4 ms·

The next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers. Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train f

The next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers. Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career, often outside of technology. Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
Quite the opposite where I live. Many older developers are shortly before retiring and companies have difficulties to get and train successors. Those that are not into development go into IT, which currently takes anyone. If you are a bum with a network cable, you will get hired. I just think that companies like Facebook are a special case. Here it can be very true, and Meta certainly might consolidate their product lineup. High stakes and generous compensation, but these developments can mean that your position gets cancelled. If it weren't for TikTok and some other competitors, they probably would have kept their jobs. But the market changes quickly. Facebook is now a network for parents and their children will look elsewhere naturally.
- revolutukr 4y ago
  Very interesting. In my retirement I've spent the past five years helping refugees get their foot in the door (mostly Syrian and Afghan students/recent grads, but about 20% have a lot of experience). This year has been brutal, we shut down in August because everything dried up. We worked mostly with lingering start-ups who failed to launch, mid-tier companies, and small companies. It all dried up, or the requirements shifted a tier (before mid-level was 3-5 years, now 5-7. Senior positions are basically looking for people with Principle / Staff engineering credentials). Of course, YMMV, we were navigating very specific situations which worked out well for people who are otherwise discriminated against / out of luck for finding work. Also, anecdotally, the salaries attached to the stream of recruiter spam I receive in my personal e-mail have plummeted. Maybe this is good, smaller companies will be able to hire more staff since salary expectations are lower?
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    You get salaries in your recruiter spam? Amazing.
    - revolutukr 4y ago
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Where do you live? In Poland, developer after 40 or 50 is very rare - the market exploded in late 00s and 10s. That's very far from retirement and average age of developer is still in the 20s.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    The US probably.
gabrieledarrigo 4y ago
This seems a very catastrophic and quite miope (based on "everybody you know") assumption!
adave 4y ago
Hmm a bit doom and gloom i see.Its just meta's loss, these people will surely find new roles or start a company or two that might take down meta with that ghastly metaverse attempt.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Sounds like a great way of shooting oneself in the foot. They routinely complain about lack of seniors, where do they think seniors come from? Thin air?
moviewatcher333 4y ago
> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials. At the same time, I think there’s growing awareness of the “quality” of a lot of tech giants. Once the market gets flooded with people who are too bad to even be retained at companies like Facebook or Google, it may merely end up being a black mark on your résumé. Similar to how some people choose to leave the specifics of their degree or some unscrupulous jobs off their history when looking for jobs, people may minimize time at a FAANG if thousands of them are entering the market all at once. When you’ve got 5 applicants who twiddled their thumbs at Facebook for 5 years and all with similarly overinflated work history, someone with a decent GitHub profile and a visibly launched product from a tiny Midwest shop doesn’t look bad.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I think reality will hit lot of these people. Similar thing happened in Finland with Nokia. A massive company for location, with compensation and internal politics and culture of big company. Many found it hard to adapt in new environment. Thus outside connections it not necessarily being positive thing on resume.
- random314 4y ago
  Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?
- CoolGuySteve 4y ago
  Yeah, I've found a sizeable portion of these people will gladly stall a project indefinitely by bringing a "but does it scale" mindset to a deployment that fits on an instance and a few AWS services. Like no really, we don't need to argue about a 5 page git branch management and deployment policy for 4 developers. We don't need datadog or whatever for 100KB of text files. Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time. etc. What we do need is something that generates revenue and an engineering philosophy that mainly comes from the rest-and-vest crowd isn't it.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
onion2k 4y ago
Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials. I don't think that's really true. Having a FAANG on your resume increases your chance of getting an interview, but very few companies will employ someone simply because they've come from a FAANG. It will always come down to how well you interview and what your tech test is like. Experience counts for a lot but most companies just don't need the sort of experience working at Facebook gives you.
- andrewingram 4y ago
  Anecdotally, when I've interviewed candidates from FAANG, they've generally been a weak "would hire"; i.e. decent enough but not overwhelmingly good.
  - b112 4y ago
    I wonder how many FAANG candidates' primary interviewee skill, is memorizing pointless trivia, and endless thought twisters. Mostly off of books bought on amazon. None of that provides for creative thinking, or real world problem solving. Nor demonstrates it. Do these candidates interview well with normal corps? I wonder.
    - bradlys 4y ago
      I wonder if you’ve been through FAANG interviews in the last 8 years. It sounds like you haven’t. I’ve not found other companies interviews to be particularly good either. Non-leetcode interviews get biased a lot towards personality, resume, and ability to BS.
      - andrewingram 4y ago
        But since any exercise you choose is going to be flawed in some way, to me it's about getting as much diversity of signal in the time you're willing to spend per candidate. For smaller orgs, 3 hours of interviews is a reasonable cap, and I find I just don't get enough signal from leetcode exercises relative to the time they generally take (in my experience as a candidate, it's been 1-2 45 minute exercises).
imiric 4y ago
That's a very short-sighted perspective. Most companies don't need "rockstars". There's a lot of good tech produced outside of the FAANG bubble. > The next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers. A junior or mid-level developer is not the same as an average developer. There are plenty of senior "average" developers, and junior "rockstars". All of this is fine.
- zero_shift 4y ago
  I think the problem is that FAANG developers are being seen as the worst of both worlds: solid performers but with Rockstar expectations (salary, desirability, job hopping). And a bias towards overcomplication. (I am not making any claim this is true, but it's the view I encounter) Personally, having worked in very small orgs (8 people) and moderately large ones (800), there is definitely a culture shock moving down an order of magnitude. You have to be more generalist and keep a very goal-oriented view. Small company work tends to be much higher ambiguity; you have to think about delivering something that may change within a few months, and where outages are seen as 'a good problem to have'. Scaling is less important than agility.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mnd999 4y ago
I think you’re overestimating the ability of having a FAANG on your CV. It might help you to get an interview, that’s kinda all. Unless you’re were an early employee, in which case you’re probably going for co-founder roles anyway, that’s if you haven’t retired already.
jurassic 4y ago
I'm sorry, but this seems like total FUD. Yes, We're coming out of the most insane time ever in the history of the planet to be a software developer, but that doesn't mean there's any reason for new entrants to the industry to despair. People might be popping fewer bottles of champaign for the next little while, but compared to the US economy overall software workers are still living incredibly privileged lives. If you can code, no matter your years of experience, there's a job for you out there. People should not use Facebook as some kind of canary in the coal mine for tech companies overall. Facebook's star is no longer rising due to recent privacy changes on the Apple platform, but the software sector overall will continue to grow. I don't believe Facebook's decline is some kind of harbinger for the entire industry, since most of the industry is not dependent on violating user privacy to the extent that Facebook has over the last 15 years or so. And even if the core of what you say is true and the industry overall is headed for contraction, I don't believe the pain will last anywhere near 5 years. Even in the present "crisis" state, anybody with any talent should be able to find a new position in a few months. Looking back to the 2008 crisis, most people were back on track well before the 5-year anniversary. TLDR: Don't listen to the doomsayers. Even with recent headwinds, I believe tech is still the highest value play for most young people entering the industry today. Unless you've got the chops and the prestige resume to be top of the class at a top law or business program, this is your best shot so you should commit mentally to doing whatever is necessary to maintain your place here. Even if there are a couple lean years, you're going to come out ahead in the long run as one of the people who knows how to control the machines.
negamax 4y ago
My take is that companies hired like crazy during the pandemic and these people will be junior employees who have larger overhead, smaller output. Problem with tech right now is that it 1. Failing to justify valuations that were reached during the pandemic. Which come crashing down when interest rates starts rising. So many got caught with unsustainable budgets and commitments 2. Mass quitting that happened during the pandemic which was plugged frivolously by mass^2 hiring. I don't think tech companies are going anywhere before getting their lost employees back. My thesis is, layoffs will impact new/young hires and newly created units/departments
- zero_shift 4y ago
  Absolutely. Trainee staff are not efficient (by definition) and provide a low ratio of productivity to investment. However, so long as your new hires have net positive impact, it's worth having them if gross velocity can expand your share of a growing market. The market has been ripe for about a decade now, thanks to quantitative easing and cheap capital propping up consumer spend. In addition those low interest rates make it inexpensive to borrow money and hire that army of developers. Coming into a more cautious market, however, where things are more expensive, the balance shifts more towards spend control and getting value for money. Which is why I think junior hiring will slow down for a few years: more experienced staff are more productive relative to their incomes, and they probably won't be promoted out of IC as quickly as they used to due to businesses slowing down. I think the age of retraining in tech as a no-brainer is behind us now. To be honest I think that was happening already as the junior market became saturated. New entrants might have to spend more cycles applying for jobs; coding bootcamps may shutter.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
You are assuming the market is homogenous. The vast majority of developers are not in the same league as FAANG devs. It's very unlikely a FAANG dev is going to go from $$$ to $. The market is not so bad that people are scrambling for any job they can get.
neilv 4y ago
> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials. I could also imagine the brand signalling not working in the favor of anyone leaving there around now. Normally, people sometimes leave there because they've decided they want a different kind of work, or a different environment. But, for the near future, there might be a large number of people forced out of there, ostensibly for poor performance. When you're sifting through resumes, as much as "got into X" can look like a positive, "possibly spat back out by X" might cancel that out.
piva00 4y ago
Those 12k are probably not even all in R&D/tech side. Even if 12k are out in the market, there's still a massive shortage for software developers and even though we are training an insane amount of new ones per year the vacant spots are still growing. Software has eaten the world, there's no industry today that don't depend on software to increase efficiency. There are more and more devices requiring software, in all levels of products from infrastructure to consumer goods. I really don't understand where do you think we have enough developers so that even "average" developers would suffer. They have experience, they will end up where other "rockstars" (side-note: I absolutely hate this terminology) have left for greener pastures. I think you should really look at the landscape before writing such a haphazard take, or at least bring some sources on why you think that this will affect in any way the job prospects of new developers for the next 5 years. There's absolutely nothing to sustain your argument more than "I think this".
revolutukr 4y ago
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
> Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career, often outside of technology. ...like what? What other career exists with such a high average and median income?
phpisthebest 4y ago
>> Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career and what would that be? In the US at least #LearnToCode was used because we were off shoring every non-tech job, and now those are going away so what is left?
twomoonsbysurf 4y ago

raxxorraxor 4y ago

Quite the opposite where I live. Many older developers are shortly before retiring and companies have difficulties to get and train successors. Those that are not into development go into IT, which currently takes anyone. If you are a bum with a network cable, you will get hired. I just think that companies like Facebook are a special case. Here it can be very true, and Meta certainly might consolidate their product lineup. High stakes and generous compensation, but these developments can mean that your position gets cancelled. If it weren't for TikTok and some other competitors, they probably would have kept their jobs. But the market changes quickly. Facebook is now a network for parents and their children will look elsewhere naturally.

revolutukr 4y ago
Very interesting. In my retirement I've spent the past five years helping refugees get their foot in the door (mostly Syrian and Afghan students/recent grads, but about 20% have a lot of experience). This year has been brutal, we shut down in August because everything dried up. We worked mostly with lingering start-ups who failed to launch, mid-tier companies, and small companies. It all dried up, or the requirements shifted a tier (before mid-level was 3-5 years, now 5-7. Senior positions are basically looking for people with Principle / Staff engineering credentials). Of course, YMMV, we were navigating very specific situations which worked out well for people who are otherwise discriminated against / out of luck for finding work. Also, anecdotally, the salaries attached to the stream of recruiter spam I receive in my personal e-mail have plummeted. Maybe this is good, smaller companies will be able to hire more staff since salary expectations are lower?
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  You get salaries in your recruiter spam? Amazing.
  - revolutukr 4y ago
KptMarchewa 4y ago
Where do you live? In Poland, developer after 40 or 50 is very rare - the market exploded in late 00s and 10s. That's very far from retirement and average age of developer is still in the 20s.
- jacooper 4y ago
  The US probably.

gabrieledarrigo 4y ago

This seems a very catastrophic and quite miope (based on "everybody you know") assumption!

adave 4y ago

Hmm a bit doom and gloom i see.Its just meta's loss, these people will surely find new roles or start a company or two that might take down meta with that ghastly metaverse attempt.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Sounds like a great way of shooting oneself in the foot. They routinely complain about lack of seniors, where do they think seniors come from? Thin air?

moviewatcher333 4y ago

> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials. At the same time, I think there’s growing awareness of the “quality” of a lot of tech giants. Once the market gets flooded with people who are too bad to even be retained at companies like Facebook or Google, it may merely end up being a black mark on your résumé. Similar to how some people choose to leave the specifics of their degree or some unscrupulous jobs off their history when looking for jobs, people may minimize time at a FAANG if thousands of them are entering the market all at once. When you’ve got 5 applicants who twiddled their thumbs at Facebook for 5 years and all with similarly overinflated work history, someone with a decent GitHub profile and a visibly launched product from a tiny Midwest shop doesn’t look bad.

Ekaros 4y ago
I think reality will hit lot of these people. Similar thing happened in Finland with Nokia. A massive company for location, with compensation and internal politics and culture of big company. Many found it hard to adapt in new environment. Thus outside connections it not necessarily being positive thing on resume.
random314 4y ago
Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?
CoolGuySteve 4y ago
Yeah, I've found a sizeable portion of these people will gladly stall a project indefinitely by bringing a "but does it scale" mindset to a deployment that fits on an instance and a few AWS services. Like no really, we don't need to argue about a 5 page git branch management and deployment policy for 4 developers. We don't need datadog or whatever for 100KB of text files. Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time. etc. What we do need is something that generates revenue and an engineering philosophy that mainly comes from the rest-and-vest crowd isn't it.
- robertlagrant 4y ago

onion2k 4y ago

Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials. I don't think that's really true. Having a FAANG on your resume increases your chance of getting an interview, but very few companies will employ someone simply because they've come from a FAANG. It will always come down to how well you interview and what your tech test is like. Experience counts for a lot but most companies just don't need the sort of experience working at Facebook gives you.

andrewingram 4y ago
Anecdotally, when I've interviewed candidates from FAANG, they've generally been a weak "would hire"; i.e. decent enough but not overwhelmingly good.
- b112 4y ago
  I wonder how many FAANG candidates' primary interviewee skill, is memorizing pointless trivia, and endless thought twisters. Mostly off of books bought on amazon. None of that provides for creative thinking, or real world problem solving. Nor demonstrates it. Do these candidates interview well with normal corps? I wonder.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    I wonder if you’ve been through FAANG interviews in the last 8 years. It sounds like you haven’t. I’ve not found other companies interviews to be particularly good either. Non-leetcode interviews get biased a lot towards personality, resume, and ability to BS.
    - andrewingram 4y ago
      But since any exercise you choose is going to be flawed in some way, to me it's about getting as much diversity of signal in the time you're willing to spend per candidate. For smaller orgs, 3 hours of interviews is a reasonable cap, and I find I just don't get enough signal from leetcode exercises relative to the time they generally take (in my experience as a candidate, it's been 1-2 45 minute exercises).

imiric 4y ago

That's a very short-sighted perspective. Most companies don't need "rockstars". There's a lot of good tech produced outside of the FAANG bubble. > The next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers. A junior or mid-level developer is not the same as an average developer. There are plenty of senior "average" developers, and junior "rockstars". All of this is fine.

zero_shift 4y ago
I think the problem is that FAANG developers are being seen as the worst of both worlds: solid performers but with Rockstar expectations (salary, desirability, job hopping). And a bias towards overcomplication. (I am not making any claim this is true, but it's the view I encounter) Personally, having worked in very small orgs (8 people) and moderately large ones (800), there is definitely a culture shock moving down an order of magnitude. You have to be more generalist and keep a very goal-oriented view. Small company work tends to be much higher ambiguity; you have to think about delivering something that may change within a few months, and where outages are seen as 'a good problem to have'. Scaling is less important than agility.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mnd999 4y ago

I think you’re overestimating the ability of having a FAANG on your CV. It might help you to get an interview, that’s kinda all. Unless you’re were an early employee, in which case you’re probably going for co-founder roles anyway, that’s if you haven’t retired already.

jurassic 4y ago

I'm sorry, but this seems like total FUD. Yes, We're coming out of the most insane time ever in the history of the planet to be a software developer, but that doesn't mean there's any reason for new entrants to the industry to despair. People might be popping fewer bottles of champaign for the next little while, but compared to the US economy overall software workers are still living incredibly privileged lives. If you can code, no matter your years of experience, there's a job for you out there. People should not use Facebook as some kind of canary in the coal mine for tech companies overall. Facebook's star is no longer rising due to recent privacy changes on the Apple platform, but the software sector overall will continue to grow. I don't believe Facebook's decline is some kind of harbinger for the entire industry, since most of the industry is not dependent on violating user privacy to the extent that Facebook has over the last 15 years or so. And even if the core of what you say is true and the industry overall is headed for contraction, I don't believe the pain will last anywhere near 5 years. Even in the present "crisis" state, anybody with any talent should be able to find a new position in a few months. Looking back to the 2008 crisis, most people were back on track well before the 5-year anniversary. TLDR: Don't listen to the doomsayers. Even with recent headwinds, I believe tech is still the highest value play for most young people entering the industry today. Unless you've got the chops and the prestige resume to be top of the class at a top law or business program, this is your best shot so you should commit mentally to doing whatever is necessary to maintain your place here. Even if there are a couple lean years, you're going to come out ahead in the long run as one of the people who knows how to control the machines.

negamax 4y ago

My take is that companies hired like crazy during the pandemic and these people will be junior employees who have larger overhead, smaller output. Problem with tech right now is that it 1. Failing to justify valuations that were reached during the pandemic. Which come crashing down when interest rates starts rising. So many got caught with unsustainable budgets and commitments 2. Mass quitting that happened during the pandemic which was plugged frivolously by mass^2 hiring. I don't think tech companies are going anywhere before getting their lost employees back. My thesis is, layoffs will impact new/young hires and newly created units/departments

zero_shift 4y ago
Absolutely. Trainee staff are not efficient (by definition) and provide a low ratio of productivity to investment. However, so long as your new hires have net positive impact, it's worth having them if gross velocity can expand your share of a growing market. The market has been ripe for about a decade now, thanks to quantitative easing and cheap capital propping up consumer spend. In addition those low interest rates make it inexpensive to borrow money and hire that army of developers. Coming into a more cautious market, however, where things are more expensive, the balance shifts more towards spend control and getting value for money. Which is why I think junior hiring will slow down for a few years: more experienced staff are more productive relative to their incomes, and they probably won't be promoted out of IC as quickly as they used to due to businesses slowing down. I think the age of retraining in tech as a no-brainer is behind us now. To be honest I think that was happening already as the junior market became saturated. New entrants might have to spend more cycles applying for jobs; coding bootcamps may shutter.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

You are assuming the market is homogenous. The vast majority of developers are not in the same league as FAANG devs. It's very unlikely a FAANG dev is going to go from $$$ to $. The market is not so bad that people are scrambling for any job they can get.

neilv 4y ago

> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials. I could also imagine the brand signalling not working in the favor of anyone leaving there around now. Normally, people sometimes leave there because they've decided they want a different kind of work, or a different environment. But, for the near future, there might be a large number of people forced out of there, ostensibly for poor performance. When you're sifting through resumes, as much as "got into X" can look like a positive, "possibly spat back out by X" might cancel that out.

piva00 4y ago

Those 12k are probably not even all in R&D/tech side. Even if 12k are out in the market, there's still a massive shortage for software developers and even though we are training an insane amount of new ones per year the vacant spots are still growing. Software has eaten the world, there's no industry today that don't depend on software to increase efficiency. There are more and more devices requiring software, in all levels of products from infrastructure to consumer goods. I really don't understand where do you think we have enough developers so that even "average" developers would suffer. They have experience, they will end up where other "rockstars" (side-note: I absolutely hate this terminology) have left for greener pastures. I think you should really look at the landscape before writing such a haphazard take, or at least bring some sources on why you think that this will affect in any way the job prospects of new developers for the next 5 years. There's absolutely nothing to sustain your argument more than "I think this".

revolutukr 4y ago

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

> Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career, often outside of technology. ...like what? What other career exists with such a high average and median income?

phpisthebest 4y ago

>> Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career and what would that be? In the US at least #LearnToCode was used because we were off shoring every non-tech job, and now those are going away so what is left?

twomoonsbysurf 4y ago