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All it takes is two things: 1. The investor bubble to bust - and I think this will happen due to the soon to be rising interest rates making capital much more

All it takes is two things: 1. The investor bubble to bust - and I think this will happen due to the soon to be rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure. 2. One of the big employers dumps devs into the market - say one of the FAANG companies has a sever downturn and lays of thousands of devs. Don't think it can happen - Facebook and Google are just a few regulations away from mass lay offs and downsizing.

Apocryphon 5y ago
Regulations? Meta itself seems to be losing marketshare all on its own just fine, with maybe some regulatory work by the iOS App Store.
lambdasquirrel 5y ago
I think the answer is closer to this, and also a lot scarier. There are vast swaths of the economy that have got to be over-leveraged and just weird from all these years of low-to-negative interest rates. We really don't know where things will be at until we have to turn up those rates, and the Fed is walking on a precarious tightrope. If interest rates go back to where they were in the 80s, it could be a bloodbath in the streets. That is why rates may end up going slower (in the grand scheme of things) than we might expect. There is a plausible scenario of the entire economy being in the VC heat-death scenario in the 80s that older tech folks had previously been expecting, but has been pushed out hitherto because of the combination of easy returns and easy money. Then of course there's how it will play out in tech. Historically, returns in tech have indeed been driven by VC capital, which is one of the more speculative areas of the economy. But speaking as someone working at a company that isn't a FANG, it seems that there's a chunk of tech that has become more like traditional finance in terms of its microeconomic structure. You have highly leveraged workers whose labor is being amplified by a combination of machines and capital, but the capital isn't so much speculative as it is boring and predictable.
ardit33 5y ago
These off the cuff remark are the typical 'armchair commentary' we get in HN and somehow they get a lot of votes, but they are really low grade 'feel good' efforts. While FB/Meta is in a vulnerable position, they still make 30B+ a quarter, and a net income of 10B. Google in such a strong position, that it seems there will be nobody that will/can disrupt it, even though their search results haven't been the greatest. Even if they got 'broken up' by the regulators, Search, Youtube, Google Apps, entities by themselves will probably be bigger and employ more people combined (the Baby Bell, breakup is a good precedent of it, where the sum of the pieces was larger than the original company). The reality is tech is becoming more and more important for everything in society. Eg. Cars: Tech was about 10% of the cost of a typical car in the 90s, now is over 35% and increasing. Cars can't be build because lack of chips and not lack of manpower or aluminum/steel. The pandemic increased the acceleration of all tech by at least 5 years, and increased demand overnight. Even when things start normalizing, some of it will stick along, as for many people the day to day life has changed, and some 'work for home' or hybrid work is here to stay. Will we see soft hiring seasons? Absolutely. In the next recession, probably hiring will be softer, and people will have harder time to find a job in the short term, (think 2008-2009), but expect in the long term that technology will take a higher percentage of the economy and tech hiring will be going up on the long term.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
People forget when IBM shed programmers like crazy in the 80s and 90s. Also, the 80s in general were very harsh to programmers. Our industry has definitely seen downturns before, the dot com bust 20 years ago being the most recent. But honestly, I’m more worried about aging out of this career then encountering another downturn. While things are better than they used to be, the pressure to continuously increase one’s value every year will necessarily wash some programmers out simply over time.
mslate 5y ago
#2 already happened in 2020 with Uber & Lyft significantly cutting their engineering workforce (but not fully like a bankruptcy might entail). I remember feeling concern about the local SF job market at the time, it was totally unfounded. The demand for software engineers that can ship product is very deep. FAANG engineers might not like the non-FAANG offers they might get at smaller firms, but they are solid jobs & you can easily retire on the timeframe set by the previous generation's yardstick (62-70 y/o).
- schnitzelstoat 5y ago
  Isn't 70 y/o pretty old to retire by previous standards? The concern I have is if anywhere is actually going to hire a 65 y/o programmer that can't afford to retire. Obviously, age discrimination is illegal but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
  - mslate 5y ago
    I referenced 70 because I checked & that's the age at which you withdraw max social security benefits. Looks like actual average in the US is ~64 y/o: https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IB_18-10.pdf https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IB_18-10.pdf I would worry more about age-ism, but I earnestly see very few "senior" candidates period (i.e. >35 y/o+) at all. It may speak to where I've worked, but I think it also speaks to how young the field still is. Once engineers hit their 30s I think the job-hopping rapidly slows down.
DarkCrusader2 5y ago
> rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure. Can someone please explain this to me or point me to some reading material. How does interest rates and investment in tech companies are related? How do we know that interest rates are going to rise soon?
- picture_view 5y ago
  I can’t answer about the relation to tech investment, but the federal reserve has a meeting every month and they have been explicitly saying for the last few meetings that they intend to raise interest rates several times this year.
- sakoht 5y ago
  Regarding interest rates, they are already up. I got a house 4 months ago at 2.85%, and now they are 4.2%. I can't speak to whether investment in tech will drop. Lately, there is so much spare money floating around investors can't find homes for it. Inflation suggests to me _more_ desperation to have the money invested, not less. And the net cause seems to be a steady stream of wealth consolidation allows a smaller subset of the economy to hold more and more wealth.
- hither_shores 5y ago
  All investment opportunities, to a first approximation, are competing with one another for capital. When interest rates drop, newly issued bonds become worse investments - but you've got to invest in something, so money flows into everything else. When interest rates go up, the opposite happens.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Regulations? Meta itself seems to be losing marketshare all on its own just fine, with maybe some regulatory work by the iOS App Store.

lambdasquirrel 5y ago

I think the answer is closer to this, and also a lot scarier. There are vast swaths of the economy that have got to be over-leveraged and just weird from all these years of low-to-negative interest rates. We really don't know where things will be at until we have to turn up those rates, and the Fed is walking on a precarious tightrope. If interest rates go back to where they were in the 80s, it could be a bloodbath in the streets. That is why rates may end up going slower (in the grand scheme of things) than we might expect. There is a plausible scenario of the entire economy being in the VC heat-death scenario in the 80s that older tech folks had previously been expecting, but has been pushed out hitherto because of the combination of easy returns and easy money. Then of course there's how it will play out in tech. Historically, returns in tech have indeed been driven by VC capital, which is one of the more speculative areas of the economy. But speaking as someone working at a company that isn't a FANG, it seems that there's a chunk of tech that has become more like traditional finance in terms of its microeconomic structure. You have highly leveraged workers whose labor is being amplified by a combination of machines and capital, but the capital isn't so much speculative as it is boring and predictable.

ardit33 5y ago

These off the cuff remark are the typical 'armchair commentary' we get in HN and somehow they get a lot of votes, but they are really low grade 'feel good' efforts. While FB/Meta is in a vulnerable position, they still make 30B+ a quarter, and a net income of 10B. Google in such a strong position, that it seems there will be nobody that will/can disrupt it, even though their search results haven't been the greatest. Even if they got 'broken up' by the regulators, Search, Youtube, Google Apps, entities by themselves will probably be bigger and employ more people combined (the Baby Bell, breakup is a good precedent of it, where the sum of the pieces was larger than the original company). The reality is tech is becoming more and more important for everything in society. Eg. Cars: Tech was about 10% of the cost of a typical car in the 90s, now is over 35% and increasing. Cars can't be build because lack of chips and not lack of manpower or aluminum/steel. The pandemic increased the acceleration of all tech by at least 5 years, and increased demand overnight. Even when things start normalizing, some of it will stick along, as for many people the day to day life has changed, and some 'work for home' or hybrid work is here to stay. Will we see soft hiring seasons? Absolutely. In the next recession, probably hiring will be softer, and people will have harder time to find a job in the short term, (think 2008-2009), but expect in the long term that technology will take a higher percentage of the economy and tech hiring will be going up on the long term.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

People forget when IBM shed programmers like crazy in the 80s and 90s. Also, the 80s in general were very harsh to programmers. Our industry has definitely seen downturns before, the dot com bust 20 years ago being the most recent. But honestly, I’m more worried about aging out of this career then encountering another downturn. While things are better than they used to be, the pressure to continuously increase one’s value every year will necessarily wash some programmers out simply over time.

mslate 5y ago

#2 already happened in 2020 with Uber & Lyft significantly cutting their engineering workforce (but not fully like a bankruptcy might entail). I remember feeling concern about the local SF job market at the time, it was totally unfounded. The demand for software engineers that can ship product is very deep. FAANG engineers might not like the non-FAANG offers they might get at smaller firms, but they are solid jobs & you can easily retire on the timeframe set by the previous generation's yardstick (62-70 y/o).

schnitzelstoat 5y ago
Isn't 70 y/o pretty old to retire by previous standards? The concern I have is if anywhere is actually going to hire a 65 y/o programmer that can't afford to retire. Obviously, age discrimination is illegal but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
- mslate 5y ago
  I referenced 70 because I checked & that's the age at which you withdraw max social security benefits. Looks like actual average in the US is ~64 y/o: https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IB_18-10.pdf https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IB_18-10.pdf I would worry more about age-ism, but I earnestly see very few "senior" candidates period (i.e. >35 y/o+) at all. It may speak to where I've worked, but I think it also speaks to how young the field still is. Once engineers hit their 30s I think the job-hopping rapidly slows down.

DarkCrusader2 5y ago

> rising interest rates making capital much more difficult too secure. Can someone please explain this to me or point me to some reading material. How does interest rates and investment in tech companies are related? How do we know that interest rates are going to rise soon?

picture_view 5y ago
I can’t answer about the relation to tech investment, but the federal reserve has a meeting every month and they have been explicitly saying for the last few meetings that they intend to raise interest rates several times this year.
sakoht 5y ago
Regarding interest rates, they are already up. I got a house 4 months ago at 2.85%, and now they are 4.2%. I can't speak to whether investment in tech will drop. Lately, there is so much spare money floating around investors can't find homes for it. Inflation suggests to me _more_ desperation to have the money invested, not less. And the net cause seems to be a steady stream of wealth consolidation allows a smaller subset of the economy to hold more and more wealth.
hither_shores 5y ago
All investment opportunities, to a first approximation, are competing with one another for capital. When interest rates drop, newly issued bonds become worse investments - but you've got to invest in something, so money flows into everything else. When interest rates go up, the opposite happens.