Companies still desperately need developers to make their business goals reality. This is not changing anytime soon. There has been no advancement that makes developers less relevant.
What changed is how companies react to perceived bumps on the road and productivity. Companies learned that global recession can affect them and it pays to prepare. Companies also learned that fast hiring causes low productivity down the line. The easiest way to fix this is to fire a bunch of people at a time rather than individually and then blame it on perceived recession (even if it barely affects the company).
My experience is also that large proportion of hires can barely program at all and got into business because every other job they could get pales when compared to software development. There are multiple reasons why these people got successfully hired (broken hiring, enormous pressures, etc.) I can't blame people for trying to do their best but from our point of view it has a huge effect on entire IT business.
Also companies started playing a kind of chicken game, it seems. Everybody waits for one company to lay some people off so that they can use it as an excuse to do the same.
"Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily ... For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer."
-- Nicolo Machiavelli
Also, when you fire one person, you have to explain in detail why this person. You open yourself to risk of being called for discrimination whether you intended it or not. All this scrutiny disappears when you do the same in bulk.
This seems like an oft repeated myth, but you say it's your personal experience, so I'm really curious what you mean by this. These are folks you've seen in SWE who just like, not opening any PRs? Just pretending to do busy work while some nice coworkers do their assigned tasks? How does this work?
Sometimes they can code, but slowly and their output is unacceptable. This creates a burden on the rest of the team to either try to review it into something good (this doesn’t actually work) or to fix/rewrite it after it’s committed (typical in shops that don’t have a review/PR culture or process). IMO this is the worst of the three types. In it’s worst form it’s also the most obvious and these bad hires tend to get managed out fairly quickly.
Sometimes they can’t seem to get anything done on their own. Questions from new hires are expected, yes, but the questions are supposed to wane over time. This group doesn’t have that curve. Having talked to coworkers after these people have left, I’ve later realized that these people have bothered a lot of people on the team with a lot of questions, to the point where most of their work has been done by other people. This is only slightly better than the group above, but it’s still a waste of a lot of productivity.
Sometimes they just hide out. I guess they dodge questions about output from managers? Or are otherwise very poorly managed? I’ve only observed this in environments with a very weak management system. Honestly if I had to choose a bad hire situation, this would be my preference. They’re leeching from payroll but they mostly don’t get in the way of work that I have to get done.
I'd say that 90% of the new graduates we hire straight up cannot program beyond what you'd need for your typical uni assignment (a few months ago one asked me what 'git' was). If they're motivated and eager to learn, I can usually get them to productivity in a month or two. The ones who are not take months to get up to speed and become a real drain on the team's productivity.
The more senior colleagues I interact with are kind of a mixed bag, some are really good and a pleasure to work with others have learned just enough to get by in their current role and become useless as soon as they have to do something slightly different.
That being said I do think that the level at my company is above average in relation to "the industry". If you want to see truly large amounts of non-contributing employees, have a look the IT-department of a large bank, pension fund, government agency or some other technology adjacent big organization. They can't hire the most talented engineers to start with and then most of them are actively kept from doing productive work by layers of middle-managers and bureaucratic procedures.
And much more often than not, the underlying issue for those crappy devs was less their lack of coding skills and more general lack of critical thinking skills. Making bad decisions when faced with a choice, that sort of thing
(For the record, I also copy SO code into my projects, but I at least leave a note on what specific problem I’m solving and a pointer back to the question.)
There are a large number of SWEs that are not worth keeping but the incentive structure is misaligned to deal with it. If tomorrow you realize more than half of your staff should be cut and replaced, how much effort would it be to do it, what do you gain and how much risk do you put on yourself if it back fires?
I recently watched a fellow leader try to go down this path to get stonewalled by HR about respect, moral and cultural values.
Disclaimer: Own personal opinions.
1. pair programing where they "want to watch you", but never modify your code and submit it
1. talks a lot about progress, but it takes days to get a commit out of them
1. will build "solutions" to perceived problems that really only serve to make them the single failure point and are not usable
1. says shit like "i don't write tests" or "it works for me, can you show me what you mean?" and clearly has no idea what you're doing
1. you repeat the same comments in loops, because they aren't taking your feedback, they're trying to hit a KPI
these people fall into two major groups, the people doing it on purpose, and the folks that don't realize that this is them. a lot of people lie to themselves about their ability, and this is the end result of them being incapable of acknowledging that they've got work to do!
whenever i read statements like that I am reminded of this : Illusory superiority
" Illusory superiority is a condition of cognitive bias wherein a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in relation to the same qualities and abilities of other people. "
It comes across as you stating you are so much better vs everynoe else. Sort of like how 88% of the population think they are better-than-average at driving
Also stating that there exists something like "illusory superiority" does not mean there does not exist "superiority". Yeah, I also studied theoretical math.
Even though most drivers think of themselves as above average it absolutely does not mean that there do not exist superior drivers. An F1 driver can absolutely say he is a superior driver and it is completely true, factual and not driven by feelings of "illusory superiority".
The 'low code' / 'no code' phenomenon is rising fast where the business folks are being asked to build out a good part of programs based on their knowledge of business systems.
Theoretically, if this all pans out, The developer is now forced to learn the business or is managed out of this particular job.
It does not pan out. Syntax is the easiest part of being a software engineer.
The reason is that they are solving easy, junior level problems. They are solving the problem of how to do this specific task that requires coding.
What they do not solve is how to develop complex systems. As a developer, you not only learn how to program things and solve technical problems, you also learn the big picture of how to develop large and reliable systems.
Agreed.
> What changed is how companies react ... Companies learned that ... Companies also learned ...
Also all wrong, though.
Nothing has changed.
> My experience is also that large proportion of hires can barely program at all ...
And that won't change either. Hiring anyone with a pulse started in the late 90s and 2008 didn't interrupt that. Those will be the people who are likely to lose their jobs in the coming recession, but hiring will expand again afterwards.
This is just another layoff cycle. People are projecting weird myths about how they think things should change onto companies when there's zero evidence that they've fundamentally changed or learned anything.
Sociologically it is weird how we haven't had a recession since 2008 and all the kids who either don't remember or barely remember that one are projecting all kinds of fundamental shifts onto the next one.
But tech job interviews are infamous for how crazy the interviews can get. Is this mainly for non-entry level positions that you're referring?
>Everybody waits for one company
The same can be said in reverse so that people are hiring just to prevent someone else from getting to hire them. If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, but I have all the employees that can reach your milkshake, then I have all the milkshake
I’m in the process of hiring a few hundred people - we’d never be this far down the funnel in 2019 because we’d be out of desks.
There's no doubt that for the next few years we're not gonna see the levels of compensation raise we've seen in the last 24 months, but it's not "end of an era" rather than a correction imho.
Will variable rates mortgages and wealthy tech workers end up paying for the covid lockdowns and government excesses?
[edit] We're talking like 2-4% of originations have been ARMs from 2009 onward, vs. a peak of 35% in 2004-2007.
I went thru the previous crashes. It feels like the start, but not the eye of the storm. Companies are cutting jobs, not going going out of business. The casualty rate of startups in dotcom felt like 90%+. In 2008 major banks had to get bailed out. Today, companies are making cuts to get back to 2019 levels. There is still a long way to go before it's a hard reset.
“Slicing to the bone”: you
I don’t think a two year hiring spree with a pullback spells the end of anything other than an aberration caused by a global natural disaster.
Back in 2000, many tech companies were buying products services from, and selling products services to, one another. When the flow of fresh capital from VCs and IPOs dried up in mid-2000, money-losing tech companies cut spending to conserve cash, reducing revenues at other tech companies, which in turn did the same, and this dynamic became self-reinforcing process affecting the entire tech ecosystem, first gradually and then "suddenly." Tech companies that had been growing at double-digit annual rates in 1999 found themselves with sudden, "unexpected," double-digit revenue declines a couple of years later. Many tech companies that couldn't make cash last for three years failed during this unpleasant period, including many which had good products and capable teams.
If the current wave of layoffs and revenue slowdowns gradually becomes a self-reinforcing process affecting the entire tech ecosystem, it could take a long while for the layoffs and revenue declines to end. These things can take a life of their own, and individual companies can't stop it, because they must cut spending to survive.
Now, within the Crypto market, yes, that is a lot like the dot com bust. I'm just wondering what the FAANG of crypto will be!
There was a lot of VC funded advertising $$$ that went straight to Yahoo. The canonical examples being WebVan and pets.com
At the other side tech companies enjoyed lot of growth during Covid as the world digitalized, and are now, well not yet in a crunch, but flatlining toward where their natural growth would have been if Covid didn't happen.
Pair lack of growth with over hiring and you get a readjustment.
I don't see reason to call this a jobpocalypse yet.
In my opinion, these are corrections to the excessive hiring done in 2020. If you take each of the companies, the layoffs cane from bets which didn't make money. I don't think this marks as an end of an era.
It's still incredibly expensive and hard to hire and retain engineers. If that remains true then this is really a blip. It won't really be the "end of an era" unless there is a glut of engineers in the market. This happened in 2000. In the UK, the unemployment rate for engineers was huge (>35% IIRC) and that excluded those who had left the industry.
Another interesting question is what will the collapse in share prices to do hiring and retention since equity is a massive (typically >50%) part of total compensation. Those who got hired last year in particular have seen a huge amount of paper value disappear.
Yes. At least at the large firms, the best case scenario is probably that effective overall comp has and will continue to take a huge haircut. And corresponding cost of living will not. In fact, pretty much the opposite. Even housing in high cost of living areas will probably be pretty sticky with respect to prices.
That said, there's little indication so far that things are in "would you like fries with that?" territory as they were in the tech sector (well beyond just engineering) as they were in ~2000 to 2003 when many people left the industry for good. I was laid off and was very lucky to land a (less well-paying) new job in short order. There weren't much in the way of nibbles.
There will probably be reasonably plentiful jobs. But comp will come down to earth commensurate with other branches of engineering for example.
Any good write-ups about this? Sounds like a very interesting time.
The “Video game crash of 1983” was a similar event that happened 30 years earlier, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983. Apple and Nintendo were the phoenix that rose from those ashes.
I'm surprised that Google and Amazon aren't jumping in and poaching all of these talented engineers from Meta, Stripe and Twitter.
For example, Facebook has some great people working on VR. If they get spooked about profitability, someone with a neuroscience Ph.D probably isn’t going to pivot to ad sales.
My hunch is they might be doing exactly that, even if they don't want to grow a lot at the moment since their profits and share price are lower than they have been. Poaching top experienced people can be done almost quietly, as it doesn't result in significant headcount expansion by itself.
Myself I took the opportunity to just improve my degree with an internship at CERN.
Later in 2008 while not being fired, I enjoyed the merge that Nokia went through with Siemens, and a few side effects from that, as they tried to keep going in a market with uncertainties.
Almost all companies cut IT spending to the bone for about 24 months. The rebound in hiring was pretty quick, but wages where suppressed until the later 2000s.
This does make me wonder if we’ll see some quiet reform in large companies as they hire people who have worked at major tech companies and can better make the case for areas to modernize.
Big layoffs never are. Projects and groups get cut and, while there may be some nominal effort to hold onto people who are particularly valued on the basis of perceived ability, connections, or or something else, there is a whole lot of randomness built into the process.
Google itself in that case afaik. Times are different now.
Part of what you’re seeing is just that the tech giants are integral to modern society and get covered the way e.g. railroads were a century ago. I think it’s especially strong for companies like Facebook, however, because they’ve not only taken the lion’s share of the profits and lowered standards in a way which has had real-world impact, and things like Facebook’s infamous pivot to video or Google’s AMP were bad-faith attempts to give tech companies more control over journalism. Angry bees are to be expected after kicking the hive.
They may be angry, but newspaper coverage isn't supposed to be about settling scores and getting revenge on the companies that threatened your profits. It's supposed to be about reporting facts and making reasonable inferences.
I know that ideal isn't always adhered to, but let's not excuse the media too quickly when they behave badly.
If economic conditions continued going well then they had the staff to meet their needs.
If they didn't then they'd cut the worst performing employees and anyone else they didn't want. Since every other company would also be doing layoffs they'd get no bad PR for it and low risk of employees leaving for greener pastures (since all other pastures would likely be closed).
Layoffs aren't some massive horrible thing for a company. They're just another part of doing business.
Then growth slows and suddenly there's a need to tighten the belt a bit and a lot of waste is found
Remember that much of the tech foundations for 2010s success were laid in mid to late 2000s. I saw it from within Amazon as AWS was building the core infrastructure components that went on to become independent services in 2010s. So I expect 2020s to go through similar phase. Maybe AI? Robotics? VR/AR? I don’t know.
Big tech happened because of open source and remote work (international collaboration on the internet). C, gcc, Linux, BSD, and publicly funded protocols like email and HTTP unlocked the last 20 years of growth. The next wave of open source is happening in robotics and manufacturing. We’re around 2005 right now in software terms. The iRobot, Nest, Oculus generation of companies was the first .com wave. Robotics and manufacturing teams are figuring out how to work remotely (accelerated by the pandemic).
That's why you'll see insane hiring phases (and hear stories of so many new people with nothing to do and no onboarding systems yet in place), and a couple of years later you'll see huge layoffs when there are big public economic fears.
Second best is a GitHub repo but often those I have seen simply included test apps resulting from a CS course or perhaps worse, code copied from somewhere else.
Regardless, app or code (or both) give the interviewer something else to talk about with the candidate about (and you would expect a good deal of enthusiasm from the candidate in this kind of discussion).
* Nobody asked culture-fit questions
* Nobody was interested in portfolio, side projects, or GitHub.
* I was not asked questions related to the role.
* Only presented with a leetcode screen
If you move away from the FAANG/unicorn scene, the interview process becomes more personable, and I was actually asked questions related to the role.
The only reason I have any open source work on GitHub now - I stopped programming as a hobby the minute I graduated from college in 1996 - is because my company has a very straightforward open source process where I can open source reusable project work I do for customers (consulting).
Tech might be changing, and it may be the end of an era, but it's not the end of tech.
People tends to believe that the current situation will last forever, the bad and the good ones.
How does Twitter, Google, Meta etc make money? With ads.
What I am avoiding like the plague are companies that have no profits, no dividends and no real innovation. Any company that is still aiming for growth before profits is just scary.
I wonder if part of the broad labor shortage of the last year or two was from so many people pivoting into remote roles for tech companies (not all engineering roles either). It was unsustainable. Now things are going back.
It's always sad to see the "who could have forseen this" argument passed around whenever things like this happen.
In fact if you treated companies like any financial advisor would tell you to treat something like a 401k or a savings account they would have considered what these companies have been doing for the last two years outright gambling with them and in turn also gambling employees futures.
With a lack of accountability for these reckless financial decisions though there is little chance that things will improve in the short or long term. This will continue to happen until legislation provides some kind of guardrail to simply firing at will anyone who disrupts a profit margin with their well paid talent and years of service.
