11 ms·

The good times in tech are over

• deleted 2y ago
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• aurareturn 2y ago
  In my first job at a fancy tech company in the Bay Area, I saw more free food and drinks than I've ever seen outside of a grocery store. It was crazy. 30 different kinds of beers. Free drinks, snacks, lunch. I jokingly said out loud, "what did we do to deserve this?". A coworkers overheard and replied, "speak for yourself". The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.
  • codr7 2y ago
    Entitlement is one thing; companies acting like they give a shit about employees was pretty nice though, I for sure miss it.
  • itake 2y ago
    SWE created billions of dollars of value for $300k/yr paychecks.
  • marcinzm 2y ago
    > The entitlement was and probably still is crazy. Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%. A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
    • bmitc 2y ago
      I would suggest rethinking that. Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". It isn't due to the "brilliance" of their engineers.
      • DeathArrow 2y ago
        >Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". Google is like a reverse Robin Hood. It steals data from the users. The customers are the ones buying that data.
    • card_zero 2y ago
      Their special skill is being in the place where all the ad money goes.
      • marcinzm 2y ago
        Their special skill is ensuring they are the place where all ad money goes by being better at getting eyeballs for that money and being better at targeting ads to those eyeballs. Many many many companies have tried to usurp one or both sides of that without success. You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
        • card_zero 2y ago
          Usurping a popular thing is difficult, because you don't have its one important quality that attracts everybody: popularity.
          • SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
            The above comment also completely sidesteps the monopolist and regulatory capture factors in difficulty to usurp Google, and thus incorrectly implies that a level playing field exists.
        • luckylion 2y ago
          Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do? Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect? Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
          • marcinzm 2y ago
            Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting." > Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do? So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world? You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
    • giantg2 2y ago
      Or maybe not exploiting society/privacy/attention to make that much.
      • salawat 2y ago
        It is hard to get a man to understand that which his salary depends on him not understanding. -Upton Sinclair
    • lolinder 2y ago
      This kind of math betrays a total lack of understanding of the way businesses earn money. With vanishingly few exceptions, no one developer makes the company $500m, and this is trivially testable with a quick thought exercise: Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year? Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev. This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer. So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
      • marcinzm 2y ago
        I'd answer but it seems you didn't read the first part of what I wrote or even the second part (I never said 500m/year). So not much point.
        • lolinder 2y ago
          Okay, you're right, I grabbed the wrong number. Sub in $1.5m/year or $500m/5 years and replace "bottom line this year" with "bottom line over the next 5 years". The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
          • marcinzm 2y ago
    • andsoitis 2y ago
      > But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable Your compensation is dominated by the function of supply of and demand for labor, not how much the company makes from your labor.
      • djrockstar1 2y ago
        Isn't demand a function of how much the company makes from your labour?
        • 9rx 2y ago
          Labour doesn't make money until the labour is already provided, so how much money labour can produce is an unknown until hindsight is available. An established company with a stable business can make some pretty reasonable forecasts, but when it comes to startups and other new business ventures one is ultimately straight up guessing. Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
    • skybrian 2y ago
      Google’s economic model has been like that for decades and it’s paying for my early retirement. Being “exploited” in this way is nice work if you can get it. The companies with narrow profit margins don’t pay nearly so well.
    • JustExAWS 2y ago
      So if they have a 2% profit margin on 1.5 million that’s $300K in profit…
      • marcinzm 2y ago
        Your point being? The profit margin is after employee compensation.
        • scarface_74 2y ago
          Would you invest in something with a 2% profit margin?
  • eaenki 2y ago
    my reply to you would’ve been: “oh, not much, we just made the founder the richest most powerful man on this planet. Right now he’s probably on a giant island in hawaii which he wholly owns, in a €200mm mansion, having an orgy with 25 escorts, while on lsd. Oh, right now he just took the jet, one of 6 €50mm jets he owns, to fly to the coast of italy. there, he will fly his giant helicopter to land on his giant 3 floor yatch with 3 pools where he will fuck 30 more chicks at once. But yeah, we get extra free food for having contributed to that”.
    • DeathArrow 2y ago
      Shouldn't you be happy you help poor boss to barely make ends meet?
    • aurareturn 2y ago
      It wasn't a profitable company. The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.
  • dbattaglia 2y ago
    10 years ago I was at an “innovation lab” of a big HR tech company that gave out free lunches and snacks. The best explanation I heard was a coworker originally from the big boring corporate HQ who said basically this is a software petting zoo for big investors to look at. “Good code monkey, here’s a banana!”
    • gogogendogo 2y ago
      I think I just learned why Amazon gives out free bananas now!
  • osrec 2y ago
    In a lot of cases, the companies leverage a large chunk of their employees' time to make very hefty returns. It's the least they can do. As someone who runs a company now (having been an employee previously), it is obvious to me that the cost of providing food is a rounding error in the overall company budget, and is well worth it, if it keeps people happy.
  • fullshark 2y ago
    They got free snacks in exchange for labor utilized to capture billions of dollars of market value, which will generate cash flows far into the future. You need to understand the game you are playing.
  • amazingamazing 2y ago
    It’s funny how impressed people are by food and beverages. Let’s be super conservative and say it was only for a mere 20 people. What percentage of wages do you think is being spent on that stuff? Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
    • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Yeah free food is a really good way to spend money on your employees. Just the cost of people walking to get food makes it worthwhile to provide on site.
      • borgdefenser 2y ago
        Coffee even more so. I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday. Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
    • IshKebab 2y ago
      I don't think it's the literal spending money on snacks that impresses people; it's more about the thought behind doing that. For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy. The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
      • ryandrake 2y ago
        Not only that, but if the company once had these things, and then took them away, it might be the wake-up call that snaps an otherwise satisfied employee out of his complacency and cause him to start looking around where the grass might be greener. Steve Blank wrote about this in [1]. Congratulations, you saved a couple of hundred dollars but caused three good employees to leave. 1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
  • SirensOfTitan 2y ago
    I worked at Facebook for half a decade during its golden period and there were a lot of people who shared your sentiment. …in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?” This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs. Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
  • doitLP 2y ago
    Your salary is not about moral desserts but about how much value or money you bring to someone else. That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
  • 9dev 2y ago
    Watching the Bay Area from over the Atlantic was always a very bewildering experience. I honestly think you guys now get something closer to the reality of European startups, where we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€! The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
    • mamcx 2y ago
      > we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€! Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!). (The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)
  • tm-infringement 2y ago
    I've always felt that the moral panic about food perks in Tech was weird. That's not free, it's part of your salary. Sure, you can't buy index funds with Pineapples but at the end of the day it's still remuneration. The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
    • fullshark 2y ago
      It's because there's a story that a lot of laborers (and capital owners) want to believe, that capitalism is a great meritocracy, and the rewards of it are based on one's moral fiber, instead of purely a function of every individual's leverage effect on the returns on capital/labor.
  • entropyneur 2y ago
    The replies are hilariously illustrative of your point. Why do you guys keep working for theese evil capitlists taking away the bilions of value you generate and leaving you with pitiful hundreds of thousands (+free snacks)? You should start a cooperative or something.
  • swat535 2y ago
    I never understood the excitement over "free food" or "ping pong tables." as perks. I'd rather have better compensation and sensible vacation / work-life balance policies, be treated as a professional, and make my own sandwich..
  • gls2ro 2y ago
    Can I offer a different perspective of providing drinks and food at the office? Add to that coffee places and more on the company campus. In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on. I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.
• skeptrune 2y ago
  There's definitely a silver lining in that being a software engineer at a normal-ish company feels more satisfying now. Being more focused and KPI-driven has some upsides.
  • codr7 2y ago
    I'm curious: more satisfying how exactly? Because from what I can see it's been quite a downhill ride since Y2k. To the extent that many who used to love the work just can't do it anymore.
    • skeptrune 2y ago
      Working at larger companies during zirp seemed high risk because the odds of getting stuck on a company side project were high. I was always wondering "is my team actually doing enough to not get fired?" That seems to be happening less now. It's easier to know where you stand.
      • codr7 2y ago
        Yeah, worrying about getting fired isn't very helpful. But selling out isn't either. Programmers should be left enough space to do their thing well, that's the only way to build great software. Which was the entire point of Agile before it was corrupted into Scrum.
    • pocketarc 2y ago
      What, in your opinion, has been going downhill? Is it all the agile stuff, or something else? Serious question, quite curious.
      • prerok 2y ago
        Well, not OP, but there's definite degradation in software quality and attention to detail. Some is due to Scrum. It's actually not the fault of the methodology but that it's been half implemented by companies that did waterfall before. You are expected to finish a feature in a sprint, but you have no connection to speak to the stakeholders/customers. The other things are these KPIs, and unsurprisingly, the bean counters behind them don't care about refactoring or addressing tech debt. In a sense, yes, we need to focus on delivering value but it's much more chaotic now, so it's very difficult to deliver performant features that deliver also what was expected.
• amelius 2y ago
  They found out that most of us are just plumbers, most of the time. And on top of that LLMs can do soft plumbing just fine.
  • hnlurker22 2y ago
    You're making it sound like plumbers are a lesser thing. You sound like you're one of those people who compare what AI does to what human junior engineers do or should be treated like (which is surprisingly a lot of people here on HN)
    • bmitc 2y ago
      They mean it as an analogy in the sense of digital plumbing.
      • hnlurker22 2y ago
        True I understand that. Digital plumbing is not a lesser thing. It's part of the job. Software engineering is done better when being "pampered" regardless if it's plumbing or rocket science. If companies want to stop pampering then sit back and watch. Bad software will be noticed
        • danaris 2y ago
          And while some of the "pampering" is excessive, an awful lot of it is just "giving your valuable employees, the ones who actually do all the work that makes you money, a good place to work that's conducive to creative work and solid work-life balance." Like...being bought the best equipment for the job they're doing? Making high-quality foods available on-site? Even something as simple as having great desk chairs, I can say from frustrating personal experience, can make a huge difference.
    • amelius 2y ago
      Not what I said. Have you ever seen plumbers being treated as rock stars? And maybe I even implied that software engineers are the lesser thing here, because LLMs can't do hard plumbing yet.
• deleted 2y ago
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• ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  I'm an engineer at a large tech company. I am by all means considered a successful engineer. I am actively looking for a way to exit the field, and am assuming that in a few years my career options will be vastly diminished. I am worried about ageism, and can already feel it in my early 30s. Its certainly become more up or out A friend of mine, with a STEM PhD, and 8+ years of experience between Amazon and Google was laid off, is struggling to find a job paying over 200k, they were making 500k previously. Obviously 150-200k is still decent money, but it really doesnt go far in major metro areas, and for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come
  • DeathArrow 2y ago
    >for someone with such a premium resume, is a bellwether of whats to come That is true in US. In Europe having a PhD and working for Google and Amazon never meant being payed huge sums.
  • jgord 2y ago
    they could probably make more angel investing.
    • sethammons 2y ago
      how so?
  • unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
    > is struggling to find a job It's always a struggle to land leadership or niche top-seniority gigs. It doesn't matter how awesome you are. They're not commodified swap-in staff roles, and there are not a lot of them, and your friend is probably looking for a quality organization too (or leaders in shabby ones won't touch this resume). Your friend is just encountering the reality that there will be a search phase after the end of any high-seniority professional job, plan for it.
    • ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
      No from the 2010-2022 period, this wasnt the case. You could find a ton of very high paying roles, or atleast get interviews for them. There is a serious vibe shift. Also, 500k isnt that senior
• oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
• redwood 2y ago
  It makes sense that there was a flood of folks coming in as they saw that it look like the place to be if you wanted to be in the good times... then you layer in interest rates. Good Times Never Last Forever
• bayindirh 2y ago
  I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve the other four, even if they don't have much to do day to day. In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies. This allowed "free" side projects and cool stuff, too. But as always, it's time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we're past the maxima.
  • gruez 2y ago
    >I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve Is there an actual reputable source that says this? For me I've only seen it asserted without evidence in comment sections.
    • bayindirh 2y ago
      It's been a while. I need to dig my history. If I can find the link, and it's alive, I'll link it here.
• the_real_cher 2y ago
  You forgot to mention outsourcing. Everyone always forgets massive outsourcing post-Covid. Go to any tech company job site and youll see many of the engineering jobs are non US.
• grumpy-de-sre 2y ago
  I'd say the good times have just moved around a bit, there's always demand for smart/experienced STEM folk. What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). But there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine. A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.
  • me_me_me 2y ago
    [dead]
  • desdenova 2y ago
    At least the hungry part will be easy after everyone is out of their jobs.
  • oytis 2y ago
    > there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine. Like what (except AI of course)? I am not working in ad tech, but it doesn't feel good either.
    • grumpy-de-sre 2y ago
      Classic stuff that impacts all of us (feel free to add/remove to the list), AI (bringing intelligence to the real world), green tech (solar/evs/power electronics etc), defense, aerospace (sat constellations etc), industrial automation, smart agriculture, government etc.
    • ptero 2y ago
      Look into profitable companies not focusing on software: Walmarts and homebuilders, Toyotas and medical device makers, miners and electric utilities and so on. All of them need software to run their businesses.
  • csomar 2y ago
    > What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). Did they? Because Google and Facebook revenues are still growing and at ATH. What happened is that they decided to divert more of that juice to their investors rather than their developers.
• deleted 2y ago
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• hnlurker22 2y ago
  The tech industry is based on copying the cool kids. Once Google and Meta started laying off, startups started laying off random people because it was cool. When Apple created the worst keyboard on earth (the arrow buttons squished together in a square) all other brands followed. Apple stopped squishing the arrow keys together but the rest still didn't notice. If someone "cool" thinks AI will replace engineers, all companies will follow blindly.
  • justanotherjoe 2y ago
    I find it weird how Elon's firing 50% of twitter is rarely brought up. Even the linked article's reference only mentions the layoffs starting jan 2023...
• hnrodey 2y ago
  insert I'm The Captain Now meme My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know. This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it. Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
• rvz 2y ago
  Notice how all the coasters at big tech companies are now being called in and with RTO policies? This is what we have here. The "good times" where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a >$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over. Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care. These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash. There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.
  • uhhhhhhh 2y ago
    The presumption that RTO is driving the wave of 'we need to be profitable' is myopic. The article rightly attributes it to financial liquidity. RTO is more expensive for most companies than remote which is often overlooked. Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related. The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created. The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days. There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
• apwell23 2y ago
  none of the newer kids or managment now care about actual software engineering, unit testing or any such stuff.
• qoez 2y ago
  This probably means there's a competitive advantage to tackle non short term ambitious innovations which everyone else is cutting away as fat.
• tobyhinloopen 2y ago
  This matches my experiences. I see a lot of side projects being dropped. I’ve been hired (as an external consultant / developer) to maintain some of these side projects while their core developers are either fired, let go, left or are put on their main projects. It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah
  • csomar 2y ago
    Just give it 3-4 years. Many of these "side-projects" are powering quite a portion of the web and elsewhere. Software requires maintenance, bug fixing, updates, etc...
    • tobyhinloopen 2y ago
      I am aware, I've been hired to maintain these things.
• fancyfredbot 2y ago
  Can I offer a contrarian point of view? Tech is still a great place to work. Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions. We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption. The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs. The hardware platforms we're coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace. I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I'm not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.
  • fullshark 2y ago
    It's heavily company/team/manager specific, but you are absolutely correct. I've seen a lot of disillusioned peers leave the industry pretty much since COVID, and they came back after a small break because it's the best of all alternatives. I think a lot of my peers didn't really understand what working was, and really bought into a lot of the BS. The last few years have been a reality check for us all.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      My current employer (big tech) is the best I've ever had. The internal tooling is amazing and works well, access to powerful development hardware is straightforward and everything just works, expensing things required for my job is not a hassle. Yes, there may be a lot of annoying process and it can take a long time to get the 20 approvals you need to deploy a code change, but in all, I've never had it so good. I've seen what it's like in startups and medium sized companies, and it would take a lot of convincing to go back. Then I see coworkers who have only ever been in this environment. This was their first job out of undergrad, and they've never seen the shit you have to deal with at other companies. They get frustrated at the trivial little things here and decide, "I'm going to quit and go to a small or medium sized company" where there's less bureaucracy or where they can have a bigger "impact" or whatever. Then they get to their new company and HR tosses them a half-working workstation and a dirty used mouse as "onboarding". And they realize they don't have the massive build infrastructure they took for granted or a dedicated build/release team. They don't have robust performance and crash metrics dashboards, and they don't have automatic code bisecting tools to find the change that caused the error. They don't even have a QA team! They don't have continuous builds or maybe they don't even have functional source control or a reliable internet connection. No free food, no massage chairs, no flexible work hours, they have to fill out a time sheet now and maybe even have to clock in and out for bathroom breaks (yes, I've worked at a shitty software company where they made engineers clock in and out). A lot of these guys realize what they had and boomerang right back after a year or so of this. And now that we are in a bear market and hiring is getting tough, I wouldn't count on the ability to just waltz back in anymore...
• fredgrott 2y ago
  For those that need a translation.... 1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining. 2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer... In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.
• bob1029 2y ago
  I think the good times are still on for anyone who continues to focus on the customer and their experience. From the perspective of the typical software engineer's salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow. I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also significantly more rewarding to work with.
• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  It's the economy, stupid. The good times will continue as soon as money does the same.
• georgemcbay 2y ago
  Not trying to throw shade on the article because I think its worth reading, but also important to note that the "good times" he's describing in tech never really existed to begin with for most people working in the tech industry or doing software development generally. I'm not going to ascribe it to "FAANG" as the freedoms he's describing existed beyond that literal set of companies, but they didn't really extend that much wider relative to the entire tech industry. Working for a company that would be happy paying you to do things that don't pretty directly lead to expected profit was always a very privileged situation.
  • harry_ord 2y ago
    Yeah, I worked for relatively normal companies as a dev from 2013 to now most of the benefits were normal across the company apart from choice of machine and I guess going to a conference but my current employer doesn't offer that.
• jmclnx 2y ago
  This seems silicon valley based. To me the real good times everywhere else ended in the early 90s.
• 404mm 2y ago
  > Providing value to the company gets you rewarded This is the part that is no longer true. The focus on individual contributors remains with your direct manager but don’t go much further. Execs always try to zoom out and save more money in different ways. So here come the offshoring and layoffs.
• mschuster91 2y ago
  The times for "resume driven development" are over, yes. And I'd argue that's a good thing - there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database" or whatnot, with hype chasers forcing developers to reinvent the wheel and make all sorts of basic errors that other mature tech has long since passed again. Maybe the industry can now focus on making the hype tech of the last 20 years finally somewhat stable and secure again before the next boom-bust iteration hits...
  • DeathArrow 2y ago
    >there just isn't any money left to develop "the next hot database" Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved? You can make money by developing a database that solves some problems, saving time and money for lots of people and companies. "Hot" doesn't make money, otherwise people posting here daily "I rewrote X in Rust" would be rich.
    • mschuster91 2y ago
      > Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved? Unless you're building the next Facebook or other billion users scaled service, mysql or postgresql will be more than enough for everything, at least until you hit 100k-1M users. And by that point you have enough real-world experience to accurately judge your needs and if you need to roll your own stuff. As for distributed data - RDS and a multi region database has that problem solved. Unless you're a real time bidding ad broker, your app can get away with a few milliseconds of replication latency.
    • lelanthran 2y ago
      > Are or problems with distributed data and databases solved? What do you need it for? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. What I see is that this sort of thing is only needed when you are planning to have the next facebook/reddit/etc type of business. I write line of business software for different SMEs, and I have not yet found a need for anything more than a beefy server/VPS. Even companies with 100k employees each using the same piece of software does not need anything "distributed", if you're even a little careful with read-only replicas, some caching of state, etc. You want to geolocate nearer to some users? For the reddit/facebook type of business, sure, good idea. For the majority of software, why would you? That webapp functions only slightly degraded when used from the other side of the world.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  For me, delivering value is acquiring new skills which I can use to augment my existing skills. Beside backend development (my main skill) and frontend, I am trying to learn more devops/infrastructure, a bit of data engineering, more cloud specific functionality and some people management. I think there is some value to be had in "jack of all trades, master of one" strategy. If I would be an employer, I would hire someone like me. :)
• z3t4 2y ago
  There has been a large influx of new software developers over the last 15 years. All fighting for the jobs, which lower their value to employers.
• agnishom 2y ago
  It may have been good times for software engineers, but arguably a lot of harm has been done to society thanks to disruption and blitz scaling culture
• mberning 2y ago
  Been in the industry for 20 years. Things are always up and down. Honestly I prefer the leaner times. Less clowns trying to cash in and more focus of engineering value, as it should be. I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels.
  • rvz 2y ago
    > I absolutely cannot stand how many people are employed in engineering and developer roles that know practically nothing. At times it reaches truly shameful levels. Indeed. The proliferation of highly immature developer tools, web framework hype, entitlement and coasting is what we have been left with. There needs to be a brutal crash to test them. "Vibe coding" is another example of the bullshit that has come out of another bubble waiting to collapse.
• ptero 2y ago
  I think the article is mostly spot on. Software engineering got detached from business goals, then forced business goals to move its way in the easy money times. The advice to software engineers to focus on building what executives request instead of trying to tell executives what must be built is good. The only thing I do not agree with is over focusing on ZIRP. Money pumping into the economy can have other forms and switched from monetary (bank lending) to fiscal (government printing) with quantitative easing strategies. Some beneficiaries changed, software is a step or two lower on that ladder, but we are still in the "plentiful money" state if you check world or your country M2 levels. And a lot of that money eventually pumps tech. The real sobering (when it is critical to be a key contributor to a profitable business or have an FU path thought through) starts when pumps inflating M2 stop. My 2c.
• zzzeek 2y ago
  so weird to see people blogging about how great tech has been throughout their whole career because they weren't yet working in 2008 or 2000
  • 9rx 2y ago
    I was working through those times and share that sentiment. 2000 was apparently bad for Silicon Valley in particular, but, being outside of that, I don't remember any noticeable effects. 2008 was the App Store gold rush. That was quite possibly the best time in tech I have seen despite what was going on the non-tech economy.
  • wolfie69 2y ago
    Yeah 2008 was much worse than today, effecting all sectors and all industries, especially anything related to the real estate industrial complex. In my opinion, things in software engineering are stagnant right now. No doubt there was a significant downturn in 2023-2024. At least at the moment no one really seems to be hiring.
• jokethrowaway 2y ago
  Good article! The only missing bit around COVID was that the cost of the economic policies which were implemented by governments caused an inevitable interest rate increase. Sure, we can argue that the response to COVID was planned in a certain way on purpose and that powerful hands could have used another excuse to get to where we are now (just press more the pedal on government spending, illegal immigration, wars, green policies) - but that's what happened.
• Nextgrid 2y ago
  During ZIRP the incentives for employees were completely disconnected from the underlying business, leading to entire careers being built around and rewarded for the wrong outcomes. People have built entire careers while completely missing/ignoring why they're doing the job and how their work is supposed to fit and contribute to the overall business - because in a lot of cases there was never a viable business to begin with, and the founders themselves were playing the "career startup founder" card and enjoying the mismatched incentives set up by a distorted funding market. Now we're seeing a readjustment as the "free money" is gone and companies realign the incentives to actually make a profit on all that manpower, and are suddenly realizing they either have way too much of it, or ended up with the wrong kind of manpower due to over a decade of mismatched incentives. Thus layoffs and a jobs market flooded with candidates whose skillsets no longer match the current demands. The good times for the career software engineer - the kind that aces LeetCode, optimizes for career growth and collects the right buzzwords on their resume has indeed come to an end, but there's still plenty of good times to be had to if you are a career problem solver. Being able to get machines to do your bidding is still a very useful skill to pretty much all business, and what matters now is delivery and solving the business problem in a profitable manner - how many tech buzzwords you have on your resume is no longer relevant. This isn't to say it's anyone's fault - I don't blame anyone for playing the game and I myself took part in it at one point. But you need to realize it's a game and plan your exit. The danger is that there's an entire generation that started their career in this game and did not realize it was a game at all, and are now caught off-guard.
  • hobs 2y ago
    It's funny because more than anything I would say the people that were most misaligned with the outcomes of the business are actually most of the engineering leaders I have worked with. The amount of short-termism and chasing press releases and caring about what your golf buddies think really clogged up a lot of companies, and it doesn't feel like THAT part is changing anytime soon, zirp or no zirp.
    • Nextgrid 2y ago
      It happened at every level - software engineers optimized for career outcomes which meant accumulating the right buzzwords. Managers optimized for their own career outcomes which meant increasing their number of direct reports. Engineering leaders optimized for their own buzzwords which means org-level complexity and a steady stream of (self-inflicted) problems to solve and brag about on their engineering blog to attract even more software engineers, and executives/founders merely optimize for securing the next funding round (because there is no and was never a viable business there to begin with), which is easier to do if you're seen as solving hard problems (even if they are self-inflicted), and investors happily oblige because they had no other choice in this distorted market. Note that incentive mismatch at the middle-management level happens everywhere to this day and isn't strictly a ZIRP-induced phenomenon, but most real businesses that need to earn a profit thus have a natural cap on how much inefficiency they can support. In ZIRP however, the complete lack of any requirement to make profit (in some cases because the business is never viable and its sole purpose is to give a good lifestyle and resume to everyone involved) exacerbated the problem.
• skobes 2y ago
  Not sure if typo: > Tech companies were thus incentivized to (a) hire like crazy, and (b) do a lot of low-risk high-reward things, even if that ends up wasting money. "...HIGH-risk high-reward..." would make more sense in the context.
• relistan 2y ago
  This has happened a few times, even in my career. I doubt we'll break that cycle in the near term. We're going on 50 years where tech was like this. Any time you have an industry can go from zero to world player in a decade or less is going to attract this kind of boom-bust cycle. Companies get overzealous about the land grab, hire too much, are careless with their money. Then the correction comes. It lasts a few years, and then it's back to boom times. Interest rates were certainly part of the equation this time, but back in the dotcom boom, e.g. US mortgages were running around 8%. If people would stop playing the gold rush an invest in building products that people like and will use long term, we might instead flatten the peaks and the troughs into a more sustainable work environment. Don't see that happening.
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• IshKebab 2y ago
  Nonsense, programming still pays amazing salaries for the work. I earn almost as much as an MP, and I have 1000th of the responsibility. The job market also seems to be totally fine if you're experienced, based on the amount of LinkedIn recruiter messages I get.
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• dangus 2y ago
  The article needs as much stronger premise. Employees being pampered and investment money flowing freely are not strictly connected. Employees being pampered with high wages, benefits, and extra perks like free meals has everything to do with talent scarcity. The only reason these extravagances are being cut is because tech employees aren't in the same level of demand. That may (or may not) change.
• jongjong 2y ago
  Times are tough now but still, I hope we never have to go back to a 0% interest environment. It was a nightmare. It only created the illusion of abundance and opportunities but in reality only pure speculation was rewarded. I'm exhausted from running on that hamster wheel. I'd rather do something really difficult and really struggle but at least get somewhere eventually, little by little... Rather than the endless cycles of false hope and disappointment of the past decade. It's like having a carrot always dangling right in front of your face. Success always appears very close but in reality, it'd be easier to just go straight for a different carrot perched atop mount everest.
• ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  > I think a lot of software engineers right now are planting their feet and refusing to change. That's not a good thing, in general, if you are in technology. We always need to be learning and moving forward. A lot of times, in my experience, it's extremely humbling, because I find out that what I know is no longer relevant. I'm 63, and still need to learn new stuff, every day. I know that he's talking about culture, as opposed to knowledge, but I think they inform each other. If we allow ourselves to ossify in one context, it just moves over into the other. I spent most of my career at a company that treated me like just another schlub. They were a hardware company, and I'm not sure if hardware engineers were ever treated like software engineers, so I am unfamiliar with free barista bars and tropical offsites. I was just another cubicle Dilbert.
• ysabelbristol 2y ago
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• Mc91 2y ago
  I have been working in IT for over 30 years. What is happening is not new. Late 1999 was a very go-go time, early 2022 was a very go-go time. Alternatively, things were dead in 1991, in 2001, in 2009. Things were briefly dead in some ways for some people in spring/summer 2020 when Covid hit. 2022 went from go-go in the spring and summer to massive FAANG layoffs in November. Massive FAANG layoffs continue into early 2023, and things have kind of been stagnant since them. Things seem to have gotten worse at the beginning of this year, although it varies, some people with certain AI-related skills are doing well. In 2000-2001, dot-com startups were hit harder than the rest of the economy. I worked for Internet startups and dot-coms from 1996 until the end of the summer 2000, where I started consulting for a large investment bank. I figured Internet-related startups were not going to make a comeback in the short term and I was right. The Fortune 500 was kind of starved for technical talent at the time, especially outside the Bay Area, so you could shift. There were some difficulties getting hired - I knew a lot about Red Hat Linux and Apache web servers and Java application servers, and I moved into a world of Solaris e4500 servers and NFS mounts and RAID 10 arrays and middleware. There were later shifts - for backend, things began shifting from monoliths and SOAs to microservices. Ruby on Rails was big from 2007 until 2013 until Javascript web front end began picking up more. Then native/hybrid mobile began cutting into the dominance of web front end. Now AI is coming in. So there are economic ups and downs, but what skills they are hiring for shift as well. Unless society is entering some major transformative period like the 1930s, these shifts of the business cycle will keep happening. While the general tech market has been stagnant since November 2022, Nvidia stock has gone up 800%, as it has gone from the 15th most valuable company in the world (by market cap) to the 2nd, behind Apple. I have a strong feeling it will surpass Apple in the coming months and years as the most valuable company in the world. Programmers programming CUDA for them and whatnot, programmers programming Pytorch for FAANG and AI startups, and these kinds of jobs are open now, and in a few years companies might be offering $200k TC to people coming out of college who can program that. Or maybe LLMs will hit a wall in the short term and that won't happen. But something will happen - I've seen IT hit a slump a bunch of times and it always comes back (unless, as I said, we get into a situation like the 1930s).
  • NetOpWibby 2y ago
    This is what I come to HN for. The perspective of OGs mean you can see patterns where the rest of us are too zoomed in to notice (or even know).
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• osigurdson 2y ago
  I don't know if interest rates can explain everything. It isn't like start ups are being funded by taking loans out at the bank.
  • menzoic 2y ago
    They are. The wealthy take low interest loans out on their assets to invest in more assets
  • mike_hearn 2y ago
    The actual path is more indirect. Low interest rates primarily means low interest rates for the government, which the central bank implements by simply buying their national bonds at rates much lower than the rest of the world would tolerate. This sucks up the supply of low-risk low-reward debt that would normally attract a lot of investors. With that supply all bought up those investors are then forced into higher risk instruments like equities, which pushes up the value of stocks (not coincidentally, the kind of investment that Congress tend to have a lot of). High valued equity means greater rewards for startup investing, and so capital diverts there. So it's all based on pushing investors around against their will, more or less.
    • osigurdson 2y ago
      Sure, I get that: when zero risk returns are low (or zero), investors must take on more risk. I don't think this explains why the "good times are over" however. I think that is more related to supply / demand. Supply was low for a while as tech was seen as a dead-end in the early 0s due to outsourcing. In the mid 2010s the opposite was true - tech was seen as essentially the only viable career so lots of people went into it. Now we have the perfect storm of natural oversupply and the threat of AI. I think the situation will eventually reverse but it will take quite a while.
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• koakuma-chan 2y ago
  So what JavaScript framework do I need to learn?
• ctvo 2y ago
  Consider what companies are launching these days and the talent they need to do it. It's AI companies, it's hardware, it's hard science. It's fewer Uber for pet grooming. There's less appetite for investing in the latter companies and _normal_ software developers are less useful for the former. Yes, ZIRP has contributed, but there are wider economic and social issues that are above my pay grade at play. The safest space continues to be distributed systems and systems programming in general IMO. You'll still find work at hyperscalers. You'll still find work in the new spaces. Until AI can operate these systems, there'll be a spot for us bit janitors for a little while longer.
• xg15 2y ago
  > [...] “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives It’s not much of a mission statement! Certainly nothing on “making the world a better place”. But it has the comforting solidity of the truth. The good thing about the music finally stopping is that you don’t have to worry about when it’s going to stop. An interesting side effect is that the tech industry is rapidly losing the "good guys" image it had in wider society for a long time (with a little help from Elon and friends, but certainly they aren't the only reason). If both devs and users are realizing that the "make the world a better place" spiel had always been a marketing lie that was kept up as long as there was spare money for it, maybe we could now also start thinking how to really make the world a better place.
• lokimedes 2y ago
  Good riddance. I for one look forward to real technology becoming valued again, not digital rent seeking. Let’s build something useful and amazing that elevates the human experience, rather than sucking the last drop of dopamine out of consumers.
• commandlinefan 2y ago
  > throwing money at their software engineers (in the form of paid trips, in-house chefs, and huge comp packages) That really was never that common, though, and reserved for a very small subset of programmers even where it did happen. I’ve been coding since 1992 and all the jobs I’ve had have been regular corporate type jobs, with a steadily (but not life changing) raising salary.
• sometimes_all 2y ago
  I've been aware of the ZIRP phenomenon and potential things that might happen when it ends since 2017. I prepared myself to slowly add more skills (finance, writing, management, etc). All this was while I continued to be a full-time dev. The problem for me has been that nobody outside of myself is OK with me taking any other role, either within the company I work for, or as someone looking for a fresh new role. When I ask why, it's always been a variant of "oh, you're more valuable to us as an engineer". Now with the advent of LLMs and bullshit experts talking about AI taking over everyone's roles, neither do people want me to remain an engineer (I quit in frustration a few months ago), nor do they want me to be anything else (even when I have skills directly relevant for other types of jobs). It's frustrating to keep on trying to switch when nobody's taking the bait.
• moribvndvs 2y ago
  I feel like this observation only applies to a section of the industry (in America). I never worked in the Valley or the Bay, just slogging away out in the Midwest, and it has always been nose to the grindstone, always executive and bottom line -lead, and none of the latitude or pampering mentioned here.
• raydev 2y ago
  I would add a point 4 to the "job of software engineering" 4. Even if the value you provide is measurably great and your manager(s) love you, in a sufficiently large company you are still just a row in a spreadsheet, and you may be terminated at any time independent of the quality of your work/output. Stay ready to interview.
• neilv 2y ago
  PSA: It looks like more-comments-than-upvotes tends to make posts fall off the front page. If this is true, then, if you think the TFA and/or comments are important, then upvote the post first. (Don't just comment, and then forget to upvote.)
• deadbabe 2y ago
  This will not be popular, but I think the real problem with tech these days: too many software engineers. Used to be just 40k comp sci graduates in the US per year, now it’s 150k plus and growing. Everyone wants tech money, but nobody wants to write all this damn code. We have people in this industry who have no real love or passion for the engineering and the science, and soon they will become the majority. Vibe coders and prompt kiddies are not satire, they are a real thing. A lot of incoming graduates would not consider this field if it wasn’t for the money and remote work opportunities. They are not like the true enthusiasts who would still be doing this even if it didn’t pay well. We need to gatekeep harder. Crush people in interviews, make it damn near impossible to get in a company unless you really want it. Redirect people to other careers like finance or sales and marketing.
• neilv 2y ago
  Great article that summarizes a few important truths. I'm hoping that some of the good news is: * If you care about focusing on business success, and requirements descending from that, then you'll gradually have more company, and fewer people working against you. * If your experience extends beyond the crazy Potemkin Village investment scam period of tech, or you otherwise have experience working business-focused, then hopefully that will soon be widely recognized as positive signal for hiring (as it used to be, and is, in many sane fields).
• JamesLeonis 2y ago
  In many ways it's the same as it ever was. If you have a lot of gray hairs, you probably remember The Dot-Com era. Before the bust it attracted a lot of bad talent from programmers all the way up to founders and investors. The joke of the time said if you could spell 'H-T-M-L' you could get a high paying job. Whole companies were founded or saw valuations triple when they added the magical ".com" to their name, much like "AI" is today. When the bust finally happened, companies would turn to outsourcing. I still remember the headlines about Computer Science departments that saw their students halved on dismal job prospects. Why go into a field that was getting shipped overseas? The whole developer pipeline cratered. Surprise, outsourcing wasn't the Silver Bullet, but the damage was already done as companies scrambled over the few programmers that stuck around. As things started to recover, the 2008 crisis hit and saw another decimation. This meant there was a critical shortage of senior talent and mentors as we entered the ZIRP era. Low supply of programmers and companies meant the industry was ripe for the flood of money that followed. If you ever wondered why we seem to repeat architecture patterns in programming, look no further than the binging and purging of talent that follows hype bubbles. Before even the Dot-Com bubble was the previous bubble of the 80s, and that collapse would lay the seeds for the Dot-Com bubble to follow. And then there was the 1960s bubble. All of the purges flush out mentors, including all of the earned profession-wide knowledge from being in the trenches. > The good news is that tech companies now live in (or at least a lot closer to) the “real world”. It was nice to be pampered, but there was a fundamental ridiculousness about it, even at the time. I know a lot of engineers who found that offputting, including myself. It’s why many engineers found the TV show Silicon Valley hard to watch - the satire was too real to laugh at. It was mainly embarrassing. I deeply feel this sentiment, especially about the satire hitting too close to home. However, one offset of the "pampering" was endless rounds of fundraising made employee equity worthless. This was disastrous for retaining talent and incentivized the much maligned 'Job Hopping' of the era. Some companies had beer on tap or espresso machines, but that came at the cost of actual ownership. It's one thing to watch your equity go to zero when the company burns. It's quite another when your equity goes to zero after repeated dilutions of every funding round. Combined with the sharp increase in housing prices and tax implications of non-liquid equity, the whole value-add of 'startups' vanished. This also broke the central mechanism Startups could use to retain talent; the vesting schedule with continued top-offs. All the incentives aligned with 'Job Hopping' and the incentives to stay were broken. My current plan is to ride this wave through because we will have another shortage of senior talent and mentors once this bubble bursts. We're going to need people who remember, teach, and lead until the pipeline recovers. But critical institutional and profession-wide knowledge will be lost and we'll reinvent architectures from twenty+ years ago all over again. It is hard, and remain hard for a while, but I'm betting on it getting better after a few years. Computers are going nowhere.
• EPWN3D 2y ago
  Genuinely don't think it was the end of the ZLB or Covid. The good times began declining well before that, when MBAs reached critical mass. Interest rates may have accelerated this, but it was always inevitable. When serious money starts getting made, a bunch of spreadsheet jockeys who've never shipped a product in their lives show up, blame engineers for declining quality, and "solve" the problem by 1. imposing more process, 2. diverting hiring budget to managers and PMs, and 3. making everyone take some snake oil training courses (run by some consulting firm staffed by people who last shipped something in the early naughts) Then the middle management culture gets entrenched and metastasizes. ICs get swept aside (they're just infinitely replaceable "resources" of course), and the engineering culture starts to atrophy and die. Then new companies come up and make a splash because they don't have any of that crap, and talent goes to them, and the cycle begins anew.
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• starchild3001 2y ago
  I believe this guy's analysis misses the point. My perspective is shaped by having navigated multiple market bubbles and three significant tech recessions – 2000, 2008, and 2022-2025. The core issue, consistently, is the imbalance between supply and demand within the high-quality SWE talent pool. We witnessed hiring bubbles in 1999 and 2021 precisely because the demand for skilled SWEs far outstripped the available supply. Essentially, major tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) appear to have miscalculated the sustained need for SWEs during the peak of the WFH trend. They subsequently found themselves with a surplus of talent relative to the number of compelling new projects. A similar dynamic occurred during the dot-com boom, where companies aggressively pursued web developers. The perceived ROI, often reflected in inflated company valuations rather than immediate profits, justified each hire at the time. The crucial question is the ROI of each incremental hire. If it remains strictly positive, robust hiring will follow. Currently, this condition is not met, particularly within large tech firms. Looking ahead, a market equilibrium will eventually be reached. A sustained oversupply of new graduates entering the field will undoubtedly face employment challenges. Conversely, a decrease in the supply of qualified SWEs will likely lead to a stabilization, and potentially an increase, in their perceived value.
• donatj 2y ago
  > After ten years of their opinion being consulted on big company decisions, they’re trying to hold on to that power. I feel this one. I've been doing this for twenty years, and we get listened to the least now of any point in my career. Rather than what we build being a conversation about what's possible, we get told what to build and have to push back when the requirements are impossible. The opportunity cost is just silly. So many times we could build something better than the requirements but it's not worth the effort to try to get it through the bureaucracy.
• replyifuagree 2y ago
  >“Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives If you are a software leader, work on discovering and filling customer needs. Filling those will boost both your success and the company's success. Executives at most companies rarely do anything other than figure out how to get a bigger paycheck. They have no clue about, nor do they try to discover, customer needs; but they have and aggressively acquire a strong sense of their upchain's needs. This means a software leader who does basic research on customer needs is the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind at most companies.
• kebbelarielle38 2y ago
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• exiguus 2y ago
  COVID-19 pandemic led to a shortage of developers, which in turn drove up salaries, and companies are now trying to reverse this trend.
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