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Bad time to be a SWE... Yet paragraphs of extremely nitpicky requirements for a job, turning up nose at opportunities for nonsense reasons. SWEs truly do not r

by n8cpdx 1y ago

Bad time to be a SWE... Yet paragraphs of extremely nitpicky requirements for a job, turning up nose at opportunities for nonsense reasons. SWEs truly do not recognize how extremely pampered and privileged they are. It might be a bad time to be a SWE but it's a worse time to be almost anything else.

ghaff 1y ago
What struck me was that the lawyer wasn’t interested in getting into all the nuts and bolts of software development. Of course they weren’t. That’s your job.
- gymbeaux 1y ago
  Of course I don't expect to wax poetic about the finer technical details of an implementation- what I mean is he tends to get frustrated at the technical limitations, but has no interest in understanding those technical limitations so that he might curb his expectations and align them more with reality. Example: I wrote an ETL pipeline that processes "hundreds of millions" of records. It takes several hours to run (on my goddamn desktop computer). He doesn't understand why it takes "so long", and doesn't want to understand why. Also little interest/desire in paying for server compute that might get it done faster.
gymbeaux 1y ago
It’s empirically a bad time to be a SWE. We’ve seen more layoffs than any other field since 2022. Times is hard, but for us it feels unnecessary and artificial. You can break my balls about having “high standards”, but the reality is our industry is absolutely plagued with MBAs and other non-technical folk who think they know better than we do about things like how we are most productive and how software should be written. It’s a plenty-toxic field made worse by, surprise, MBAs who don’t understand LLMs but have an unfounded belief that they can replace engineers outright (2024-)…. Or MBAs who thought hiring every SWE they possibly could would be a good idea because borrowing money was “basically free” and they could just throw things at the wall to see what stuck and ax the rest (2020-2022). If being a software engineer means constantly swimming against the current with things like commuting to an office, allowing non-technical people to make architectural decisions, and getting yelled at and cursed at over the phone because an ML model is “only” ~90% accurate…. It’s not the career for me.
- n8cpdx 1y ago
  I guess by comparisons to extremely anomolous conditions, yes it is a bad time. But it is still a time in which it is better to be a SWE than so many other careers. I'm not making FAANG money and my life is so fucking easy and comfortable compared to basically anyone I interact with IRL (aside from other SWEs). It seems like dealing with a mild form of what every other office worker deals with is a very low price to pay. Perhaps it is an especially bad moment to be a laid off tech worker due to the surge in supply, but that's a very small proportion of SWEs. I'm sorry you're being shouted at and cursed at, that's totally unacceptable in any workplace and I hope you're able to find something better. FWIW there are still places that give their SWEs offices with doors that close.
  - gymbeaux 1y ago
    I appreciate the empathy. I don't have much insight into "other industries", so I believe that even unemployed I would be better off than most (I have an emergency fund after all). We should all be very worried when even ~5% of us can't find work. Sure, in the past it was just part of a cycle and the jobs "came back", but in the meantime it is bad for everyone- employed or not- when the employers have the leverage. Those who are employed are basically stuck- and employers know this. Employer abuse will run rampant. Stay late. Do the work of two people. Put up with your boss's attitude. Quit and they'll replace you within the week with someone a little more desperate than you. There's also no guarantee those jobs are coming back, or coming back within the expected time-frame. How many years was the tech job market "bad" following 2000? 2008? By official metrics, this recession hasn't even formally started yet, even though we've arguably been in one since 2022 or 2023. Even if the timer were to start today and stocks fell 30%, it might be another 2-4 years before companies "recover" and feel like hiring SWEs again. If all that's out there for SWEs are "scraps" that I have to vigorously fight over with other engineers via bullshit hoops like leetcode - I don't think it's worth it. I mean we're at the point where companies are just going to hire whoever they like more from a personality/appearance standpoint. That's just the natural outcome of having five, ten, or fifty otherwise-identical and equally-qualified candidates to choose from.

by n8cpdx 1y ago

ghaff 1y ago

What struck me was that the lawyer wasn’t interested in getting into all the nuts and bolts of software development. Of course they weren’t. That’s your job.

gymbeaux 1y ago
Of course I don't expect to wax poetic about the finer technical details of an implementation- what I mean is he tends to get frustrated at the technical limitations, but has no interest in understanding those technical limitations so that he might curb his expectations and align them more with reality. Example: I wrote an ETL pipeline that processes "hundreds of millions" of records. It takes several hours to run (on my goddamn desktop computer). He doesn't understand why it takes "so long", and doesn't want to understand why. Also little interest/desire in paying for server compute that might get it done faster.

gymbeaux 1y ago

It’s empirically a bad time to be a SWE. We’ve seen more layoffs than any other field since 2022. Times is hard, but for us it feels unnecessary and artificial. You can break my balls about having “high standards”, but the reality is our industry is absolutely plagued with MBAs and other non-technical folk who think they know better than we do about things like how we are most productive and how software should be written. It’s a plenty-toxic field made worse by, surprise, MBAs who don’t understand LLMs but have an unfounded belief that they can replace engineers outright (2024-)…. Or MBAs who thought hiring every SWE they possibly could would be a good idea because borrowing money was “basically free” and they could just throw things at the wall to see what stuck and ax the rest (2020-2022). If being a software engineer means constantly swimming against the current with things like commuting to an office, allowing non-technical people to make architectural decisions, and getting yelled at and cursed at over the phone because an ML model is “only” ~90% accurate…. It’s not the career for me.

n8cpdx 1y ago
I guess by comparisons to extremely anomolous conditions, yes it is a bad time. But it is still a time in which it is better to be a SWE than so many other careers. I'm not making FAANG money and my life is so fucking easy and comfortable compared to basically anyone I interact with IRL (aside from other SWEs). It seems like dealing with a mild form of what every other office worker deals with is a very low price to pay. Perhaps it is an especially bad moment to be a laid off tech worker due to the surge in supply, but that's a very small proportion of SWEs. I'm sorry you're being shouted at and cursed at, that's totally unacceptable in any workplace and I hope you're able to find something better. FWIW there are still places that give their SWEs offices with doors that close.
- gymbeaux 1y ago
  I appreciate the empathy. I don't have much insight into "other industries", so I believe that even unemployed I would be better off than most (I have an emergency fund after all). We should all be very worried when even ~5% of us can't find work. Sure, in the past it was just part of a cycle and the jobs "came back", but in the meantime it is bad for everyone- employed or not- when the employers have the leverage. Those who are employed are basically stuck- and employers know this. Employer abuse will run rampant. Stay late. Do the work of two people. Put up with your boss's attitude. Quit and they'll replace you within the week with someone a little more desperate than you. There's also no guarantee those jobs are coming back, or coming back within the expected time-frame. How many years was the tech job market "bad" following 2000? 2008? By official metrics, this recession hasn't even formally started yet, even though we've arguably been in one since 2022 or 2023. Even if the timer were to start today and stocks fell 30%, it might be another 2-4 years before companies "recover" and feel like hiring SWEs again. If all that's out there for SWEs are "scraps" that I have to vigorously fight over with other engineers via bullshit hoops like leetcode - I don't think it's worth it. I mean we're at the point where companies are just going to hire whoever they like more from a personality/appearance standpoint. That's just the natural outcome of having five, ten, or fifty otherwise-identical and equally-qualified candidates to choose from.