7 ms·

Tech layoffs hurt Gen Z job prospects, could backfire for big tech

43 points by galaxyLogic 4y ago

JCM9 4y ago
Waves of the market are just a fact of the business world. A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing. Some folks are in a bad spot at a bad time, and it’s a good reminder too that others are in a good spot at a good time and their “success” may have been more luck than skill. Over the long term these things tend to sort themselves out but in the short term yeah sometimes stuff is not “fair.” The “up” market in tech went on for so long that many forgot what a down market is and many have never experienced one.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah. The article makes the point that, while it's true that in "tech" things may look a bit like dot-bomb with layoffs and offers being rescinded, it's (so far) a pretty good employment market overall. And going to work for the government or a big bank may be disappointing to many but it's not the worst thing in the world.
- kodah 4y ago
  > A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing. Can confirm. I was putting myself through school and when my programming job went away it was a complete life reset. I didn't get back on track with my peers until about a decade later. It's also had the added effect that I'm very risk conscious and save aggressively. I am always looking for the next down market. > Some folks are in a bad spot at a bad time, and it’s a good reminder too that others are in a good spot at a good time and their “success” may have been more luck than skill After saying all that, I'm not a fan of this saying at all. There is something to being in the right place at the right time, but it's very difficult to luck yourself into top tech jobs. You do need to work very hard both for interviews and on-going work. You'll inevitably do some soul sacrificing whether you realize it or not. All that to say, it's a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, but the luck isn't to be forgotten.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Luck favors the prepared and all that. I have been very lucky at two particular points in my career where I really needed a new job and I found one both times with one email (including one in 2001!). Which was very lucky. But the emails were also to people I had worked with in the past and had a good relationship with.
  - JCM9 4y ago
    Fair call out on the luck thing and yes the old adage of the harder I work the luckier I get is very true.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > it's very difficult to luck yourself into top tech jobs. Not true. There are many avenues to it. The most important is deliberate training to be a top engineer. I know several who got into top tech jobs. All of them were no-brainers to hire, because of their track records.
    - kodah 4y ago
      I'm not sure if you realize how what you said looks, but I clearly cut the whole college thing early. Studying the required math for programming, even leaving out DS&A, is very hard. It's a lot of book reading, not a lot of hand holding, and self learners will probably have to learn the same thing many times over. That's to say, the deliberate training is exactly what I was speaking to from my own experience.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        Perhaps I misinterpreted your statement. I inferred it meant that getting into a top tech job was due to luck, and so it's a long shot lucky chance (like winning the lottery). The other meaning is it isn't luck to get a top tech job.
        kodah 4y ago
        Ah, that is a misinterpretation. I said there's a little bit of luck involved, but it's mostly hard work. I even regarded it as a bit of soul sacrificing.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Waves of the market are just a fact of the business world. A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing. yeah, and then that was the start of the huge mobile, cloud, app boom that followed. So many people got hugely rich with ESOs from the bull market that followed, or with IPOs or other exits. A small setback in 2022 does not change the long-term picture of FANMG tech jobs having among the best prospects of probably any job or sector. A lot of people on reddit have retired 'FIRE style' with 7 figures with such jobs.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    My job for the past 10+ years with a medium-sized tech company pretty much fundamentally changed my financial situation even given salary and stock appreciation that was nothing extraordinary.
newaccount2021 4y ago
[dead]
theteapot 4y ago
Isn't "tech", specifically software, in perpetual meltdown? I'm gen X. My first job out of uni, the company collapsed 2 weeks before I'd finished my internship. The next one lasted 8 months before going into administration.
- ardit33 4y ago
  If you started your career in 2000, Tech has always been a dumster-fire of meltdowns. 2000-2003, 2008-2009, etc. If you started your career 2012, for the last 10 years, Tech has always been going up and up, (compensation, job opportunities), etc.... this is the first time many have seen a true tech downturn. And this is a serious one. It is starting to look a bit worse than 2008-2009 slowdown, and getting closer to the 2001 one. (it is somewhere in between).
  - dalyons 4y ago
    Looking worse than 2008? What are you looking at? Doesn’t seem like that at all from what I’ve seen.
    - mkr-hn 4y ago
      2008 started in 2006 when the housing bubble started to burst. It was a slow burn through to 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed and revealed how bad things were. These things are always cascade failures that start slow and isolated, and no one has been able to predict each domino before it falls. It could be years before anyone can draw a line back to the stage-setting events of the next collapse. I don't know what they're looking at, but I suspect there will be some fallout as we find out how many complicated investment vehicles were wrapped up and set on top of cryptocurrencies.
      - countvonbalzac 4y ago
        2023 started in 2020 when the world shut down because of a pandemic.
      - 4y ago
flappyeagle 4y ago
Over the last 3 years, large tech companies have 2x, 3x in size. And now people are spooked by a 15% layoff? Boggles the mind.
- ghaff 4y ago
  While true, it's not a lot of consolation to someone graduating in June that many of those companies aren't hiring or are only hiring experienced people for very specific roles.
  - game_the0ry 4y ago
    I graduated class of 2007 (when companies stopped hiring due to the GFC), I did not get much consolation either. Got the opposite, in fact - everyone telling me I was being a spoiled millennial and everything was my fault. I couldn't get a job for a year. All of my peers made it through, so will the class of 2023.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      I graduated in 2001 and it was extremely difficult to break in. Minimum wage programming jobs that were so competitive other candidates were left crying when they couldn't land a position. Just keep pushing.
- game_the0ry 4y ago
  Agreed, this is more of a small correction instead of a "meltdown," at least for now. Not to minimize the effects of getting laid off early in your career, but almost everyone will likely be fine.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Doom and gloom for clicks. Sensationalism means more clicks. Perspective is lost.
- yibg 4y ago
  Although where did those 2x, 3x increase come from? Did big tech grab employees from other companies who have been short handled for a couple of years? Not like all of a sudden we got 2x more engineers ready to go.
revskill 4y ago
Tech in last 10 years be like: Move fast, break things and get drown. Legacy softwares are everywhere that needs new generation of devs to maintain. Wait, in order to maintain legacy softwares, one needs to be an experienced tech worker. Seems like a chicken-egg issue.
- majewsky 4y ago
  Not sure if I agree. My first job out of university was on a team maintaining a legacy Perl application with 400 KLOC. I believe those were two of the most impactful years of my career in what habits they formed wrt. clean coding and building maintainable stuff.
  - revskill 4y ago
    Legacy software requires much more x10 efforts to new ones. Because you must at the same time support bug fix, refactor, new features implementation, and also migrate to new systems for the same functionalities.
eBombzor 4y ago
There's plenty of jobs outside tech right now. It's the lower expectations that kill people internally. They just can't go from that fancy big tech salary to something merely above average.
- charlie0 4y ago
  What would kill me the most wouldn't be the lower salary, it would be working at a company that treats tech as an expense to be minimised, where non-technical people are calling the shots, working on 10 year old tech with no plans of upgrading ever.
  - eBombzor 4y ago
    Yeah that too. Funny, I'm in that situation right now. Side note, does anyone really enjoy working with Kafka/Kubernetes? I mean the tech sounds cool, but working with these tools...
    - charlie0 4y ago
      The pendulum can swing too far the other way as well. All I ask for is working with an up to date language and frameworks.
- snapetom 4y ago
  We've seen this before in smaller waves, or institutionally woven, in big tech. Standard operating procedure has been to hoard a bunch of cheap new grads, grind them out with your culture or small RIFs, and keep the most productive. It boggles me that this is acceptable and the norm for new grads. This, from the article, should be the norm: "The job prospects in Big Tech are so grim that career counselors at even the most elite universities are urging students to consider positions at smaller companies and in less sought-after sectors, such as manufacturing or government."
KerrAvon 4y ago
I think commenters here are missing the point. The issue is that between the layoffs and things like Musk's Twitter meltdown, there's a reevaluation of priorities by the folks entering the workplace. FAANG is no longer attractive by default because they're now perceived to be absuing their employees.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Good! The last thing we need is to centralize brainpower among 5-6 too-large companies. There's also the dirty secret that there are lots of hard problems out there, and you probably have a better chance of working on one of those hard problems than you would at Google, where you'd come up against people with decades of experience and lots more credentials than you. We should be warning grads that getting into Google could mean you getting paged to keep Gmail running at 4am in the morning, rather than figuring out a sweet graph analysis problem. I worry that the grasping for status for some is actually a cover for, "I don't know what to do but I would like others to validate me."
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  if "abuse" = 300k salary + cushy office + free meals, gym, on site medical, flexible working hours, then the word had lost all meaning and reached escape velocity. this is some bizarre loss aversion fallacy going on. Please, don't give me a top 0.00001% best job in the history of mankind because there's a 15% chance I might lose it. What!?
  - tennisflyi 4y ago
    I agree with most of what you said except for flexible working hours (they might not be 5 8-hour shifts, but they'll get it in some other capacity) - they usually want your soul.
andsoitis 4y ago
> the college and graduate students who dreamed of getting lucrative tech gigs once they completed their degrees many (most?) of us who have been at one of the prominent high-tech companies for a long time didn’t start there. it was a non-linear path with some non-glamorous work along the way.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Being young almost always involves paying your dues. It ain't fun but you get experience and figure out what you want. You usually don't have your choice of where to work from. I realize you can't make TikToks about that but it's reality.
- tennisflyi 4y ago
  You'll see plenty of college to FAANG/whatever coveted startup paths on LikedIn profiles.
jasmer 4y ago
2000 dot-com crash, 1992 recession, the 1970's were horrible. The issue right now is 'education and housing' costs which at least in part have something to do with our much longer than planned life expectancy and built up housing equity among those people, who vote and are very well organized as well as having deep ties into the system. I don't know what the answer is but I don't see anyone with great answers. Maybe 'decentralized' workforces will help out a bit, because affordability is reasonable in many places and frankly the supposed 'cool spots' just are not that cool.
alkonaut 4y ago
Define “tech”? It’s almost as if it stopped meaning “technology” and now means… what?
zmxz 4y ago
I know two devs. One changed 3 jobs in his whole career of 20 years and was genuinely interested in what he does, for whom he does it, which tools he uses and how to understand better the technology that's needed to achieve the goal. He is great to talk to, listens and never tries to interrupt with "but what about <technology X>, why didn't you use <latest serverless thingy>, who the f* is the ID-10-T that made you learn <language that does the job and people know it>", just in order to give himself credibility. Doesn't use popular social media. The other one always talked at people, knew all the buzzwords and changed 1 job every 8 - 12 months in the span of his 10 year long career, and never failed to mention it in social gatherings as if it's something to be proud of. His Twitter, LinkedIn, StackOverflow (with low score of answers and badly written questions that are borderline insulting when told to provide sufficient info), Facebook and TikTok are regularly updated multiple times in a day, mostly with phrases such as "In order to grow, you can only do so with an awesome team like <array of names from LinkedIn with similar social presence>" or other motivational phrases. He never skips the chance to mention that there exists choice of tech that does the job better and it's the one he happens to use, being the latest and shiniest in the toolbox of frameworks, SaaS or similar tools. Interactions with him are multiplayer monologue and most his social circle is similar - people who talk about themselves and how great they are, backed up with obscure, witty, wannabe-nerd words used for frameworks/libs/SaaS in their toolbox. One of these two lost the job and blames the world and big tech. The other one kept it. And will keep it for forseeable future. There is work to be done and there are people to do it. One of these two is a rare find in world of engineering, the other is common occurrence. One of these two is economically viable while the other incurs loss. As unpopular my comment will get, I'll let the downvoter (or upvoter) guess who kept the job and which person sounds as a more pleasant co-worker.
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  I'm guessing the first one lost his job, because I'm a pessimist.
  - zmxz 4y ago
    First one kept the job. > because I'm a pessimist Shoot for the worst, hope for the best type? :)
mattbaker 4y ago
Graduated in ‘09, things were still chaotic post-crash, but I did find work in the end. I joined a small local company, they had a codebase dating back to the 90s and they’d succeeded in becoming the dominant solution in a niche space. It was a far cry from the nifty places I read about on hacker news. It wasn’t flashy, weird proprietary tooling, ancient version of .NET, little to no version control, no testing infrastructure, but man I learned so much. I was fresh out of school, everything was a learning experience! I think it’s easy to forget that these stable, smaller, more “humble” options exist out there and they’re not necessarily slashing massive proportions of their staff.
notShabu 4y ago
This problem is actually somewhat similar to (or a result of) the inflation problem. Normally the market distributes demand in a continuous and predictable fashion so it's easier to plan for the future. This includes demand for toilet paper, eggs, and tech jobs. When the market is manipulated excessively, the results are hard to predict as the feedback is delayed and noisy. Like steering a huge ship with siri voice commands and an antagonistic crew. So when averaged over a long period of time, the steering does kinda-sorta align to a desired path, but like a fishtailing car, it causes a lot of collateral damage and is never really in control. E.g. demand for tech jobs was pulled forward causing long term planning (multi year degrees) to fail since supply is now being dumped onto a market with no demand. (and the previous excess demand just creating bloated orgs and salaries). This disrupts career paths b/c it delays the the ability to compound wealth/network/skills/etc... This has further negative effects b/c the difference between two individuals compounding at the same rate but with a different X axis start time is also an exponential function. (https://www.desmos.com/calculator/88s8c2uus2 https://www.desmos.com/calculator/88s8c2uus2) This increasing inequality drives up the prices of assets that are used to absorb excess wealth like stocks and real estate (considered a 'necessity' for life scripts like starting-a-family) Newcomers are forced into either starting over in some overlooked blue ocean leveraging new innovation, forced into negative expected return but high volatility strategies like robinhood/wallstreetbets, or forced into new life scripts that don't rely on clinging to a wealth sponge. * * Crypto has elements of all of these including new kinds of wealth sponges that are completely useless (unlike a house) so for many it seems like the only path to an acceptable future.
tristor 4y ago
So, I finished up with college in 2008 right before the worst part of the financial crisis hit. I also went to a no-name school in the middle of flyover country, and I didn't graduate. At no point in my career did I ever feel like I was having difficulty with finding a job. I would argue that the biggest challenge graduates in 2023 face is a battle inside themselves between their expectations, their delusions of grandeur, and the reality of the world. I didn't work properly for a "tech company" for more than 2 years after I finished school, and I started in a lower level role than I was qualified for, but the entire time I was learning things, working with people I respected and admired, and was paid decently for my time and efforts. The domain knowledge I gained from outside of "tech" at various points in my career has been incredibly valuable during all the times I worked in tech, because most of the "tech" companies make their money selling products to non-tech companies. Knowing your customer and their domain is actually crucial. If you're willing to work as a software developer at a health insurance company maintaining eligibility processing and claims processing systems, or at a manufacturing company writing automation tooling to help process engineers convert prototypes into mass producible widgets, or working on plugins for the unwieldy "enterprise" software used in the back office at a global trucking and logistics company, you'll never want for work, and you'll learn a lot and earn a decent wage compared to the market you find yourself in. No, it's not $300k TC right out of school with free lunches and trendy swag packages, but it's also not purgatory and destitution. Realistically, I think social media has created a completely unhinged set of expectations amongst people, in general, and especially young people. Everyone has to pay their dues, and what you learn along the way and the relationships you build will set up the rest of your career.
lasermike026 4y ago
No one is going to want to invest in an economy that never pays out. Gen-Z and gen-whatever is already fed up. We are all one moment away from, "Screw it, I'm not doing this anymore." We may all choose of life rigid frugality and minimal participation in the market economy. We will buy only what we need and nothing more.
fmajid 4y ago
It’s worth mentioning Apple didn’t resort to layoffs, unlike the other Big Tech companies.

43 points by galaxyLogic 4y ago

JCM9 4y ago

Waves of the market are just a fact of the business world. A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing. Some folks are in a bad spot at a bad time, and it’s a good reminder too that others are in a good spot at a good time and their “success” may have been more luck than skill. Over the long term these things tend to sort themselves out but in the short term yeah sometimes stuff is not “fair.” The “up” market in tech went on for so long that many forgot what a down market is and many have never experienced one.

ghaff 4y ago
Yeah. The article makes the point that, while it's true that in "tech" things may look a bit like dot-bomb with layoffs and offers being rescinded, it's (so far) a pretty good employment market overall. And going to work for the government or a big bank may be disappointing to many but it's not the worst thing in the world.
kodah 4y ago
> A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing. Can confirm. I was putting myself through school and when my programming job went away it was a complete life reset. I didn't get back on track with my peers until about a decade later. It's also had the added effect that I'm very risk conscious and save aggressively. I am always looking for the next down market. > Some folks are in a bad spot at a bad time, and it’s a good reminder too that others are in a good spot at a good time and their “success” may have been more luck than skill After saying all that, I'm not a fan of this saying at all. There is something to being in the right place at the right time, but it's very difficult to luck yourself into top tech jobs. You do need to work very hard both for interviews and on-going work. You'll inevitably do some soul sacrificing whether you realize it or not. All that to say, it's a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, but the luck isn't to be forgotten.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Luck favors the prepared and all that. I have been very lucky at two particular points in my career where I really needed a new job and I found one both times with one email (including one in 2001!). Which was very lucky. But the emails were also to people I had worked with in the past and had a good relationship with.
- JCM9 4y ago
  Fair call out on the luck thing and yes the old adage of the harder I work the luckier I get is very true.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > it's very difficult to luck yourself into top tech jobs. Not true. There are many avenues to it. The most important is deliberate training to be a top engineer. I know several who got into top tech jobs. All of them were no-brainers to hire, because of their track records.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I'm not sure if you realize how what you said looks, but I clearly cut the whole college thing early. Studying the required math for programming, even leaving out DS&A, is very hard. It's a lot of book reading, not a lot of hand holding, and self learners will probably have to learn the same thing many times over. That's to say, the deliberate training is exactly what I was speaking to from my own experience.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Perhaps I misinterpreted your statement. I inferred it meant that getting into a top tech job was due to luck, and so it's a long shot lucky chance (like winning the lottery). The other meaning is it isn't luck to get a top tech job.
      - kodah 4y ago
        Ah, that is a misinterpretation. I said there's a little bit of luck involved, but it's mostly hard work. I even regarded it as a bit of soul sacrificing.
paulpauper 4y ago
Waves of the market are just a fact of the business world. A whole bunch of folks graduating in 2007-09 walked into a massive dumpster fire of an economy that makes the current scenario look like nothing. yeah, and then that was the start of the huge mobile, cloud, app boom that followed. So many people got hugely rich with ESOs from the bull market that followed, or with IPOs or other exits. A small setback in 2022 does not change the long-term picture of FANMG tech jobs having among the best prospects of probably any job or sector. A lot of people on reddit have retired 'FIRE style' with 7 figures with such jobs.
- ghaff 4y ago
  My job for the past 10+ years with a medium-sized tech company pretty much fundamentally changed my financial situation even given salary and stock appreciation that was nothing extraordinary.

newaccount2021 4y ago

[dead]

theteapot 4y ago

Isn't "tech", specifically software, in perpetual meltdown? I'm gen X. My first job out of uni, the company collapsed 2 weeks before I'd finished my internship. The next one lasted 8 months before going into administration.

ardit33 4y ago
If you started your career in 2000, Tech has always been a dumster-fire of meltdowns. 2000-2003, 2008-2009, etc. If you started your career 2012, for the last 10 years, Tech has always been going up and up, (compensation, job opportunities), etc.... this is the first time many have seen a true tech downturn. And this is a serious one. It is starting to look a bit worse than 2008-2009 slowdown, and getting closer to the 2001 one. (it is somewhere in between).
- dalyons 4y ago
  Looking worse than 2008? What are you looking at? Doesn’t seem like that at all from what I’ve seen.
  - mkr-hn 4y ago
    2008 started in 2006 when the housing bubble started to burst. It was a slow burn through to 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed and revealed how bad things were. These things are always cascade failures that start slow and isolated, and no one has been able to predict each domino before it falls. It could be years before anyone can draw a line back to the stage-setting events of the next collapse. I don't know what they're looking at, but I suspect there will be some fallout as we find out how many complicated investment vehicles were wrapped up and set on top of cryptocurrencies.
    - countvonbalzac 4y ago
      2023 started in 2020 when the world shut down because of a pandemic.
    - 4y ago

flappyeagle 4y ago

Over the last 3 years, large tech companies have 2x, 3x in size. And now people are spooked by a 15% layoff? Boggles the mind.

ghaff 4y ago
While true, it's not a lot of consolation to someone graduating in June that many of those companies aren't hiring or are only hiring experienced people for very specific roles.
- game_the0ry 4y ago
  I graduated class of 2007 (when companies stopped hiring due to the GFC), I did not get much consolation either. Got the opposite, in fact - everyone telling me I was being a spoiled millennial and everything was my fault. I couldn't get a job for a year. All of my peers made it through, so will the class of 2023.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    I graduated in 2001 and it was extremely difficult to break in. Minimum wage programming jobs that were so competitive other candidates were left crying when they couldn't land a position. Just keep pushing.
game_the0ry 4y ago
Agreed, this is more of a small correction instead of a "meltdown," at least for now. Not to minimize the effects of getting laid off early in your career, but almost everyone will likely be fine.
paulpauper 4y ago
Doom and gloom for clicks. Sensationalism means more clicks. Perspective is lost.
yibg 4y ago
Although where did those 2x, 3x increase come from? Did big tech grab employees from other companies who have been short handled for a couple of years? Not like all of a sudden we got 2x more engineers ready to go.

revskill 4y ago

Tech in last 10 years be like: Move fast, break things and get drown. Legacy softwares are everywhere that needs new generation of devs to maintain. Wait, in order to maintain legacy softwares, one needs to be an experienced tech worker. Seems like a chicken-egg issue.

majewsky 4y ago
Not sure if I agree. My first job out of university was on a team maintaining a legacy Perl application with 400 KLOC. I believe those were two of the most impactful years of my career in what habits they formed wrt. clean coding and building maintainable stuff.
- revskill 4y ago
  Legacy software requires much more x10 efforts to new ones. Because you must at the same time support bug fix, refactor, new features implementation, and also migrate to new systems for the same functionalities.

eBombzor 4y ago

There's plenty of jobs outside tech right now. It's the lower expectations that kill people internally. They just can't go from that fancy big tech salary to something merely above average.

charlie0 4y ago
What would kill me the most wouldn't be the lower salary, it would be working at a company that treats tech as an expense to be minimised, where non-technical people are calling the shots, working on 10 year old tech with no plans of upgrading ever.
- eBombzor 4y ago
  Yeah that too. Funny, I'm in that situation right now. Side note, does anyone really enjoy working with Kafka/Kubernetes? I mean the tech sounds cool, but working with these tools...
  - charlie0 4y ago
    The pendulum can swing too far the other way as well. All I ask for is working with an up to date language and frameworks.
snapetom 4y ago
We've seen this before in smaller waves, or institutionally woven, in big tech. Standard operating procedure has been to hoard a bunch of cheap new grads, grind them out with your culture or small RIFs, and keep the most productive. It boggles me that this is acceptable and the norm for new grads. This, from the article, should be the norm: "The job prospects in Big Tech are so grim that career counselors at even the most elite universities are urging students to consider positions at smaller companies and in less sought-after sectors, such as manufacturing or government."

KerrAvon 4y ago

I think commenters here are missing the point. The issue is that between the layoffs and things like Musk's Twitter meltdown, there's a reevaluation of priorities by the folks entering the workplace. FAANG is no longer attractive by default because they're now perceived to be absuing their employees.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
Good! The last thing we need is to centralize brainpower among 5-6 too-large companies. There's also the dirty secret that there are lots of hard problems out there, and you probably have a better chance of working on one of those hard problems than you would at Google, where you'd come up against people with decades of experience and lots more credentials than you. We should be warning grads that getting into Google could mean you getting paged to keep Gmail running at 4am in the morning, rather than figuring out a sweet graph analysis problem. I worry that the grasping for status for some is actually a cover for, "I don't know what to do but I would like others to validate me."
flappyeagle 4y ago
if "abuse" = 300k salary + cushy office + free meals, gym, on site medical, flexible working hours, then the word had lost all meaning and reached escape velocity. this is some bizarre loss aversion fallacy going on. Please, don't give me a top 0.00001% best job in the history of mankind because there's a 15% chance I might lose it. What!?
- tennisflyi 4y ago
  I agree with most of what you said except for flexible working hours (they might not be 5 8-hour shifts, but they'll get it in some other capacity) - they usually want your soul.

andsoitis 4y ago

> the college and graduate students who dreamed of getting lucrative tech gigs once they completed their degrees many (most?) of us who have been at one of the prominent high-tech companies for a long time didn’t start there. it was a non-linear path with some non-glamorous work along the way.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
Being young almost always involves paying your dues. It ain't fun but you get experience and figure out what you want. You usually don't have your choice of where to work from. I realize you can't make TikToks about that but it's reality.
tennisflyi 4y ago
You'll see plenty of college to FAANG/whatever coveted startup paths on LikedIn profiles.

jasmer 4y ago

2000 dot-com crash, 1992 recession, the 1970's were horrible. The issue right now is 'education and housing' costs which at least in part have something to do with our much longer than planned life expectancy and built up housing equity among those people, who vote and are very well organized as well as having deep ties into the system. I don't know what the answer is but I don't see anyone with great answers. Maybe 'decentralized' workforces will help out a bit, because affordability is reasonable in many places and frankly the supposed 'cool spots' just are not that cool.

alkonaut 4y ago

Define “tech”? It’s almost as if it stopped meaning “technology” and now means… what?

zmxz 4y ago

I know two devs. One changed 3 jobs in his whole career of 20 years and was genuinely interested in what he does, for whom he does it, which tools he uses and how to understand better the technology that's needed to achieve the goal. He is great to talk to, listens and never tries to interrupt with "but what about <technology X>, why didn't you use <latest serverless thingy>, who the f* is the ID-10-T that made you learn <language that does the job and people know it>", just in order to give himself credibility. Doesn't use popular social media. The other one always talked at people, knew all the buzzwords and changed 1 job every 8 - 12 months in the span of his 10 year long career, and never failed to mention it in social gatherings as if it's something to be proud of. His Twitter, LinkedIn, StackOverflow (with low score of answers and badly written questions that are borderline insulting when told to provide sufficient info), Facebook and TikTok are regularly updated multiple times in a day, mostly with phrases such as "In order to grow, you can only do so with an awesome team like <array of names from LinkedIn with similar social presence>" or other motivational phrases. He never skips the chance to mention that there exists choice of tech that does the job better and it's the one he happens to use, being the latest and shiniest in the toolbox of frameworks, SaaS or similar tools. Interactions with him are multiplayer monologue and most his social circle is similar - people who talk about themselves and how great they are, backed up with obscure, witty, wannabe-nerd words used for frameworks/libs/SaaS in their toolbox. One of these two lost the job and blames the world and big tech. The other one kept it. And will keep it for forseeable future. There is work to be done and there are people to do it. One of these two is a rare find in world of engineering, the other is common occurrence. One of these two is economically viable while the other incurs loss. As unpopular my comment will get, I'll let the downvoter (or upvoter) guess who kept the job and which person sounds as a more pleasant co-worker.

theandrewbailey 4y ago
I'm guessing the first one lost his job, because I'm a pessimist.
- zmxz 4y ago
  First one kept the job. > because I'm a pessimist Shoot for the worst, hope for the best type? :)

mattbaker 4y ago

Graduated in ‘09, things were still chaotic post-crash, but I did find work in the end. I joined a small local company, they had a codebase dating back to the 90s and they’d succeeded in becoming the dominant solution in a niche space. It was a far cry from the nifty places I read about on hacker news. It wasn’t flashy, weird proprietary tooling, ancient version of .NET, little to no version control, no testing infrastructure, but man I learned so much. I was fresh out of school, everything was a learning experience! I think it’s easy to forget that these stable, smaller, more “humble” options exist out there and they’re not necessarily slashing massive proportions of their staff.

notShabu 4y ago

This problem is actually somewhat similar to (or a result of) the inflation problem. Normally the market distributes demand in a continuous and predictable fashion so it's easier to plan for the future. This includes demand for toilet paper, eggs, and tech jobs. When the market is manipulated excessively, the results are hard to predict as the feedback is delayed and noisy. Like steering a huge ship with siri voice commands and an antagonistic crew. So when averaged over a long period of time, the steering does kinda-sorta align to a desired path, but like a fishtailing car, it causes a lot of collateral damage and is never really in control. E.g. demand for tech jobs was pulled forward causing long term planning (multi year degrees) to fail since supply is now being dumped onto a market with no demand. (and the previous excess demand just creating bloated orgs and salaries). This disrupts career paths b/c it delays the the ability to compound wealth/network/skills/etc... This has further negative effects b/c the difference between two individuals compounding at the same rate but with a different X axis start time is also an exponential function. (https://www.desmos.com/calculator/88s8c2uus2 https://www.desmos.com/calculator/88s8c2uus2) This increasing inequality drives up the prices of assets that are used to absorb excess wealth like stocks and real estate (considered a 'necessity' for life scripts like starting-a-family) Newcomers are forced into either starting over in some overlooked blue ocean leveraging new innovation, forced into negative expected return but high volatility strategies like robinhood/wallstreetbets, or forced into new life scripts that don't rely on clinging to a wealth sponge. * * Crypto has elements of all of these including new kinds of wealth sponges that are completely useless (unlike a house) so for many it seems like the only path to an acceptable future.

tristor 4y ago

So, I finished up with college in 2008 right before the worst part of the financial crisis hit. I also went to a no-name school in the middle of flyover country, and I didn't graduate. At no point in my career did I ever feel like I was having difficulty with finding a job. I would argue that the biggest challenge graduates in 2023 face is a battle inside themselves between their expectations, their delusions of grandeur, and the reality of the world. I didn't work properly for a "tech company" for more than 2 years after I finished school, and I started in a lower level role than I was qualified for, but the entire time I was learning things, working with people I respected and admired, and was paid decently for my time and efforts. The domain knowledge I gained from outside of "tech" at various points in my career has been incredibly valuable during all the times I worked in tech, because most of the "tech" companies make their money selling products to non-tech companies. Knowing your customer and their domain is actually crucial. If you're willing to work as a software developer at a health insurance company maintaining eligibility processing and claims processing systems, or at a manufacturing company writing automation tooling to help process engineers convert prototypes into mass producible widgets, or working on plugins for the unwieldy "enterprise" software used in the back office at a global trucking and logistics company, you'll never want for work, and you'll learn a lot and earn a decent wage compared to the market you find yourself in. No, it's not $300k TC right out of school with free lunches and trendy swag packages, but it's also not purgatory and destitution. Realistically, I think social media has created a completely unhinged set of expectations amongst people, in general, and especially young people. Everyone has to pay their dues, and what you learn along the way and the relationships you build will set up the rest of your career.

lasermike026 4y ago

No one is going to want to invest in an economy that never pays out. Gen-Z and gen-whatever is already fed up. We are all one moment away from, "Screw it, I'm not doing this anymore." We may all choose of life rigid frugality and minimal participation in the market economy. We will buy only what we need and nothing more.

fmajid 4y ago

It’s worth mentioning Apple didn’t resort to layoffs, unlike the other Big Tech companies.