Despite business and investor hype around generative AI last year, information-technology hiring slumped as companies laid off workers and sought to cut costs.
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By neonate 2024-01-0823:45 By deathpanels 2024-01-0814:449 reply Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditions deteriorating.
By orochimaaru 2024-01-0814:5815 reply I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.
My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs.
An example to illustrate what I was working with:
Problem: input validation is too restrictive
Their solution: remove all input validation
For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.
Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.
This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net
By marcus0x62 2024-01-0912:44 Bottom Line Up Front - opening your message with the core request or message first - is a related practice from the military that works really well for email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
The way I apply this to emails is to ask myself: if someone only reads the first sentence would they know what I need and if they need to act on it immediately, read it at their leisure, or file it away?
I like this one, it's a little more subtle: https://yeshello.org/
I fear that one would be misinterpreted by a significant percentage of American office workers.
And by an even higher percentage of overseas colleagues in some countries.
By cableshaft 2024-01-0917:081 reply Look at the timestamps. That exchange extends over three days on that site, showing how useless it is in a subtle way.
By neilv 2024-01-0919:09 Consider all the people who are naturally inclined or conditioned to behave like the example, and then consider that many of them will miss the subtlety.
Especially those who for whom American business culture might be foreign. "Oh, they have politeness and trust-building conventions, much like we do. This is more pleasant than Hollywood led us to believe. It seems the difference is that you also verbalize what you are doing in their conventions. Maybe that's because they are a nation with a diverse immigrant mix, so they evolved that to reduce misunderstandings, and to help integrate people to common conventions. That's nice of them, and I will be sure to emulate."
I think the subtlety on that page is tuned for humor to those who already know, not to educate or persuade those who don't.
By dragonsky 2024-01-098:06 Agreed. Just ask the bloody question.
By causality0 2024-01-092:191 reply People, particularly family, calling me on the phone and then asking me what I'm doing as if it's any of their business and it's their decision whether what they need is more important than what I'm doing is such a pet peeve of mine.
How do you start the conversation when you call your brother/sister?
By saalweachter 2024-01-092:52 *ring*
"Hello?"
"IT IS TIME."
*click*
By causality0 2024-01-0914:56 With whatever the thing is I need to talk to them about.
I admit to being guilty of the "YT?" or "Hi" type messages, but it's for a reason: the person may be presenting to a client and shared their screen instead of their window.
I've been on too many Zooms where the presenter's Slack pops up saying, "John, we have a call with <company name> about <topic> at 3:00. Can you join?"
Multiple times, this information was probably sensitive. I'd rather avoid that by waiting until I get a response.
While you have a point, the golden rule is to shut down everything related to email and IM during meetings.
By cableshaft 2024-01-0917:093 reply But you can't control what other people do. You can control what messages you send.
But you can expect people to do their jobs. If a notification embarrassed the company in front of a customer then talk to that person's manager about training them to not be a numpty.
Stop having such low expectations of grown ass adults.
By cableshaft 2024-01-1016:41 You clearly haven't worked at a job with incompetent adults before. I mostly haven't either thankfully, but my wife just put in her two weeks resignation after two months at her new job because she works proposal management and she couldn't get anyone to do anything properly (proposal management requires getting information from other people in order to put together a proposal with all the information requested), while they just kept piling enough work to keep at least 3 employees busy on her.
Forms filled out wrong after explicit instructions, vital information needed for a proposal due at 10 in the morning not received until 5pm the day before (and even then it's missing half of what they were told was needed), and then after asking for it again, finding out half an hour before it's due "oh I'm out running an errand, I'm not in the office, I can't get that to you", people taking pictures of handwritten notes in sloppy handwriting and sending them to other coworkers instead of typing them up themselves, people refusing to click a link on their iPads to access a document and demanding email attachments instead, people refusing to store important documents in CRM tools and instead saying "well it's in someone's email somewhere".
She's worked with several of these types before, but not this many people at one company, and not with such an intense workload (I think she was expected to submit a proposal every other day this month while wrangling these people, which is very short. At past jobs she usually only had to juggle 1 or 2 proposals in any given week).
She had no choice but to work holidays and nights and weekends and it still looked like she wasn't doing a good job because they weren't doing their jobs (her boss knew she was though, since she had to do the job before she was hired and knew what it was like, and begged her to stay).
I guarantee none of these people would have bothered turning off a notification, and then something confidential (legally not supposed to be seen by certain employees) could have been revealed.
Not that I ever usually bother to think about that myself, personally. It's rare that I start a conversation with someone with 'Hey blah! Here's some information that I can get in trouble if other people besides you see!'
By telotortium 2024-01-0923:58 It's called snooze your notifications. Easy enough to do, at least on macOS, and surely all OSs with a unified notification manager.
By madcadmium 2024-01-102:04 You can control what messages you receive by closing your client
By saalweachter 2024-01-0913:29 There may be a middle ground. In this example, you could say, "Are you available to join a call at 3:30?"; that gives a little information about the topic and the time sensitivity, but it may still require a follow-up.
By paulryanrogers 2024-01-0912:33 At one point I installed a filter on my IM client to silently discard trivial messages like "thanks" and "OK". There were already delivery indicators so nothing was lost.
Perhaps a hello filter and "yes?" auto responder could help, at least during business hours. Then send an OOO message if after hours.
By droopyEyelids 2024-01-094:18 The next level of this is waiting a couple hours and reacting to their message with a waving emoji- not replying! only putting the reaction in there.
If they don't want to talk business then a friendly greeting is appropriate.
By kaashif 2024-01-092:41 This is the real answer. If they ask you why you didn't respond, you can honestly tell them you were waiting for them to ask their question.
If someone says "how are you?" that doesn't work though.
By gumballindie 2024-01-0910:23 Imagine being this guy.
By nostrademons 2024-01-090:058 reply My company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code.
It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.
I'm not college educated and I've been coding since I was about nine in different capacities. I was inspired by two engineers my dad worked with that were the same; one of them was a SWE and the other was a Systems Engineer. I ended up dropping out before I hit any of my CS courses, so I basically did a repeat of high school.
The stuff you need to know for most jobs can be learned through books (DS&A); everyone, including grads, learn to actually code on the job. Systemic thinking and breaking problems down into manageable chunks is harder to train for; this is where I think something that's akin to apprenticeship could really help. At least the way I view it, and maybe I'm wrong, is that in the early 2000's, much less the 90's, there weren't many CS or CE schools - much less accredited ones that followed CAC standards. If your company is doing this then they're just getting back to the roots of what a computer programmer used to be.
By pavel_lishin 2024-01-092:16 We've done this, and it's worked out pretty well - all of our apprentices were dedicated to learning to write software, about half were offered jobs at the end of the apprenticeships, and half of those accepted.
Remember that they're not just mashing code straight to the main branch; they're apprentices, so other engineers paired with them, others read their pull requests, etc. It wasn't a free-for-all, nor should it be.
By mschuster91 2024-01-091:351 reply > It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.
German here. The secret sauce behind the Duales System is that it's, as the name suggests, a split system - one part of the training is at government-run schools ("Berufsschule"), and the other part at the company that trains and pays you. And since the curricula are virtually the same across the schools, even if they're a bit outdated, they still produce decent graduates.
Can you list some things graduates of this “secret sauce” have built?
By mschuster91 2024-01-093:291 reply We don't make glamorous "unicorns" in the US style as we lack both the financials (aka enormous amounts of dumb money floating around waiting to be invested - remember, we don't have 401k, we have rolling-contribution pensions so no need for that) and the culture (we're very risk averse)... but our "Mittelstand" has produced hundreds of small and medium size companies that are world leaders in their respective market [1], often dominating their market with 70-90% [2]. And the foundation of that, especially for the older companies, isn't academics, it's trades, training and apprenticeship. Many of the Mittelstand companies, you enter in your youth and remain there for the rest of your life.
Our pride as a nation, our role models, is not a few people who struck it right to become multi-billionaires, our pride is the millions of people working for the Mittelstand and the consistently high quality of the stuff they produce. Boring, but wildly profitable and very, very resilient.
PS: You actually might know some of these things our tradespeople built. BMW/Audi/Mercedes/Volkswagen cars, MAN trucks, Rheinmetall, KMW and ThyssenKrupp military hardware from tanks to the massive Panzerhaubitze 2000, Diehl's IRIS-T anti-air defense, Heckler & Koch/Walther guns, anything with "Siemens" on it built before Siemens fell to MBA shenanigans, all developed and prior to globalization also built in Germany. And a lot of it, especially the military tech, is up to par with what the US military builds - for IRIS-T SLM and PzH 2000, the Ukraine war shows that they are even better to some experts.
One thing we sadly lost was pharmaceuticals - up until the 60s-70s, Germany used to be the "apothecary of the world" [3], but we lost that to India and China.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
[2] https://hbr.org/1992/03/lessons-from-germanys-midsize-giants
[3] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2018/daz-44...
By bvvg 2024-01-093:33 Very likely core-competence in technical work, which is priceless in my opinion.
This only works if you hire enough really good engineers and have them spend most of their time mentoring, and most companies aren't willing to accept the senior engineers individual contributions on paper dropping to zero.
By oooyay 2024-01-0917:11 I disagree. Actively mentoring, like what this demands, is more supervisory. I do it with college interns all the time. It's not suddenly different because the pipeline doesn't originate with college. The process generally goes:
1. In weekly one on ones we may discuss a topic. I ask them to apply that topic.
2. They pick up sprint tasks and look to apply the knowledge they've gained.
3. They may ask some questions along the way; it's important that other engineers are also available for question asking - the same way peers may depend on each others knowledge.
4. You peer review the outcome in a PR.
Rinse and repeat.
I'll add I end up having to do this with everyone if they're fresh to industry or came from a place with poor standards for code writing and/or problem solving.
By ofcrpls 2024-01-091:51 https://www.yearup.org/ A non-profit that I've volunteered with,that explicitly trains folks from alternate pathways to place them at entry-level positions, with support from certain corporate entities, ranging from training support to directly hiring via internships/apprenticeships.
By pjmlp 2024-01-097:12 In Germany, and Portugal (where I went through similar system), you still need to finish high school, and there is a programming related curriculum anyway.
The part-time work is like doing the labs part.
Also at the end of it, you can still go to the university if feeling like it. I did so.
Going through technical school was a secure way to have a job, in case the university exams weren't good enough for the engineering degree, which by the way is mostly state sponsored on this side of the Atlantic.
By claytongulick 2024-01-092:30 My 23 year old son has ops experience, but not much development, though he's eager to learn.
This sounds like the kind of situation he'd excel with - is your company currently hiring U.S. based folks?
By whoknew1122 2024-01-0916:12 Amazon has a few different programs to retrain people for tech jobs, such as non-tech Amazonians, people separating from the military, under-represented people, etc.
By nostrademons 2024-01-094:001 reply It's a FANG.
Thanks. If it's Google (and I suspect it is), what are they calling this employee development program and where can people apply?
By nostrademons 2024-01-1015:56
That sounds like a frustrating experience. I wonder what caused this problem? We’re the people leading your company’s subsidiary’s hiring efforts incompetent? Was it a management issue? It’s not like there’s something about being German or British or Indian or Filipino or Australian, as opposed to American, that makes you think input validation doesn’t matter.
With contracted outsourcing the root of the problem is generally a third party with misaligned incentives. But here this is no third party.
By AnthonyMouse 2024-01-091:402 reply Companies can have internal intermediaries.
Suppose you go to a country and talk to a charlatan who tells you that they have many qualified people and they'll work for 30% of what you're paying in the US. You hire them and tell them to hire more staff there.
Then it turns out there are many qualified people in that country, but they don't work for 30% of what you're paying in the US, because it's a global market and actually they can command the same wages as their skills imply anywhere else. But there are plenty of unqualified people who will sign on for lower wages, and you've been promised workers for lower wages, so that's what you get.
By coredog64 2024-01-094:08 The good news: Each employee only asks for 30% of what your onshore resources want. The bad news: You need four of them.
By schnitzelstoat 2024-01-0911:291 reply You kind of can though. In Europe even 30% of a US FAANG wage would be an incredible wage here. 50% certainly would be.
There are other problems like timezones etc. and maybe payroll taxes are higher here too but I think the possibility for labour arbitrage is definitely real.
By everforward 2024-01-0917:371 reply In my dealings with companies that had European offices, European workers had far higher non-salary costs that brought the total compensation numbers closer together.
Eg Europeans usually had much more time off. The costs of that time off scale with salary.
I do think labor arbitrage could work, I just don't think it would be in Europe. I suspect the total employee cost in Europe approaches that of the US, the money just goes to non-salary places (taxes, time off, labor protection, etc).
By AnthonyMouse 2024-01-0920:49 The thing about arbitrage is that it generally implies you know something nobody else knows or are otherwise in a different situation than they are. Otherwise everybody would do it, bid up the price, and there would be no more arbitrage opportunity.
Which is basically what happened. When the earliest companies figured out that you could do a lot of computer things remotely, they would hire some quality staff in e.g. India, pay them a little more than they'd usually get in India but a lot less than they would in the US, and that was great. Then everybody wanted to do that... but there isn't an unlimited supply of qualified staff.
So the competent staff started demanding more money, because they could, until they got paid enough that the savings was only just offsetting the inconvenience of different timezones and laws etc. But the current CEO still remembers that case study they read in business school from 1985 about how great outsourcing is at saving money, from before the arbitrage opportunity was eliminated by everybody trying to do it.
By deathpanels 2024-01-0821:211 reply Now that's problem solving!
By throwup238 2024-01-090:45 At the very least it makes pivoting from mediocre engineer to ransomware kingpin much easier.
Pivot! Lean startup! Four hour workweek!
By kevin_thibedeau 2024-01-092:311 reply I've had them confidently tell me they verified functionality by decrypting a TLS session even though that was impossible because I hadn't yet implemented a way to expose ephemeral TLS keys and there was no way to do it from the other side of the link.
By alasdair_ 2024-01-093:22 Maybe you encrypted with 8-bit keys? :)
By deathanatos 2024-01-090:593 reply You probably say that in jest, but I have seen — multiple times — someone just go and delete all the tickets. Boom! 0 tickets. No bugs, totes. /s
Reposting my comment from a couple of months ago:
At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."
By democracy 2024-01-096:13 that could be a great feature of a new product - "your jira is full? time to move on to...." ))
By wyclif 2024-01-092:20 I've seen it too. Actually, I'm in SE Asia right now and the ISP I'm using routinely deletes tickets that haven't been resolved.
By mewpmewp2 2024-01-091:27 That's called ruthless prioritization.
By derwiki 2024-01-0816:19 I worked at a company that was doing this, but the candidates I interviewed were all below [what had been] the bar. Recruiters asked me why no one was passing the interviews; I told them I ran the interview the same way I had been doing for 3 years. I stopped being scheduled for interviews.
As soon as your company hires a Indian CIO, you're done. More and more of the staff will be H1B's and over time they will transition the work to India. I could name a very big corporation doing that right now. The CIO they just hired (last 6 months) is an Indian who just finish doing this to the previous corporation he was a CIO at. Both these companies are the largest in their respective industries in the world.
By booleandilemma 2024-01-095:28 We don't have an Indian CIO but the trend is generally true. Indian managers hire more Indians.
By avasii 2024-01-0917:49 I will guess that the two industries are agricultural machinery and transportation.
By closeparen 2024-01-0818:124 reply At the same time, US salaries are either $300k+ in the Bay Area or $0 and unemployed, there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area.
There are many large, stable, profitable companies that are hiring software engineers. They are not software houses, but they pay well for a comfortable life (outside of NYC and Bay Area) and offer good work-life balance. For some examples you can look at medical devices, utilities, manufacturing, IBMs and Walmarts and R&D departments of virtually any large non-software company.
But there are frictions, too. Unless you go into management, comp tops out around $200k in most metros. HR -- instead of write-your-own-rules in a startup you have to take corporate training and get approval for things folks at the startups take for granted. Limited tools, externally managed corporate OS and software, Outlook instead of Slack. Office time requirements -- fully remote is very rare. And so on.
Not saying this is the wrong choice, just that there are tradeoffs.
By closeparen 2024-01-0821:391 reply Absolutely. It’s weird though that tech focused companies with Silicon Valley style cultures who are looking to cut costs are completely uninterested in those regions. With more developer-friendly working conditions, they wouldn't have to compete as aggressively on TC. And with more normal cost of living, it could be sustainable for senior people who are not independently wealthy to have long tenures there.
I think you are absolutely right that there appears to be some low hanging fruit for tech companies to pick by looking to "second tier metros". But I inertia and (lack of) critical mass play a big role.
In the past decade (i.e., when the money was plentiful) when a startup is young, the TC of its engineers rarely makes or breaks the startup. Being able to get an MVP out and iterate quickly is more important, so it was a rational choice to stay in the Bay Area even if it means 30% inflated TC. And after that moving is expensive in both time and money and risky (e.g., a key engineer might not want to go).
And having a critical mass of tech companies helps attract talent: if a company goes under or has large layoffs it is perceived to be easier to find a new job in the center of the tech hub.
I think covid helped nudge along the process of moving tech development out of SV, but it is a slow process. My 2c.
By closeparen 2024-01-0822:391 reply Tech is moving rapidly out of Silicon Valley... but strangely, straight to the developing world, skipping second-tier metros.
Some tech is. Meanwhile large tech companies that are actually innovating (FAANG, near-FAANG, and FAANG-adjacent companies) are not. My comp has never been higher, and we're hiring. In the bay area.
I’m honestly unable to name a single innovation from a FAANG that wasn’t just buying another company or cloning a competitor in the last five years.
What has Meta or Google or Microsoft actually innovated on recently?
By hasty_pudding 2024-01-096:25 They havent innovated on anything of significance in decades. They just sit on their cash crops and buy up startups.
By bombcar 2024-01-093:59 The M1 is kinda innovative but Apple did “just buy companies”.
Self-driving cars, from the Google self-driving car project, which was later renamed Waymo, kinda seems like a big deal to me.
By hasty_pudding 2024-01-096:27 Will be interesting to see if they keep it going or shut it gown.
Google has a way of starting something and then shutting it down.
By charcircuit 2024-01-095:58 These companies are always innovating. Google doesn't just say "Our ad recommendation system is good enough, lets just go into maintenence mode for a year." No. They constantly are trying to improve their models, switch to a better architecture, and innovate to try and eke out a few more percentage points of conversions.
By alasdair_ 2024-01-093:26 I just looked at Walmart. Base pay was 240k remote plus a lot of bonuses and benefits. Even Walmart isn’t paying Walmart wages any more.
By democracy 2024-01-096:17 Frankly I miss these annoying outlook calendar notifications, these days nothing comes close to be that invasive )
By deathpanels 2024-01-0818:35 Those companies exist but they are being squeezed by borrowing costs so they're either not growing or are cutting staff.
By cableshaft 2024-01-1020:08 There's definitely $150k jobs in a normal metro area. Chicago, for example, has a lot of posted software engineering jobs in that range (I've even seen more that are lower than that lately after this past year of tech layoffs, like around $120k, unfortunately)
> there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area
There are "normal metro areas" that aren't the Bay Area where a $150k salary leads to a very comfortable life, with loads of $150k jobs for people with decent skills.
By IntelMiner 2024-01-0916:461 reply I'd happily take 150K/year and go live in nowhere Wyoming or something. As much as I loathe Musk I'm sure I could get by on something like Starlink
Except oops Amazon would absolutely decimate my yearly comp because they base it entirely off where you live, and adjust it if you try to move somewhere cheaper
Though of course that's all moot anyway since we've all gotta go back to the office because the people who own all the realestate are weirdly chummy with all the management of these companies. Weird how that worked
By vel0city 2024-01-0917:20 > Except oops Amazon would absolutely decimate my yearly comp
There are other employers hiring tech people other than Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.
In fact, a teammate of mine is a software developer just got his Starlink connection up and running replacing his WISP in a rural area where he's farming as well on the side. Another friend works as an SRE and lives way out in the desert pursuing his amateur astronomy hobby. I know of several other friends and coworkers who live similar lives.
Technically I'm 100% remote, but personally I enjoy the metro life so I'm living in an affordable metro area living a lifestyle I enjoy.
By hnthrowaway0328 2024-01-091:031 reply Yep ours are hiring from India directly. Rumor says head of IT has a affiliated company set up...
By democracy 2024-01-096:15 It's possible, in one of my jobs the senior project manager was found to hold a stake in one of the outsourcing companies working for us and was terminated under conflict of interest.
By freddie_mercury 2024-01-093:281 reply This was a pretty forseeable event after US based developers repeatedly told their bosses that development could be done just as productively remotely.
just as productively remotely
...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
The problem with this argument is that it implies "you're special".
And you likely have experience, domain knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge and so on, so I'd argue you Are special.
But then you leave, and need to be replaced. Since I'm hiring from a pool where no-one has this special, I may as well hire from overseas. Its cheaper.
Equally, when you work remotely your special is invisible. The way you keep the customer happy is invisible. The way you enable your team (assuming your special is passed on) is invisible.
Of course there are very smart people, with lots of experience, and lots of special of their own. Finding them is hard (of course) but the reward for finding them is significant.
FAANG companies are skipping the labor broker, and building subsidiaries offshore. Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing.
So your point us well made- existing employees have value. But companies deal with churn. And we don't need 300 people onshore with your special skills. We can offshore 200 posts, and wait for them to come up to speed.
Being a remote worker makes this process easier.
By marcus0x62 2024-01-0914:43 > Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing.
Everybody goes into these arrangements believing, against all history and experience, that they aren't going to lower their hiring bar. Good luck with that.
By wait_a_minute 2024-01-0920:00 Once those 200 posts offshore come up to speed, soon they'll be acquiring incomes at comparable levels since skilled thought-work and crafts are always going to be sought after until labor is meaningless.
We saw this trend happening with manufacturing overseas. Chasing the cheapest labor is not an effective strategy in the mid to long term because it means that eventually your supply chain is at risk and the savings delta shrinks to the savings being irrelevant.
By 7speter 2024-01-096:50 >Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
Management does.
Same. My "team" is doubling in size, but all the hires are international.
By deathpanels 2024-01-0818:502 reply I bailed on a small local company in early 2021. I checked in with how they were doing recently. They laid off all the local developers, minus management (of course). They're hiring exclusively in Africa, the Middle-East, and South America. My current company has done the same thing by emphasizing that we're only hiring in our EU office. I've not seen many US based roles unless they are customer support related.
It is predictable that remote work would lead to another wave of off-shoring. The question now is whether or not these companies can actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. We've all seen the abominations produced by offshore teams. Moving to a fully remote foreign workforce may be short-sighted.
By giantg2 2024-01-0819:18 At least so far, we've seen foreign direct hires work out well. Much better than the outsourcing teams by a long shot.
>> actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce.
As distinct from a remote, largely local, expensive workforce?
Innovation is often the mix of vision, direction, and implementation. AWS for example, was implemented by an offshore team. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#:~:text=....
By dh2022 2024-01-0919:36 AWS was not implemented by an offshore team. The link you pasted implies that EC2 was implemented by an offshore team - which is not correct either. EC2 had two teams, one of which was in Cape Town. The other team was in Seattle - and larger than the one in Cape Town. The rest of AWS at the time (2007) consisted of S3, SQS, DevPay, CDN, SimpleDB (AWS' own DB implementation at the time) etc... These teams were all in Seattle (in the red brick building by I5).
By hotpotamus 2024-01-0815:30 I've been down this road, and I'm sorry to tell you that your team will be halving again once the international hires are considered onboarded. They might sell it as going to a follow the sun model, but the plan is to move to cheaper labor. I've been through it myself.
Same. I work as an SWE at a non-FAANG, non-tech Fortune 100 company. We already had an IT staff in India and would hire consultants in India, but this has been accelerating over the past year - virtually all hires or new consulting contracts have been in India. Some of the SWEs in the US are even being put under PMs in India.
My company is actually doing mostly Europe and ex-US North America
By pc86 2024-01-0816:01 I've actually considered setting up a Mexican corporation to run C2C contracts through for those who want LATAM hires, but the logistics seemed pretty onerous, especially since I don't live near the border. I'd be willing to do a single trip there to finalize everything, but it seems like as a US resident/citizen you'd need to basically stay there for weeks/months while everything is set up, or make multiple trips for each step of the process.
It's hard not to get angry at the company when you see them hiring at median US wages ($100-120k US equivalent) but specifically refusing to hiring folks in the US, when the company is US-based.
By red-iron-pine 2024-01-0820:15 Yeah seeing a lot of Canadian and Mexico hires.
Mexico City, especially -- general consensus is that the level of expertise is good, it's not hard to find a Spanish speaker in the US, better cultural fits, and the timezones overlap better; MXC is on Central Time. Not India-level cheap, but competitive enough.
Canada is even better in that sense, but at a higher price.
NAFTA TN visas are also attractive there, too. No H1B nonsense, and can easily bring personnel over for short (~3 year) tours.
Disclaimer: USA-ian of Hispanic extraction in Canada, so I follow these gigs reasonably closely.
By __turbobrew__ 2024-01-091:561 reply At my company many of the new hires are within Canada. You get similar talent, similar culture, native English, and same time zones for about 2/3 the cost of a USA dev.
You also don’t have to pay for healthcare of your Canadian employees since they pay for it on their income taxes.
By dukeyukey 2024-01-0911:36 Being in the UK I see a lot of that too - we're cheaper than Americans, speak the same language, are pretty close culturally, and while we're a few timezones off, we're far enough east to overlap with both the West Coast and India.
Plus, London alone has 10 million people, and if you lump in the London commuter belt that adds up to aroun 15 million people, more than all of Ontario! That's a hell of a skilled worker base to work with.
It’s time we unionize as software developers. You saw what the UAW achieved, Software Engineering needs the same type of protections
By orochimaaru 2024-01-0817:192 reply How would unionizing help stop a company from setting up an offshore subsidiary? It may prevent layoffs in the short term - but even with big3 auto manufacturers it hasn’t prevented a move in manufacturing to Mexico and Canada.
I think the solution here has to come from the federal government to explicitly increase sw development employment in the US. Just like we find ourselves in a bad place with scaling chip manufacturing, we will find ourselves hamstrung in sw dev.
I doubt unions can help here - except maybe pressure the government (and that too works mostly on democrats if at all).
By tharkun__ 2024-01-090:42 Canada (close to Detroit) has always been part of the US auto manufacturing scene. In fact you could take what you write and replace the US with Canada and you have what people (and unions) in Canada are complaining about. Not sure what to replace Canada with in your text though. Maybe Mexico a second time?
Easy: The union can negotiate they don't have to train or work with anyone overseas (or non-union members generally).
The union can force an all-or-nothing decision, but some companies can and will easily choose "nothing" and keep only the overseas developers, not the local unionized ones.
By pleasantpeasant 2024-01-094:151 reply I think there would be too many programmers who would be proud to take the jobs of other programmers trying to unionize.
There are a lot of anti-unionists and Libertarian minded programmers in the US.
By acdha 2024-01-0818:56 That would certainly make the union workers more attractive given the average consultant’s experience, teaching ability, and understanding of the business.
By nebula8804 2024-01-091:591 reply It remains to be seen if the UAW's achievements will work out in the EV era. They need to unionize Tesla or they will lose hard. Looking at the teardown of GM & Fords EVs vs Tesla, there is no profit being made whatsoever by the old guys. Everyone either loves to idolize Musk or downright hate him with a passion. At the end of the day, the union companies need to still sell a compelling product at a good price. Couple that with how freakin fast Musk moves and the Union companies will eventually end up in bankruptcy court unless something drastically changes: Either the legacy OEMs turn their act around (unlikely see Boeing) or the Unions successfully unionize Tesla. Will be interesting to see the show nonetheless.
The truck is a disaster, as is Twitter. I’d guess you have 18-24 months before something pops.
By nebula8804 2024-01-1112:551 reply People have been saying 18-24 months for the last 15 plus years. Its not going to happen at this point. Lets say the truck is a complete flop, the amount of runway they have allows them to just pivot to something else. Plus these engineering achievements give them massive breathing room to cut costs compared to their competitors. This is what I said by people unable to look past their hatred or love of Musk and look at the actual details on the ground.
As for Twitter well, I can't explain why his other companies get 1 million plus applicants while this company languishes.
I can explain why Twitter languishes. Other than the obvious troll hole he’s turned it into, it also doesn’t fit the brand he worked so hard to build around himself in the 2000s and early 20teens.
What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him. Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark.
People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go help him stan for a guy called "catturd2."
By nebula8804 2024-01-122:021 reply I mean yeah its true. In fact I recall going to DEFCON this past Aug and they had a handful of Starlink engineers there. I tried to get them to discuss that whole Twitter saga, they absolutely were adamant that they did not care one bit. They really emphasized how they are doing cutting edge work at starlink and it definitely showed in the town down equipment that they brought to demonstrate. Tesla/Spacex get so many applicants thats its insane.
This leads me to want the OEMs to succeed, we desperately need a counterbalance to Musk because just shaming his employees won't change a goddamn thing but if there was another place where A players can be embraced well that would put a massive chink in the Musk armor. Hell I remember there were a whole group of furry employees at Tesla as well. Tesla has also participated multiple times in pride parades. I wonder where they are now...
By api 2024-01-1212:13 It’s worth asking why there aren’t way more Elon Musks.
He’s not superhuman. I think he was once quite smart but I feel like he’s fried his brain. (I think the fash brain worms are an opportunistic infection.) So what made him able to get these companies going?
A lot of lazy critics think it’s just luck. Founding a rocket company and a car company and having them even work at all is not luck.
Maybe he’s showing us that the bar is actually not as high as we think, and instead that the process whereby we promote people to levels of wealth and influence where they might have the opportunity to do what Elon did is horribly broken. We aren’t promoting competent people to pivotal positions as a society, and in fact are probably filtering them out.
I guess you can see that clearly in politics. Look at all Presidential elections 2016 onward. Look at the whole lineup during the primaries. You’re telling me these are the best candidates we can find for the highest government office? Really?
Protectionism doesn't work beyond selfish short-term interests. American cars are not exactly paragons of technical or mechanical prowess compared to their Japanese or German counterparts.
I've been a software developer for the better part of two decades, I'm not worried about the C-tier code coming out of rural India. You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
By toomuchtodo 2024-01-0816:142 reply I’m okay with my fellow citizens being selfish and protecting their livelihood. No one else will. “Whose interests?” You’re advocating for shareholder returns (labor arb savings->profits). Ain’t nobody coming to save us.
If we can mandate EV batteries be built in the US to get subsidies (Inflation Reduction Act), other protectionism mechanisms should be on the table. Otherwise, businesses will do their best to maximize profits in the market they’re offering in without any labor contribution back, extractionist style.
And at the end of the day, the ones doing the outsourcing will have outsourced themselves out of a job too. China won’t need American MBAs when they can do everything in house.
By toomuchtodo 2024-01-0819:14 Jack Welch died before getting outsourced after driving GE into the ground, and there are lots of folks like him still alive, empowered, and with that belief system. These are the folks controls are needed against.
I appreciate you telling me what I'm advocating for. Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
By toomuchtodo 2024-01-0816:58 > but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The evidence does not show the American worker being better off after these policies you support were enacted and have had decades to run. Free trade is great for shareholders and some consumer cohorts who get excess utility, but terrible for workers. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/
https://www.epi.org/publication/botched-policy-responses-to-...
https://www.epi.org/press/globalization-lowered-wages-americ...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...
By kypro 2024-01-091:26 > Any basic macroeconomics class covers the effects of protectionism. Yes, in the short term wages may be artificially propped up, industries may be (temporarily) saved, but you do long-term damage to the economy, and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
You're almost certainly correct in the sense that the people of the entire system will be better off, but your own domestic market could suffer at the gain of the other market where the business is now being outsourced to.
A good example of this might be tech in the EU. The EU basically has no major tech companies because we "import" all our tech services the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc). It's great for us in the sense that we didn't have to pay anyone to build amazing online services like Facebook, Google, etc – it's just free stuff we get here from the US. But who benefits the most from this arrangement, is the US or the EU? I'd argue that the EU allowing the US to provide all of our major tech services has been great for US growth, but it's stagnated the EU economy in recent years as we've had no real reason to build 21st century companies here. The free stuff we get from the US actually comes at a cost for us even if overall the economy as a whole (EU + US) is better off for it.
Similarly, imagine an extreme scenario where US companies outsource all work to low-cost labour countries (I know this is impossible, but assume the US is 100% service sector jobs which could be outsourced). Would this hypothetical scenario be good for the US economy? It might be good for companies registered in the US because now they can provide their services to markets they serve for a fraction of the cost, and it would be great for those low-cost labour countries getting all this foreign work, but it would be awful for the actual US economy that's allowing this to happen in the pursuit of efficient markets.
So yeah, you might be growing the whole pie at a faster rate, but it's possible mass outsourcing doesn't help grow your share of the pie. And like with manufacturing, you also need to consider how you'll lose technical competency within your domestic market over time if you outsource too much, and this will likely lead to the country you out sourced to eventually out competing you in your own industries. We see this today in China.
If you want to cripple tech innovation in the US, outsource all your software engineers so there's no one in the US with the skills or resources to start the next Google or Facebook.
> and the people are better off with free, open markets long term.
The theory only says that all the people globally will be better off. It does not say anything about citizens of a specific country that is applying protectionism. They may be better off for it, they may be worse - it depends on the particulars and, as most economic interventions, can only really be judged post-factum.
Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions? Did we forget that having weekends off and holidays off was not a thing until unions? Did we also forget that children were put to work at a young age until unions?
I think many well-off people just don't care. They might support them in a poll but question their utility in a specific sector like software. Or how another commentor said they weren't concerned about competing with people writting c grade code in India since they have been writing software for 20 years.
I don't think unionizing will help with off-shoring for development. I do think unionizing could bring about more equal treatment though. It seems most companies ignore their own policies when it comes to ratings, work assignment, hours, etc. Devs have very little recourse. Of course the assholes that do well and aren't afraid of c grade coders are the ones who don't want unions since they might loose their edge over others comp-wise.
By mrguyorama 2024-01-0822:451 reply No, a huge amount of Americans are actively hostile to unions as a concept. The very idea that employees should be able to negotiate as a block instead of individually has been scapegoated as basically all of society's ills.
Consider the common refrain: I'd rather negotiate for myself
It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work, as if you as a solo person in a 1000 person company could somehow EVER be more valuable to the company than the entire labor pool.
Newsflash: If your company doesn't throw a fit any time you try to take time off, like CEO comes and talks to you personally fit, they think they could replace you just fine. 40 years of project management has attempted to build things just for that.
By randomdata 2024-01-091:41 > It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work
The misunderstanding is yours. Workers understand what you say just fine, but don't care about out-negotiating the company. They will never meet the CEO at the bar, so it means nothing to them. They want to be able to out-negotiate their neighbour so they can peacock dominance over someone they actually interact with.
The purpose of a union is to establish a brotherhood between metaphorical neighbours so that they don't try to be assholes towards each other. While that does, indeed, improve the overall worker position against the company, it hinders the power dynamic between them. And that's where you find the pushback.
It's much like you find in 'middle-class' neighbourhoods where you see households trying to outdo each either with nicer yards, or fancier BMWs, or whatever, all while racking up crazy debt to pay for it all. If they invested the money they pour into that stuff instead they would be way better off, but being better off isn't the motivation.
By randomdata 2024-01-091:04 > Do people forget that a 40 hour work week exists because of unions?
Is it still forgetting if it never happened? Both the idea of the 8-hour work day and weekends predate the first recognized union. The 40-hour workweek became the norm during the Great Depression by way of government initiative in an attempt to spread the work out across more people.
Unions have long supported the 40-hour work week, but are not meaningfully responsible for it. If showing support for something is necessary for something to exist, then you could probably say that just about everything exists because of unions...
Even still, we're talking nearly 100 (when it became common) to well over 200 years ago (when it was conceived). Even if unions actually were responsible, people are going to naturally ask "What have you done for me lately?". Where is the 10-hour workweek?
By missedthecue 2024-01-094:121 reply The weekend was due to organized religions. The Atlantic has a great article on the history of it. Henry Ford pioneered the 40 day workweek without union prodding, only through his own experimentation.
Besides, let's say youre right and unions have given us all those things. Those standards are over 100 years old. If it were true, it would mean nationwide unions did some things 5 generations ago and have collected literal trillions in inflation adjusted dues* since and have provided nothing in return.
* 11% of the US is unionized, representing about 1.1 trillion in annual payroll. Average union due is 1.5%, that's $16.5B per year in union dues collected, over 100 years = $1.6 trillion. But union membership used to be much much higher than 11% so its actually a much bigger number than $1.6T. But you get the math.
By pi-e-sigma 2024-01-0922:47 Only Sunday was off thanks to Christianity. Free Saturday only came in early XX century. Before that it was work 6 days a week.
By PeterisP 2024-01-092:07 In the long term we're all dead.
Short and mid term matters a lot to people.
By giantg2 2024-01-0818:11 "and the people are better off with free, open markets long term."
Eh, maybe not. It depends on the demand and availability of skill/labor. If you have a high percentage of low skill labor and you can outsource low skill labor to cheaper markets, then what are the current low skill citizens going to do? Surely the rust belt is not better off now than when coal and steel (and other manufacturing) were still a domestic thing. Maybe other areas of the county faired better, but with median wages dropping over the past 50 years, it doesn't seem like a strong case.
By gedy 2024-01-091:05 > You shouldn't be either unless you're a really bad dev.
I dislike the tone as there are plenty of good devs who've been cut and replaced (sort of) by offshore. Don't equate laid off/replaced with "really bad dev".
The downside is for people disabled. Maybe they aren't a terrible dev but they aren't a great dev either. If they're on par with outsourced labor, they aren't so safe. But what else can they do?
If I lost my job right now, I'd be totally fucked. I'd end up working at Walmart. Masters degrees might as well be toilet paper.
I remember driving through West Virginia with my parents to visit family as a kid, and my dad was lamenting the fact that its full of the haves and the have nots, with the distinct implication that the haves did something wrong to end up there, and the have nots would be just fine if it wasn't for those pesky rich people. I was just left thinking that if life was haves and have nots, shouldn't you spend your time trying to be one of the haves rather than lamenting the way reality was? But in reality, both those views are overly simplistic.
It's a pretty big leap to go from a software engineer to Walmart. The median software developer (~$110k/yr last I checked but could be outdated) is somewhere in the upper teens as far as income percentile (20% being around $100k and 10% being around $150k[0]). Pretty much any non-management role at Walmart is going to land you in the bottom half.
I'd be curious (but it's none of my business) what about your situation makes that the most likely outcome. I'd bet there are ways to head that off.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States
Just in general, what do you think an alternate job would be for an ex-dev (without spending 10s of thousands on reschooling)?
Seems like retail, warehouses, and other unskilled labor are the main options. Even something like teaching would require a certification.
Basically anything tech-adjacent - product, "business analysts," management. Maybe something like tech writing but there are going to a lot of decent devs who make terrible tech writers so that's much more on an individual basis. And then there's the devs who still code but that's not their focus - SDET, devrel, that sort of thing.
Devrel would actually probably be the easiest thing to get into with a few years' foresight. Building a following on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter/X, etc. will make it infinitely easier to land that first devrel role.
You bringing up teaching is a good point - I'm not sure about where I currently live but where I used to live you could get a substitute teaching cert basically by just passing the background check and having a college degree. It was pretty easy to get an add-on certification as well to teach your subject or closely related ones. I can't say what it's like everywhere though, and to be honest most of the people I know who have teaching degrees have left or wished they could. But if you can get a job and can deal with the bullshit you're basically set from a put-food-on-the-table standpoint.
By giantg2 2024-01-0818:17 Most of those roles you list require strong interpersonal skills. That's usually not something an autistic person is strong at. Not a big market for many of those either (dev rel, tech writer).
By throwfish3000 2024-01-090:03 I'm looking to switch into IT from teaching. The job security in teaching is the best but half of my colleagues are in psychotherapy. Last year we had 30% of our teachers on leave. It's not a happy life unless you're a social butterfly and unless you enjoy yelling at kids.
Can't wait till I'm out.
By FrustratedMonky 2024-01-092:35 Options:
Tech Writers - nope. Nothing dealing with boilerplate text is safe, in any field.
Twitch/YouTube - nope. That is just celebrity economics again. For every half dozen people that make it (and make it is just back to median dev salary) there are thousands that only get a few viewers.
Teaching - this is option. But as noted by others. Can have own problems and a lot of people leave.
I'm an old Dev looking for second career, and it is tough. The option is to just re-skill and be dev again in another industry. Dev's be Dev's. It doesn't seem like there are many upward paths, and limited sideways paths.
What, product manager, analyst, marketing? Tried them, they all have downsides.
Even with all the crap, I only find comfort in creating things. Coding.
By fuzztester 2024-01-095:05 If talking percentiles, you probably mean 80th percentile instead of 20%, and similarly for the other number - 90, not 10.
the new CEO of Google is from India, no?
I see a lot of very qualified people coming from India, around a big University here.. They have had twenty years to build to this.
By frank_nitti 2024-01-091:121 reply There are extremely talented Indian engineers, but I don’t think this discussion is about the elite “cream of the crop” but more so the rank and file.
I have been assigned to lead offshore teams with engineers that need direct guidance on very basic coding tasks, produce low quality code and become combative when receiving feedback.
So many times I’ve reviewed and requested the same changes to code, classic example: a try/catch then completely ignore a caught exception, just to get some code “working” for the example inputs. When I call this out as a problem, it’s met with “well you did not say that in the specification, I have completed what was asked”. Another commenter had a similar anecdote where all input validation was removed to get test cases passing… are we expected to write things like that into a work spec? Seems like this would take longer than for me to write the damn code myself
By sinkwool 2024-01-094:46 There's gotta be something between Satya and "C-tier code out of rural India".
There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.
As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way, that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.
Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.
By realusername 2024-01-097:53 Those talented indian engineers are paid on the global market rate though. The logic also goes the other way, those don't want to be underpaid.
That's why these outsourcing threats from companies make me laugh, they don't understand that software is a global market and they also are competing in it.
The world class FAANG-level Indian engineers which are underpaid just do not exist.
By pc86 2024-01-0816:34 Thanks for the advice. I suggest you take a gander at the HN guidelines before you reply again.
By changoplatanero 2024-01-091:48 the only thing i want from UAW is a refund for all the dues they made me pay in grad school
By madsbuch 2024-01-0910:06 I now understand why American unions have such a bad name.
By depereo 2024-01-092:28 I've seen a bunch of US companies setting up offices here in New Zealand and hiring SRE/DevOps types. Our wages are garbage so it's much cheaper for them! Plus our timezone means having staff here leads to much less on-call requirement for US/UK staff.
By fuzztester 2024-01-091:37 The overseas subsidiary business model was happening well before 2007. I left a company doing it, in 2004, for example. And they had been doing it for some years before I joined. And they were not the only one.
By taude 2024-01-0815:07 Yeup, we're expanding and only hiring off-shore.
By nobodyandproud 2024-01-0917:09 My company is doing this, with the end goal of reducing engineering headcount in the US..
The only way for me to protest is to leave, but the job market is terrible.
By fnordpiglet 2024-01-093:01 My exposure to bigco is they aren’t hiring anywhere.
By Bluescreenbuddy 2024-01-0914:51 When you can hire engineers in South America or Easter Europe for a tiny fraction of US salaries, you bet they're going to do it.
By rngname22 2024-01-0815:20 What industry?
By Workaccount2 2024-01-0815:046 reply To me it looks like tech is just falling more in line with other industries pay/workload. I think there are many who joined the tech workforce during the pandemic thinking the norm was to make $135k while doing 10 hours of real work a week from home, twiddling a few lines of bootcamp level javascript to appease your largely absent boss.
Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. The pay was just decent too. Not jaw dropping like today.
By spacemadness 2024-01-0817:073 reply I am dumbfounded this idea gets trotted around HN so freely. I’ve met nobody like this in the industry. Most people I know are burnt out from many years of having to work over 40 hours.
> I’ve met nobody like this in the industry.
nobody is going to admit to other people they know that this (slacking off) is what they do. You only get this on an anonymous forum like HN or reddit. Of course, some of them might be lying, but where there's smoke, there's fire imho.
I work at FAANG. People here coast while making mountains of money.
By Infinitesimus 2024-01-093:20 Google is the big tech company with that reputation though. MS has pockets but pays considerably worse
Which one?
A large part of the IT community does indeed very little work.
As for having to work over 40 hours and being stressed, I guess there's a price to having to work in US under such lax worker's rights and benefits, in Europe you just say no thanks boss see you on Monday.
By StressedDev 2024-01-092:351 reply I hate to break it to you but in the US, employees at many companies do not work more than 40 hours a week. There are two reasons for this:
1) People who can leave will leave if the work load is too high. Those who can leave are usually the best team members.
2) It does not work. Research has shown most people are incapable of producing more than 40 hours of work a week over the long term. They can do it for a week, maybe a month but after that their productivity is either the same as a 40 hour/week work or maybe even less. People are not machines and just because they are asked to do something (or ordered to) does not mean they will or even can.
One last thing, what keeps employers inline in the US is people can leave. If you are in a bad job, you can switch to a good one.
By wyclif 2024-01-094:15 Another thing about Europe v. USA conditions: it is considerably harder to fire a bad hire or team member in Europe.
It is a testament to the great work they do that many people believe that IT does not do much. The work required to keep things working without noticible downtime is hardly trivial.
By epolanski 2024-01-099:10 Thanks I work in IT, I'm a dev, and based my comment on both my own and experience and the dozens of peers I know very well in many companies of the world.
And I reiterate, a large parte of our sector does very little practical work.
By closeparen 2024-01-0818:162 reply Jaw dropping pay is inextricable from the jaw dropping Bay Area housing market. Standard white-collar pay for Bay Area-only roles is a pretty bad deal, and most tech workers would be better off learning something else. But standard white-collar pay with the geographic distribution of other white-collar work (i.e. any mid-sized and up metro is fine) would be a perfectly good equilibrium.
It's arguably more expensive in West Los Angeles (where tech is in LA). Most articles compare LA to SF but LA is giant. If you lived in La Verne (cheap), the east most side of LA, your commute to tech companies on the West Side would be 2 to 3hrs.
Looking at Rent Cafe:
SF: $3267
Santa Monica: $3956
Venice: $3844
Playa Vista: $3726
Marina Del Rey $3896
These are all places near Meta, Google, etc....
I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet but in LA on the west side it's all over the place. "Coliviing" where they rent out individual bedrooms for $2500-$3500 a month and you share the living room and dining room. It's like having a roommate except you have have lock on your bedroom door and no choice who your roommates are (and no responcibility if they don't pay their rent).
By baby_souffle 2024-01-092:57 > I don't know if the "coliving" thing has hit SF yet
There was a startup for just this a few years ago. Home share is what it was called.
By ehnto 2024-01-093:30 Makes you wonder if these mega corporations wouldn't be better off lobbying to resolve the housing crisis instead of paying more in salaries.
By itsoktocry 2024-01-0815:24 >Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.
Exactly. Look at industries that also recruit smart college grads and pay well: consulting, finance, law. These jobs have very demanding schedules.
Not saying that's good, just that it is.
Software industries outside of VC are still pretty normal, decent pay but in line with other local industries, nothing jawdropping. Working pretty hard still, but balanced enough compared to the overtime all the time days. That's going to depend on your company.
By wizerdrobe 2024-01-0911:30 I’ve had this conversation with my boss, we’ve settled on about 3-4 modes of compensation.
Lowball, either because on ignorance (bro I have an app idea!), intention (fast buck artists preying on folks that don’t know better, maybe it’s a BS startup with 80k S.E. base and worthless ISO), or something like government.
Middle-Road, all the normal companies in all those “flyover” states or something to that affect. You’ll get paid a reasonable market rate for a reasonable expectation of work, e.g. an American 40 hours work week. If you’re lucky these might be a small tech-shop, but no flashy VC driven mania. I’ve worked at several, currently work at one. From the inside looking out the ZIRP issues are nonexistent, Cost-of-Living raises might not be as high as I’d like but I have 0 worries about the trends of tech layoffs I read of here.
Upper-Middle, places that are similar to Middle Road in that they are not flashy VC driven firms but “real” companies delivering profitable software or tech-enabled products and services but they also highly value their IT as a force multiplier. As a result the compensation might be a fair bit higher than Middle Road but nothing insane. You’re not walking about with 300-500k Total Comp. Nice 200k TC for a quality Senior here for a normal place of living. I’ve worked at one such firm but something of a unicorn.
Finally, VC world where the rules don’t matter and the points are made up… or something like it. Compensation is ludicrous and often detached from real-world value provided.
I know this is neither exhaustive scientific, but rather to play with the idea that there are different patterns of compensation than the 5 hours of work and 500k of compensation I see some thinking is both reasonable and deserved (trolling?)
By gabrieledarrigo 2024-01-0821:112 reply > Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours.
And I can't understand sorry, why should we go back to this scenario, exactly?
By coolThingsFirst 2024-01-0815:583 reply Takes a low IQ person to accept ridiculous workload for kinda ok money
Only when there are better options available in the same industry. Nobody is getting a CS degree from a good school then switching to nursing because they can make the same money with better hours (or better money with the same hours).
The gravy train might be ending, I just wish it would end with the jobs that actually do nothing (product) rather than engineering first, but oh well.
By rrr_oh_man 2024-01-091:12 Ouch :) I felt that
By coolThingsFirst 2024-01-0911:021 reply No lol, why would anyone work crazy hours for not an impressive salary?
By Andrex 2024-01-114:27 Off the top of my head:
- They're a founder
- They're a spouse of a founder
- They're a friend of the founder
- The worker is unskilled and needs to work crazy hours to break even
- They believe in the company and have equity
- The vertical is more politically compatible than alternatives
- The vertical punishes newbies before the career starts paying off (lawyers, doctors, academia)
- The work is interesting/fun on its own (in these cases, the type of work would never be paid well -- teaching, charity work, homemaking, niche tech, etc.)
- The worker is being compensated in other, non-monetary ways (aside from equity)
- The job is poorly paid locally but well-compensated elsewhere, and moving/remote work is not possible
Are such people idiots? Maybe.
That said, people who place money above all other factors trend closer to the "idiot" line, in my book. YMMV.
If you require the literal best pay possible, you'll be job-searching forever. Some people do not have that luxury.
By epolanski 2024-01-090:45 You take what you can find and negotiate.
By justinzollars 2024-01-090:592 reply I was on a 24 hour on call for months, a two man team, managing Chick-fil-A's Doordash, UberEats and GH Go integrations for thousands of stores. It was literally insane. I survived this recession - but I was way way way overworked. The balance has definitely tipped towards the employer.
By wizerdrobe 2024-01-0911:321 reply Sorry to hear that!
I had some clowns reach out to me for the same job it sounds like, promising that I could absolutely move up to employment with Chic-fil-a after my contract was up…
As if I haven’t heard that story before.
By notherhacker 2024-01-0914:08 Who was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.
By notherhacker 2024-01-0914:081 reply Who was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.
By justinzollars 2024-01-0915:59 This was a good position to get me through the tech recession. I was able to continue working on Go, and the system was interesting. But it wasn't an easy job by any means. I ended up going back to startups where I have more ownership.
By coolThingsFirst 2024-01-0815:541 reply Is this based on Elon’s idea of trimming the fat?
Id like to believe it isnt but its a copycat industry.
By wyclif 2024-01-094:23 It's not as if Elon invented the idea. Every successfully entrepreneur who went on to found a large company has done it in one form or another. Maybe it didn't take the form of layoffs, but cost-cutting is a natural behaviour when the soft money disappears. Happened in 2008 as well.
Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs and refusing to hire more who is going to take on the work burden? Obviously existing employees.
By benterix 2024-01-099:50 > Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs . . .
Sometimes, yes, but not always - if the load is high enough, employees are overworked even if headcount increases.
By ilrwbwrkhv 2024-01-0915:45 I also am getting multiple reports of fake job ads posted to show health in the market but internally those jobs are understood to never be filled.
By FrustratedMonky 2024-01-092:21 And - somehow when things slip, the customer is pissed, it's your fault.
By cdeutsch 2024-01-1218:42 You just have to be more hardcore
joking
By thomascgalvin 2024-01-0821:1311 reply > Based on analysis of US Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Janco, news that the IT industry added just 700 jobs following an estimated 262,242 jobs lost amid mass layoffs is shocking, but not surprising.
So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
> Currently, there are almost 100K unfilled jobs with over 101K unemployed IT Pros – a skills mismatch.
Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job. Additionally, I suspect that a lot of these unfilled positions are either paying too low, or aren't real jobs.
Yeah but over 100,000 people graduate in CS/IT per year. 700 net jobs is rough. (I should know - several of those graduates are old friends of mine who struggled massively to find jobs.)
Relatively young industry, the population pyramid of workers would have more people at the bottom. So gaining only 700 jobs isn’t that fun. That being said, I feel bad for newgrads, since it feels like nobody wants to train them anymore. Any job posting I’ve seen is mostly 2-3 year minimum experience at a professional level.
I have genuinely never seen an in-house training program in the software industry. Maybe some bullshit industry certs that amount to a single exam. But nothing like an apprenticeship style program where over a year you are taught and mentored.
Even university doesn't teach you how to work in the industry. It's a very DIY career, we should probably change that.
By bojan 2024-01-099:17 At my previous company there was an in-house training, where the first three months were dedicated to the training of a new employee. The training consisted of both the tech stack and the development and business processes used by the company.
As a result everyone knew how things worked and everyone by far exceeded the minimum level of knowledge needed to meaningfully contribute. It was a great department to work in and I miss it still.
Sadly, the company had that insane policy of only 3-4% annual raise irregardless of performance, so most people, including me, would leave after a few years.
By photonbeam 2024-01-094:471 reply Training in CS is giving some new-grad a job, instead of not. Plenty of companies hire senior-only.
By ehnto 2024-01-097:32 I agree we should be doing at least that. But we could do better too. Apprenticeships are a much better transfer of practical knowledge than university, and has been a concept in use for centuries.
By kredd 2024-01-0915:32 Think of internship programs, streamlined hiring of new grads and etc. My previous companies had both, now I don’t see that on their website. Obviously not a real statistic, but a bit disheartening.
There was a tech company in the UK who was doing it (irritatingly, I can't remember their name atm) with Oxford and Cambridge humanities grads. Just googled it and couldn't find it. If anybody remembers what I'm talking about, please reply below because now it's bugging me.
By dukeyukey 2024-01-0911:43 Lots of UK companies do it - google Software Engineer Apprenticeships. Vodafone, BAE, Softwire, BT, Rolls-Royce, the BBC, HMRC, tonnes do.
No one wanted to hire new grads when I first started working in 2000... Except startups. And it was very slim pickings until you had 3 years under your belt. This isn't a new phenomenon.
By kredd 2024-01-0915:34 Well, that would mean we’re just rolling back to 2000s era? I did finish a pretty decent university to be fair, but had options right after grad even in mid-sized companies. So did my peers.
By iamflimflam1 2024-01-098:15 I’m not sure that’s changed at all. I graduated in 93 and I remember having conversations with friends where we complained that all the jobs seemed to expect 2-3 years experience.
Probably more relevant is how many over 40 give up coding because they're bored and/or employers dont want them any more. (I'm over 50 and finding it much harder to get piad compared to when I was younger despite kids moved out and I have lots of time to dedicate to working)
Ageism is one of the bad things about our industry. It's the last accepted form of discrimination. The irony is that when you're young and starting a family, you feel guilty about working crazy hours because you're not spending time with your wife and kids. Then when the nest is empty you've got plenty of free time to work hard and even learn some new things, languages, frameworks, &c. but at that point a lot of closed-minded companies think you're too old for software development.
not to nit pick but there are still many accepted forms of discrimination after ageism.
My sample set is definitely biased. I see plenty of very conservative (doesn't want to learn, will only work in one technology) junior engineers, folks who are going to stall out. For senior folks I don't see many. This could be because older folks have jobs or are self filtering to the tech they like or maybe their resumes don't make it to my desktop. Of the folks I can recall that were going for a jr position with many years of experience had some pretty obvious personality issues. Everyone else I interview that's been in industry over 12 years is trying for Lead/Staff/PE. I'd definitely want to know why someone with 20+ years of experience in development is applying for a SDE2 job.
"Just needs a job" and "moved into software" are good reasons. But I'd be really worried about "just needs a job" person getting mad/frustrated if they were that experienced and banging heads with manages that didn't know how to leverage their skills.
When I was younger (~2005) I worked as a peer with one of the dads of a kid who was one year older than me in highschool. He actually became a good friend and mentor. I also worked with a guy who had been a CTO of a 500 person dev shop for years and went back to being a dev. He relished not making decisions or dealing with politics. They were both great mentors. It was a 2 way mentorship as I had a bit more core CS than they did and was more willing to experiment on new tech. They were great with doing whatever they needed to to get the job done. And they'd been in many techs stacks, that helped me break my single language bias and my "not my job" quickly.
I think these days my bias would come from everyone I work with that's older is also quite senior, level wise. On the engineering side they're people who are also constantly trying new things and really leveraging their experience. They're all very introspective. You can call into question pretty much anything with them and you'll get a good discussion.
Companies I've worked with definitely expect engineers to at least reach the lead position for the most part. Up or out in some ways. But the megaco I worked at definitely has really solid non-lead, non-entry-level engineers who have been there forever, esp in critical systems, ignoring their up-or-out guidelines. The main risk there was a new manager being biased and just assuming a 15 year tenure L5 engineer should be managed out. As a contradicting factor there was general consensus anyone over 10 years "really knows some shit" as the default assumption.
Thanks, this is a really valuable answer and makes sense to me. The only follow-up I would have would be if that dev with 10-20 years of experience applying for SDE2 did tell you in an interview that they didn't want to move "up or out" and their goal was to be a productive dev for as long as possible instead of applying internally for management roles, would you accept that answer?
So lead (3) isn't manager...
I'm in one of those systems where after lead you have staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier. You never have to be a manager in those. In that style system you can stop at lead (L1/L2/L3 lead/PE/sr PE/de). At those you can stop at L3. It would be very hard to explicitly stop at L2 there. You would have to opt out of hiring, peer reviews, and doing architecture and just do assigned tasks on jira.
We had one engineer who wanted this, they had a ton of stock and we're kinda set, had been there forever. Their super power was ops. You just let em go at a system and it just becomes more and more stable and better documented quietly over time. They had a manager explicitly protecting them that they didn't really grok was happening. They actually left after moving to a new product team and the new manager kept trying to uplevel them. But again they basically just retired at that point.
For me I always worry about people who just do what others tell them. I need feedback and have had projects go sideways when I didn't get it. "Wait you realized 3 months ago this wasn't going to work and you didn't mention it?" "Your the boss/lead I do what you say".
Another way to say it is I think small team lead is the minimum viable dev in places I've worked. That doesn't mean you cant step into a support role and rotate who's lead or work as a team but you need to be capable of doing it.
By democracy 2024-01-0923:22 "staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier"
wow people do love their titles )))
By sureglymop 2024-01-0910:30 There are definitely many more forms of discrimination. Think about neurodiverse people, e.g. with autism. Reardless of skill, knowledge, degree, age etc. it may be much harder to acquire a job for social reasons.
By bjorglo 2024-01-0923:31 [dead]
By barbariangrunge 2024-01-091:32 Or become unhireable because of age discrimination
By asynchronous 2024-01-092:451 reply Not enough, obviously
By grogenaut 2024-01-092:59 not enough for what? you'd have to show numbers of either unemployed new grads or retiring tech folks over the last few years to be able to say anything at all.
By lo_zamoyski 2024-01-095:18 This feels like the dot-com bust. The job market sucked around 2000/2001.
All Principal/Staff positions or laptop repair.
Canada's latest economic report had a net positive of only 100 jobs in the entirety of the labor market.
By drpgq 2024-01-092:05 With a massive growth of people.
By throwup238 2024-01-092:03 There's only so much Maple syrup to harvest!
Isn't Canada still hiring loads of Filipino nurses, physical therapists, and caregivers?
By brailsafe 2024-01-095:13 I don't know why Filipino would be a necessary qualifier, even if that's been a pretty common demographic, but yes there's a lot of health care stuff still.
By tootie 2024-01-0822:27 It's 700 net, but that's generally how numbers are reported. When we get the national BLS numbers of "178,000 jobs created in October" that number is always net. In reality, most months you'll see a few million jobs created and a few million terminated.
By UncleOxidant 2024-01-0822:01 > So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
Were it not for December hiring (which is usually pretty low in most years, but was the highest for any month last year according to the data) it would've been negative. That could mean that things are improving in the tech job market - have to see if the trend continues into January, February this year.
I wonder how many “unfilled” roles are ghost jobs. I keep seeing the same roles re-posted or just never filled.
By jonnycoder 2024-01-095:031 reply I'm an unemployed staff/sr level software engineer who's been unemployed for 4 months. The only interview I got in the past 3 months was due to an internal referral. I'm seeing a lot of similar re-posts.
By the_only_law 2024-01-0911:27 Basically my story, but with a longer timescale.
I was getting rejected from jobs that seemed a perfect fit for my resume. End up getting a job I wasn’t qualified for on paper via referral.
And some of those jobs that rejected me are still reposting the same damn job monthly.
By tymscar 2024-01-0822:52 Way closer to 0 than to 100k
By coffeecloud 2024-01-093:381 reply "Skill mismatch" could also mean experience mismatch. I would imagine a mismatch is more often about a company wanting someone with 10 years experience in a particular domaine than about a Java developer needing to learn python.
You can't take an online course or build a couple side projects and be qualified to run a 1M+ qps distributed system.
By loa_in_ 2024-01-0921:45 it can also be a sign of company looking for graduates to hire for cheap, so they're looking for inexperienced only.
By ShadowBanThis01 2024-01-095:25 Yes, this "statistic" makes no sense. No fucking way was there a net addition of jobs.
By refulgentis 2024-01-090:18 One of the stranger victory laps I've ever seen
By HumblyTossed 2024-01-0822:083 reply > Staying current with skills is always part of an IT professional's job.
Gotta love capitalism. CEO sees some shiny new thing and all the sudden some poor shlub's entire livelihood is fucked.
I am realising that this is what taxes pays for in Denmark. I have a masters in computer science (5 year, postgraduate + thesis, Aarhus University which is top 100 and even higher for PL + semantics, which is my thesis subject) that I received tuition free and I am continuing with a professional degree in business at a reasonable tuition at 10k USD for the entire degree.
It appears like continual learning should be a tax as it is non-negotiable for people living in a modern world. Just like roads, hospitals, military, etc.
(Maybe it is just my European midnset that speaks here)
I don't necessarily think it needs to be government run. The best schools in America are private. Ironically government support (the federal student loan system) is imo largely responsible for crazy high tuition in the U.S.
Maybe there is just less demand in Denmark? But I feel like demand surged here, and with easy access to capital it drove prices to absurd levels.
This is and interesting, and very American, point of view.
In Europe all countries have tuition free universities, in Denmark people even get a government stipend of ~1000 USD/month by the government. And yet, there is availability on most programmes (like computer science)
It seems like the market powers do not apply for American universities? When tuition (demand) surges, it should be profitable to expand supply (new unis, added seats on programmes, hire more staff).
Regardless, the supply seems quite inflexible?
Though it is convenient to blame the government for supporting the ones most in need (young people starting their careers) it seems to be more appropriate to blame structural issues that inhibit the creation of supply – which is also very anti-American.
By grotted 2024-01-0917:54 Classic American mentality. "If we don't have it here, it can't work anywhere else."
By tonyedgecombe 2024-01-0910:051 reply >In Europe all countries have tuition free universities
The UK doesn't (and didn't before Brexit either).
By madsbuch 2024-01-0911:08 Sorry my statement should have been moderated: "In EU most countries have institutions with insignificant tuition costs"
By wyclif 2024-01-094:36 The last part is the biggest factor. When all the easy, soft VC capital dried up, so did the jaw-dropping salaries.
By hooverd 2024-01-092:18 Direct education funding has been going down though.
By willsmith72 2024-01-091:222 reply it depends what skills you're talking about. when i see people complaining about always having to learn new things, it's related to new libraries, frameworks, technologies (e.g. now i have to learn graphql, now i have to learn to make things cloud-native, now i have to learn go because it's cooler than java).
this stuff in my experience is either taught badly or not at all in universities, and i don't even mind that. the institution can stick to fundamentals applicable across the given hot tech on any day
personally i don't agree with the sentiment. constant learning is something i love about the industry. for one it's interesting, but it also means there are always opportunities to prove yourself by being interested in learning
By tharkun__ 2024-01-091:44 That would be OK if they actually let you learn while doing, which is my preferred way of learning. But they ask you to give ironclad estimates for how long it's going to take to implement <insert completely unclear requirement in one sentence> in <technology nobody has heard of so far>.
They can go do whatever they want to themselves. Either tell me what cool new tech you want me to try out and what problems we might want to solve soonish and I'll see which of those and how it might be applicable to or you tell me you want to build <whatever it is> in whatever tech I think will get me there best and fastest. If you know so much, do it yourself. Oh you can't? Well then STFU (not you you but that proverbial manager type above you that seems to know so much)
By not_the_fda 2024-01-092:35 None of its "new", its simply repackaged and slightly different, not really any better. Its just constant churn of frameworks, languages, and libraries.
By psunavy03 2024-01-0822:31 Pour one out for the buggy whip manufacturers . . .
By nateglims 2024-01-091:29 slap ~~crypto~~ generative AI on it
> So it isn't that only 700 jobs were created, it's that despite the massive layoffs everyone is reporting on and focusing on, there was actually a small net positive in job growth.
^ This guy reads.
By burnte 2024-01-093:19 Oof, tough crowd.
