8 ms·

I agree with you, but I forgot to mention that in the original reply I meant to say that "After the economy turns around, there is no point to hire me, an older

I agree with you, but I forgot to mention that in the original reply I meant to say that "After the economy turns around, there is no point to hire me, an older guy with maybe a couple of gap years, who worked as a Uber driver for the last two years and can't leetcode". But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway. And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for many years if it does collapse -- and we are already seeing many cracks on it.

echelon 11mo ago
New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management. If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI. None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat. Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower. The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment. Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away. Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
- tibbar 11mo ago
  This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by a) getting really good at clarifying requirements b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot. This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
  - echelon 11mo ago
    Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees). I'm genuinely curious. I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand. Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output. From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now. We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development. I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc. Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination. Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder. > We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products. It seems to be working… https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2EZqQ-p1XkybYp21llKCfLsME/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
      - Lio 11mo ago
        > GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK GenAI does not exist yet.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood. Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).
  - echelon 11mo ago
    A big tech breakup needn't be anti-capitalist. In fact, it might be the most pro-capitalist move. If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit. Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc. Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V. Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies. Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.
    - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      I think it depends on which kind of entrepreneur you're aiming to be. VC breakups are amazing if your goal is to box in and become a market competitor. But as of the last decade or so there's been plenty of "incubators" to take into account. startups whose goal is instead to be sold off to some major company and get their payday that way. Those kinds of models would deteriorate, and are likely what want to prop Big Tech up. I do hope we have more genuine competitors fighting out there for breakupps. But it's hard to say these days.
      - bluefirebrand 11mo ago
- QuiEgo 11mo ago
  I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago. My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out. We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(
  - echelon 11mo ago
    > I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago. "This time it's different." 20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming. Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems. > We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc. We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.
    - QuiEgo 11mo ago
      My personal experience, YMMV: I was told that once video conferencing got good and internet and infrastructure became better in other places, "this time it will be different." I was told once universities in other countries started pumping out a pool of great candidates, expats who worked for FAANGs in the US would go home to found their own companies using that pool, and those companies would take over the world. "this time it's different." I was told during covid once everyone was remote, why would people not just hire the cheapest remote workers going forward? "This time it's different." Don't get me wrong, I absolutely have seen more and more offshoring over time, but there's a huge inertia behind the US tech industry that's hard to change. The VC / startup ecosystem and all of it's resources have huge Bay Area inertia - it mostly hasn't even spread to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the world, despite the cost of living and constrained talent pool in the Bay Area. There's something about getting a bunch of people with the same mindset in one spot and having them know each other, socialize with each other, make friends and networks with each other that still matters. Founders tend to build off the people and connections they know and are connected with personally. I'm hoping it will take long enough to change for me to finish my career. We'll see. This time really may be different :). EDIT: p.s. Agree totally it's way to complex to tell what's actually happening. The _impact_ of the end of ZRIP, the rise of AI, major tax changes on R&D amortization, and US tariffs pretty much landed at the same time, so who knows?
- intended 11mo ago
  > Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms. What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well? That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time. Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.
- cyberax 11mo ago
  > New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. We've just hired a couple of graduates, with the expectation that they are going to take some time to grow. What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out. Others in the industry are seeing the same and it's quite likely that your resume is getting lost. One practical advice for resume writers from me. PLEASE, just don't put stuff like "Improved the API responsiveness by 23.123897%". Unless it's a crazy number like 100x.
  - matwood 11mo ago
    We posted a job a year ago for a dev. We received terrible candidates, but still tried to fill it from the pool. 2/3 ghosted the interview and the other I'm not sure had ever done anything in iOS. I just pulled the job instead of wasting more time. I'm planning to post another job in the new year and I'm not looking forward to wading through the garbage.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    > What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out. This has been true in software for decades. From the very first time I was senior enough in my career to start conducting interviews on the "employer" side of the table, we've seen a huge number of candidates who literally (in the literal meaning of literally) could not code. Like you would ask them to write a for loop, and they froze up and couldn't do it, or just started talking, hoping we would move onto more "behavioral" questions. This has been pretty much a constant in the software industry for as long as I've been in it.
- baq 11mo ago
  > If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean $500K TC in 2019 dollars. ZIRP might just come back, but it'll come with a higher price tag than the one from 2008.

echelon 11mo ago

New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management. If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI. None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat. Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower. The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment. Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away. Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.

tibbar 11mo ago
This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by a) getting really good at clarifying requirements b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot. This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
- echelon 11mo ago
  Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees). I'm genuinely curious. I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand. Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output. From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now. We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development. I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc. Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination. Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder. > We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products. It seems to be working… https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2EZqQ-p1XkybYp21llKCfLsME/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
    - Lio 11mo ago
      > GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK GenAI does not exist yet.
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood. Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).
- echelon 11mo ago
  A big tech breakup needn't be anti-capitalist. In fact, it might be the most pro-capitalist move. If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit. Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc. Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V. Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies. Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    I think it depends on which kind of entrepreneur you're aiming to be. VC breakups are amazing if your goal is to box in and become a market competitor. But as of the last decade or so there's been plenty of "incubators" to take into account. startups whose goal is instead to be sold off to some major company and get their payday that way. Those kinds of models would deteriorate, and are likely what want to prop Big Tech up. I do hope we have more genuine competitors fighting out there for breakupps. But it's hard to say these days.
    - bluefirebrand 11mo ago
QuiEgo 11mo ago
I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago. My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out. We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(
- echelon 11mo ago
  > I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago. "This time it's different." 20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming. Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems. > We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc. We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.
  - QuiEgo 11mo ago
    My personal experience, YMMV: I was told that once video conferencing got good and internet and infrastructure became better in other places, "this time it will be different." I was told once universities in other countries started pumping out a pool of great candidates, expats who worked for FAANGs in the US would go home to found their own companies using that pool, and those companies would take over the world. "this time it's different." I was told during covid once everyone was remote, why would people not just hire the cheapest remote workers going forward? "This time it's different." Don't get me wrong, I absolutely have seen more and more offshoring over time, but there's a huge inertia behind the US tech industry that's hard to change. The VC / startup ecosystem and all of it's resources have huge Bay Area inertia - it mostly hasn't even spread to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the world, despite the cost of living and constrained talent pool in the Bay Area. There's something about getting a bunch of people with the same mindset in one spot and having them know each other, socialize with each other, make friends and networks with each other that still matters. Founders tend to build off the people and connections they know and are connected with personally. I'm hoping it will take long enough to change for me to finish my career. We'll see. This time really may be different :). EDIT: p.s. Agree totally it's way to complex to tell what's actually happening. The _impact_ of the end of ZRIP, the rise of AI, major tax changes on R&D amortization, and US tariffs pretty much landed at the same time, so who knows?
intended 11mo ago
> Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms. What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well? That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time. Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.
cyberax 11mo ago
> New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. We've just hired a couple of graduates, with the expectation that they are going to take some time to grow. What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out. Others in the industry are seeing the same and it's quite likely that your resume is getting lost. One practical advice for resume writers from me. PLEASE, just don't put stuff like "Improved the API responsiveness by 23.123897%". Unless it's a crazy number like 100x.
- matwood 11mo ago
  We posted a job a year ago for a dev. We received terrible candidates, but still tried to fill it from the pool. 2/3 ghosted the interview and the other I'm not sure had ever done anything in iOS. I just pulled the job instead of wasting more time. I'm planning to post another job in the new year and I'm not looking forward to wading through the garbage.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  > What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out. This has been true in software for decades. From the very first time I was senior enough in my career to start conducting interviews on the "employer" side of the table, we've seen a huge number of candidates who literally (in the literal meaning of literally) could not code. Like you would ask them to write a for loop, and they froze up and couldn't do it, or just started talking, hoping we would move onto more "behavioral" questions. This has been pretty much a constant in the software industry for as long as I've been in it.
baq 11mo ago
> If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean $500K TC in 2019 dollars. ZIRP might just come back, but it'll come with a higher price tag than the one from 2008.