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FWIW, I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job. Both because of the earnings potential and be

FWIW, I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job. Both because of the earnings potential and because of some “it” factor/cultural cache. This led to an influx of people who would otherwise have gone into banking or consulting or other careers similarly targeted as “elite” professions when graduating from college and to an influx of people from those professions into tech. I think it bodes well for the sector to have less of this prestige seeking- not because these folks aren’t talented, but because rebalancing the overall tech workforce towards a mix of talent is probably more healthy for people who value working in tech because it’s an area of genuine interest for them.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
I think it's further back than 5 years, beginning prior to even The Social Network movie. I would argue that Apple probably made tech cool for normies, despite not being a modern-day Apple user. The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech. The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs. Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps". The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.
- Clubber 3y ago
  When I first got into tech, it wasn't cool, it was nerd stuff (as a pajorative). I remember it first started being cool when the internet went commercial. It became really cool when the iPhone was released. I think tech is currently undergoing a long overdue culling period. I recall one in 2001ish and in 2008ish. All the people who got into it because of the money and don't particularly care for it will move on. Some people who do care for it will also get culled. It's not pretty.
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  - coolbreezetft22 3y ago
    I got into it for the money and became very disillusioned with the tech industry long ago. I don't plan on going anywhere though, just gonna continue coasting in my high-pay+easy job and stay focused on family and hobbies. One of the things that annoyed me about this field is the obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. Sometimes a job is just a job.
    - Clubber 3y ago
      >I got into it for the money I got into it for the passion, but I don't have it as much as I did. I can't imagine doing something else like marketing or accounting though. >obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. That's most corporate places, especially in sales. One of the funniest takes is Step Brothers, "it's the Catalina wine mixer!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9HcYuGVgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9HcYuGVgU
      - jacurtis 3y ago
        Yeah I got into it for the passion and stayed for the money. I really loved tech. For about a decade I truly loved every day of work. Then I got really worn out and it took me almost 5 years to work through it. Part of this low point was a point of terrible health (mostly caused by my job and stress). When I came back out of it, I considered leaving the field, but stayed in it for the money. I was in a management position at this point. I could go into a different field and start over, but I'd probably end up working my way up to management eventually too and its really all the same at that point. You are managing people and processes. So I might as well do that with the tech spin on it. The obsession with over-manufactured enthusiasm is one I really laugh at now that I look back on my career. I realized that most of us in tech will work on boring stuff. I can't even tell what I am working on anymore, to the point that it is almost comical. I could be building self-driving cars or cloud billing portals. At the end of the day, you are fixing bugs or improving performance or polishing my tiny grain of sand in the huge sculpture that these platforms have become. When you are working on large-scale complex platforms nobody really understands how it all works. There is no magic, even when working on "sexy" projects. I've worked on exciting projects and boring projects and the day-to-day experience is exactly the same. Pro Tip: "Boring" projects tend to pay better, and since its the same work and same day-to-day experience, take the boring projects. You also tend to find fewer sensationalized colleagues on those projects.
- deepzn 3y ago
  We could go even further back to the late 90's and the official launch of the Internet, where you see the more people believing in this. When Bill Gates was officially the richest man in the world. But, I think with every cycle, you got more believers. Google in 2003-06, along with Facebook. In 2007-09 with the iPhone disrupting the phone industry, that became a big thing. And early 2010's with the rise of the apps - Airbnb, Uber, etc. I feel we hit a crescendo with the post pandemic bubble and fed pumping money, that's when tech usage globally was of course at it's highest, but also like the sheer number of people using it everyday was massive(maybe 50-75%+ of the world). And it arguably "ate" or saved the world during the pandemic. It's fascinating, and now we're entering another cycle maybe after a brief respite, with LLMs.
- mountainofdeath 3y ago
  In my youth, console gamers were considered basement dwelling weirdos by normal people and PC gamers were considered weirdos by console gamers. Such was the hierarchy.
  - treeman79 3y ago
    I think World of Warcraft change that somewhat. I joined one company and was shocked, discover that practically everyone and every department had an account and played at least casually. I made sure not to mention that I was in a top tier guild getting server firsts. I didn’t want to come off as to weird. I mean I have three computers and seven monitors on my desk, but one have to know when to draw the line.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      I think WoW also significantly grew the female demographic in terms of gaming, but we saw that with RPGs even prior to WoW too, especially Final Fantasy.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  “Apple probably made tech cool for normies” It felt like that, but I suspect it’s not really true.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    What do you feel the truth is? It was certainly well-marketed, and felt like there were way more normies with Apple stuff than nerds in the UK.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  The 2008 financial crisis. Before that it was less FAANG, more Goldman and McKinsey.
throwawayai2 3y ago
I think it's partly that, but I think it's also partly that tech is just becoming just another job. Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating. There is also 80% that just needs to the role filled and could be done by someone decent enough to make CRUD react apps. I think it's moving more towards how engineering (mechanical, ee, etc, not software) is seen. It's a skilled and respected job that pays decent, but at the end of the day it's just another job. There will always be mechanical engineers and software engineers who LOVE it and tinker all through the night after work, but that's becoming less and less then norm for software. My old roommate was a mech engineer who designed lighting fixtures, didn't love his job, but it paid decent enough, and the company needed an ME to design them. There are plenty of "lighting fixtures" that need to be built in the software world.
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- ativzzz 3y ago
  > Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating Try closer to 1%. The vast majority of us are just making software to make businesses chug along
CPLX 3y ago
The elites chase the money. It's definitional. Rapidly emerging profitable technologies create fortunes and the elites chase the fortunes. There's no conceptual difference between the iPhone and the steam engine or steel mill in this regard.
- bendango 3y ago
  Why do we keep providing such unskilled grifters so much influence over human agency? Such classist BS exploits manual labor. We’re just perpetuating empowering the lazy. It makes the screeching about social programs seem hilarious since being a bank CEO is not biology sustaining work. It’s historical barnacle. History we hallucinate since we were never there. We’re more like LLMs than we want to admit
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Elites? I think our definitions vary widely here.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    In the context of career choice, I mean the children of wealthy and powerful families and/or those graduating from our most prestigious preparatory institutions. Is there some other definition?
    - spacemadness 3y ago
      You think this is only about powerful families’ kids? I think the article is clickbait personally, but that wasn’t my take at all.
krooj 3y ago
There's nothing fashionable or prestigious about debugging and patching a security hole at 1am on a Friday in my underwear.
- jorvi 3y ago
  It is if you’re getting paid $300 000 a year to do that.
  - krooj 3y ago
    Nah, the money only goes so far. I've been doing SWE professionally since '07, and that wasn't in the US, so there was far, far, far less comp involved. The trend I see with new grads is that they're driven and drawn to the space for whatever reason (money, etc), but most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc) or just go back to complete a professional degree (law, MBA, etc) or PhD. 16 years isn't a whole lot of time in the field, but it's enough to have watched the expectations of SWE roles expand, and the demands of dumping ops ontop of an already complex job do take their tole. My original comment was tongue in cheek, but late night fixes, pages, opsing, ontop of day to day development is a recipe for burnout when you add partners and kids into the mix.
    - jmillikin 3y ago
      > most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and > go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc) SRE is a specialized subfield of programming. Someone has to write and debug all those low-level tools (runc, systemd, etcd) that sit "below" what most people consider to be the backend stack. If someone becomes an SRE because they don't like programming, they're going to be in for a big surprise when they discover how much quality time they're about to share with the unshare(2) manpage.
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negamax 3y ago
I think the six months bootcamp hires certainly tilted the prestige part into tech being just another mass hiring industry. And mass hiring did happen during the pandemic on a large scale. Imo, tech is still a great place to be. But we all need to raise the bar for hires.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Tech became fashionable with the Netscape IPO. Maybe even as far back as Adam Curries internet chat based MTV things he would do. IMO that was the pivot when I look back - once it was cool enough to be on MTV in weekend marathons, back in say 1994, that was the beginning.
deepzn 3y ago
I think it's also recalibrating the different types of jobs. The type that tech has accumulated in excess over the last 5 years especially and even longer in the biggest companies are the product and middle managers, Marketing/Strategy/HR/Sales folks.
compiler-guy 3y ago
People were saying this back in the dotcom crash days around 2001, and before that in the collapse of the 6501-based home computer market, to name just two. I don't think much has changed in the attractiveness--it has been a high-paying field for fifty-years now. The sexiness comes and goes with the cycle. And tech is cyclical on about 10-15 year cycles or so, and we have hit a downturn after a long upturn. Maybe AI will be the next uptick. Or maybe VR. Hard to predict. But I'm pretty sure it will happen.
hvs 3y ago
This "trend" started over 25 years ago.
intelVISA 3y ago
I'm mixed on this, I can definitely appreciate the 10x TC boost but it makes hiring unbearable: I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs. None of the existing methods e.g. leetcode work well, so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend. Something you'd likely have been exposed to in CS102 type stuff.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  > I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs. > so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend There are too many good candidates so you're having to... flog them harder? God, tech hiring is weird. People in other sectors of the economy look at me like I've just announced that I have cancer, when I explain what the tech interview world looks like.
  - tcmart14 3y ago
    Yup. My wife finds it extremely odd that my interviews go more rounds and more hours for a job to write a simple CRUD app than for her interviewing for an ICU job as an RN.
    - yamtaddle 3y ago
      Oh well you see writing a CRUD app is so much more important and serious and difficult than saving human lives. And bad programmer hires are uniquely damaging in a way that bad hires aren't in any industry with normal interview processes (which is nearly all of them) and there's just no way to mitigate those effects until they're nearly gone by applying common-sense best-practices to your processes, that you ought to be doing anyway. Nope, only solution's to put every candidate through the wringer, at enormous time & monetary expense to all concerned! Programmers catch a lot of shit for being immature or unprofessional, but I think tech management deserves a harder look, when it comes to those things.
mountainofdeath 3y ago
I can confirm. When I graduated in the early 2010s, one of the professors I was close to mentioned that the cohorts where turning away from the typical hacker types and to the high-achieving money and prestige seekers who did not really care about the field. The last time it had happened was leading into the year 2000 and the EECS department got an entire building out of it as a result. Once the dotcom bubble crashed, enrollment was down to third of its 1999 levels and the building was mostly empty. History is a flat circle. My last company was chock-full of Ivy league/Stanford/Berkeley/etc graduates with almost none being the type who actually is interested in technology. About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years. I will also say that parental pressure had a big part. Why spend 10 years of your life to be a doctor when you can make more money in big tech? It also became fashionable for people to pivot out of high-finance or management consulting (traditional white-shoe industries) and into corporate development roles at hot companies.
- jgalentine007 3y ago
  If I remember correctly, there were 600 CS freshmen in 2000 at Virginia Tech, only ~60 of us were left by graduation, I think largely because of people evaluating their prospects after the crash (and computer science is hard).
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    That’s some bullshit. I applied for CS at tech and they butchered my admission and put me in general engineering. When I called to correct this obvious mistake they said the CS program was full. I blamed it on Virginia tech’s football team making it to championships that year (1999). Oh well, still got to work with famous professors and got a very good head start on my career through my Alma mater
    - jgalentine007 3y ago
      I was totally surprised how many people I had met in those first classes, who had no programming experience whatsoever and were surprised by the amount of math in the curriculum - they were for sure chasing a trend. I think my class was the last to graduate from arts/sciences, the CS dept was moved into the engineering college.
treeman79 3y ago
Back in 1997 when I joined college for computer Science in California, in any class there was maybe 1, occasionally 2 people that were in the class because they loved technology, and wanted to be in due to passion. Everyone else was in it because computers paid well. Not to say that people didn’t work hard or eventually become skilled. Just that money was the driving force more than anything.
currymj 3y ago
previously the only socially acceptable legitimate career paths for new grads from top colleges were finance, consulting, medical+law+business school, PhD (for nerds), and maybe working for Congress or a policy think tank. anything else and other people's parents would pity your parents at graduation. probably about 10 years ago big tech got added to this list. not sure exactly why. maybe they just got big enough to start doing serious campus recruiting.
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neilv 3y ago
Different people will say it happened at different times. I noticed it around 25 years ago. But I understand there have been phases of go-to prestige job that a certain class went through. Techbro didn't immediately displace, say, investment banking bro, or management consulting bro.
g9yuayon 3y ago
> I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job This is especially interesting given that Americans used to mock nerds in pop culture and in schools. A trajectory question that always puzzles me is how fast can we really supply software engineers. Is software engineering like other ordinary white-collar jobs where supply is as elastic as it can be, or software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent? I draw this question from personal observation, so it's definitely not scientific: China has been big on math education. Math whiz kids are honed like superheroes in China. Teachers and parents put great pressure on students to excel at maths. Yet in the end, only a small percentage of students can truly learn high-school math or entry-level college math. If software engineering is like math, then the supply will stay tight until the demand drops, and techies will continue enjoying good pay after the recession.
- reaperman 3y ago
  I think software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent. However, there's actually a massive pool of these candidates who allocate themselves between different industries as demand ebbs and flows. They end up in medicine, consulting, engineering, manufacturing, academic research, Wall Street, etc and often switch whole industries mid-career too.
- epolanski 3y ago
  I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times. But this is also a byproduct of many tech companies valuing plumbing over good engineering and accepting or ignoring the cost. But yes, I've met so many boot campers easily outperform their ivy college senior because the second one didn't care, barely worked and completed his daily tasks in one hour. But in the end the first one churned more code, learned more about the business and people and was miles ahead in efficiency.
  - 908B64B197 3y ago
    > I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times. I don't think I've ever seen it. Maybe it's a location/caliber thing, where in some "best cost locales" there's a big brain drain to the valley. We just flat out stopped interviewing bootcamp grads at some point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low. At one point, the most notorious bootcamp, Lambda (or Bloom Tech, they had to change names a few times to avoid litigation), was desperate enough they would "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And this was pre-pandemic when hiring was at it's peak. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610
nonethewiser 3y ago
But scarcity also adds prestige. Frankly I think its much simpler. Its a high income to effort career. But even if we do think this is good because it weeds out people worried about prestige, why stop at 200k layoffs. Why not more? You probably don’t really want that.
etrautmann 3y ago
The swing towards tech as a default prestige career over finance and banking started after the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent aftermath. The iPhone was released in 2009, Facebook had already been growing for 6 years, and google was already big and the cool place to work.
- listenallyall 3y ago
  It started in the mid 1990s. The common thought was, why join an investment bank and underwrite some random dude's IPO when I can start my own company and by 28 it'll be MY company going public?
- derwiki 3y ago
  iPhone was released in 2007
thedailyroar 3y ago
I agree with you to some extent, however, the skillset you can build working for a financial institution motivates young adults beyond prestige. The knowledge you accumulate in these roles (info on investment strategies, financing options and strategic thinking surrounding exit opportunities or inorganic growth pathways) can be applicable in many industries and is useful no matter what you choose to do since money is moving the world. People prefer these careers for more than the high status and tech graduates could benefit from expanding their horizons.

hammyhavoc 3y ago

I think it's further back than 5 years, beginning prior to even The Social Network movie. I would argue that Apple probably made tech cool for normies, despite not being a modern-day Apple user. The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech. The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs. Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps". The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.

Clubber 3y ago
When I first got into tech, it wasn't cool, it was nerd stuff (as a pajorative). I remember it first started being cool when the internet went commercial. It became really cool when the iPhone was released. I think tech is currently undergoing a long overdue culling period. I recall one in 2001ish and in 2008ish. All the people who got into it because of the money and don't particularly care for it will move on. Some people who do care for it will also get culled. It's not pretty.
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- coolbreezetft22 3y ago
  I got into it for the money and became very disillusioned with the tech industry long ago. I don't plan on going anywhere though, just gonna continue coasting in my high-pay+easy job and stay focused on family and hobbies. One of the things that annoyed me about this field is the obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. Sometimes a job is just a job.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    >I got into it for the money I got into it for the passion, but I don't have it as much as I did. I can't imagine doing something else like marketing or accounting though. >obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. That's most corporate places, especially in sales. One of the funniest takes is Step Brothers, "it's the Catalina wine mixer!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9HcYuGVgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9HcYuGVgU
    - jacurtis 3y ago
      Yeah I got into it for the passion and stayed for the money. I really loved tech. For about a decade I truly loved every day of work. Then I got really worn out and it took me almost 5 years to work through it. Part of this low point was a point of terrible health (mostly caused by my job and stress). When I came back out of it, I considered leaving the field, but stayed in it for the money. I was in a management position at this point. I could go into a different field and start over, but I'd probably end up working my way up to management eventually too and its really all the same at that point. You are managing people and processes. So I might as well do that with the tech spin on it. The obsession with over-manufactured enthusiasm is one I really laugh at now that I look back on my career. I realized that most of us in tech will work on boring stuff. I can't even tell what I am working on anymore, to the point that it is almost comical. I could be building self-driving cars or cloud billing portals. At the end of the day, you are fixing bugs or improving performance or polishing my tiny grain of sand in the huge sculpture that these platforms have become. When you are working on large-scale complex platforms nobody really understands how it all works. There is no magic, even when working on "sexy" projects. I've worked on exciting projects and boring projects and the day-to-day experience is exactly the same. Pro Tip: "Boring" projects tend to pay better, and since its the same work and same day-to-day experience, take the boring projects. You also tend to find fewer sensationalized colleagues on those projects.
deepzn 3y ago
We could go even further back to the late 90's and the official launch of the Internet, where you see the more people believing in this. When Bill Gates was officially the richest man in the world. But, I think with every cycle, you got more believers. Google in 2003-06, along with Facebook. In 2007-09 with the iPhone disrupting the phone industry, that became a big thing. And early 2010's with the rise of the apps - Airbnb, Uber, etc. I feel we hit a crescendo with the post pandemic bubble and fed pumping money, that's when tech usage globally was of course at it's highest, but also like the sheer number of people using it everyday was massive(maybe 50-75%+ of the world). And it arguably "ate" or saved the world during the pandemic. It's fascinating, and now we're entering another cycle maybe after a brief respite, with LLMs.
mountainofdeath 3y ago
In my youth, console gamers were considered basement dwelling weirdos by normal people and PC gamers were considered weirdos by console gamers. Such was the hierarchy.
- treeman79 3y ago
  I think World of Warcraft change that somewhat. I joined one company and was shocked, discover that practically everyone and every department had an account and played at least casually. I made sure not to mention that I was in a top tier guild getting server firsts. I didn’t want to come off as to weird. I mean I have three computers and seven monitors on my desk, but one have to know when to draw the line.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    I think WoW also significantly grew the female demographic in terms of gaming, but we saw that with RPGs even prior to WoW too, especially Final Fantasy.
2devnull 3y ago
“Apple probably made tech cool for normies” It felt like that, but I suspect it’s not really true.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  What do you feel the truth is? It was certainly well-marketed, and felt like there were way more normies with Apple stuff than nerds in the UK.
FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
The 2008 financial crisis. Before that it was less FAANG, more Goldman and McKinsey.

throwawayai2 3y ago

I think it's partly that, but I think it's also partly that tech is just becoming just another job. Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating. There is also 80% that just needs to the role filled and could be done by someone decent enough to make CRUD react apps. I think it's moving more towards how engineering (mechanical, ee, etc, not software) is seen. It's a skilled and respected job that pays decent, but at the end of the day it's just another job. There will always be mechanical engineers and software engineers who LOVE it and tinker all through the night after work, but that's becoming less and less then norm for software. My old roommate was a mech engineer who designed lighting fixtures, didn't love his job, but it paid decent enough, and the company needed an ME to design them. There are plenty of "lighting fixtures" that need to be built in the software world.

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ativzzz 3y ago
> Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating Try closer to 1%. The vast majority of us are just making software to make businesses chug along

CPLX 3y ago

The elites chase the money. It's definitional. Rapidly emerging profitable technologies create fortunes and the elites chase the fortunes. There's no conceptual difference between the iPhone and the steam engine or steel mill in this regard.

bendango 3y ago
Why do we keep providing such unskilled grifters so much influence over human agency? Such classist BS exploits manual labor. We’re just perpetuating empowering the lazy. It makes the screeching about social programs seem hilarious since being a bank CEO is not biology sustaining work. It’s historical barnacle. History we hallucinate since we were never there. We’re more like LLMs than we want to admit
spacemadness 3y ago
Elites? I think our definitions vary widely here.
- CPLX 3y ago
  In the context of career choice, I mean the children of wealthy and powerful families and/or those graduating from our most prestigious preparatory institutions. Is there some other definition?
  - spacemadness 3y ago
    You think this is only about powerful families’ kids? I think the article is clickbait personally, but that wasn’t my take at all.

krooj 3y ago

There's nothing fashionable or prestigious about debugging and patching a security hole at 1am on a Friday in my underwear.

jorvi 3y ago
It is if you’re getting paid $300 000 a year to do that.
- krooj 3y ago
  Nah, the money only goes so far. I've been doing SWE professionally since '07, and that wasn't in the US, so there was far, far, far less comp involved. The trend I see with new grads is that they're driven and drawn to the space for whatever reason (money, etc), but most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc) or just go back to complete a professional degree (law, MBA, etc) or PhD. 16 years isn't a whole lot of time in the field, but it's enough to have watched the expectations of SWE roles expand, and the demands of dumping ops ontop of an already complex job do take their tole. My original comment was tongue in cheek, but late night fixes, pages, opsing, ontop of day to day development is a recipe for burnout when you add partners and kids into the mix.
  - jmillikin 3y ago
    > most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and > go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc) SRE is a specialized subfield of programming. Someone has to write and debug all those low-level tools (runc, systemd, etcd) that sit "below" what most people consider to be the backend stack. If someone becomes an SRE because they don't like programming, they're going to be in for a big surprise when they discover how much quality time they're about to share with the unshare(2) manpage.
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negamax 3y ago

I think the six months bootcamp hires certainly tilted the prestige part into tech being just another mass hiring industry. And mass hiring did happen during the pandemic on a large scale. Imo, tech is still a great place to be. But we all need to raise the bar for hires.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Tech became fashionable with the Netscape IPO. Maybe even as far back as Adam Curries internet chat based MTV things he would do. IMO that was the pivot when I look back - once it was cool enough to be on MTV in weekend marathons, back in say 1994, that was the beginning.

deepzn 3y ago

I think it's also recalibrating the different types of jobs. The type that tech has accumulated in excess over the last 5 years especially and even longer in the biggest companies are the product and middle managers, Marketing/Strategy/HR/Sales folks.

compiler-guy 3y ago

People were saying this back in the dotcom crash days around 2001, and before that in the collapse of the 6501-based home computer market, to name just two. I don't think much has changed in the attractiveness--it has been a high-paying field for fifty-years now. The sexiness comes and goes with the cycle. And tech is cyclical on about 10-15 year cycles or so, and we have hit a downturn after a long upturn. Maybe AI will be the next uptick. Or maybe VR. Hard to predict. But I'm pretty sure it will happen.

hvs 3y ago

This "trend" started over 25 years ago.

intelVISA 3y ago

I'm mixed on this, I can definitely appreciate the 10x TC boost but it makes hiring unbearable: I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs. None of the existing methods e.g. leetcode work well, so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend. Something you'd likely have been exposed to in CS102 type stuff.

yamtaddle 3y ago
> I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs. > so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend There are too many good candidates so you're having to... flog them harder? God, tech hiring is weird. People in other sectors of the economy look at me like I've just announced that I have cancer, when I explain what the tech interview world looks like.
- tcmart14 3y ago
  Yup. My wife finds it extremely odd that my interviews go more rounds and more hours for a job to write a simple CRUD app than for her interviewing for an ICU job as an RN.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    Oh well you see writing a CRUD app is so much more important and serious and difficult than saving human lives. And bad programmer hires are uniquely damaging in a way that bad hires aren't in any industry with normal interview processes (which is nearly all of them) and there's just no way to mitigate those effects until they're nearly gone by applying common-sense best-practices to your processes, that you ought to be doing anyway. Nope, only solution's to put every candidate through the wringer, at enormous time & monetary expense to all concerned! Programmers catch a lot of shit for being immature or unprofessional, but I think tech management deserves a harder look, when it comes to those things.

mountainofdeath 3y ago

I can confirm. When I graduated in the early 2010s, one of the professors I was close to mentioned that the cohorts where turning away from the typical hacker types and to the high-achieving money and prestige seekers who did not really care about the field. The last time it had happened was leading into the year 2000 and the EECS department got an entire building out of it as a result. Once the dotcom bubble crashed, enrollment was down to third of its 1999 levels and the building was mostly empty. History is a flat circle. My last company was chock-full of Ivy league/Stanford/Berkeley/etc graduates with almost none being the type who actually is interested in technology. About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years. I will also say that parental pressure had a big part. Why spend 10 years of your life to be a doctor when you can make more money in big tech? It also became fashionable for people to pivot out of high-finance or management consulting (traditional white-shoe industries) and into corporate development roles at hot companies.

jgalentine007 3y ago
If I remember correctly, there were 600 CS freshmen in 2000 at Virginia Tech, only ~60 of us were left by graduation, I think largely because of people evaluating their prospects after the crash (and computer science is hard).
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  That’s some bullshit. I applied for CS at tech and they butchered my admission and put me in general engineering. When I called to correct this obvious mistake they said the CS program was full. I blamed it on Virginia tech’s football team making it to championships that year (1999). Oh well, still got to work with famous professors and got a very good head start on my career through my Alma mater
  - jgalentine007 3y ago
    I was totally surprised how many people I had met in those first classes, who had no programming experience whatsoever and were surprised by the amount of math in the curriculum - they were for sure chasing a trend. I think my class was the last to graduate from arts/sciences, the CS dept was moved into the engineering college.

treeman79 3y ago

Back in 1997 when I joined college for computer Science in California, in any class there was maybe 1, occasionally 2 people that were in the class because they loved technology, and wanted to be in due to passion. Everyone else was in it because computers paid well. Not to say that people didn’t work hard or eventually become skilled. Just that money was the driving force more than anything.

currymj 3y ago

previously the only socially acceptable legitimate career paths for new grads from top colleges were finance, consulting, medical+law+business school, PhD (for nerds), and maybe working for Congress or a policy think tank. anything else and other people's parents would pity your parents at graduation. probably about 10 years ago big tech got added to this list. not sure exactly why. maybe they just got big enough to start doing serious campus recruiting.

deleted 3y ago
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neilv 3y ago

Different people will say it happened at different times. I noticed it around 25 years ago. But I understand there have been phases of go-to prestige job that a certain class went through. Techbro didn't immediately displace, say, investment banking bro, or management consulting bro.

g9yuayon 3y ago

> I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job This is especially interesting given that Americans used to mock nerds in pop culture and in schools. A trajectory question that always puzzles me is how fast can we really supply software engineers. Is software engineering like other ordinary white-collar jobs where supply is as elastic as it can be, or software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent? I draw this question from personal observation, so it's definitely not scientific: China has been big on math education. Math whiz kids are honed like superheroes in China. Teachers and parents put great pressure on students to excel at maths. Yet in the end, only a small percentage of students can truly learn high-school math or entry-level college math. If software engineering is like math, then the supply will stay tight until the demand drops, and techies will continue enjoying good pay after the recession.

reaperman 3y ago
I think software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent. However, there's actually a massive pool of these candidates who allocate themselves between different industries as demand ebbs and flows. They end up in medicine, consulting, engineering, manufacturing, academic research, Wall Street, etc and often switch whole industries mid-career too.
epolanski 3y ago
I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times. But this is also a byproduct of many tech companies valuing plumbing over good engineering and accepting or ignoring the cost. But yes, I've met so many boot campers easily outperform their ivy college senior because the second one didn't care, barely worked and completed his daily tasks in one hour. But in the end the first one churned more code, learned more about the business and people and was miles ahead in efficiency.
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  > I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times. I don't think I've ever seen it. Maybe it's a location/caliber thing, where in some "best cost locales" there's a big brain drain to the valley. We just flat out stopped interviewing bootcamp grads at some point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low. At one point, the most notorious bootcamp, Lambda (or Bloom Tech, they had to change names a few times to avoid litigation), was desperate enough they would "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And this was pre-pandemic when hiring was at it's peak. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610

nonethewiser 3y ago

But scarcity also adds prestige. Frankly I think its much simpler. Its a high income to effort career. But even if we do think this is good because it weeds out people worried about prestige, why stop at 200k layoffs. Why not more? You probably don’t really want that.

etrautmann 3y ago

The swing towards tech as a default prestige career over finance and banking started after the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent aftermath. The iPhone was released in 2009, Facebook had already been growing for 6 years, and google was already big and the cool place to work.

listenallyall 3y ago
It started in the mid 1990s. The common thought was, why join an investment bank and underwrite some random dude's IPO when I can start my own company and by 28 it'll be MY company going public?
derwiki 3y ago
iPhone was released in 2007

thedailyroar 3y ago

I agree with you to some extent, however, the skillset you can build working for a financial institution motivates young adults beyond prestige. The knowledge you accumulate in these roles (info on investment strategies, financing options and strategic thinking surrounding exit opportunities or inorganic growth pathways) can be applicable in many industries and is useful no matter what you choose to do since money is moving the world. People prefer these careers for more than the high status and tech graduates could benefit from expanding their horizons.