialize.

> I had a job listing for a Senior Dev. I was completely inundated with resumes from recent bootcamp grads. No indication that they had any experience whatsoever or that they even knew what a variable was prior to the start of their bootcamp 6 months ago. I got resumes from people who were waiters, mechanics, construction workers, fast food workers, etc.

That was for dev jobs. Imagine all the "tech adjacent" jobs out there (PM, tech recruiters, something something diversity). The signal to noise ratio during the pandemic was catastrophically bad. No wonder there are so many layoffs happening right now.

Why aren't there any entry level positions? We don't need any, we have 100M people with degrees everyone else in the world banging down the door to work here, so there's no incentive for corporations to train junior developers.

Engineers doing their work in 2 days and being blocked for the next 5?

Example scenario: hand off a task, describe it fully, ask it be prioritised. Let me know how it goes, please raise any issues. Come back a week later to check in: employee hit minor obstacle, couldn't proceed, waiting on X or Y to do Z, almost nothing has progressed. No communication to me. Instead: spent time refactoring favorite library to do C which was not asked for and now is going to land on me to do code review before it can merge.

It's a low responsibility culture that many staff have and yeah - I can invest a lot of time and effort nannying these people or I can put even more effort into culture shift. But boy it is easier if you just don't have these people in the team to begin with.

A trend of "everyone's constantly waiting on <blank>" should trigger the manager to think "if we could make <blank> not a bottle neck, we could raise our sprint utilization factor by x%" and thus set prioritization accordingly. Engineers still have to figure out how to do that.

The engineers need to surface information about where their processes suck, but they need prioritization to implement fixes

They'd be furious and would be raising hell about it. Very few people want to just warm their seats, especially engineers. They want to do things.

I have a hard time believing that most of the affected engineers haven't raised the problem to management.

I have literally never seen this happen at any place I've worked. I think I must be doing it wrong!

that hasn't changed, and has nothing to do with layoffs. projects move at whatever speed they move at, and fires will pop up to steal the attention of others.

I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation.

If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options:

- Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars.

- Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager.

- Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it.

And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain.

There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.

Keep in mind that If I want to hire:

A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR

A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0]

my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone?

Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).

[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...

The legitimate users of the H1B program are really looking for specialized skills and hard-to-find talent. Especially for software, it's not even cheaper to hire qualified candidates from abroad...

Nor are they on the same timezones.

Nor are they comparatively cheap to fly out, if needed.

There is a big reason why offshoring has been tilting more and more to Mexico City... or Alabama.

I think when people are planning for the future, they need to be realistic about what actually may happen rather than hoping for their preferred ideological outcome to happen. Don't write yourself off from ever getting a job, but at the same time understand that the job market of the medium term future will probably look radically different from the job market of the past. Very little of it will have anything to do with location. In fact, most jobs will probably be in the same places they've always been, it's just likely you won't get paid as much to do them. There will be more people vying for them. And they won't be quite as secure as they used to be.

I keep seeing folks say this but I don't know if it is true. I just looked at some layoff lists from Twitter on layoffs.fyi and the vast majority looked to be Software Engineers of some shape or form.

Layoffs in the companies I personally know about have affected software engineers but have massively affected back-office staff and other business functions.

I never got any FAANG interviews until I'd had a developer job for a couple years. I got to a final round at Facebook, but didn't get hired there.

Still doing ok at that first job, though.

And yes, I agree, I am happy that I am not hitting the job market out of a bootcamp today.

This is me. But I had at least one round of phone interviews with about 40 companies before I landed one. Maybe I'm bad at interviewing. A couple of places put me through ~8 hours of interviews all for nothing. I will also add that 3-4 of the places I interviewed with have since had a chunk of layoffs right up to discussions here about them. Maybe I actually got lucky? It sure didn't feel like it after that many failures in a row. Luckily I landed a new role that I'm finding I like.

I wouldn't worry too much if I were you. Worst case scenario you can spend time intensively prepping for interviews. :shrug:

It does seem to be the common factor. Then again the industrialized interview processes some companies (some of which have since had bulk layoffs) suggests another possibility.

I hate having to develop interviewing as a skill. I'd rather develop my development skills.

Just wait till you get grey hair!

Sometimes they're less sure of their plans than an interviewee might think.

There were anecdotes like this (and worse) even during the supposed hiring boom of 2021-2022. It was never a walk in the park as the prevailing narrative seems to portray.

The other thing to keep in mind is that tech has attracted a lot of people in it just for the crazy money that FAANGs pay, despite that not being representative of the industry as a whole. Regardless, as that crazy money exits there will be less of those people.

At the end of the day worry without preparation is pointless. I don't think it's a tech apocalypse, but I also work for a company that was formed in the wake of the dotcom crash. Crashes can cause problems for incumbents, but it also provides opportunity for others.

I think a lot of the industry shake up will be to clear house of these people. At big tech companies it’s easier to hide, especially remotely, but slowly layoffs or PIP will come for some of them, and they will have a harder time getting a job than the rest. I just hope the layoffs can affect the management layer like the IC later, because I’ve seen the growth of pretty crappy management.

I was recently laid off, and I know a few other people laid off. I have years of doing projects and contributing to OSS and being a technically curious learner. I found a new job much faster than my peers who admittedly joined tech for the money and don’t care to learn or grow beyond their next pay raise.

I will echo the preparation thing though. I started saving an extra few months of salary across 2022, and tried to convince my partner to lower spending for a while.

"Why do you want to work here?"

Because money rocks, my dude. I'll give a nice politic answer in an interview, but I'm there to do a job.

I care about my income, pick good jobs and negotiate my salary. I also care about technology, and care about the quality of the product I work on. I don't care about "family" or whatever.

If you're in tech for the money, and the money dries up, you'll leave. That was my point. I personally work in tech because I enjoy technology and I enjoy software development (the money helps). I don't think ill of someone who is in it for the money, money is important. That said, if you're in it for the money, and you're not in-tune with the industry (or trying), I won't shed a tear if you have trouble staying in it during a down-cycle.

I do think ill of managers who are in it just for the money and don't care about anything beyond their middle-management fiefdom. I've worked with plenty of them, and I enjoyed working with none of them, and I think they've all had a bad affect on the success of the business (especially at scale).

However, for many people who are only in it for the money and do the minimum necessary additional exploration in the domain - if they find that they need to switch technologies or domains they may not have practiced enough to be able to make that switch in a timely manner.

On the other hand, people who continue to explore outside of the "this is what is needed to do my job" will be more likely able to adapt to a new stack or show to a interview panel that they are able to change to fit the needs of the organization.

If you're worried about ChatGPT taking your job you weren't doing much. We're still going to need humans to find the horrible bugs in codebases caused by humans copypasting ChatGPT output into production code. You need to become an actual expert in something. Pick a system that is critical to your employer and get good at it.

Harsh, but it has to be said! Too many devs are focused on code rather than the business it serves.

Many people who choose full-time work for corporations would not have an experience any differenr whether they worked in Soviet Russia or USA or Feudal Japan. These corporations (especially in Japan) are intertwined with our lives and even sense of self-worth. In Japan they coordinate with your landlord. Here they are who gives you health insurance etc.

If we had strong safety nets, none of this mentality would be an issue. You’d be jumping for joy that a project or warehouse has been automated and you don’t have to be a cog in a machine or warehouse wage slave.

That’s if we had UBI and Universal Health Insurance too. People would work on projects because they want to, whether that is art, science, open source, wikipedia or other gift economies. At the end of the day, that’s where DALL-E, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot get their content to ape from. It’s our collective work product! We humans have given it away online for these companies to scrape and build models from.

Be proud. Stop demanding a living wage and health insurance from a corporation and start demanding a Universal Health Insurance and a UBI in your community. We have to start valuing stuff the market doesn’t.. raising children instead of government schools, taking care of our own parents instead of nursing homes. Look around … if you and your partner are working 10 hour days just to make ends meet, the problem isn’t robots taking your job. It’s society not truly valuing human beings authentically living their lives!

The real problem right now is not the layoffs. The layoffs are needed, because many companies cannot reasonably justify their headcount, and it's destructive to a culture to have so many new people join so fast. If you've worked at the same company since 2021 you might have more tenure than half your coworkers!

The real problem is the hiring freezes. These especially impact new grads, but also experienced people will have trouble finding jobs simply because few companies are actively hiring. If you get laid off from a FAANG you might be able to find a startup job paying ~1/4 to 1/2 of your previous total comp. Might as well just not work for a year. Businesses overhired so much they need to shed more employees before they can even backfill or grow teams that work on things that make sense.

This happened in 2001 too, but the big difference between now and then is we aren't seeing a lot of tech companies completely fail and go out of business.

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-i...

I would consider moving to Germany before considering the UK. I certainly wouldn't ever move to the US.

The only place you mentioned I would rank above Germany is Switzerland.

regarding the rest - with german pay you wont have money to travel across Europe. your best bet will be "backbacker" style travel on budget - which is hard to do with kids.

and dont get me at the quality of their daycares....

And Germans have plenty of money (and vacation days) to travel across Europe, in fact you will encounter them pretty much everywhere.

The quality of care in German daycare centers is still not great despite recent improvements, I'll give you that.

Unlike in the USA, these people in Germany don't get their insane voices boosted by the ballot box equivalent of Affirmative Action (aka the Senate and Electoral College). Their views have remained far from the PM's office.

They even will accept english if you're a good developer as lingua franca instead of german. YMMV

I felt the opposite:

I have no idea how anyone could look at the tech craziness for the past 3-4 years, especially after COVID, and think any of it was sustainable. But I've also lived through a couple of these economic cycles...

Things like remote work, many people absolutely loved it, and it changed how people can work and hire. It had far-reaching affects, and many thought it'd last. Not everyone was convinced, of course, but we had proven it works for at least some conditions. As Facebook recently announced, it may not work as well, but for many organizations, the savings is better than the decrease in productivity.

Regarding a lot of the crazy tech-industry changes like salaries, employment demand etc, yeah I totally didn't think it'd last either. Same with the affects of 0% interest rates (not that I really invested any differently).

> we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months.

I am of a realistic nature that in today's craze over anything people tend to call pessimistic. However, some of the code generation examples we've seen are truly astonishing, but a far cry from replacing anyone in the real world. Best case scenarios it would save you minutes.

> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years

You're being very generous with the word "talent" there. Things have been a bit crazy and all, but from anecdotal evidence the large influx of new developers has done what large influx always do and lowered the bar.

I've literally been asked in two different companies who boast about their standards being high to "leave aside my ideals" and have "realistic expectations", while the only thing changing in the set {expectations, hiring goals} being the latter. "we need to hire very good people very fast" while not changing anything about the process and sourcing has to make you forgo one of these two. It's physical, people don't get instantiated out of thin air.

So I think it may be harder on average to find a job in software for a while, mostly because of the direction of the job market, but it will be harder for people with less experience, and those who can do something else in which they have experience will also be incentivized to do so.

Google, Amazon, Salesforce, etc. all have reported very healthy quarterly earnings and year-end results. Yet their actions are those of failing companies operating in the red for multiple quarters.

Every company is giving the same excuses --ahem, I mean reasons-- ("overhiring", "economic downturn"), laying off the same amount of people, and making their announcements within days of each other.

Have we ever seen such an industry-coordinated event like this? Especially with no public data supporting their actions?

The real reasons many believe for these layoffs amount to taking back the power & control that employees gained in 2020 until early 2022:

1. Salary correction: Compensation boomed, with major tech companies offering new grads and junior engineers job offers high than employees 2 levels higher. Has there ever been a time that employee pay raised so quickly?

2. Corporate control: Leadership wanted everyone back in the office but employees collectively refused. Can you think of another time where companies had lost this much control over their own workforce?

3. Pay Wall St: The only public financial data to support layoffs of this kind are from the stock prices, which mostly plummeted. However, they did not plummet due to poor performance but rather due to the macroeconomic events out of their control. Even at their present day levels, they are still mostly above their pre-pandemic highs. And guess what? Almost every other company's stock price in most industries fell significantly as well. With the profits erased from the surged stock prices, layoffs are the quickest and easiest way to push up a company's value.

I can only hope that employees continue to band together to know their worth and not settle for less.

Btw, I use copilot every day. It makes me more productive. Someday I may only use copilot or maybe I'll do something else.

Nothing is permanent. Speak to those who have been laid off, and make sure you can take care of yourself if it happens, but then stop worrying. You'll suffer more in imagination than reality.

I think this probably has the majority effect on how you're feeling. Jobs come and go, layoffs happen. I've been laid off and I've been fired, and I've found jobs afterwards. As long as you have a decent bankroll to keep you going through a couple months (easy for me to say as I'm single and have supportive family), I wouldn't worry about THE STATE OF THE WORLD/ECONOMY.

I love programming but I certainly hate most ofthe tech companies and products that exist nowadays. I’m part of it, though, since it doesn’t pay that bad in this part of the world (not usa).

Toys aren't useless. People enjoy playing. I'd certainly rather work on a "toy" that lots of people use and enjoy than some CRUD app to handle insurance claims data or some other random "serious business" use.

But seriously, Twitter is a global network that can disseminate news globally in minutes, its been used to start revolutions. TikTok, YouTube, etc help distribute knowledge, and grow communities. "Thousands of SaaS apps" help people work better, faster, quicker, and employ millions of workers to build and maintain. "Millions of NPM libraries" are the result of the toil of countless developers choosing to freely share their hard work and learning to anyone who wants it.

What is not a waste of time to you? What is noble enough to receive your approval?

Very true, colleges have been seeing double-digit growth in applicants of CS majors every year in the past 10+ years, and this year the number of applicants is at least 2x more than last year. That said, I'm not sure about the growth rate of qualified talent. At least 8 out 10 senior engineers who I interviewed could only throw some terms around and draw a few boxes. "Experts" of Apache Beam can't write a simple word count using even pseudo code of Beam's APIs. The team leads from FAANG could talk only about team coordination but not specifics of the tech stacks of their systems. ML experts could throw terms like BERT around but could not explain simple things like the difference between layer normalization and batch normalization, let alone coming up with models to solve specific problems. Experts of distribute system couldn't design a simple stateful system or articulate any distributed algorithm. The list can go on and on.

Given such shortage of true talent, I'd rather worry about whether there will be growth in IT the industry. Without growth opportunities, investment will drop, so will the demand of talent.

Is it that most of your applicants are liars with what they put on their resume? Or that those specific skills you mentioned aren’t applicable to their day-to-day work? Or is that your expectations are out of line with the reality of their work or is there something amiss with your interview style?

> Experts of distribute system couldn't design a simple stateful system or articulate any distributed algorithm.

What do you picture as an acceptable answer? Leader election via broadcast? Simple link-state routing? Something more complex?

It almost sounds like part of the problem is convincing competent people that the bar is lower than they perceive it to be.

Deep breaths. All industries are cyclic. We've been here before, we'll be here again. From my perspective as a wizened curmudgeon, this is more directly disruptive to tech careers than 2008/9 was. But it's significantly less of an existential disaster than 2001.

It is true, though, that to new entries to the labor market, these things can be unfair. Someone coming out of college last year had a vastly different experience than a very similar candidate trying to get a job right now. And that sucks. But over decades, things even out.

Only I'm a low performer who might have a real chance at getting fired for performance issues.

Funny, I attribute that "assistance" to improvements in hardware and networking. Today's commercial software is not great to say the least. And then we have the ridiculous amount of surveillance that comes with it.

Without a doubt, computers and networks are proving their worth. But intermediaries calling themselves "tech" companies I am not so sure. It seems the market, too, is questioning the need for them.

GPT is cool, and has a lot of potential uses, but don't be scared by the hype.

The biggest impact GPT is going to have on most people's software careers is that everyone will have to include "Prompt engineering" on their resumes in the very near future, and data science/ML folks are going to have to answer a lot more questions about transformers by people who have never heard of "Attention is all you need", even though the deepest they'll have to dive into the subject in practice is a few api calls.

If you could do a 180 switch this quickly I think you should look inward. The concept that you could be more concerned about the future in 2023 rather than 3 years ago where a novel virus was killing thousands per day would be funny if it wasn't so absurd - consider therapy, because this seems to be an internal issue rather than a problem with the world at large.

Nobody should be "wishing for 2020". Everyone in this country is better off than they were in 2020 at this point.

[0] https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/small-business-applicants...

Some of the players changed, but they've also changed since 2015 and 2011, yet I don't hear anyone complaining about either of those years.

If I live to 2073, I fully expect to still keep hearing the meme that half of the small businesses in this country permanently closed in 2020. It'll be as nonsensical then as it is today.

I have watched engineers consistently automate themselves out of a job and didn't even have the foresight to update their resume because they over inflated their own self value to the company.

Hint: You are about as valuable as your tech companies building's custodian crew. Tech companies know their burn rates, why do you think they stay close to campuses like Berkley? Plenty of fresh blood to burn through.

If you work for a company like Amazon, and you don't want to be laid off, the only thing you can do to move the needle is join a union. (You can also be a top performer, but it's not clear how big of a difference that makes; top performers with big salaries make big targets for layoffs as well.)