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I scroll through linked-in and I see a lot of green looking for work tags. Many of these are really strong developers that have been laid off in the last few ye

I scroll through linked-in and I see a lot of green looking for work tags. Many of these are really strong developers that have been laid off in the last few years. This feels much worse than 2008 and 2008 was bad. At least back then there was hope that things would recover, now it feels like a permanent malaise has set in. I got my first real tech job with Microsoft shortly after the 2008 financial crisis and right before the layoffs. Microsoft had an early form of Uber and a number of the drivers were recently laid off tech people that would hand me their resumes for me to give to my boss. I read them and it was revealing how a careers could go sideways out of nowhere and former highly credentialed executives could be reduced to asking me, a new hire, for such a favor on the very small chance that something could come of it. The whole market is a lemon market with a crazy information asymmetry between employer and employee. This has steadily gotten worse my whole career, I eventually became self employed just to get away from it. Leave the lemon market for the lemons. The threats of being replaced by low cost Indians has given way to threats of being replaced by low cost AI. And many people were replaced by Indians and I’m sure many will be replaced by AI. AI is already more helpful than any junior hire I’ve ever had. This sets a rather high low bar for ability for junior devs to meaningfully contribute. I’m not sure what my advice to a new grad would be. Life is the mother of all selection criteria biases. I don’t find solace in false optimism. The point of false optimism is to avoid despondent inaction, but it’s best to realistically understand your situation in order to make the necessary tough decisions.

mavelikara 1y ago
Are you Steve Balmer?
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  Steve Balmer is a hype-guy
AbstractH24 1y ago
I’d like to think this will leads to a new wave of startups and innovation. Hope I’m right?
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  I think people hold on to such hopes due to an aversion to the pain from empathy. The 'bad thing is actually good'. Related to the Just-World-Fallacy. I think this is a very natural human response, a psychological defense mechanism, especially for the set of circumstances that we can do nothing about. I get it, no one wants to feel bad and impotent. For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.
gh0stcat 1y ago
Just wanted to say that last bit really articulates my feelings as well. However, I think that life is more than just finding success, in the traditional way. I hope that these changes allow for more talent to seep into places where the average employee has no idea how a computer works, let alone can leverage any kind of automation tooling. I think for a long time, there has been a huge disparity between these (at least) two very different cultures of work.

mavelikara 1y ago

Are you Steve Balmer?

cjbgkagh 1y ago
Steve Balmer is a hype-guy

AbstractH24 1y ago

I’d like to think this will leads to a new wave of startups and innovation. Hope I’m right?

cjbgkagh 1y ago
I think people hold on to such hopes due to an aversion to the pain from empathy. The 'bad thing is actually good'. Related to the Just-World-Fallacy. I think this is a very natural human response, a psychological defense mechanism, especially for the set of circumstances that we can do nothing about. I get it, no one wants to feel bad and impotent. For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.

gh0stcat 1y ago

Just wanted to say that last bit really articulates my feelings as well. However, I think that life is more than just finding success, in the traditional way. I hope that these changes allow for more talent to seep into places where the average employee has no idea how a computer works, let alone can leverage any kind of automation tooling. I think for a long time, there has been a huge disparity between these (at least) two very different cultures of work.