Spain tech job market is facing a hiring freeze (opens in new tab)

In Europe, it was nothing like the US.

In the UK, which was nowhere as bad as Spain or Italy, programmers were making £17k/year pre-08 outside London. IT was just a cost base, minimized at all costs, the main job for programmers was academia, most people working in companies were hired out of high school. A job in IT or even a CS degree was career suicide, employment rates were one of the lowest of any degree and if you got a job you were just a cost.

It is hilarious to see the change. Companies that have tried to re-sell themselves as tech companies when ten years ago all their "IT" staff were just working on managed services.

The reason why this is relevant is because most of the change recently has been spillover from the US. If that spillover stops, there are no jobs domestically, you are a mechanic living in a horse-drawn society. The advantage the US has is compounding rapidly.

High incomes in tech were a symptom of the money printing that was supposed to keep the economy afloat largely never reaching past the ranks of the alumnae of certain colleges and universities. They exploded from the liquidity surplus that, in a more sane world*, would have gone towards lifting, say, service and retail wages (which instead languished for the better part of a decade). Six-figure SWE salaries have less to do with expertise than QE.

*One where restrictions on advertising and data collection/sales kept software as a pay-to-play enterprise, necessitating higher wages among those who would be users.

Do you mean Office Space?

> All the major Internet properties are falling to pieces. I’ve encountered more hung GMail loading screens and empty IG story trays (which should be impossible if feed loads at all) in the last week than in the decade starting at 2012.

Nothing like that on my end. Sounds like a confirmation bias story: you think the tech industry is collapsing, so you see failure everywhere.

There is an economic advantage to having "nerds" in "tech cities" like SF or general Bay Area. And if you disagree, then I recommend you attend a simple Tech meetup in SF and then go to one in say, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and witness the difference.

Collaboration is more effective in person. We're not machines, we're humans.

> They do it because they hate the leverage and mobility it gives employees

This really goes both ways. If you can work from anywhere, I can hire from anywhere, possibly from somewhere where the cost of living is much lower, where people are willing to do the job for less. The leverage really is coming from there still being a limited supply of labor, but that is not a perpetual given.

In the linked Paul Graham comment, he is not wholly supportive of remote work. The comparison is that communism, like remote work, can appear to work, but he attributes this to the fact that it sprung from a healthy foundation (his example is in-person work). If anything, Graham leans toward in-person work in this tweet.

"Why do you think Paul Graham compares it to communism?"

Link, please?

Yes, definitely need ad-blocking here.

This reads as if it was written with a large number of buzzwords that did not translate well.

Also, there's another article on the same site, "End to the great era of layoffs: big technology companies reactivate hiring but with conditions". Which came first? There's no date.