This post was part of an experiment. It was largely generated by AI, and does not reflect my views. Please see the post How I Tricked Hacker News and Made The Front Page with AI Slop for details! The…
This post was part of an experiment. It was largely generated by AI, and does not reflect my views. Please see the post How I Tricked Hacker News and Made The Front Page with AI Slop for details!
The reason it’s so hard to get a programming job right now is because Big Tech caused it. It’s not an accident. It’s not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy.
For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. They wanted to make as much money as possible, even if that would destroy the tech landscape in the long-run.
Salaries went up fast as Big Tech tried to hire as much talent as possible. Even smaller companies had to pay more to keep up.
And salaries weren’t the only thing that went up. Fake work went up. Slow pace. Endless planning. Work not just on the core business, but on side-projects that would probably never see the light of day.
In the end, it wasn’t sustainable. It turns out you don’t need a thousand developers to run a chat app or whatever. You can support a bunch of extra programmers when the economy is great and you can afford it, but eventually the economy changed.
Growth slowed down. Interest rates went up. Investors got mad. Big Tech started slashing jobs. They couldn’t afford to keep all the people they hired. Those people weren’t actually needed for the core business. They were side-investments, and now the economy was not favorable to unnecessary investment. So hundreds of thousands of programmers got laid off.
Now things are bad. Big companies aren’t hiring. Small companies aren’t hiring. All companies are afraid of making the same mistake as before. Young, new developers can’t get their foot in the door. Even mid-level devs aren’t getting jobs. Seniors have trouble too.
Software is still important. People still buy things on Amazon. People are still watching Netflix. People still use social media. But side-investments like Facebook Live Shopping, Amazon Care, or Google Stadia all got the axe. When times are tight, you have to focus on what makes money. Nobody wants to take a risk.
What happened wasn’t just carelessness on the part of Big Tech. It was a power move. They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.
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Wow, that sure was a great article/book/blog post/reddit post/essay you just read! Well… mostly. After reading it, you have some reservations. For example, the author might have said the phrase “everyone knows”, but technically, not everyone knows! How can you enjoy an article if it’s clearly wrong in some way?
Don’t worry! The author has linked to this list of caveats, which apply to the work you just read (hereby referred to as “the article”). Viewed through the lens of these caveats, the article will be much easier to appreciate, especially to pedants and nitpickers. Please read through them before leaving any comments, to avoid personal embarrassment.
The Caveats
- The “Not All” Caveat: The author said “all” or something like it. All people. All fish. Every turtle. Each and every American. But you know there may be exceptions or edge cases. However, it would be tedious to call that out in every case, and the author hereby acknowledges the possibility that such exceptions could exist whenever they use a word like “all”. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “You said all men struggle to verbalize their emotions, but some men actually aren’t like that.”
- “Not all wars are about power. Some wars are defensive.”
- The “Wrong Degree” Caveat: The author takes a position in the article. But you know that they have slightly overstated things, or that they didn’t go quite far enough. Or the emotional tone is not quite what you think it should have been. However, it is hereby not the intention of the author to claim their position is exactly, 100% correct, with the exactly correct amount of emphasis and intensity. Their goal was simply to say what they believed to be true. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “I agree with the author, but I think they’re exaggerating things.”
- “This article has a point, but I don’t think it’s quite that bad.”
- “This is worth paying attention to, but not worth sounding alarm bells over.”
- The “Bigger Fish to Fry” Caveat: The author makes an argument in the article, perhaps on a topic of importance. But you know this isn’t the most important thing to be talking about with respect to that topic. And there may be topics more worthy of attention than this. However, the author hereby states their goal with their article is not to talk about the most important possible thing on the planet, but rather the thing that happens to interest them and which they currently find personally important. After all, multiple things can be good/bad at the same time. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “How can you talk about plastic bags when there’s a genocide happening in Gaza?”
- “This is true, but this isn’t even the main thing causing a decrease in software quality over time.”
- “Why are we debating the ethics of including dark mode in an AI chatbot when AI misalignment could kill us all?”
- The “Wrong About Minor Details” Caveat: The author includes a lot of factual details in their article (hopefully). But you know that one of the details they mentioned is incorrect! However, the mistake you have noticed is not materially relevant to the article’s main argument. Perhaps what the author said is not technically true, but their meaning is easily understood. If materially relevant details are wrong, the author acknowledges they are still at fault, of course. But the author hereby acknowledges that some of the minor details of the article may be wrong, and that their goal in writing the article was not for it to be 100% correct in every possible way, as that would require too much effort and would make the writing tedious and full of qualifications. Comments of the following form are therefore invalid:
- “The author says Git was released in 2004, but it released in 2005. If they can’t get that right, how am I supposed to trust their opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict?”
- “Actually, Java isn’t strictly pass-by-value. Kind of undermines your credibility to be talking about technical topics.”
- The “Jokes and Irony Exist” Caveat: The author says some things that are not literally true. You believe they are being serious, or they aren’t being serious but are being flippant and should treat the subject with more gravity. However, the author hereby declares that their intention is not to say only true things, but sometimes to say untrue but entertaining things, and they rely on the audience to be able to sort out the difference. Also, the author hereby declares that their goal is not to be as serious as possible at all times, and have intentionally chosen to include levity in their article according to their own tastes, which may or may not be at odds with your own. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “Your joke about ‘turning it on and off again’ being all support desk workers do is demenaning to IT professionals.”
- “Saying JavaScript is held together with duct tape is spreading misinformation about a robust language that’s just as valid as any other.”
- The “Hyperbole Exists” Caveat: The author says things in their article, but way overstates them. You know reality is not as dramatic as the author says. However, the author hereby declares that hyperbole exists, and they have possibly chosen to use it intentionally. Maybe they said “literally every person knows…”, but not every person knows. They are not unaware of this contradiction. After all, it is obvious that not every person knows. There is not a single learned fact that every human being knows, after all, since newborn infants exists. So the statement and similar statements are to be taken as intentional hyperbole. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “The author says literally every woman cares about money, but the women I know also care about other things, and don’t care about money that much.”
- “You’re wrong to describe Rust as a cult.”
- The “Incomplete or Failed to Elaborate” Caveat: What the author said in their article was good and true, but it left out some details you feel are important, or they didn’t go into further detail in an area you think they should have. Or perhaps you just think they weren’t thorough enough or could have done a better job. However, the author hereby declares they did not intend their article to be complete, all-encompassing, or final. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “I think you’ve ignored the biggest factor when it comes to microservices: deployment.”
- “How can you talk about procrastination without talking about sleep?”
- The “Author Sucks” Caveat: You agree with what the author said (or you don’t), but you have a hard time taking them seriously because in the past they have said something you disagree with or were offended by. They may have even, heaven forbid, changed their mind about something, and are now writing an opinion different from their earlier opinion. The author hereby acknowledges that they suck and have many flaws beyond those you wish to articulate, and are as a human being a work in progress. In the interest of staying on topic, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “This you? (link to image of the author being wrong or saying something apparently contradictory to what they’re saying now).”
- “This is the same company that laid off half its engineers last year. Why should we listen to them about employer surveillance?”
- “Just so everyone knows, this is the same author who once said that Microsoft shouldn’t be punished for collecting user data by default. Clearly they shouldn’t be taken seriously.”
- The “Contradiction by Association” Caveat1: You associate the author with a group of people. The author has just said something that is the opposite of what others in that group say. Aha! They’ve just contradicted themselves, and you’ve caught them in the act! However, the author hereby states that their opinions are their own, and any association you may perceive between them and other humans does not impinge upon them a duty to never say anything contrary to what the rest of their group says. They are an individual, not a spokesperson for any group or team. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “Oh, you think sex work should be decriminalized? I was under the impression you feminists thought sex work was exploitative?”
- “Funny to hear an OpenAI employee talk about AI safety with a straight face.”
- “But I thought you were a Christian? Aren’t you supposed to be against abortion?”
- The “This is Obvious” Caveat: What the author says is true, but it’s so obvious you don’t even know why they’re talking about it. Surely there are better things to write an article about. However, the author hereby acknowledges that what they wrote may be obvious to some people, or even to many people, but they chose to write the article anyway because it was once not obvious to them, and they hope to reach others for whom it is not obvious. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “Everyone knows premature optimization is bad. There have been a thousand articles written about this before.”
- “You wrote a whole post just to say ‘sleep is important’? No kidding!”
- The “Inadequate Solution” Caveat: The author correctly points out a problem, but you believe the solution they proposed is inadequate, or they didn’t propose any solution, or there is no known solution. In that case, you believe this isn’t even worth talking about. However, the author acknowledges that it would have been better to include an amazing solution in their article; they just couldn’t come up with one. The author believes at least having the problem clarified will be a lot better than having not brought up the issue at all, and hopes their article can inspire others to do more thinking on the subject. Therefore, comments of the following form are invalid:
- “Why describe a problem and then say there is no good solution?”
- “Yes, modern life is lonely and alienating. But what are we supposed to do about it?”
- “Capitalism is flawed. Everyone knows that. But unless you have an alternative, talking about it is pointless.”
- The “Title is Wrong” Caveat: The author wrote an amazing article. Perhaps you read it, perhaps you did not. Either way, you found a flaw in the title. The title, read literally and taken as the author’s entire position, is not wholly correct. However, the author hereby acknowledges that their title is not supposed to be a replacement for or tiny summary of their entire article, and exists mainly to help people decide whether they want to read the article or not. Therefore: ALL comments that could be made solely on the basis of the title are invalid.
- For example, on an article titled, “Learning is slower than you think”, the comment “Actually, learning is pretty fast…” is invalid.
- The UR-CAVEAT: Even after reading all of these caveats, you still believe there is something the author has done wrong that is worth calling attention to. However, there exists in theory a reasonable caveat which would assuage your concerns and allow you to direct your attention instead to the meat of the article. The author hereby includes all of those caveats as well. Therefore, ALL comments that miss the point, are low-effort, are nitpicky and fussy, are unfair or uncharitable, or otherwise do not focus on the main thrust of the article or important details, are hereby invalid. There are infinite examples that could be listed, but here are just a few:
- “This article would have been better as a tweet.”
- “There’s probably a good point in here somewhere, but the snarky tone makes it unreadable.”
- “I can’t even engage with this because you never defined precisely what you mean by ‘AI’.”
- “Do you have any citations for any of this?”
- “This article really gives the impression of ‘guy thinking about something in an unfalsifiable way with no attempt to do research or have any expertise or gather any real information’.”
You don’t need to love everything about an article. An article of text is not an article of clothing. You read it once; you don’t wear it for years. It doesn’t need to be an exact fit. It’s better not to let the things you don’t like about it distract you from the main point.
After reading all these invalid examples of comments, you might be wondering, what can I comment? Isn’t this all a bit too limiting? Here are some ideas:
- You can comment that the argument in the article is flawed or fallacious and explain how.
- You can comment that the evidence the article relies on is faulty and explain why.
- You can state the article is missing a larger, materially relevant point.
- You can state there is a solution or explanation the author missed.
- You can present an alternative position, with arguments of your own.
- You can relate a story about your experience with the subject matter.
- You can comment praisingly or critically about the quality of the article, as long as it doesn’t distract from the conversation and you don’t use the article’s quality as an argument about its validity.
- You can ask a materially important clarifying question.
- You can share some thoughts you’ve had recently on the same subject.
- You can give a helpful suggestion. You can comment literally anything that doesn’t involve irrelevant, microscopic complaints that derail what could be a productive conversation.
And since we’re doing caveats: I hereby acknowledge that this list of caveats is incomplete, flawed, written in too aggressive a manner, and that I suck for having written it. I’ll also clarify that the example comments are made up. And by the way, if you’re thinking, “actually, some of these example comments could actually be valid in some contexts!”, no they’re not. You’re wrong and bad and you should go to hell. And feel free to reread Caveats #5 and #6 on the way down :)
P.S. I’m thinking about linking this at the top of my future posts with the link text caveat lector, and you’re free to do the same!
P.P.S I have now done so.
Page 3
Post: Caveat Lector - A Generic List of Caveats For Any Essay or Article
Read the original article
Comments
It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time?
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
By wnc3141 2025-08-0115:16 Decreasing earning power with career progression, while quite possible, is sort of a huge violation of the social contract.
By jaymzcampbell 2025-07-3021:07 > a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement
I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
By techpineapple 2025-07-3015:101 reply Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor.
On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
By zwnow 2025-07-3015:14 I remember a documentary on people that had no work a while back. It was filmed in a town where sailing boomed. Nowadays there are almost no sailors left, lots of them never learned a different job. And we still need sailors nowadays. Same with mining/miners. Booming industries will always die out eventually.
By rkozik1989 2025-07-3015:118 reply >It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort.
Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.
Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
I'd have said the Golden Age started about the time Linux distros allowed you replicate the full Unix workstation experience on a basic PC - which I think in my case was around '93 or '94 - right around the same time as the Web starting to become a standard technology.
By freedomben 2025-07-3017:221 reply Agreed, and importantly the increasing availabilty of open source compilers/interpreters that made it possible for the broke kid to sling real code.
By TheNewsIsHere 2025-07-3110:45 It wasn’t just programming either. It was anything with computing. I remember when you could walk into a book store and find a wall of books on Linux, so many of which came with “the Publisher’s Edition” of a Linux distro. That’s how I learned (and obtained!) Linux for the first time. I was hooked.
Where else was a kid going to get a full Linux suite (with just a dial up connection) and a sound basic education for it, in 2003?
I never quite took that for granted, but I still miss being able to walk into a bookstore and walk out with a book with software included. There was something really special about that.
Of all the impressive software developers I had pleasure to meet before 2012, I never met one who did it for money. They loved their work, the craft, the science, and sheer joy of the creative process. That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.
By freedomben 2025-07-3017:24 I think it was the rise of SaaS and major-scale big tech. That was also the point where structure sucked a lot of the fun out of it by converting SWEs into code factory workers by removing most of the forms of artistic expression from it (yes SWEs aren't always the best UI designers or product managers or program managers, but I think it was a mistake to remove them entirely from the equation. Regardless whether it was a mistake, it really sucked the joy out of it for many people, myself included).
By thewebguyd 2025-07-3016:20 > That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.
The learn to code movement, the plethora of bootcamps promising to make you "job ready", and how it became more widespread knowledge that software development was a "quick" way to a 6 figure+ salary. It's around that time it spread beyond just the nerds and became the hot new easy money career, or at least people thought at the time.
2008 played a role as well. People saw that tech was relatively resilient, and one of the only industries accelerating after the crisis. After 2008, chosen majors at universities saw a drastic change as well from humanities and arts into more job-focused degrees, CS being the major one.
Still happening today, although the job market isn't what it used to be, tech is still one of the very few fields where someone can quickly earn 6+ figures without a PhD.
Honestly if salaries would have kept up in other fields, we probably would not have seen as many people rushing to software development as a safe haven from economic instability.
By surgical_fire 2025-07-3016:17 People figured out that their passion was being exploited by some very rich and greedy people for obscene amounts of money.
If you can't fight it, you can at least profit from it too.
Open source really flourished due to lots of sponsoring of projects, I could see an argument that money caused a golden age in 2010s, but money also attracted the type of person who could, without irony, say "It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort."
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
By zwnow 2025-07-3019:23 Because my industry experience has been exactly that. It's importing stuff and puzzling packages together. There really isn't a lot of jobs where you actually have to implement interesting algorithms yourself.
By einpoklum 2025-07-3016:09 The post title, and your comment, made me wonder - what criteria should we use for considering some period of time as a "golden age" in programming? I definitely agree it should not be the level of compensation, but it could still be any number of things:
* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.
* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.
* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.
* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.
* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.
etc.
By hecanjog 2025-07-3015:28 This was my experience, too. During that period there were free tools and accessible information for learning, search was useful and the excitement was about making things. Not products to sell, interesting software to use. Then it all got paved over into a shopping mall. Those tools and information are still around. (If you look hard enough past the edges of the shopping mall.) I just spent my morning before work once again working on free software, but the mainstream culture of programming is depressing to me now.
I define golden age by how much I have to do to support my family. How much work there is and ultimately how much $/hr you are paid for it. Your interpretation is also very valid. The article complains about there not being available jobs though, so I went that route.
By ecb_penguin 2025-07-3015:221 reply That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.
By surgical_fire 2025-07-3016:201 reply If that's your metric, then the golden age never ended, and we are still in the upward trend.
There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants.
If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.
By freedomben 2025-07-3017:261 reply That's true, but I think you need to account for the state of hardware and operating systems too. Unless you're on Linux, the hackability and control over your own computing environment has never been worse (aside from when those things weren't accessible at all). Yes I can build almost anything nowadays, but actually using it is a different story, even just for personal use (ask people with iPhones and increasingly Android about that).
By surgical_fire 2025-07-3019:001 reply > Unless you're on Linux
Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?
I am forced to use a Mac at work, but I digress.
By freedomben 2025-07-3118:14 > Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?
I totally agree, but most people I know (myself included) initially got started on different systems (Windows in my case). If I'd had to learn Linux at the same time, it may have been too steep a learning curve
I remember when people paid (a lot of) money for a good compiler / tooling setup.
By bsoles 2025-08-013:26 I was genuinely excited as a 16 year old, poor kid when I first bought my Borland Turbo C suite/compiler. That was my golden age of programming.
By ecb_penguin 2025-07-3015:22 You are spot on. People are confusing programming with money
By deadbabe 2025-07-3016:03 It’s not high salary for low effort.
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire.
From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.
The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.
I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?
Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles
By icedchai 2025-07-3016:35 This sort of corporate rot even infected smaller companies. Teams where we have a 1:1 PM to Engineer ratio, 3 person dev teams with a dedicated "engineering manager" that invents useless meetings to justify their position, individuals claiming they have no time for hands-on work due to all the meetings...
Also: telling a senior SWE (L5) that for good performance reviews they must act as a tech lead and spend most of their time in "alignment" meetings with other TLs and managers. Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews.
By ryandrake 2025-07-3018:16 > Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews.
This kind of forced role inflation is infuriating, and happens at every company I've worked for, big or small. You can't just get by on technical mastery anymore--you always have to be seen as a "leader" of some group or "leading" some project. Even if you just want to stand still in your career and get cost-of-living raises, there is this widely held expectation that you're always cosplaying as a leader of something.
By Ferret7446 2025-07-312:071 reply Define "natural". IMO the demand absolutely was natural, you just don't agree with it (perhaps for perfectly good reasons)
By GreenWatermelon 2025-07-3110:38 I think "natural" here would refer to genuine project rrquirequirements that will translte directly to value to customers e.g. customers demand x features in y time and we don't have enough manpower to handle it. This is natural, it's business survival.
Contrast with the Unnatural cause of "manager just wants a promotion at any cost" which, in a sense, is akin to Embezzlement. The manager worsens business prospects and contributes to organizational rot for their personal gain.
By lokar 2025-07-3017:05 I’m talking about like 2003 to 2010 or 2015
Every company and every team I've ever worked for has had somewhere between 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog that they were staffed to do. Entire projects that were seen as priorities, but never even started because there was just no staff available to do them. Hundreds of "P1 important" bugs not getting fixed (and never getting fixed) because the limited staff was working on "P0 emergencies" all the time.
For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.
By OldfieldFund 2025-07-3018:361 reply > 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog
This is an old trick to get people to work hard. It's no accident that every tech company does this.
I mean, if you worked at any of these companies, you could see the bug list for yourself. These are not fake bugs filed by corporate conspirators. They're actual software defects that affect real users.
By OldfieldFund 2025-07-3019:40 I'm not saying the bugs aren't real. But there is a non-specific frontier of control, so to speak. And the stock prices of the big companies are always going up, and there aren't any major disasters. Usually.
With more people, there could still be more bugs, and disasters could still happen. Limiting resources can work well in corporations.
In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.
By WorldMaker 2025-07-3016:28 Some of that is easily explainable as just the ancient corporate mistake of seeing and paying recruiters as a commission-based sales force. They have vacations to pay for and sales quotas to meet and the easiest way to do that is volume over substance.
But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".
> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.
Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.
At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.
It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
By castwide 2025-07-3016:20 I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.
By quantumsequoia 2025-07-311:36 It's called pooled hiring, and it makes sense when a company is hiring lots of people for lots of teams. Most large companies do this when hiring rates are high. You end up with better employee-team match when you interview a candidate first and then match them based on their skills/interest, rather than contacting them for a specific role they may or may not be interested in.
Has nothing to do with whether hiring is for headcount or other reasons
By freedomben 2025-07-3015:1515 reply This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two).
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.
Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
By ecb_penguin 2025-07-3015:214 reply Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent.
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever
It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.
> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?
They explained their argument.
> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?
They explained their argument in the article
> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
By tickettotranai 2025-07-3015:293 reply If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.
Ultimately, all actions multinational companies take are rooted in greed.
Questioning that feels a lil naive?
Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?
Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?
I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.
We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.
And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.
By ryandrake 2025-07-3017:53 > Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?
Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.
By Paratoner 2025-07-3017:25 > How do we determine what excessive employment is?
Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.
By klik99 2025-07-3016:44 Yeah, the parent comments feel confused, it's kind of a truism that corporations make decisions based on greed. Capitalism, at it's best, tries to align personal/corporate self-interest with the interests of society. If you can't beat 'em, try to direct their interest towards things that benefit society. Keyword here is "try", I mean it's better than feudal lords pursuing self interest by constantly killing each other. The article does a good job of showing how that drive has really made a mess of the job market, and criticizing it because it blames all this stuff on corporate greed is really confusing since both critics and proponents of capitalism agree corporate decisions are all driven by self-interest, they just disagree on the outcomes.
By tickettotranai 2025-08-017:44 If anything, I take corporate greed as axiomatic. Saying something happened because of it is stupid. There's no information in it.
And hey, look, turns out the article was AI slop generated to make the front page of HN.
They're identifying a driving force, greed, behind a range of actions. That's no more "unfalsifiable" than the claim that gravity is variously responsible for objects falling, orbits, spherically symmetric bodies, and stars collapsing.
So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything.
I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).
Any corporate behavior that doesn’t lead fairly directly to increased share price, profit, revenues, or market share would qualify.
But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.
By thelaxiankey2 2025-08-018:19 The argument your link suggests is legal, not empirical. Legally speaking, there is no mandate, and acting like there is is almost surely bad for society. So I don't disagree there.
And as to the existence of exceptions, that is what makes humanities hard. Unlike physics, it is never all, it's always most, it's always shades and never direct. I use absolutist words in these discussions because it makes the points stick better, but I obviously do not mean them totally.
I think corporations maximizing profit is the default, and so writing an op-ed about how corporate greed caused something to happen seems pretty dumb to me.
By ahf8Aithaex7Nai 2025-08-013:071 reply How is this framing unfalsifiable? It is up to you to demonstrate that. Otherwise, I question whether you even understand what falsifiability means and why it is relevant.
By tickettotranai 2025-08-017:41 Something can be falsifiable without being false. F=ma is falsifiable but not false. With humanities stuff it's less clear cut, but I'm inclined to be skeptical of ideas that explain too many things.
Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill.
It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting.
PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.
>> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
>> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?
By lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2025-07-3018:37 Per the banker analogy, it'd be like if the banker hired all of the personal trainers so other bankers wouldn't have access to them, give most of them nothing to do because it turns out the banker only needs one, and then fire them all once the other bankers won't be able to hire them as easily, all without any regard for the impact this strategy has on the trainers' lives and without being upfront and honest with the trainers about the strategy.
Yes, that's greedy.
Is the argument against layoffs purely based on the stock market value of the company ? That sounds very reductiveIt depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.
By ttoinou 2025-07-3017:20 Oh, interesting. I meant the argument "they can afford it, they have enough money, look at the stock market", not "they are trying to save money and drive up their stock value"
By yyyk 2025-07-3019:34 >A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down?
What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.
* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.
The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it...
Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.
If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.
That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.
That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
By bluetomcat 2025-07-3016:131 reply Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. This is a huge opportunity cost to society - that talent could be doing great creative stuff for small and medium-sized businesses instead.
By gruez 2025-07-3017:25 >Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens.
???
What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase.
>They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines.
That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.
The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.
By johnfn 2025-07-3015:33 Are we not supposed to pass judgement on a blog post just because it's opinion-based? If I put the most nonsensical opinions into my blog post, I hope people tell me that it's not very good.
By freedomben 2025-07-3017:061 reply I don't disagree, but I also don't think that gives the article a pass to make whatever claims they want without getting any pushback. Especially where they posted it to HN, they should be expecting to be challenged. I could (and probably should) have been nicer instead of calling it "terrible", but I don't think we (a site like HN dedicated to intellectual curiosity) should give bad claims a pass just because they are "opinion." We don't let journalists make unsubstantiated factual claims that are self-contradictory just because they listed it under the "opinion" section of the paper/site, and I don't think we should have different standards for a self-published piece. I'm not advocating censoring it or taking it down, I'm just critiquing it.
By bigbuppo 2025-07-3021:05 Where is your peer-reviewed research that shows your opinion on this is correct? Do you have the numbers to back that up? Is there any verified source of data that says, "I love it when the people of HN find my blog post and start screaming at me for shit that doesn't matter."
By szundi 2025-07-3015:29 Parent commenter presents perfect arguments to show this opinion or whatever it is is based on questionable grounds
By sugarpimpdorsey 2025-07-3015:371 reply > This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO
The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
By freedomben 2025-07-3016:512 reply > The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism?
> It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification.
> Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?
By sugarpimpdorsey 2025-07-3017:141 reply You can do all that without being dismissive and telling everyone the post "isn't worth reading" (while believing your comment is).
By freedomben 2025-07-3017:19 Fair, point taken. I concede my language was overly harsh. Was a bit of a hot take. I don't retract it, but I do think I could have been nicer.
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.
When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.
When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
By freedomben 2025-07-3017:111 reply I don't disagree, but then it seems like the definition of "greed" that you are using is essentially synonymous with "running a company." If we want to use that definition, then the claims become true, but the term "greed" also becomes meaningless as it applies to everything we as humans do. "Greed" becomes the motivation behind why I took two slices of pizza instead of one, or why I turn the thermostat down in the winter to use less fuel (and thus save money), or why I turn the thermostat up in the winter (to get more comfortable, even though I'm using more gas). We greedily want to stay alive, so we use resources to procure food at the expense of other living creatures. For that matter, all life on the planet is driven by greed.
By graemep 2025-07-3017:42 I do not think it is synonymous. Running a company means pursuing profits, but it does not mean you have to ignore all other considerations. You can have ethical limits, server customers, look after the interests of your employees, reduce your environmental impacts etc.
Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things.
IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.
By danesparza 2025-07-3015:22 Agreed. This article doesn't even touch on other factors like tax law changes that influenced corporate hiring (specifically for software development teams). That seems like a glaring omission.
By benreesman 2025-07-3016:271 reply TFA is largely vibes, the angst it expresses is about real things but the analysis is to your point flawed in the details. Here's a better one.
The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.
This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).
This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.
In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.
There. FTFY.
By freedomben 2025-07-3017:17 Definitely a much better article :-)
I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat).
That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA).
Appreciate the discussion!
By ManlyBread 2025-07-3016:22 >This is a really terrible article.
I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.
By at-fates-hands 2025-07-3016:32 I'm not buying the idea that "corporate greed" led to over hiring to control the labor market. In fact, if the companies were really greedy, they would only hire the LEAST amount of developers and actually increase their bottom line and ergo, more profit for their shareholders. Which makes far more sense then expanding your overhead which actually reduces the amount of money your company profits.
By ponector 2025-07-3018:53 > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool
I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
By rozap 2025-07-3019:08 Volatility caused by short term thinking is bad for workers. Over hiring and layoffs are a symptom of that.
That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.
By AnimalMuppet 2025-07-3016:111 reply Well, it was a widely and strongly suspected behavior. It was never proven, to the best of my knowledge.
By j45 2025-07-3020:20 Yeah, seems like a behaviour that increased during ZIRP and started reversing when that went way.
At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing.
It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.
+1
"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
By bryan_w 2025-07-315:40 Cost of capital
By neuroplots 2025-07-3016:37 TFA is simplistic and combative, but not entirely incorrect. When companies are cash-rich, they hire generously but invest in vanity projects that do nothing for the careers of the people staffed in them. When they’re poor, they fire people and use the fear factor to extract even more work.
This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
By nullc 2025-07-3016:27 > It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition.
I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
