4 ms·

It happened before, in living memory, it's hardly impossible. It gets easy to justify by employers when enough people lost their job that every job opening is f

It happened before, in living memory, it's hardly impossible. It gets easy to justify by employers when enough people lost their job that every job opening is flooded with candidates. There are basically two schools of thought: the "software is eating the world" one says that requirements will continue to be more and more specialized, for every advance in tooling there will be advances in complexity we can tackle, and the size of the overall dev market will continue to grow in a way that makes it less likely to be as affected by another single thing like the dot-com bubble. The other is that today's salaries are driven in large part by "fake money" (e.g. VC investment or internal speculative spending more than by revenue from paying customers) and that there will be a nasty correction when that stream dries up. I don't know which is right.

pm90 5y ago
Both these views are incorrect. Software is one of the only professions in the US where non executives have managed to enjoy a sliver of the increase in compensation that executives do in most other sectors of the economy. The spectacular rise in productivity has generally been funneled to the top; except in specialized fields like software, which requires highly specialized skills to be effective. The “crazy VC money” hypothesis is especially easy to prove wrong since the highest compensation is currently offered by Big Tech (public companies). While people that work on startups do luck out sometimes, there aren’t enough of those unicorns to move the market for most; thats almost exclusively being fueled by competition among Big Tech.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Your second paragraph sounds like the same thing I meant, essentially "specialization and skill will continue to be required as software continues to be highly influential all over the place." For the latter, I think stuff like Facebook's whole "metaverse" money-loser, Google's random-other-non-ads-project stuff, a bunch of Netflix efforts beyond "just show the damn video," would be at risk in a major recession. Couple that with an implosion of a bunch of "growth" companies and it would hardly surprise me to see hiring get a lot easier for the money-making Big Tech projects. (I don't actually believe that, I lean to the former, but I think it's a much more credible idea than you do. I've had a lot of coworkers the last decade who've never worked at a profitable company but passed FANG-style interviews and were making near-FANG money.)

pm90 5y ago

Both these views are incorrect. Software is one of the only professions in the US where non executives have managed to enjoy a sliver of the increase in compensation that executives do in most other sectors of the economy. The spectacular rise in productivity has generally been funneled to the top; except in specialized fields like software, which requires highly specialized skills to be effective. The “crazy VC money” hypothesis is especially easy to prove wrong since the highest compensation is currently offered by Big Tech (public companies). While people that work on startups do luck out sometimes, there aren’t enough of those unicorns to move the market for most; thats almost exclusively being fueled by competition among Big Tech.

majormajor 5y ago
Your second paragraph sounds like the same thing I meant, essentially "specialization and skill will continue to be required as software continues to be highly influential all over the place." For the latter, I think stuff like Facebook's whole "metaverse" money-loser, Google's random-other-non-ads-project stuff, a bunch of Netflix efforts beyond "just show the damn video," would be at risk in a major recession. Couple that with an implosion of a bunch of "growth" companies and it would hardly surprise me to see hiring get a lot easier for the money-making Big Tech projects. (I don't actually believe that, I lean to the former, but I think it's a much more credible idea than you do. I've had a lot of coworkers the last decade who've never worked at a profitable company but passed FANG-style interviews and were making near-FANG money.)