Sure there’s exceptions everywhere, but unless you’re self employed and contract in other industries, tech is still where it’s better.
NDIS work also pays similar to construction.
You will struggle to find tech wages that match that for the majority of available work. Techs over saturated with employees and as software improves you need less workers to do more IT work erryday. Meanwhile it still takes the same amount of workers to lay a slab or stand a house frame as it did 20 years ago.
The grass might seem greener on the other side (like that "if architects had to work like programmers" article the other day), but there really isn't any industry that's as easy to work in and high paying as tech is. That might be a bubble that'll pop eventually (I suspect it might) but right now that's the reality.
I think construction is an underrated profession by a lot of folks in the U.S, but it doesn't really compare to software for effort vs. reward. It's a favorable alternative for folks who would otherwise work retail or push paper around in non-tech office jobs.
Over the last ten years I have watched the number of PMs and middle managers explode across the industry. Executives from other industries have crept in, bastardized agile, commoditized developer work, and began micromanaging everything. You get to build less cool stuff - there's less opportunity for achievement or advancement. So now these jobs are not much different than garden variety white collar work.
I think there are a variety of valid reasons: The market capital that created unicorns is gone - and with high interest rates comes risk aversion. The NYTimes decision to adopt an anti-tech editorial policy changed public perception. Pushes for diverse hiring practices clashed with tech's original meritocracy structure. Increasing regulation. The age of the average coder has gone up and so the corps have matured too.
But more than anything, I think it comes down to nature abhorring a vacuum. The other corporations in our economy are mired by risk-averse gatekeeping admins and executives - it was only a matter of time before enough consultants and management firms made their way into the building.
The "move fast and break things" culture of tech was what changed public perception. The NYT was just a manifestation of that change.
Amazon and Google and Apple all still have extremely high public perception of their brands, despite only receiving negative national press, so it's hard to pin this as a reason that people wouldn't want to work at these places. But I think it's contributed to places like Google transitioning from being open and publicly glowing places to work, to circle their wagons and becoming more private and cagey with their employees.
I especially have the feeling that - while being in AI - leadership simply jumped too early on that train and now has teams full of people knowing that every project is set up for failure…
Maybe we should just accept that these are just jobs, and no glamour is necessary -- so maybe big tech jobs losing it is not the worst thing. Let the talent spread and create more "glamorous" jobs.
As long as that remains true, tech will remain a hot industry.
The ability to spend almost no money to generate ridiculously high margins (50-70%) is hard to beat. The only similar industry is Finance, but that is heavily gatekept due to the limited need for staffing.
If I am going to build important features and services, constantly improve my own and engineering skills, know our systems through and through, be on-call, deal with cross team issues, fix bugs, mentor juniors, and essentially keep everything running day in, day out - the least I can expect from management is to be on my side and not be my adversary. As long as this relationship is adversarial - as it is in big tech - I couldn't care less about the job, the managers, the services. For all I care, it can all sink.
(no need for BBC in the title)
