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This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companie

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech salaries and wanted in on it so they started taking every quick certification, bootcamp, degree, etc to get into tech. It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech and don't want to go deeper than the bare minimum required by their job. So I think tech overhired by a LOT, then they realized all these new people are actually net negatives on the company, and we are slowly correcting. I think a solid 50% of people in tech are still on the chopping block. You can do much more with tools + really smart people in the year 2024 than you could before.

Freedom2 3y ago
The proliferation of LeetCode for interviews means that we have an army of employed software engineers who are great at solving toy puzzles, but when it comes to actual business and / or customer problems, they stumble and falter. Management only have themselves to blame for spreading this kind of culture of interviewing around.
pi-e-sigma 3y ago
Even if we assume that what you think is true then it is still solely the companies' fault. Because if the prospective employees are so shit why would you hire them in the first place?
- srverma 3y ago
  I feel like assigning blame is neither here nor there. Leaders in these companies often look at what other companies are doing, and follow suite. There's an argument that Elon laying off 80% of twitter is another catalyst - so why companies not follow? Ultimately, if hiring managers offered these roles because work was needed but no longer is, would you blame them for adjusting their approach?
- spike021 3y ago
  Either that or why not interview, accept a certain level of experience, and then expect to do a bit more training during the onboarding phase. My previous two companies didn't do a great job with onboarding and I think it can be so varied and not very helpful many times.
- helsinki 3y ago
  because A’s hire B’s that hire C’s that hire D’s /incorrect grammar
- groby_b 3y ago
  Because time-to-market matters? Because even minimally productive folks were ROI-positive in ZIRP world, but a bad idea in 8% interest world? Because Wall Street rewards growth?
- leetharris 3y ago
  I'm not looking to assign blame or anything, I've just seen this pattern play out in the last couple of decades. I think it's a valid theory of the current "market correction."
- tensility 3y ago
  Because that's how managers promote themselves...by hiring.
babyshake 3y ago
And yet, the engineering interviews still typically revolve around Leetcode algorithms instead of the messy but hardly CS-intensive day to day work that engineering typically involves.
- ljm 3y ago
  The more experience you rack up in your career, the more likely you are to walk away from jobs with laborious hiring processes too. I will politely decline any opportunity that requires me to do multiple code and architecture tests and several other lengthy meetings, usually spread out over the course of months, because it’s not worth my time to jump through so many hoops. It signals to me that there is already a tendency to implement process for the sake of process. What will really sell me on a company is a more in depth conversation with the leadership and the team where we learn more about what we value and how we like to operate. And that’s how I would interview anyone who was referred by someone I trust.
  - sph 3y ago
    Very true, because an experienced engineer had internalised that the hard part of this field is not writing code. A company that focused all on that in their hiring process means they're either misguided, or are looking for inexperienced "coding monkeys." In a productive day as a solo dev, hitting keys on my keyboard is the easiest part, the hardest part is thinking about a problem in front of my notepad, usually staring out my living room window or while taking a shower.
  - voidnap 3y ago
    It isn't about experience in your career as much as just being marketable. I'm being a little pedantic, but it's a meaningful distinction because marketing yourself to a HR department is a skill to be worked at for some.
  - armitron 3y ago
    That's all well and good if you're willing to leave a lot of money on the table. All the companies that hand out half-a-million to a million-dollars/yr total compensation packages operate using similar hiring processes. That's a lot of money over the span of even a few years to miss out on.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 3y ago
"Your average colleague is an idiot" is never an unpopular opinion among tech workers. "You are average," now that is unpopular opinion.
- forward1 3y ago
  “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
  - Mouse47 3y ago
    That only applies to the median, not the average. Every time I see this quote I can't help but think that. Funny tho
    - nradov 3y ago
      Median is one type of average.
      - catchnear4321 3y ago
        what do you mean?
        DANmode 3y ago
        In maths, averaging has multiple forms. Mean (what most people call "averaging"), median, mode.
        catchnear4321 3y ago
        yes yes, suppose you have summed it up
        cjalmeida 3y ago
        Well, no variance in opinions it seems.
bcrosby95 3y ago
The awkward part is that most people I know that have been at these companies for 10+ years feel like they couldn't pass the current hiring bar.
- fardo 3y ago
  In my experience, this mostly is because the “hiring bar” at big companies is frequently disassociated from actual day-to-day work. It typically looks like 1. memorizing some 50-200 or so domain-specific general patterns which problem solutions will tend to follow, so you can solve an arbitrary leetcode medium in under 20 minutes time — a skill that has almost nothing to do with the plumbing and product work most tech-workers engage in on a day to day basis, and 2. Speak at length and extemporaneously on arbitrary from-scratch system design problems — a skill which, while sometimes important, is a skill which most engineers that aren’t working at a startup won’t usually exercise more than once or twice a year, as the ratio of work on “systems already designed” to “systems needing new designs” will overwhelmingly skew towards pre-existence. When your hiring process and day job are so thoroughly dissociated and unrelated to each other, it’s not a surprise current workers who aren’t actively studying for a job change couldn’t pass it.
soared 3y ago
This doesn’t really make sense - if it were true a single company could pay many times what faang does to secure talent 10x+ better than a normal tech worker and have unfettered success. It also means a 10x dev years ago would be.. 100x now? It also implies some weird logic that if you were into tech before, you’re better than someone who was born 10 years later and is into tech now. And implications that if you’re not devoted to your employers industry your work output is meaningfully worse, which maybe is true but maybe not.
- verve_rat 3y ago
  Your first point assumes that it is easy to identify top tier talent during the hiring process and that tech employment is not a market for lemons [1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
- leetharris 3y ago
  Apologies, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying so would love to hear more of your thoughts. > It also implies some weird logic that if you were into tech before, you’re better than someone who was born 10 years later and is into tech now. This was not what I was trying to say. The amount of people who work in tech is far, far higher now than it was 20 years ago. It just brought more "average" people in who don't really push the boundaries of what is possible. Lots of apps that move strings in and out of databases, very little real innovation going on from smart people.
windowlessmonad 3y ago
I don't think this is a significant factor in the size of the layoffs. Many high-level and high-tenure employees are being laid off, and this is apparent in many of the various companies that have had significant layoffs in the last couple years. The lay-offs have also heavily affected departments outside of engineering: product, marketing, finance, etc. have all been affected. I don't disagree that companies greatly over-hired, but I don't think the largest portion there has been bootcamp/cert/junior SWEs.
fritzo 3y ago
More charitably: Many people who 10-15 years ago would have excelled in a non-tech field have since then been drawn into tech due to shrinkage in those other fields and to the attractively high compensation in tech.
flashgordon 3y ago
I think this is only half the answer (or atleast part of it). This not only ends up attracting the make-quick-buck-with-certification types but also the political sociopaths who knows how to optimize time on the ladder over quality. This not only has lowered the bar but also made these places very toxic to work in! Passive aggressiveness anybody?
- drewcoo 3y ago
  In ancient times, HP used to be one of the dream jobs. It was incredibly unusual in ways that I think are best expressed by "The HP Way." https://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm https://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm It was a dream job because other tech jobs were almost nothing like that. Most tech jobs featured techies managed by MBA-types and that can be a recipe for passive-aggressiveness.
kasey_junk 3y ago
This exact complaint was common in 2001. Which hey maybe it’s true! Maybe the nerds from 2 generations ago could have built all this technology 10x over… except they didn’t.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > This exact complaint was common in 2001 I, for one, had the same complaint then. The dotcom boom pulled in lots of people not interested in tech, just in paychecks. > Maybe the nerds from 2 generations ago could have built all this technology 10x over… except they didn’t Fantasy math aside, the nerds don't really decide what tech to build. There was no mass of nerds 25 years ago arguing over NNTP about who could build the best ad platform for the newly-emerging World Wide Web. That's a suit thing.
kypro 3y ago
> The quality of your average tech worked has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. It's definitely got worse over the last ~10 years, but the pandemic era hiring from 2020-2021 took it to new level of bad at many companies. Anyone who had done some basic coding was getting hired at a great salary in 2021, and these individuals are still around today – some now calling themselves "senior developers". But I completely agree with what you're saying here about about it no longer being nerds working in tech. A nerd who isn't the best coding will still engage with me about technical details, be keen to learn new things, and care about their work. A lot of the new guys I work with today are just doing the bare minimum and they think you're an idiot for caring.
- bennyelv 3y ago
  I have evidence to support this - I lost people from my team who were offered "senior" or "lead" developer roles when they were nowhere near the level required for that kind of job. The level they were at was already a a stretch that they were growing into. ...and with a salary boost to match. Now in the UK salaries have flatlined and the number of jobs is way down, and this no longer seems to be a problem.
  - ric2b 3y ago
    It was a problem that workers were getting a bigger share of the profit?
armchairhacker 3y ago
I don’t think the average tech worker is dumb. They may even be better than the average in the 2000s/2010s (tech boom), maybe not, but I’m at least sure especially those at Google could get and stay hired in earlier times. What I suspect is that tech companies have many more workers than needed, because most software simply doesn’t need many people to build and maintain. I remember massive tech companies running on teams of <100 people, and even today, I hear of many critical departments with only around a dozen or less. Google search, Github, AWS, Outlook, Facebook, Uber, IntelliJ. These are software behemoths, but at their core they’re rather simple, and a single developer could make an MVP of any in a few weeks, and with adequate testers and resources, something scalable and stable that could be used by professionals in a few months. And that’s creating it from scratch (well, existing libraries), though maintaining everything maybe doesn’t require much less, it surely doesn’t require more. I understand the big products have more, at least name recognition, and I understand that a big product needs more than programmers (asset creation, marketing, QA, tech support, accounting, etc.) But the software development side isn’t very big, especially if you already have the software.
- enterprise_cog 3y ago
  A single dev can make an mvp of AWS? Or IntelliJ? Let me guess, they could write Dropbox in a weekend too.
  - okr 3y ago
    Hey, chatgpt, write me a dropbox script, that mimics dropbox. Nono, this library does not have this function. No, this is also useless. What are you suggesting, aaaah, get me out of here.
- democracy 3y ago
  Just don't try to rebuild Netscape navigator please
drewcoo 3y ago
I tend to agree. The industry hired more people than the small percent of the population before that were attracted to tech. The jobs needed to change to accommodate all the new, less-tech-interested people. They became more standardized and less thought-involving. More and more jobs are now about using frameworks and writing glue code instead of solving novel problems. Even the new techier-than-average people are likely in less techy jobs. And jobs less oriented to making them grow into their best geek selves. Because the jobs became oriented to hiring neophytes to do the bulk of the work, we also see title compression and a low cap to expected salaries. If someone seems too senior and starts to cost too much, this model allows replacing them with new tabula rasa (bootcamp) workers.
vrosas 3y ago
I was just today reminiscing about how smart and capable everyone seemed at the startup I interned at in 2013, and comparing them to the quality of engineers I’ve worked with in the startup scene more recently. The difference is stark. I can’t pin down one reason but I agree with you. Too many bootcamps. Too much resume-driven development. Too many engineering managers whose only programming language is JQL.
- dalyons 3y ago
  Another factor here is that for many reasons startup equity (and thus startup comp in general) is much less valuable statistically than it was 10-15 years ago. Everyone knows that it a shit deal now, so many of the best engineers, those who can, are in big tech now. Leaving startups with lower quality talent pool, or those who just need a first job. I say that with sadness and fond memories of ~2013 startup culture.
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    Yeah, having interviewed pretty recently, I was shocked at how low startup offers were compared to established companies and late stage startups.
    - willcipriano 3y ago
      I started my career in start ups, they ask for 150% and want to pay 75. It's only fresh graduates and bootcamp people who fall for the equity scam nowadays. Everybody who has been around the block knows they are going to dilute the hell put of it before any liquidity event. It's really a shame beacuse I am far more productive in that environment I just wish I was able to eat more of what I kill there.
jmspring 3y ago
I don’t disagree. That said, at large companies there are a lot of people that do the minimum to make themselves look good and pass the buck down.
kromem 3y ago
Also, the move to virtual commuting plus better translation automation means a much larger potential candidate pool to compete against than before.
akg_67 3y ago
How do you define "quality" of tech worker? What is the profile of people being let go? Are they recent hire or people with quick certification, bootcamp, etc? A quick review of people on LinkedIn with Open to Work badges seems to paint a different picture than any claim of people being let go are of lower quality. > It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech Now having experienced almost three generations coming to adulthood, I hard disagree with any such notion of newer generation not being dedicated and smarter. I have lot more respect for the newer generation: what they have been served with and how they are handling it. The changes in last 10 or 20 years have far exceeded any changes I experienced in my first 0-40 years of life. And, imo newer generation has been adapting much better to such changes than the previous generations including my own. This adaption might come across not being "dedicated nerds" to previous generation but with the rapid change taking place, ability to adapt quickly trumps being "dedicated nerd."
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  > A quick review of people on LinkedIn with Open to Work badges seems to paint a different picture than any claim of people being let go are of lower quality. Come on, LinkedIn (CVs) tell nothing. Having been somewhere is often made up as great experience even if did not yield much experience, or one wasn't as involved as claimed, and even been somewhere is a lie. It is usually the opposite if I check known colleagues: null performers and phonies have outstanding profiles, the good or super programmer somtimes an awkward or does-not-care profile. (But yeah, also admitting: Companies usually fire by the wrong metrics and even direct managers, which are bad managers, do not know the real differences of their underlings..) > notion of newer generation not being dedicated and smarter Full agree, I don't think it is much new generation vs old, there are the same kind of great peoples. But computer science really changed and grew. E.g. I strongly remember when I joined university 20 years or so ago how all tutors claimed how big our year is, and that before us everybody knew each other (profs/tutors/students), but now impossible. But still, 80-90% of the students that survived the first semesters just belonged there and would be great coders or computer scientists, with the right skills and ambitions. If you look nowadays, it is different and maybe more similar to other professions, and more 50/50 between those guys, and the other half which is ambitionless and/or just lack the skills, mindset, whatever, and would have better become something else. If you aks those some even freely admit they hate their job, but only drawn by the money.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
100% this. One of the reasons I left a salaried position and struck out on my own was that I saw the talent density around me drop like crazy.
matrix87 3y ago
> It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech and don't want to go deeper than the bare minimum required by their job. The average day-to-day work is menial, for example investigating a production issue. That isn't something that people get into as a hobby, that's work in a very unromantic sense. Maybe having good systems background can help in those situations, but it's a little more subtle I do think though that it works the other way: people who actually care about computers don't care if tech is no longer a money field, they just want to work on computer stuff. And maybe earlier it wasn't as much of a money field. But that doesn't imply that the enthusiasts are better at fulfilling work responsibilities. A lot of work stuff is business specific and not very dependent on systems background So yeah, I don't think the part about over-hiring is necessarily wrong, but this sort of "I'm better than you" attitude isn't very becoming. Maybe you should give this [0] a read, just to see a different perspective [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
- noduerme 3y ago
  I'd never heard of that novel or these laws, but as an American it would be unthinkable to consider them anything other than Kafkaesque dark satire. The idea that they've moved from that to some sort of positive model for egalitarian society is downright creepy. Specifically, because they all contain the hypocrisy of saying explicitly as a group the very thing they're telling the individual not to say. Taking the side of we is therefore willfully brutal and repugnant to individual dignity. Presented without irony, is this some sort of fascism-light?
  - whearyou 3y ago
    Or communist-light, but the latter ideology doesn’t seem to hold the same sting as a descriptor despite very similar outcomes
    - noduerme 3y ago
      Sure, if you like. Although a nit: communism historically doesn't mind celebrating individual heroics or achievements as such, if they're seen as selflessly done in service of the cause. The view of society as a single organism which knows better than you is more central to the definition and prototype of fascism, even if it's also a result of any kind of collective reordering of a society.
sph 3y ago
Explains why tools like Copilot seems to be so hyped, yet I as an old school developer really can't find a place where it would help me. I guess most people really benefit from a tool to autogenerate an Erathostenes sieve in Python or a fizzbuzz function in Prolog or yet another React Router boilerplate. EDIT: a more nuanced version of this comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38965283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38965283
- mijamo 3y ago
  I do really benefit from finally having a way to use shell scripting. Life is too short to remember hundreds of one letter options with obscure combinations
  - sph 3y ago
    Back in my day, man pages and --help were enough. The thing about great documentation is that it rarely hallucinates.
    - throwaway5959 3y ago
      I imagine you slapping your knee as you started typing that. :)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - speedgoose 3y ago
      It’s just a bit more slow.
- democracy 3y ago
  Copilot is great to do boilerplate, it guesses and completes code correctly most of the time
metabro 3y ago
This doesn’t mesh with my experience. I work at big tech co that went through massive rounds of layoffs. The criteria was a mixed bag. A lot of it was just entire products and associated teams being dismantled. Also, one can make the argument the other way as well. Tools and infra have gotten good enough that the work doesn’t require the “dedicated nerds”. So let’s get rid of the highest paid engineers as that’s the most impactful to our bottom line. They coincidentally happen to be the nerds. We can always hire them back for less because what else are these nerds going to do in this market. Not saying that’s the case but demonstrating that it’s pretty easy to string together silly notions we might have to explain reality.
- eps 3y ago
  These are two sides of the same medal. What the GP said was how the bloat accumulated and why the professional quality went down. What you are saying is how they are trimming the bloat. It's not possible to trim by skill alone, because it would leave all teams and products understuffed. But the bloat is there and it is insane.
  - foofie 3y ago
    > These are two sides of the same medal. I don't think it is at all. OP put up a strawman on how the tech world is packed with incompetent new arrivals, but corporations are firing people indiscrimately by blindly cutting branches out of their org tree. Corporate's criteria to fire people is deciding which product they can either slow development, freeze, or even completely eliminate. This has absolutely nothing to do with the skills of whatever employees are covered by the firing rounds. These are pure business decisions which bear no connection with the tech aspect of their services. This is not bloat. In fact, I know for a fact that one FANG was still hiring midway through a round of layoffs and their HR was adamant in not even considering internal transfers for those positions. Are we expected to believe that employees who not only passed last year's hiring bar and received positive performance reviews are bloat, but today's new recruits are competent?
  - gnz11 3y ago
    This assumes "professional quality" was somehow higher in the past when it's really just looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. There was plenty of crap and even bloated software written in the past.
throwaway5959 3y ago
There’s also just no process anymore. Product managers can’t even be bothered to fill out more than a title line in a ticket. Burndown charts? Ha who cares about points on the tickets.
- Ancalagon 3y ago
  Is this true at many places now? I thought it was just mine...
foofie 3y ago
> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. I don't think your take holds water. It reads as a mix between self-aggrandizing and ladder-pulling, typically pinned on the so-called boomer mindset. For the past 15 years you have seen universities producing graduates that are far better prepared for a cloud world in every single aspect of the business, and these graduates start off working in cloud-related projects. All frameworks that dominate front-end and back-end components were created in the past decade, and leverage the same cloud-based competencies that new graduates learn. If anything, new graduates are heads and shoulders above veterans, and the only thing that they miss is two decades of work experience. That can be an asset or a liability. I also add that the bulk of >15year veterans graduated in the 90s and 80s, which was a time when the academic world was still trying to figure out what it was supposed to teach in terms of software engineering, and most universities had basically scrambling to cover relevant topics. The graduates that went through those programs, unlike today's graduates, were woefully unprepared for the reality of software engineering. Two decades ago you could land a job by passing yourself as a "programmer" which meant you knew the syntax of a programming language such as Pascal or Cobol. That's the technical background of your average veteran with >15years of experience. Therefore, I think you are entirely wrong. If anything, the quality of your average tech worker improved greatly in the last 15 years. Those who arrived in the field actually hit the ground running in today's tech world and often push over and replace much senior team members. Those who enter the field from non-tech fields have the technical chops ro replace both veterans and new graduates. In today's world you need more than claim to know C or Java to actually land a job. Disclaimer: I'm a veteran with >15years of experience who worked at and was involved in the hiring process of a FANG.
- democracy 3y ago
  "could land a job by passing yourself as a "programmer" which meant you knew the syntax of a programming language such as Pascal or Cobol" Never and nowhere
whatever1 3y ago
"I think a solid 50% of people in tech are still on the chopping block. You can do much more with tools + really smart people in the year 2024 than you could before." Absolutely not. So much more red tape now rquires a ton more headcount. Just think how much time we spend these days to fix dependency hells and patching security issues.
austin-cheney 3y ago
My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.
- foofie 3y ago
  > You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. What technology or data structure do you think developers don't understand if they work on React projects? Isn't it silly to claim any person is suddenly incompetent just because they are assigned to a project which uses a particular framework?
  - austin-cheney 3y ago
    Yes, that is silly until the employer becomes over leveraged or the resulting product becomes too expensive. Then hard choices must be made. At that point it’s not silly anymore. Having written JS full time for 15 years most JS developers are deeply uncomfortable navigating complex data structures of any kind. There is a deep emotional reliance on declarative APIs to do that for them. This is a skill super foundational to programming in any language learned from experience, but in modern JS the reliance on tools fails to foster those very necessary skills. This is a challenge to describe to software developers who have no experience writing original software, such as without a framework, because they have no frame of reference to consider alternative points of view. People might find it challenging to explain modern astronomy to tribal people living in a jungle, for example, because the necessary intermediate education is absent.
  - sershe 3y ago
    It's not that. I used to work on web apps about 20 years ago, and we created some involved interfaces using hand-coded cross-browser AJAX and DOM (it was before jquery even existed; iirc I remember when prototype.js came out and it was very exciting). They were really fast. It took a fair amount of skill and perseverance to do that, and that filtered out a lot of the developers. These days, the people who could do the above can instead do it better (and in much less time) with jQuery. However, the people who previously couldn't do it at all in any reasonable amount of time, can now also do it with jQuery... poorly. There's a middle (the people who would struggle with the low level but are proficient enough to do a good job with jQuery) but they are, in my impression... not a majority. I believe that's why most sites (especially non-tech e.g. Chase bank and Amex) and many Electron apps (Teams, Evernote, ...) are such bloated, slow, glitchy monstrosities. Well that, combined with what the top comment said about the money
bionsystem 3y ago
I'm scared about the skill level of some of my coworkers. They are 30+ yo and I hear them debating about whether or not docker needs vt-d activated, if .msi packages can be customized, if terraform is useful for deploying on a single esxi.... All things that can be foind out with 1s of googling they will talk about it for 5 to 15min in meetings (formal or not) and the conclusion is always "we will have to test this".
- xkqd 3y ago
  There’s a decent chance they want to chit-chat a bit. I’ll occasionally strike up a conversation I know I could avoid by googling, just to have a conversation.
- democracy 3y ago
  Best sarcasm is when u r not quite sure .. ))
Yizahi 3y ago
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint." (c) Hesiod
pera 3y ago
> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google decided to lay off several compiler engineers working on LLVM, but sure, please tell me more about those low quality bootcamp kiddos that are ruining everything...
- caeril 3y ago
  The LLVM layoffs notwithstanding, OP is still largely correct in general. Your typical developer could solder, knew how the CPU works, knew roughly how many clocks would retire a MOV, ADD, MUL, etc, was cognizant of wait states, understood cache lines, protection rings, instruction decode, memory mapping, etc. Try asking a typical Django or React developer today what a cache line even is.
  - zb10948 3y ago
    Yeah the OP is quite correct. Ask your generic web developer about nuances of HTTP, SSL or even networking in general.
    - democracy 3y ago
      Ask your VB veteran about the same topics ))
  - sdf4j 3y ago
    That's nonsense. Your typical developer had to deal with all those things in the past maybe, but is no more than specialization knowledge. You don't care about how many ticks you need to MOV with indirect addressing when you are developing Django. Feels like complaining because someone that is not a Django developer doesn't know how proxy model inheritance works.
    - 3y ago
lm28469 3y ago
> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. The average tech job requires much less skills though. It's not like we're all working on rockets or the building blocks of the internet. A good 70% of tech jobs today are crud api and basic web/mobile apps
- nsxwolf 3y ago
  I've heard people describe the corporate travel platform I work on described as a "simple CRUD app" so I'm not sure I believe this is true about almost any software company.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    Well it for sure isn't the Apollo guidance computer
somewhereoutth 3y ago
And this is on a backdrop of a long term 'hollowing out of the middle' as technology automates rote work (AI being the latest incarnation), leaving only high skilled jobs (including in tech) on one end, and manual jobs (driving, picking, construction) that we've been unable to automate on the other. Thus both ends (high and low skill) are seeing 'refugees' from this economic process, with overskilled people doing menial work, and underskilled people trying to tackle high end work.
mikebelanger 3y ago
Interesting idea. But supposing that the quality never nosedived, I suspect companies would still be doing these mass layoffs. Quality is always relative to the overall pool of job applicants, and companies would just layoff people with a higher bar in mind.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  This is my bet as well. They're not firing because they have to. They're firing because the bean counters showed them how much more money they could have if they did. Coast for a year or two, save millions, then rehire back when they need to innovate or update.
democracy 3y ago
Nah, not true by any means
gniv 3y ago
> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. Not my experience. I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar. Based on anecdotes, I have another theory. The people that build the systems got old and are unwilling to work the crazy hours. The new folks are hired to work on maintaining these systems, and it's not fun. So overall both quality and speed declined.
- SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
  I’ve seen this exact thing happen myself, I think you’re onto something here.
- ativzzz 3y ago
  It's much easier and faster to build greenfield systems that have no historical baggage than it is to retrofit older systems that already support large customer bases and revenues for newer features. Not just pure tech systems, but businesses and non-tech systems as well. And tech companies have gotten large with a ton of baggage and customers
- atraac 3y ago
  Not arguing over original point of quality of tech workers but... > I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar. Are FAANG interviews these days an indicator of anything besides being good at FAANG interviews? Some of the best people I worked with that brought real value would never pass big tech leetcode interview...
  - foofie 3y ago
    > Some of the best people I worked with that brought real value would never pass big tech leetcode interview... FAANGs don't do leetcode. They may ask about data structures knowledge, but even their coding interviews are aimed at evaluating stuff like system design, write readable code, be coachable, and even soft skills.
drewmaker78 3y ago
[dead]
smrtinsert 3y ago
Having survived through many layoffs, this is 100% not the case. The modern layoffs don't even seem to consider whether or not the person was a top contributor or sme. They are done to reduce cost and look good to the board/investors/whoever. I'm pretty sure I survive because my tco is probably more on the humble side but I'm far from cheap.
paulcole 3y ago
> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. I’d be shocked if you didn’t enter the industry 20-25 years ago.
Clubber 3y ago
>The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. Initially this sounded right, but then I remembered all the trash that showed up during the dot boom and subsequent booms. It's just hiring booms attract a lot of people who want to make easy money and those people think programing is easy money (it's not). Bootcamps and even CS degrees are just step one of many steps and many people think step one is the only step and don't work to further their craft. Once it becomes evident that an org has way too many of these people, it starts to cull. Unfortunately, large orgs are very bad at "rightsizing," and just "mow the lawn." The problem with tech is to be good at it, you have to be passionate about it to the point of near obsession. That's a requirement above and beyond just being smart or good at math, or even good at programming. You can fill a room with brilliant but dispassionate people and you won't get much done. So you're right in a 15 year cycle, but this cycle has happened before and we're now in the the culling part.
tdy_err 3y ago
> These blanket statements on Hackernews are so frustrating to read. > Please understand that every environment, company, and project is different.
znpy 3y ago
I mostly agree with your point and I have a corollary around this part: > Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech salaries and wanted in on it so they started taking every quick certification, bootcamp, degree, etc to get into tech. In 2007-2017 the concept of "startup company" was also heavily romanticized, to the point it was almost toxic. I was in university in 2013 and pretty much anyone wanted to build a startup. More often than not it was non-tech people exploiting tech people into building MVPs. It was painful to see (and in a few cases, to experience). Don't even get me started on "apps". Every moron on the block had some kind of "idea for an app" and was completely clueless to how the app markets worked (let alone how to actually do that). Of course, being pretty much all amateurish at best, no single business plan was in sight.
nitwit005 3y ago
If they overhired by 50%, and hired a bunch of idiots, the tech executives should be the ones on the chopping block.
- wilg 3y ago
  Only if its the same executives. And those 50% would still have to go too.
Communitivity 3y ago
I agree with the opinion, but not the timeframe. I would say the quality has nosedived over the last 8 years, based on my experience as the tech interviewer for potential new hire interviews across the last 12 years on different projects. The last 4 years I've gotten comments from co-interviewers of 'you ask the hard questions', 'you are tough'. These are in response to questions such as 'What are your thoughts on composition vs inheritance in object oriented design', 'What are the arguments for Java as a better language than Javascript? How about the other way around?', 'What's a progressive web app, what aspects of React and what react-related libs help with creating one?'. These were all directly relevant to the positions being interviewed, and some of those were for senior engineer positions. These are questions that I think should be answerable by any senior frontend engineer, and most senior software engineers.
never_inline 3y ago
As a tech worker of current generation, I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that I suck.
savorypiano 3y ago
10 years ago people were complaining that candidates couldn't even write a for loop in interviews.
deleted 3y ago
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hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
Maybe it's just beneficial to move web developers to a different catalog? So you have the web developers who mostly chase new or cool frames/tools, prefer dealing with human problems than machines problems, and other developers. Does it make sense?
fulladder 3y ago
Around 2015, I read an article saying that computer science was the most popular major for Harvard undergraduates. I found it quite surprising. I would think that a Harvard student could basically do anything with their life that they want: medicine, law, business, politics, anything they set their minds to. Why, I wondered, would they want to enter this strange industry with all our odd characters and personalities? To me it's like, this is a place where you're going to compete to fix or improve something in the Linux kernel in order for Linus to swear at you and publicly humiliate you in an immutable ledger called the LKML. (Welcome to tech!) Even now, I don't really understand how this could have become the most popular major at Harvard. I think things will sort themselves out in time. A person might start a career with little inherent interest but stumble into something that excites them and excel at it. Or a person might work in technology for a while, decide it's not right for them, and move on to something else. We'll have to see where it goes.

Freedom2 3y ago

The proliferation of LeetCode for interviews means that we have an army of employed software engineers who are great at solving toy puzzles, but when it comes to actual business and / or customer problems, they stumble and falter. Management only have themselves to blame for spreading this kind of culture of interviewing around.

pi-e-sigma 3y ago

Even if we assume that what you think is true then it is still solely the companies' fault. Because if the prospective employees are so shit why would you hire them in the first place?

srverma 3y ago
I feel like assigning blame is neither here nor there. Leaders in these companies often look at what other companies are doing, and follow suite. There's an argument that Elon laying off 80% of twitter is another catalyst - so why companies not follow? Ultimately, if hiring managers offered these roles because work was needed but no longer is, would you blame them for adjusting their approach?
spike021 3y ago
Either that or why not interview, accept a certain level of experience, and then expect to do a bit more training during the onboarding phase. My previous two companies didn't do a great job with onboarding and I think it can be so varied and not very helpful many times.
helsinki 3y ago
because A’s hire B’s that hire C’s that hire D’s /incorrect grammar
groby_b 3y ago
Because time-to-market matters? Because even minimally productive folks were ROI-positive in ZIRP world, but a bad idea in 8% interest world? Because Wall Street rewards growth?
leetharris 3y ago
I'm not looking to assign blame or anything, I've just seen this pattern play out in the last couple of decades. I think it's a valid theory of the current "market correction."
tensility 3y ago
Because that's how managers promote themselves...by hiring.

babyshake 3y ago

And yet, the engineering interviews still typically revolve around Leetcode algorithms instead of the messy but hardly CS-intensive day to day work that engineering typically involves.

ljm 3y ago
The more experience you rack up in your career, the more likely you are to walk away from jobs with laborious hiring processes too. I will politely decline any opportunity that requires me to do multiple code and architecture tests and several other lengthy meetings, usually spread out over the course of months, because it’s not worth my time to jump through so many hoops. It signals to me that there is already a tendency to implement process for the sake of process. What will really sell me on a company is a more in depth conversation with the leadership and the team where we learn more about what we value and how we like to operate. And that’s how I would interview anyone who was referred by someone I trust.
- sph 3y ago
  Very true, because an experienced engineer had internalised that the hard part of this field is not writing code. A company that focused all on that in their hiring process means they're either misguided, or are looking for inexperienced "coding monkeys." In a productive day as a solo dev, hitting keys on my keyboard is the easiest part, the hardest part is thinking about a problem in front of my notepad, usually staring out my living room window or while taking a shower.
- voidnap 3y ago
  It isn't about experience in your career as much as just being marketable. I'm being a little pedantic, but it's a meaningful distinction because marketing yourself to a HR department is a skill to be worked at for some.
- armitron 3y ago
  That's all well and good if you're willing to leave a lot of money on the table. All the companies that hand out half-a-million to a million-dollars/yr total compensation packages operate using similar hiring processes. That's a lot of money over the span of even a few years to miss out on.

deleted 3y ago

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fullshark 3y ago

"Your average colleague is an idiot" is never an unpopular opinion among tech workers. "You are average," now that is unpopular opinion.

forward1 3y ago
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
- Mouse47 3y ago
  That only applies to the median, not the average. Every time I see this quote I can't help but think that. Funny tho
  - nradov 3y ago
    Median is one type of average.
    - catchnear4321 3y ago
      what do you mean?
      - DANmode 3y ago
        In maths, averaging has multiple forms. Mean (what most people call "averaging"), median, mode.
        catchnear4321 3y ago
        yes yes, suppose you have summed it up
        cjalmeida 3y ago
        Well, no variance in opinions it seems.

bcrosby95 3y ago

The awkward part is that most people I know that have been at these companies for 10+ years feel like they couldn't pass the current hiring bar.

fardo 3y ago
In my experience, this mostly is because the “hiring bar” at big companies is frequently disassociated from actual day-to-day work. It typically looks like 1. memorizing some 50-200 or so domain-specific general patterns which problem solutions will tend to follow, so you can solve an arbitrary leetcode medium in under 20 minutes time — a skill that has almost nothing to do with the plumbing and product work most tech-workers engage in on a day to day basis, and 2. Speak at length and extemporaneously on arbitrary from-scratch system design problems — a skill which, while sometimes important, is a skill which most engineers that aren’t working at a startup won’t usually exercise more than once or twice a year, as the ratio of work on “systems already designed” to “systems needing new designs” will overwhelmingly skew towards pre-existence. When your hiring process and day job are so thoroughly dissociated and unrelated to each other, it’s not a surprise current workers who aren’t actively studying for a job change couldn’t pass it.

soared 3y ago

This doesn’t really make sense - if it were true a single company could pay many times what faang does to secure talent 10x+ better than a normal tech worker and have unfettered success. It also means a 10x dev years ago would be.. 100x now? It also implies some weird logic that if you were into tech before, you’re better than someone who was born 10 years later and is into tech now. And implications that if you’re not devoted to your employers industry your work output is meaningfully worse, which maybe is true but maybe not.

verve_rat 3y ago
Your first point assumes that it is easy to identify top tier talent during the hiring process and that tech employment is not a market for lemons [1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
leetharris 3y ago
Apologies, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying so would love to hear more of your thoughts. > It also implies some weird logic that if you were into tech before, you’re better than someone who was born 10 years later and is into tech now. This was not what I was trying to say. The amount of people who work in tech is far, far higher now than it was 20 years ago. It just brought more "average" people in who don't really push the boundaries of what is possible. Lots of apps that move strings in and out of databases, very little real innovation going on from smart people.

windowlessmonad 3y ago

I don't think this is a significant factor in the size of the layoffs. Many high-level and high-tenure employees are being laid off, and this is apparent in many of the various companies that have had significant layoffs in the last couple years. The lay-offs have also heavily affected departments outside of engineering: product, marketing, finance, etc. have all been affected. I don't disagree that companies greatly over-hired, but I don't think the largest portion there has been bootcamp/cert/junior SWEs.

fritzo 3y ago

More charitably: Many people who 10-15 years ago would have excelled in a non-tech field have since then been drawn into tech due to shrinkage in those other fields and to the attractively high compensation in tech.

flashgordon 3y ago

I think this is only half the answer (or atleast part of it). This not only ends up attracting the make-quick-buck-with-certification types but also the political sociopaths who knows how to optimize time on the ladder over quality. This not only has lowered the bar but also made these places very toxic to work in! Passive aggressiveness anybody?

drewcoo 3y ago
In ancient times, HP used to be one of the dream jobs. It was incredibly unusual in ways that I think are best expressed by "The HP Way." https://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm https://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm It was a dream job because other tech jobs were almost nothing like that. Most tech jobs featured techies managed by MBA-types and that can be a recipe for passive-aggressiveness.

kasey_junk 3y ago

This exact complaint was common in 2001. Which hey maybe it’s true! Maybe the nerds from 2 generations ago could have built all this technology 10x over… except they didn’t.

drewcoo 3y ago
> This exact complaint was common in 2001 I, for one, had the same complaint then. The dotcom boom pulled in lots of people not interested in tech, just in paychecks. > Maybe the nerds from 2 generations ago could have built all this technology 10x over… except they didn’t Fantasy math aside, the nerds don't really decide what tech to build. There was no mass of nerds 25 years ago arguing over NNTP about who could build the best ad platform for the newly-emerging World Wide Web. That's a suit thing.

kypro 3y ago

> The quality of your average tech worked has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. It's definitely got worse over the last ~10 years, but the pandemic era hiring from 2020-2021 took it to new level of bad at many companies. Anyone who had done some basic coding was getting hired at a great salary in 2021, and these individuals are still around today – some now calling themselves "senior developers". But I completely agree with what you're saying here about about it no longer being nerds working in tech. A nerd who isn't the best coding will still engage with me about technical details, be keen to learn new things, and care about their work. A lot of the new guys I work with today are just doing the bare minimum and they think you're an idiot for caring.

bennyelv 3y ago
I have evidence to support this - I lost people from my team who were offered "senior" or "lead" developer roles when they were nowhere near the level required for that kind of job. The level they were at was already a a stretch that they were growing into. ...and with a salary boost to match. Now in the UK salaries have flatlined and the number of jobs is way down, and this no longer seems to be a problem.
- ric2b 3y ago
  It was a problem that workers were getting a bigger share of the profit?

armchairhacker 3y ago

I don’t think the average tech worker is dumb. They may even be better than the average in the 2000s/2010s (tech boom), maybe not, but I’m at least sure especially those at Google could get and stay hired in earlier times. What I suspect is that tech companies have many more workers than needed, because most software simply doesn’t need many people to build and maintain. I remember massive tech companies running on teams of <100 people, and even today, I hear of many critical departments with only around a dozen or less. Google search, Github, AWS, Outlook, Facebook, Uber, IntelliJ. These are software behemoths, but at their core they’re rather simple, and a single developer could make an MVP of any in a few weeks, and with adequate testers and resources, something scalable and stable that could be used by professionals in a few months. And that’s creating it from scratch (well, existing libraries), though maintaining everything maybe doesn’t require much less, it surely doesn’t require more. I understand the big products have more, at least name recognition, and I understand that a big product needs more than programmers (asset creation, marketing, QA, tech support, accounting, etc.) But the software development side isn’t very big, especially if you already have the software.

enterprise_cog 3y ago
A single dev can make an mvp of AWS? Or IntelliJ? Let me guess, they could write Dropbox in a weekend too.
- okr 3y ago
  Hey, chatgpt, write me a dropbox script, that mimics dropbox. Nono, this library does not have this function. No, this is also useless. What are you suggesting, aaaah, get me out of here.
democracy 3y ago
Just don't try to rebuild Netscape navigator please

drewcoo 3y ago

I tend to agree. The industry hired more people than the small percent of the population before that were attracted to tech. The jobs needed to change to accommodate all the new, less-tech-interested people. They became more standardized and less thought-involving. More and more jobs are now about using frameworks and writing glue code instead of solving novel problems. Even the new techier-than-average people are likely in less techy jobs. And jobs less oriented to making them grow into their best geek selves. Because the jobs became oriented to hiring neophytes to do the bulk of the work, we also see title compression and a low cap to expected salaries. If someone seems too senior and starts to cost too much, this model allows replacing them with new tabula rasa (bootcamp) workers.

vrosas 3y ago

I was just today reminiscing about how smart and capable everyone seemed at the startup I interned at in 2013, and comparing them to the quality of engineers I’ve worked with in the startup scene more recently. The difference is stark. I can’t pin down one reason but I agree with you. Too many bootcamps. Too much resume-driven development. Too many engineering managers whose only programming language is JQL.

dalyons 3y ago
Another factor here is that for many reasons startup equity (and thus startup comp in general) is much less valuable statistically than it was 10-15 years ago. Everyone knows that it a shit deal now, so many of the best engineers, those who can, are in big tech now. Leaving startups with lower quality talent pool, or those who just need a first job. I say that with sadness and fond memories of ~2013 startup culture.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  Yeah, having interviewed pretty recently, I was shocked at how low startup offers were compared to established companies and late stage startups.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    I started my career in start ups, they ask for 150% and want to pay 75. It's only fresh graduates and bootcamp people who fall for the equity scam nowadays. Everybody who has been around the block knows they are going to dilute the hell put of it before any liquidity event. It's really a shame beacuse I am far more productive in that environment I just wish I was able to eat more of what I kill there.

jmspring 3y ago

I don’t disagree. That said, at large companies there are a lot of people that do the minimum to make themselves look good and pass the buck down.

kromem 3y ago

Also, the move to virtual commuting plus better translation automation means a much larger potential candidate pool to compete against than before.

akg_67 3y ago

How do you define "quality" of tech worker? What is the profile of people being let go? Are they recent hire or people with quick certification, bootcamp, etc? A quick review of people on LinkedIn with Open to Work badges seems to paint a different picture than any claim of people being let go are of lower quality. > It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech Now having experienced almost three generations coming to adulthood, I hard disagree with any such notion of newer generation not being dedicated and smarter. I have lot more respect for the newer generation: what they have been served with and how they are handling it. The changes in last 10 or 20 years have far exceeded any changes I experienced in my first 0-40 years of life. And, imo newer generation has been adapting much better to such changes than the previous generations including my own. This adaption might come across not being "dedicated nerds" to previous generation but with the rapid change taking place, ability to adapt quickly trumps being "dedicated nerd."

throwbadubadu 3y ago
> A quick review of people on LinkedIn with Open to Work badges seems to paint a different picture than any claim of people being let go are of lower quality. Come on, LinkedIn (CVs) tell nothing. Having been somewhere is often made up as great experience even if did not yield much experience, or one wasn't as involved as claimed, and even been somewhere is a lie. It is usually the opposite if I check known colleagues: null performers and phonies have outstanding profiles, the good or super programmer somtimes an awkward or does-not-care profile. (But yeah, also admitting: Companies usually fire by the wrong metrics and even direct managers, which are bad managers, do not know the real differences of their underlings..) > notion of newer generation not being dedicated and smarter Full agree, I don't think it is much new generation vs old, there are the same kind of great peoples. But computer science really changed and grew. E.g. I strongly remember when I joined university 20 years or so ago how all tutors claimed how big our year is, and that before us everybody knew each other (profs/tutors/students), but now impossible. But still, 80-90% of the students that survived the first semesters just belonged there and would be great coders or computer scientists, with the right skills and ambitions. If you look nowadays, it is different and maybe more similar to other professions, and more 50/50 between those guys, and the other half which is ambitionless and/or just lack the skills, mindset, whatever, and would have better become something else. If you aks those some even freely admit they hate their job, but only drawn by the money.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

100% this. One of the reasons I left a salaried position and struck out on my own was that I saw the talent density around me drop like crazy.

matrix87 3y ago

> It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech and don't want to go deeper than the bare minimum required by their job. The average day-to-day work is menial, for example investigating a production issue. That isn't something that people get into as a hobby, that's work in a very unromantic sense. Maybe having good systems background can help in those situations, but it's a little more subtle I do think though that it works the other way: people who actually care about computers don't care if tech is no longer a money field, they just want to work on computer stuff. And maybe earlier it wasn't as much of a money field. But that doesn't imply that the enthusiasts are better at fulfilling work responsibilities. A lot of work stuff is business specific and not very dependent on systems background So yeah, I don't think the part about over-hiring is necessarily wrong, but this sort of "I'm better than you" attitude isn't very becoming. Maybe you should give this [0] a read, just to see a different perspective [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

noduerme 3y ago
I'd never heard of that novel or these laws, but as an American it would be unthinkable to consider them anything other than Kafkaesque dark satire. The idea that they've moved from that to some sort of positive model for egalitarian society is downright creepy. Specifically, because they all contain the hypocrisy of saying explicitly as a group the very thing they're telling the individual not to say. Taking the side of we is therefore willfully brutal and repugnant to individual dignity. Presented without irony, is this some sort of fascism-light?
- whearyou 3y ago
  Or communist-light, but the latter ideology doesn’t seem to hold the same sting as a descriptor despite very similar outcomes
  - noduerme 3y ago
    Sure, if you like. Although a nit: communism historically doesn't mind celebrating individual heroics or achievements as such, if they're seen as selflessly done in service of the cause. The view of society as a single organism which knows better than you is more central to the definition and prototype of fascism, even if it's also a result of any kind of collective reordering of a society.

sph 3y ago

Explains why tools like Copilot seems to be so hyped, yet I as an old school developer really can't find a place where it would help me. I guess most people really benefit from a tool to autogenerate an Erathostenes sieve in Python or a fizzbuzz function in Prolog or yet another React Router boilerplate. EDIT: a more nuanced version of this comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38965283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38965283

mijamo 3y ago
I do really benefit from finally having a way to use shell scripting. Life is too short to remember hundreds of one letter options with obscure combinations
- sph 3y ago
  Back in my day, man pages and --help were enough. The thing about great documentation is that it rarely hallucinates.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    I imagine you slapping your knee as you started typing that. :)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - speedgoose 3y ago
    It’s just a bit more slow.
democracy 3y ago
Copilot is great to do boilerplate, it guesses and completes code correctly most of the time

metabro 3y ago

This doesn’t mesh with my experience. I work at big tech co that went through massive rounds of layoffs. The criteria was a mixed bag. A lot of it was just entire products and associated teams being dismantled. Also, one can make the argument the other way as well. Tools and infra have gotten good enough that the work doesn’t require the “dedicated nerds”. So let’s get rid of the highest paid engineers as that’s the most impactful to our bottom line. They coincidentally happen to be the nerds. We can always hire them back for less because what else are these nerds going to do in this market. Not saying that’s the case but demonstrating that it’s pretty easy to string together silly notions we might have to explain reality.

eps 3y ago
These are two sides of the same medal. What the GP said was how the bloat accumulated and why the professional quality went down. What you are saying is how they are trimming the bloat. It's not possible to trim by skill alone, because it would leave all teams and products understuffed. But the bloat is there and it is insane.
- foofie 3y ago
  > These are two sides of the same medal. I don't think it is at all. OP put up a strawman on how the tech world is packed with incompetent new arrivals, but corporations are firing people indiscrimately by blindly cutting branches out of their org tree. Corporate's criteria to fire people is deciding which product they can either slow development, freeze, or even completely eliminate. This has absolutely nothing to do with the skills of whatever employees are covered by the firing rounds. These are pure business decisions which bear no connection with the tech aspect of their services. This is not bloat. In fact, I know for a fact that one FANG was still hiring midway through a round of layoffs and their HR was adamant in not even considering internal transfers for those positions. Are we expected to believe that employees who not only passed last year's hiring bar and received positive performance reviews are bloat, but today's new recruits are competent?
- gnz11 3y ago
  This assumes "professional quality" was somehow higher in the past when it's really just looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. There was plenty of crap and even bloated software written in the past.

throwaway5959 3y ago

There’s also just no process anymore. Product managers can’t even be bothered to fill out more than a title line in a ticket. Burndown charts? Ha who cares about points on the tickets.

Ancalagon 3y ago
Is this true at many places now? I thought it was just mine...

foofie 3y ago

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. I don't think your take holds water. It reads as a mix between self-aggrandizing and ladder-pulling, typically pinned on the so-called boomer mindset. For the past 15 years you have seen universities producing graduates that are far better prepared for a cloud world in every single aspect of the business, and these graduates start off working in cloud-related projects. All frameworks that dominate front-end and back-end components were created in the past decade, and leverage the same cloud-based competencies that new graduates learn. If anything, new graduates are heads and shoulders above veterans, and the only thing that they miss is two decades of work experience. That can be an asset or a liability. I also add that the bulk of >15year veterans graduated in the 90s and 80s, which was a time when the academic world was still trying to figure out what it was supposed to teach in terms of software engineering, and most universities had basically scrambling to cover relevant topics. The graduates that went through those programs, unlike today's graduates, were woefully unprepared for the reality of software engineering. Two decades ago you could land a job by passing yourself as a "programmer" which meant you knew the syntax of a programming language such as Pascal or Cobol. That's the technical background of your average veteran with >15years of experience. Therefore, I think you are entirely wrong. If anything, the quality of your average tech worker improved greatly in the last 15 years. Those who arrived in the field actually hit the ground running in today's tech world and often push over and replace much senior team members. Those who enter the field from non-tech fields have the technical chops ro replace both veterans and new graduates. In today's world you need more than claim to know C or Java to actually land a job. Disclaimer: I'm a veteran with >15years of experience who worked at and was involved in the hiring process of a FANG.

democracy 3y ago
"could land a job by passing yourself as a "programmer" which meant you knew the syntax of a programming language such as Pascal or Cobol" Never and nowhere

whatever1 3y ago

"I think a solid 50% of people in tech are still on the chopping block. You can do much more with tools + really smart people in the year 2024 than you could before." Absolutely not. So much more red tape now rquires a ton more headcount. Just think how much time we spend these days to fix dependency hells and patching security issues.

austin-cheney 3y ago

My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.

foofie 3y ago
> You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. What technology or data structure do you think developers don't understand if they work on React projects? Isn't it silly to claim any person is suddenly incompetent just because they are assigned to a project which uses a particular framework?
- austin-cheney 3y ago
  Yes, that is silly until the employer becomes over leveraged or the resulting product becomes too expensive. Then hard choices must be made. At that point it’s not silly anymore. Having written JS full time for 15 years most JS developers are deeply uncomfortable navigating complex data structures of any kind. There is a deep emotional reliance on declarative APIs to do that for them. This is a skill super foundational to programming in any language learned from experience, but in modern JS the reliance on tools fails to foster those very necessary skills. This is a challenge to describe to software developers who have no experience writing original software, such as without a framework, because they have no frame of reference to consider alternative points of view. People might find it challenging to explain modern astronomy to tribal people living in a jungle, for example, because the necessary intermediate education is absent.
- sershe 3y ago
  It's not that. I used to work on web apps about 20 years ago, and we created some involved interfaces using hand-coded cross-browser AJAX and DOM (it was before jquery even existed; iirc I remember when prototype.js came out and it was very exciting). They were really fast. It took a fair amount of skill and perseverance to do that, and that filtered out a lot of the developers. These days, the people who could do the above can instead do it better (and in much less time) with jQuery. However, the people who previously couldn't do it at all in any reasonable amount of time, can now also do it with jQuery... poorly. There's a middle (the people who would struggle with the low level but are proficient enough to do a good job with jQuery) but they are, in my impression... not a majority. I believe that's why most sites (especially non-tech e.g. Chase bank and Amex) and many Electron apps (Teams, Evernote, ...) are such bloated, slow, glitchy monstrosities. Well that, combined with what the top comment said about the money

bionsystem 3y ago

I'm scared about the skill level of some of my coworkers. They are 30+ yo and I hear them debating about whether or not docker needs vt-d activated, if .msi packages can be customized, if terraform is useful for deploying on a single esxi.... All things that can be foind out with 1s of googling they will talk about it for 5 to 15min in meetings (formal or not) and the conclusion is always "we will have to test this".

xkqd 3y ago
There’s a decent chance they want to chit-chat a bit. I’ll occasionally strike up a conversation I know I could avoid by googling, just to have a conversation.
democracy 3y ago
Best sarcasm is when u r not quite sure .. ))

Yizahi 3y ago

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint." (c) Hesiod

pera 3y ago

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google decided to lay off several compiler engineers working on LLVM, but sure, please tell me more about those low quality bootcamp kiddos that are ruining everything...

caeril 3y ago
The LLVM layoffs notwithstanding, OP is still largely correct in general. Your typical developer could solder, knew how the CPU works, knew roughly how many clocks would retire a MOV, ADD, MUL, etc, was cognizant of wait states, understood cache lines, protection rings, instruction decode, memory mapping, etc. Try asking a typical Django or React developer today what a cache line even is.
- zb10948 3y ago
  Yeah the OP is quite correct. Ask your generic web developer about nuances of HTTP, SSL or even networking in general.
  - democracy 3y ago
    Ask your VB veteran about the same topics ))
- sdf4j 3y ago
  That's nonsense. Your typical developer had to deal with all those things in the past maybe, but is no more than specialization knowledge. You don't care about how many ticks you need to MOV with indirect addressing when you are developing Django. Feels like complaining because someone that is not a Django developer doesn't know how proxy model inheritance works.
  - 3y ago

lm28469 3y ago

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. The average tech job requires much less skills though. It's not like we're all working on rockets or the building blocks of the internet. A good 70% of tech jobs today are crud api and basic web/mobile apps

nsxwolf 3y ago
I've heard people describe the corporate travel platform I work on described as a "simple CRUD app" so I'm not sure I believe this is true about almost any software company.
- lm28469 3y ago
  Well it for sure isn't the Apollo guidance computer

somewhereoutth 3y ago

And this is on a backdrop of a long term 'hollowing out of the middle' as technology automates rote work (AI being the latest incarnation), leaving only high skilled jobs (including in tech) on one end, and manual jobs (driving, picking, construction) that we've been unable to automate on the other. Thus both ends (high and low skill) are seeing 'refugees' from this economic process, with overskilled people doing menial work, and underskilled people trying to tackle high end work.

mikebelanger 3y ago

Interesting idea. But supposing that the quality never nosedived, I suspect companies would still be doing these mass layoffs. Quality is always relative to the overall pool of job applicants, and companies would just layoff people with a higher bar in mind.

BizarroLand 3y ago
This is my bet as well. They're not firing because they have to. They're firing because the bean counters showed them how much more money they could have if they did. Coast for a year or two, save millions, then rehire back when they need to innovate or update.

democracy 3y ago

Nah, not true by any means

gniv 3y ago

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. Not my experience. I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar. Based on anecdotes, I have another theory. The people that build the systems got old and are unwilling to work the crazy hours. The new folks are hired to work on maintaining these systems, and it's not fun. So overall both quality and speed declined.

SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
I’ve seen this exact thing happen myself, I think you’re onto something here.
ativzzz 3y ago
It's much easier and faster to build greenfield systems that have no historical baggage than it is to retrofit older systems that already support large customer bases and revenues for newer features. Not just pure tech systems, but businesses and non-tech systems as well. And tech companies have gotten large with a ton of baggage and customers
atraac 3y ago
Not arguing over original point of quality of tech workers but... > I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar. Are FAANG interviews these days an indicator of anything besides being good at FAANG interviews? Some of the best people I worked with that brought real value would never pass big tech leetcode interview...
- foofie 3y ago
  > Some of the best people I worked with that brought real value would never pass big tech leetcode interview... FAANGs don't do leetcode. They may ask about data structures knowledge, but even their coding interviews are aimed at evaluating stuff like system design, write readable code, be coachable, and even soft skills.

drewmaker78 3y ago

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smrtinsert 3y ago

Having survived through many layoffs, this is 100% not the case. The modern layoffs don't even seem to consider whether or not the person was a top contributor or sme. They are done to reduce cost and look good to the board/investors/whoever. I'm pretty sure I survive because my tco is probably more on the humble side but I'm far from cheap.

paulcole 3y ago

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. I’d be shocked if you didn’t enter the industry 20-25 years ago.

Clubber 3y ago

>The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. Initially this sounded right, but then I remembered all the trash that showed up during the dot boom and subsequent booms. It's just hiring booms attract a lot of people who want to make easy money and those people think programing is easy money (it's not). Bootcamps and even CS degrees are just step one of many steps and many people think step one is the only step and don't work to further their craft. Once it becomes evident that an org has way too many of these people, it starts to cull. Unfortunately, large orgs are very bad at "rightsizing," and just "mow the lawn." The problem with tech is to be good at it, you have to be passionate about it to the point of near obsession. That's a requirement above and beyond just being smart or good at math, or even good at programming. You can fill a room with brilliant but dispassionate people and you won't get much done. So you're right in a 15 year cycle, but this cycle has happened before and we're now in the the culling part.

tdy_err 3y ago

> These blanket statements on Hackernews are so frustrating to read. > Please understand that every environment, company, and project is different.

znpy 3y ago

I mostly agree with your point and I have a corollary around this part: > Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech salaries and wanted in on it so they started taking every quick certification, bootcamp, degree, etc to get into tech. In 2007-2017 the concept of "startup company" was also heavily romanticized, to the point it was almost toxic. I was in university in 2013 and pretty much anyone wanted to build a startup. More often than not it was non-tech people exploiting tech people into building MVPs. It was painful to see (and in a few cases, to experience). Don't even get me started on "apps". Every moron on the block had some kind of "idea for an app" and was completely clueless to how the app markets worked (let alone how to actually do that). Of course, being pretty much all amateurish at best, no single business plan was in sight.

nitwit005 3y ago

If they overhired by 50%, and hired a bunch of idiots, the tech executives should be the ones on the chopping block.

wilg 3y ago
Only if its the same executives. And those 50% would still have to go too.

Communitivity 3y ago

I agree with the opinion, but not the timeframe. I would say the quality has nosedived over the last 8 years, based on my experience as the tech interviewer for potential new hire interviews across the last 12 years on different projects. The last 4 years I've gotten comments from co-interviewers of 'you ask the hard questions', 'you are tough'. These are in response to questions such as 'What are your thoughts on composition vs inheritance in object oriented design', 'What are the arguments for Java as a better language than Javascript? How about the other way around?', 'What's a progressive web app, what aspects of React and what react-related libs help with creating one?'. These were all directly relevant to the positions being interviewed, and some of those were for senior engineer positions. These are questions that I think should be answerable by any senior frontend engineer, and most senior software engineers.

never_inline 3y ago

As a tech worker of current generation, I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that I suck.

savorypiano 3y ago

10 years ago people were complaining that candidates couldn't even write a for loop in interviews.

deleted 3y ago

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hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

Maybe it's just beneficial to move web developers to a different catalog? So you have the web developers who mostly chase new or cool frames/tools, prefer dealing with human problems than machines problems, and other developers. Does it make sense?

fulladder 3y ago

Around 2015, I read an article saying that computer science was the most popular major for Harvard undergraduates. I found it quite surprising. I would think that a Harvard student could basically do anything with their life that they want: medicine, law, business, politics, anything they set their minds to. Why, I wondered, would they want to enter this strange industry with all our odd characters and personalities? To me it's like, this is a place where you're going to compete to fix or improve something in the Linux kernel in order for Linus to swear at you and publicly humiliate you in an immutable ledger called the LKML. (Welcome to tech!) Even now, I don't really understand how this could have become the most popular major at Harvard. I think things will sort themselves out in time. A person might start a career with little inherent interest but stumble into something that excites them and excel at it. Or a person might work in technology for a while, decide it's not right for them, and move on to something else. We'll have to see where it goes.