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When I finished my degree in Spain 15 years ago, programmers weren't a well paid or well regarded job. In fact I used to live paycheck to paycheck (making less
by angarg12 3y ago
When I finished my degree in Spain 15 years ago, programmers weren't a well paid or well regarded job. In fact I used to live paycheck to paycheck (making less than some of my friends in non-tech jobs), and programming was considered "for nerds".
I think this didn't change much for the following decade, but COVID turned the tables. Suddenly Spanish programmers could take jobs for global companies for very competitive salaries. I've heard of people making 70-80k euros working from home, which is more than 2x the average national. Recently someone told me that when they offered a Spanish programmer a job for 100k USD, she started crying.
So the "correction" that we are seeing seems more like a logical consequence of the contracting job market, plus the move away from remote work for many companies. It seems more like a correction than a crisis.
- gxs 3y agoWhy do you think “leaders” are pushing for return to office? Why do you think Paul Graham compares it to communism? It’s not because of some culture building nonsense - it’s 2023 and by now we know it works. They do it because they hate the leverage and mobility it gives employees. How someone can’t see why SV investors and the CEOs of various companies and the giant conflict of interest is beyond me.
- pertymcpert 3y agoCollaboration is more effective in person. We're not machines, we're humans.
- collaborative 3y agoSure, but employees would rather work and live away from the grind-zero. If businesses want to attract talent, they need to accept this. Again, it's about leverage. Employees need to hold the line
- pertymcpert 3y agoAs I said in another comment, part of the job as an experienced/senior engineer in tech is to work with others, and not be a hero programmer. I actually think that there's room here for a hybrid. Have one track for remote engineers and one for in person. Remote engineers get different work, they generally have a lower ceiling in career potential. In exchange they get what they want, they work mostly by themselves with videoconf/slack as aid. Of course there's always the exceptions. If you're the top 0.0001% in domain experts in a field, you can do whatever you want.
- RestlessMind 3y ago> employees would rather work and live away from the grind-zero Citation needed. Most of the people I talk to prefer a hybrid setup - 2/3 days from home, 2/3 days in office. For office days, an obvious caveat is that the entire team has to be present on those days to realize the benefits. > If businesses want to attract talent, they need to accept this. Looking around here in SV, plenty of businesses seem to be attracting great talent even with RTO policies.
- rqtwteye 3y agoI feel in today's workplace we need to collaborate all the time (preferably in a loud open office) and nobody needs to do any actual work. I love to collaborate but my best work got done when I had several weeks of uninterrupted focus on a task.
- pertymcpert 3y agoYes, there's a balance. Best focused, individual work is probably done alone, in quiet. But with collaboration, sometimes weeks of work can be cut out if one discovers the right work to do. And even better if a new direction or idea can be found. This is all of course technically possible remotely, but it doesn't happen in the general case because we didn't evolve to work by ourselves without f2f contact.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoWe also didn't evolve for worldwide, nearly instantaneous communication; or even monogamy for that matter. Yet people are adapting.
- pertymcpert 3y agoAdapting sure. As effective though? No. That's my point, it's not as effective. > worldwide, nearly instantaneous communication This isn't nearly as good of a point as you think it is. > or even monogamy Speak for yourself.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago> > worldwide, nearly instantaneous communication > This isn't nearly as good of a point as you think it is. Why not? If we evolved to relate to a small tribe and now are exposed to huge numbers of people then I'd say there's proof humans can and are adapting.
- pertymcpert 3y ago
- orange-mentor 3y agoYea, but 99% of all jobs aren't important enough to demand it. The average tech startup is vastly less important than a hospital, grocery store, etc.
- pertymcpert 3y agoI'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you saying because you think tech jobs aren't important then collaboration in tech jobs isn't important as well?
- orange-mentor 3y agoYes, that's what I'm saying. The commuting and associated infrastructure are wasted on most office jobs, and they're not important enough to warrant it.
- pertymcpert 3y agoThe business benefits from collaboration though, and people tend to grow professionally as well. It's not important as being a surgeon saving lives sure. Taking your logic further, why bother with anything? Why even work remotely? Just don't work. Nothing is as important as putting food on the table and a roof over your head, so become a builder and a farmer.
- RestlessMind 3y agoIt's funny to bring up hospital and grocery stores when the subthread is about RTO and collaboration in person. Those would probably be the last places to go fully remote.
- the_gipsy 3y agoIt sure feels more like a machine, shuffling to the office every day.
- pertymcpert 3y agoEnd of the day, you can always quit and do another job. Part of the role of senior+ engineers in tech is to be a force multiplier and work across silos. If you don't want to do that, there's still remote jobs out there where if you're a good enough pure coder you can get paid. Sure you won't have the same career progression but it's different priorities right?
- the_gipsy 3y agoHave you heard of the Gervais' principle?
- pertymcpert 3y agoYes, I have. I love it. It doesn't however contradict anything I said, because unlike say the laws of thermodynamics, it's just something that someone made up one day having watched the best version of The Office.
- the_gipsy 3y agoDo you believe that 100% remote companies are something like a perpetual motion machine, or a fraud?
- pertymcpert 3y agoNo I don't. Why do you think I think that?
- wkat4242 3y agoBreaking silos... You sound like the complete idiot they chose to "lead" our Enterprise IT department :') In fact we have more silos since this idiot stepped in.
- wkat4242 3y agoMost of my collaboration is a distraction and wasted time. People can fix their own excels.
- pertymcpert 3y agoSure, for some jobs there's probably not much benefit to collaboration. I'm mostly talking from the perspective of FAANG type companies, where there's very high potential impacts from small groups of focused people. If you're not working at that scale, the stakes are lower and it may not matter as much.
- chmod600 3y ago"Why do you think Paul Graham compares it to communism?" Link, please?
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agohttps://twitter.com/paulg/status/1667582737228627971 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1667582737228627971
- stg22 3y agoSo, that link answers "Why do you think Paul Graham compares it to communism?" Communism seems to be his favorite example of something that can work initially from a good starting point, but fails over time, and he also believes that's true of Work From Home. He might "hate the leverage and mobility it gives employees", but his limited comparison of it to Communism isn't strong evidence in either direction.
- gxs 3y agoYou are being way too generous with this interpretation. Paul Graham is not dumb and he knows what a loaded term communism is. On top of that, you’re taking his comment and interpreting it in the most superficial way without even attempting to think about his choice of words or why he’s so against the idea in general.
- RestlessMind 3y ago> or why he’s so against the idea in general. Maybe because fully remote simply doesn't work? Covid was a forced event and people coasted for an year on the relationships build in office until Jan 2020. Over time as people moved on and colleagues one has never met in person showed up, things started fraying. Also, I believe there are some companies who can be fully remote but that has to be in the DNA of the company culture, right down to how we communicate and collaborate. Very few people have skills to rewire their communication habbits and so they go back to what has worked previously for them.
- incrudible 3y ago> They do it because they hate the leverage and mobility it gives employees This really goes both ways. If you can work from anywhere, I can hire from anywhere, possibly from somewhere where the cost of living is much lower, where people are willing to do the job for less. The leverage really is coming from there still being a limited supply of labor, but that is not a perpetual given.
- gxs 3y agoEven if it goes both ways, at the very least it evens the playing field. Today it’s lopsided in the companies’ favor.
- RestlessMind 3y agoIt is also lopsided in favor of employees in SV or other tech hubs. They can command high salaries at a mediocre talent level simply because they have no competition.
- brendamn 3y agoOffshoring has been around for decades, and if it produced the desired results at the desired price then employers would replace every expensive employee with a cheaper one (where possible). As it stands, offshoring is commonly used by large body shops, and a non-zero amount of work is done offshore, yet the cost for tech talent has increased (at least on average, the last year or two has seen somewhat of a correction). There are definitely highly talented individuals in low cost areas, but they quickly realise they can earn a Big Tech wage, and are willing to relocate (often relocation is a bonus; as much as we complain sometimes, quality of life in a HCOL area is comparably quite nice compared to many LCOL areas). The threat of hiring a bunch of cheap offshore labour is a bogeyman; companies would already have done this if it were feasible.
- pjmlp 3y agoThey are doing all the time, Wipro, TCS, Infosys, HCL aren't having any shortage of customers.
- outrun86 3y agoIn the linked Paul Graham comment, he is not wholly supportive of remote work. The comparison is that communism, like remote work, can appear to work, but he attributes this to the fact that it sprung from a healthy foundation (his example is in-person work). If anything, Graham leans toward in-person work in this tweet.
- plorkyeran 3y agoI think you have significantly misunderstood things. Paul Graham comparing it to communism is an example of a business person attacking remote work using one of the standard boogeymen.
- stevehawk 3y agoThere is an economic advantage to having "nerds" in "tech cities" like SF or general Bay Area. And if you disagree, then I recommend you attend a simple Tech meetup in SF and then go to one in say, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and witness the difference.
- rjaobfmck 3y ago[dead]
- broken-kebab 3y agoI see where you are pointing, of course, but what is economic advantage, and for who? I suspect that whatever meetups are rather a social byproduct of whatever people concentrated in a place where US-specific culture of networking reigns. From my observations, such kind of events are noticeably less popular outside of the North America, and it doesn't really seem to hurt.
- RestlessMind 3y ago> and it doesn't really seem to hurt Anecdotally, my friends from India make trips to SV just for in-person interactions. Their claim is that India has good tech talent and a somewhat decent tech job scene, but a bleeding edge expertise (eg. LLMs) can only be found in SV. That doesn't mean there are no experts in India, but they are very few and scattered around. Whereas you can come to SV for a week, attend 2-3 meetups each in SF / Palo Alto coupled with some other expo / conference and you get a great bang for the buck on your trip.
- throw__away7391 3y ago> programmers weren't a well paid or well regarded job...and programming was considered "for nerds" It was similar in the US in the 90s. The pay was OK but nothing compared to the past 15 years or so, and socially it was not well regarded at all. The movie "Office Space" depicts what it was like pretty accurately.
- ralusek 3y agoDo you mean Office Space?
- throw__away7391 3y agoYeah…
- yterdy 3y agoHigh incomes in tech were a symptom of the money printing that was supposed to keep the economy afloat largely never reaching past the ranks of the alumnae of certain colleges and universities. They exploded from the liquidity surplus that, in a more sane world*, would have gone towards lifting, say, service and retail wages (which instead languished for the better part of a decade). Six-figure SWE salaries have less to do with expertise than QE. *One where restrictions on advertising and data collection/sales kept software as a pay-to-play enterprise, necessitating higher wages among those who would be users.
- est31 3y agoHigh tech incomes don't come from empty money printing, but they come from the value that automation at scale unlocks for societies. To stay with the service industry analogy, in a service industry job you can only make X burgers an hour, but you can make software that runs on a billion computers and makes the lives of billions of people better. Tech incomes got high precisely when Google etc. started making big money from their super scalable services. It also very happily coincided with the age of (well networked) college dropouts being able to found billion dollar companies within just a few years. So the established companies had to dry up the market and make it less profitable to join a startup, on average, than to stay at your FAANG job. You rather have an engineer develop a service at your FAANG that will never see customers than have them build the competitor to your core money maker. That, and the demand created by digitalization literally outpacing the number of graduates joining the industry.
- carlosjobim 3y agoZero Spanish programmers would have gotten hired for salaries that were worth more than the money they brought in to the company hiring them, so the only way for a "correction" is if their work is not worth much anymore. Companies do not overpay when they outsource. Why would any company fire a Spanish programmer that brings in money to the company, only to hire somebody more expensive in-office?
- benreesman 3y agoThere’s going to be a “counter-correction”. They’ve tried this before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust... All the major Internet properties are falling to pieces. I’ve encountered more hung GMail loading screens and empty IG story trays (which should be impossible if feed loads at all) in the last week than in the decade starting at 2012. GPT-4 didn’t go hyperbolic or whatever, the regular Internet needs to keep working after all. They’ll keep kicking for a few more months, they really want hackers brought to heel, but rates aren’t doubling again and “AI” hasn’t hockeysticked.
- terminous 3y ago> All the major Internet properties are falling to pieces. I’ve encountered more hung GMail loading screens and empty IG story trays (which should be impossible if feed loads at all) in the last week than in the decade starting at 2012. Nothing like that on my end. Sounds like a confirmation bias story: you think the tech industry is collapsing, so you see failure everywhere.
- benreesman 3y agoWell I was basing that more on my years of managing IG tray load outs than some guess, but I suppose I have concede that me and a few friends observing these things shit the bed isn’t data.
- wkat4242 3y agoPs not calling you an idiot, that was not my intention sorry. Just frustration at work.