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The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’
- nivenkos 4y agoNow? It was the same since the start.
- throwaway290 4y agoNow. There was never chatgpt and copilot before
- CraigRo 4y agoA lot of very mediocre people were getting pretty astounding money. Happens every cycle.
- nonethewiser 4y ago> A lot of very mediocre people were getting pretty astounding money. Good
- itsoktocry 4y ago>Good Sure, but there should be no surprise (or complaining) when the cycle reverses. Remember the posts a year or so ago of people working multiple remote jobs?
- Doofus20230425 4y agoWait, are we talking about shareholders or employees?
- 4gotunameagain 4y agoIf everyone makes astounding money, noone makes astounding money. And meritocracy dies.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoIs this one of those sentiments people like to say until the monkey's paw curls and they too find out they are mediocre?
- hef19898 4y agoBy definition, half of us are under the median.
- drewcoo 4y ago> By definition, half of us are under the median. Given that no one can agree how to measure, I'd bet that most of us are.
- moate 4y agoNo, don’t do that, now you’ve upset math. Or rather: I’ll mortgage my house and put my life savings on the line against that bet.
- falcolas 4y agoNobody specified what measure the median was made against - or that skill is involved in any way - so it’s still possible. Brought to you by another chapter in the book Recreational Arguments.
- randomdata 4y agoShame about your house and life savings. One man's brilliance is another man's "who wrote this crap?" It is indeed quite likely that most of us, possibly even all of us, will fall below the median of someone's measure.
- everforward 4y agoThey're making a math joke. It's impossible for more than half of the sample to be below the median since the median is constructed so that half fall on each side. Having 60% of a sample below the median means someone calculated the median wrong.
- jzb 4y agoYes, but this article is about developers getting laid off - not c-suite and VPs.
- soVeryTired 4y agoOver the past decade more and more devs have been out-earning surgeons and white-shoe lawyers. The tech salaries of today feel like the i-banking salaries of the early 2000s. It’s not just the c-suite that’s been earning crazy money.
- 908B64B197 4y ago> more and more devs have been out-earning surgeons and white-shoe lawyers That's not abnormal. There's only so many surgeries a man can perform, and so many cases a lawyer can argue. But software scales differently. Good luck performing surgery on three different continents at the same time.
- jzb 4y agoYeah, but I have little interest in pointing a finger at developers for inflated salaries while there's the Sundar Pichai crowd being paid north of $200 million a year. A mediocre developer can be a drag on a company or just keep the lights on. A mediocre CEO gets paid enough to fund an overpaid developer at $400K a year for... oh, about 560 years. The damage that a mediocre (or worse) C-suiter or VP does to a company is a lot worse than the mediocre developer (and, in fact, there's a straight line to overstaffing/overpaying and the "leadership") will ever do. As long as folks are calling out other workers as overpaid and neglecting the execs, the industry is going to continue to get worse.
- rednerrus 3y agoNo offense, but what we so is more complicated that lawyers and also more impactful on society.
- 29083011397778 3y agoA kid was stabbed to death on a bus last week. A lawyer will play a major role in whether his killer goes to jail. People are evicted, set free, imprisoned, and suffer serious economic setbacks (or not) based on lawyers. This completely ignores any knock-on effect of jail time in a persons life. What on Earth could you possibly do that would be more impactful to society?
- whoomp12342 4y agowhats the next phase in the cycle?
- theGnuMe 4y agoAfter exiting the expansion phase, we are in a consolidation and cut expenses cycle. If you can increase productivity then you will find value. If you take a tech specific viewpoint this is the hope for AI. At the same time AI will create new market opportunities overall. In addition the digital transition and the digital to cloud transition will continue.
- Thorentis 4y ago> Coders made up 14% of employees at tech companies Wow is this true? If so, I'm extremely surprised it is this low. No wonder Elon could cut 80% of jobs and everything would keep ticking along.
- hef19898 4y agoThat assumes "supporting" functions from HR over Accounting to Sales are actually not doing anything at a daily basis...
- maxilevi 4y agoHow many HR employees do you realistically need for a company that is downsizing?
- hef19898 4y agoQuiteva few, actually. Downsizing does require a lot of admin work. Once the downsizing happened, well, those downsizing HR folks are the last to be downsized.
- swexbe 4y agoTo do what exactly? Click send on the mass email?
- anthonypasq 4y agohow are you actually this naive? Classic HN attitude of thinking every single job that isnt engineering does nothing. You understand theres tons of underlying systems like payroll, insurance, legal issues, severance packages, government filings that happen when you either hire or fire someone?
- orwin 4y agoA lot, until the downsizing is done. Although the US don't seems to have a lot of these 'worker's rights' so I guess I don't really know (/s).
- christkv 4y agoI'm surprised not more of support staff is getting laid off. Product managers is like 2.9% only for example. Also the weird split between software engineers and application developers or web developers ?
- jacknews 4y ago"Also the weird split between software engineers and application developers or web developers ? " Yes it suggests these stats are meaningless, and only provided to fit the 'developers are doomed, don't be asking to for a raise now' narrative. Just another part of the inflation-reduction and capital-clawing-back-labor-power plan.
- larry_ralph_ 4y ago[dead]
- yobid20 4y agoThere are a lot of "software engineers" who can't code well. I see a lot of "google and copy paste until it works and deploy". No thoughts behind design. No idea about performance. No testing. No innovation. They all need to go.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoIs that the fault of the devs or the broken processes where management promises unrealistic deadlines up the chain, so devs have no time to think about the bigger picture and just do everything in their power to ship something that barely works at the end of each sprint and move on to putting out the next fire? To me, the fault is in the industry and how the ships are run.
- IKLOL 4y agoPretty much this, there have been times in my career when I was prepared to do everything the right way, but deadlines and unrealistic expectations from people who don't even know what JavaScript is forced my hand, so the product was less pretty internally but still functioning. For most people software engineering is about driving results, not making everything beautiful under the hood. Although it's nice to do that when you have time.
- throwawayfaang9 4y agoI agree the problem you are describing also exists. But I think the GP here is describing when people really can’t program. Like they can only write trivial programs by copy/pasting code from stackoverflow, and they don’t understand CS at all. That is a different issue then knowledgeable devs cutting corners to meet deadlines.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoIf you hire inexperienced people who don't know CS and can't think critically and only copy-paste off S.O., then it's entirely on you.
- everforward 4y ago
- bratao 4y agoAs a fellow developer who has been passionate about open-source programming since childhood, I was disgusted in this last hiring bubble how condescending and disrespectful the developers were towards other professions, which is disappointing. My general feeling was that it elevated developers to a seemingly different caste of "special" people, and here in my country (Brazil) there was advertisements everywhere about how you can study a couple of weeks and get a Top 1% salary.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoDon't worry, the sweet irony is hitting those condescending tech-bros now too the same way it hit the condescending crypto/stock bros who kept preaching "the market only goes up", "to the moon" and, my personal favorite which I read on HN, "developer demand is infinite". How's that infinite demand working out now tech-bros? Just ask Twitter employees. https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o A lot of people working in tech were delusional by the 10+ year long cheap money printing bonanza which fueled VC growth, and a bust is a good reality check that no boom lasts forever and that it's best to be humble and not inflate your lifestyle while you're on top, as your position on top was most likely due to survivorship bias and great market conditions and not earned through raw skills and hard work alone.
- lelanthran 4y ago> https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o I was around for the last 13 years, and I'm pretty certain that it was *self-identified left-leaning journalists* who told coal-miners "LearnToCode" and then got all huffy when they got told "#learntocode". Developers weren't taking part in this mess.
- ProllyInfamous 4y agoI'member when "Learn to Code" was taken as SEXIST somehow?! It's irrelevant now, it's more properly "Learn to prompt" [-engineer without tell anybody you have self-obsolesced your own career].
- 4y ago
- larrymyers 4y agoThis seems logical. The software engineers are likely going to be some of the highest paid employees, so laying off underperforming engineers is going to help reduce labor costs substantially. Many of these engineers have been hired for new business units that didn't end up being profitable with cheap credit going away. Others might be in business unit that is purely a cost center. Nothing has really changed over the past few decades. Regardless of your role strive to be part of the company that produces the company's profit. Try to avoid parts of the company that are viewed as cost centers and are constantly under the eye of finance as they manage costs. You will find how are you treated in good and bad times radically different.
- onion2k 4y agoThe software engineers are likely going to be some of the highest paid employees, so laying off underperforming engineers is going to help reduce labor costs substantially. It might seem counter-intuitive, but often businesses lay off the high-performing-but-best-paid people because that drives the biggest savings while reducing the vanity headcount metric less, especially in companies where the effort of the team greatly outweighs any individual. They assume (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) that the team will carry on without the 'superstar' people. There's also an assumption that the best people will leave when there's a layoff (mostly rightly), so getting rid of them means maintaining control of who's gone. There should never been an assumption that you're safe from layoffs because you're the highest performing person on the team. Sadly.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoHigh performing people adding the most value to the business were rarely the highest paid ones as they had long tenure and the best institutional knowledge but got mediocre wage increases as a punishment for being to loyal too the business. The highest paid ones were usually the ones who job hopped the most during the times of economic boom. They added little value where they went as their tenure was too short for that, but the market was so hot and the dev demand so high that tenure length and adding value didn't matter back then. If you knew how, where and when to jump ship during the past boom, you could be an incompetent buffoon and you could still end up making way more than the tenured workers actually adding value to the company. Now the companies are attempting to correcting that "mistake".
- robofanatic 4y agoIt would be nice to see a chart of how many people were hired over last few years across different functions. I guess it would look similar. Software engineers would be at the top.
- jongjong 4y agoIt feels like we are facing a software security armageddon. There are millions of disgruntled coders, powerful AI tools to help hackers find security holes in record time, broken media, no trust in institutions, software complexity has grown out of control (increasing the surface area for security vulnerabilities)... Will centralized software survive the next decade?
- KoftaBob 4y agoThis comment sounds like the output that ChatGPT would give you if you asked it to generate a discussion board comment that maximizes fear mongering and hyperbole.
- jongjong 4y agoHaha. It used to be an insult to have one's writing abilities compared to that of a bot but since GPT4, I take that as a compliment.
- bottom999mottob 4y agoI mean GPT4 was trained on hella patents, Wikipedia, StackOverflow, OSS, etc. etc. I also don't see the insult here heh
- KoftaBob 4y agoThat chart showing software engineers having the highest share of laid off employees in 2023 only tells half the story, which doesn't surprirse me because that allows the author to push their "sky is falling for devs now too!" narrative. To show the full picture, you would need to also see the share of new jobs filled from end of 2020 to end of 2021 that were software engineers positions. I don't think people really grasp how massive the hiring spree was for software engineers in that time period.
- paulcole 4y ago[flagged]
- tyingq 4y agoSo, the same companies that overhired and ended up with underskilled developers are somehow going to accurately identify the underperforming developers and lay them off?
- peddleroftruth 4y agoI think one of the problems is that they are about as good at identifying talent as they are at laying off underperforming developers. One of my friends has worked at the same place for 10+ years, dodging several layoffs. When he talks about layoffs it seems pretty random who gets the stick. He doesn't have the complete picture though, so they might very well be great developers, but still underperforming...
- tyingq 4y agoThere's also some obvious issues with the way they do layoffs. Like, say there's a 10% cut target. They typically make every leader hit that target. Even if one team has, say, 30% of their devs underperforming, and another team has 0%. And, of course, the idea that every leader even has a reasonable idea of their developers' performance. They don't. And they protect or punish people for all sorts of reasons, often unrelated to performance.
- epolanski 4y ago> When he talks about layoffs it seems pretty random who gets the stick Because it mostly is.
- gorbachev 4y agoIt is usually not that random. People get laid off from low impact projects/teams. People working on higher profile, more important projects get to stay, even if they're objectively worse than those who got laid off. There are obviously exceptions, like strict "lay off 10% of all teams" type of layoffs, or a family business firing everyone who's not family, or Elon Musk firing anyone who disagrees with him.
- skeyo 4y agoI don't understand what they're insinuating with the phrase "those who chose to 'learn to code'"?
- epolanski 4y agoI interpreted it as "those who chose to learn to code in the last 12 months" are in a grim tech-recruiting scenario.
- valbaca 4y ago'learn to code' was a refrain during the incredibly hot dev market of the past couple of years. Hell, I'd have every plumber and electrician that came to work on my house ask which programming language they should learn. It was viral.
- epolanski 4y agoWell, according to that stats, there's several other roles that could be amassed under the software engineer broad umbrella like application developer, web developer and many QA testers. This makes software roles much more impacted than 20%.
- darkhorse13 4y agoThey should learn to code, oh wait.
- SirMaster 4y agoAnd over here in the Midwest, among all my friends and collogues who are software developers, I don't know a single one that was laid off. This seems more like an issue in tech hubs or in primarily software companies. What does it look like for all the software developers in the IT departments in non-software companies?
- scarmig 4y agoProbably lower real wages (compared to what they'd have been otherwise) as competition heats up for those positions, as well as a tougher hiring environment for job seekers.
- GaryNumanVevo 4y agoMidwest "old school" firms tend to be very conservative in terms of compensation and headcount. That was definitely the case when I was managing teams there. Good talent, but at a fraction of the cost of hiring people at any tech hub. Ninja edit: The company I worked for did layoff (around 2008) but that was more of a scare tactic which I ended up leaving the company over.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tpoacher 3y agoThere was a blogpost recently on HN, which compared the "learn to code" campaigns as useful if one thinks of this along the same lines as "learn to cook". I liked that perspective. The problem of course comes when someone who just learnt how to cook their first omelette feels ballsy enough to apply to a michelin restaurant as head chef ... and the hiring manager can't tell the difference.