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BBC: Big Tech jobs have lost their glamour

35 points by test1235 3y ago

doubtfuluser 3y ago
+1 on this sentiment. I myself see myself leaving big tech. In the past I drank the kool-aid. There was a mission. There was a vision, and there were growth opportunities. Now I see people leaving left and right and none is inspired anymore - since it became clear that the mission is solely “making the world a better place by relying on our shareholders to do something with their money”. I especially have the feeling that - while being in AI - leadership simply jumped too early on that train and now has teams full of people knowing that every project is set up for failure…
- malermeister 3y ago
  The mission was always bullshit. People just nodded along with it as long as the getting was good.
darth_avocado 3y ago
I would agree if tech jobs without the perks were worse than outside the industry, but they are not. I worked for other industries before and let me tell you they are far worse on all objectively measured metrics. Worse pay, less emphasis on WLB, RTO 5 days a week, worse tech stacks, worse work culture and non existent perks are the norm everywhere else. Sure there’s exceptions everywhere, but unless you’re self employed and contract in other industries, tech is still where it’s better.
- gtvwill 3y ago
  Eh if you live in Aus construction gives tech a run for its money. Work everywhere, you can walk on-site and get >35p/hr with little to no experience. If your ticketed it's more like 80 per hour. Get yourself a abn a shovel and a drill and your off to the races. NDIS work also pays similar to construction. You will struggle to find tech wages that match that for the majority of available work. Techs over saturated with employees and as software improves you need less workers to do more IT work erryday. Meanwhile it still takes the same amount of workers to lay a slab or stand a house frame as it did 20 years ago.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    What does tech pay in Australia? AU$80/hour = AU$160K/year which I think is ~US$110K/year. Big Tech TC starts at about $200K/year for straight out of college and quickly goes up to around $450K/year by mid-career. Plus you don't need to do physical labor or risk your health hauling stuff. I think construction is an underrated profession by a lot of folks in the U.S, but it doesn't really compare to software for effort vs. reward. It's a favorable alternative for folks who would otherwise work retail or push paper around in non-tech office jobs.
    - gtvwill 3y ago
      Yeah there's bugger all of the work actually there though and the competition to get it is pretty high. I went through a bunch of interviews over the last year for a mix of systems engineer through to lvl1 support (beggars can't be choosers). Most offers peaked at 85k. I did a half dozen interviews and had a few offers. Got a good mate who is a data analyst with a fair wack of experience, he struggles to find much available at 120k per annum let alone higher. Job security in IT hasn't been great to me either. Prior to starting my own company I never had a role last >12 months due to some external factor deleting my job(e.g. company loses support contract). Meanwhile the whole time I've had constant offers to get back into construction. I'm not ticketed or anything I'm just reliable and turn up.
      - mywittyname 3y ago
        The American tech industry is far more generous than in other countries, and Americans tend to forget this fact.
      - pygar 3y ago
        The lowish tech wages in Australia are in part explained by our economy being pretty unsophisticated. A data analyst (already of dubious utility at the best of times) is going to find getting work hard in a country with a population of 25M that moves very slowly and doesn't actually make anything. The same goes for most engineering roles. A lot of us just become glorified PMs. IT is even worse, I work for a company that has >10K employees and we have 50 external IT staff which seems to be enough. The cattle side has won over in the "Pet vs cattle" analogy. After the initial setup, most SMEs will have a guy who comes in once a week.
- ttymck 3y ago
  What makes one tech stack worse than another?
  - 98codes 3y ago
    It's often not the tech itself but rather the implementation. Enterprise dev is notorious for a reason.
  - darth_avocado 3y ago
    Outdated stacks are career ending. If you spend years on old stacks, it’s extremely hard for you to switch jobs and command the same amount of career growth.
ayberk 3y ago
I'm torn about this. I've been in FAANG for a while now, and while I do think I'd be more successful/happier at a smaller company (and I actually was), I don't think "smaller" tech is necessarily going to be better, especially right now. Maybe we should just accept that these are just jobs, and no glamour is necessary -- so maybe big tech jobs losing it is not the worst thing. Let the talent spread and create more "glamorous" jobs.
alephnerd 3y ago
Wages in the tech industry are still much higher than equivalent jobs factoring hours worked and additional compensation. As long as that remains true, tech will remain a hot industry. The ability to spend almost no money to generate ridiculously high margins (50-70%) is hard to beat. The only similar industry is Finance, but that is heavily gatekept due to the limited need for staffing.
legitster 3y ago
Big tech jobs used to be fun. "Move fast and break things". It was the ultimate job for the intelligent underachiever who didn't want to waste time on paperwork and routines. Over the last ten years I have watched the number of PMs and middle managers explode across the industry. Executives from other industries have crept in, bastardized agile, commoditized developer work, and began micromanaging everything. You get to build less cool stuff - there's less opportunity for achievement or advancement. So now these jobs are not much different than garden variety white collar work. I think there are a variety of valid reasons: The market capital that created unicorns is gone - and with high interest rates comes risk aversion. The NYTimes decision to adopt an anti-tech editorial policy changed public perception. Pushes for diverse hiring practices clashed with tech's original meritocracy structure. Increasing regulation. The age of the average coder has gone up and so the corps have matured too. But more than anything, I think it comes down to nature abhorring a vacuum. The other corporations in our economy are mired by risk-averse gatekeeping admins and executives - it was only a matter of time before enough consultants and management firms made their way into the building.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  The NYTimes decision to adopt an anti-tech editorial policy changed public perception The "move fast and break things" culture of tech was what changed public perception. The NYT was just a manifestation of that change.
  - legitster 3y ago
    Not necessarily. I am alluding to a specific policy that the NYT adopted that said only negative stories about the tech industry would be run. Some NYT writers like Matt Yglesias have confirmed this policy and the knock-on affect at other publications. Amazon and Google and Apple all still have extremely high public perception of their brands, despite only receiving negative national press, so it's hard to pin this as a reason that people wouldn't want to work at these places. But I think it's contributed to places like Google transitioning from being open and publicly glowing places to work, to circle their wagons and becoming more private and cagey with their employees.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Some more from a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39317549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39317549 (no need for BBC in the title)
nine_zeros 3y ago
For me, it is management processes such as sprints, Jira story points, OKRs, interviews asking completely irrelevant questions, performance reviews based on completely useless metrics, stack ranking that pits people against each other - all this shit makes me want to quit. If I am going to build important features and services, constantly improve my own and engineering skills, know our systems through and through, be on-call, deal with cross team issues, fix bugs, mentor juniors, and essentially keep everything running day in, day out - the least I can expect from management is to be on my side and not be my adversary. As long as this relationship is adversarial - as it is in big tech - I couldn't care less about the job, the managers, the services. For all I care, it can all sink.

35 points by test1235 3y ago

+1 on this sentiment. I myself see myself leaving big tech. In the past I drank the kool-aid. There was a mission. There was a vision, and there were growth opportunities. Now I see people leaving left and right and none is inspired anymore - since it became clear that the mission is solely “making the world a better place by relying on our shareholders to do something with their money”. I especially have the feeling that - while being in AI - leadership simply jumped too early on that train and now has teams full of people knowing that every project is set up for failure…

malermeister 3y ago
The mission was always bullshit. People just nodded along with it as long as the getting was good.

darth_avocado 3y ago

I would agree if tech jobs without the perks were worse than outside the industry, but they are not. I worked for other industries before and let me tell you they are far worse on all objectively measured metrics. Worse pay, less emphasis on WLB, RTO 5 days a week, worse tech stacks, worse work culture and non existent perks are the norm everywhere else. Sure there’s exceptions everywhere, but unless you’re self employed and contract in other industries, tech is still where it’s better.

gtvwill 3y ago
Eh if you live in Aus construction gives tech a run for its money. Work everywhere, you can walk on-site and get >35p/hr with little to no experience. If your ticketed it's more like 80 per hour. Get yourself a abn a shovel and a drill and your off to the races. NDIS work also pays similar to construction. You will struggle to find tech wages that match that for the majority of available work. Techs over saturated with employees and as software improves you need less workers to do more IT work erryday. Meanwhile it still takes the same amount of workers to lay a slab or stand a house frame as it did 20 years ago.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  What does tech pay in Australia? AU$80/hour = AU$160K/year which I think is ~US$110K/year. Big Tech TC starts at about $200K/year for straight out of college and quickly goes up to around $450K/year by mid-career. Plus you don't need to do physical labor or risk your health hauling stuff. I think construction is an underrated profession by a lot of folks in the U.S, but it doesn't really compare to software for effort vs. reward. It's a favorable alternative for folks who would otherwise work retail or push paper around in non-tech office jobs.
  - gtvwill 3y ago
    Yeah there's bugger all of the work actually there though and the competition to get it is pretty high. I went through a bunch of interviews over the last year for a mix of systems engineer through to lvl1 support (beggars can't be choosers). Most offers peaked at 85k. I did a half dozen interviews and had a few offers. Got a good mate who is a data analyst with a fair wack of experience, he struggles to find much available at 120k per annum let alone higher. Job security in IT hasn't been great to me either. Prior to starting my own company I never had a role last >12 months due to some external factor deleting my job(e.g. company loses support contract). Meanwhile the whole time I've had constant offers to get back into construction. I'm not ticketed or anything I'm just reliable and turn up.
    - mywittyname 3y ago
      The American tech industry is far more generous than in other countries, and Americans tend to forget this fact.
    - pygar 3y ago
      The lowish tech wages in Australia are in part explained by our economy being pretty unsophisticated. A data analyst (already of dubious utility at the best of times) is going to find getting work hard in a country with a population of 25M that moves very slowly and doesn't actually make anything. The same goes for most engineering roles. A lot of us just become glorified PMs. IT is even worse, I work for a company that has >10K employees and we have 50 external IT staff which seems to be enough. The cattle side has won over in the "Pet vs cattle" analogy. After the initial setup, most SMEs will have a guy who comes in once a week.
ttymck 3y ago
What makes one tech stack worse than another?
- 98codes 3y ago
  It's often not the tech itself but rather the implementation. Enterprise dev is notorious for a reason.
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  Outdated stacks are career ending. If you spend years on old stacks, it’s extremely hard for you to switch jobs and command the same amount of career growth.

ayberk 3y ago

I'm torn about this. I've been in FAANG for a while now, and while I do think I'd be more successful/happier at a smaller company (and I actually was), I don't think "smaller" tech is necessarily going to be better, especially right now. Maybe we should just accept that these are just jobs, and no glamour is necessary -- so maybe big tech jobs losing it is not the worst thing. Let the talent spread and create more "glamorous" jobs.

alephnerd 3y ago

Wages in the tech industry are still much higher than equivalent jobs factoring hours worked and additional compensation. As long as that remains true, tech will remain a hot industry. The ability to spend almost no money to generate ridiculously high margins (50-70%) is hard to beat. The only similar industry is Finance, but that is heavily gatekept due to the limited need for staffing.

legitster 3y ago

Big tech jobs used to be fun. "Move fast and break things". It was the ultimate job for the intelligent underachiever who didn't want to waste time on paperwork and routines. Over the last ten years I have watched the number of PMs and middle managers explode across the industry. Executives from other industries have crept in, bastardized agile, commoditized developer work, and began micromanaging everything. You get to build less cool stuff - there's less opportunity for achievement or advancement. So now these jobs are not much different than garden variety white collar work. I think there are a variety of valid reasons: The market capital that created unicorns is gone - and with high interest rates comes risk aversion. The NYTimes decision to adopt an anti-tech editorial policy changed public perception. Pushes for diverse hiring practices clashed with tech's original meritocracy structure. Increasing regulation. The age of the average coder has gone up and so the corps have matured too. But more than anything, I think it comes down to nature abhorring a vacuum. The other corporations in our economy are mired by risk-averse gatekeeping admins and executives - it was only a matter of time before enough consultants and management firms made their way into the building.

gamblor956 3y ago
The NYTimes decision to adopt an anti-tech editorial policy changed public perception The "move fast and break things" culture of tech was what changed public perception. The NYT was just a manifestation of that change.
- legitster 3y ago
  Not necessarily. I am alluding to a specific policy that the NYT adopted that said only negative stories about the tech industry would be run. Some NYT writers like Matt Yglesias have confirmed this policy and the knock-on affect at other publications. Amazon and Google and Apple all still have extremely high public perception of their brands, despite only receiving negative national press, so it's hard to pin this as a reason that people wouldn't want to work at these places. But I think it's contributed to places like Google transitioning from being open and publicly glowing places to work, to circle their wagons and becoming more private and cagey with their employees.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Some more from a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39317549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39317549 (no need for BBC in the title)

nine_zeros 3y ago

For me, it is management processes such as sprints, Jira story points, OKRs, interviews asking completely irrelevant questions, performance reviews based on completely useless metrics, stack ranking that pits people against each other - all this shit makes me want to quit. If I am going to build important features and services, constantly improve my own and engineering skills, know our systems through and through, be on-call, deal with cross team issues, fix bugs, mentor juniors, and essentially keep everything running day in, day out - the least I can expect from management is to be on my side and not be my adversary. As long as this relationship is adversarial - as it is in big tech - I couldn't care less about the job, the managers, the services. For all I care, it can all sink.