It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.
Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.
* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.
* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.
* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.
* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.
etc.
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.
The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.
I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?
For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.
This is an old trick to get people to work hard. It's no accident that every tech company does this.
But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".
Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.
At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.
It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
Has nothing to do with whether hiring is for headcount or other reasons
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.
Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever
It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.
> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?
They explained their argument.
> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?
They explained their argument in the article
> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
>> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.
* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.
Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.
If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.
That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.
That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism?
> It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification.
> Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?
Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.
When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.
When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.
This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).
This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.
In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.
There. FTFY.
I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat).
That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA).
Appreciate the discussion!
I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.
I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
I think everyone's idea of the "golden age" of programming happens to coincide when they were young and everything was exciting.
Ask people of different ages and you'll get different answers.
Anyone remember when Google raised the entire company's salary, maybe 30K or 60K people at that point, something like 20-25% all at once? Eric Schmidt and Laszlo Block got on stage and told the whole company how great we are, so they want to keep us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
We learned later that was because Facebook didn't participate in the Steve Jobs-initiated cartel of Google-Apple-Pixar-Adobe-Intuit-LucasFilm-eBay
Eric and Laszlo of course made no mention of the collusion that turned out be illegal
It could also be a 4X increase in grads for Computer and Information Sciences degrees since the 90s.
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&qu...
1 - These #s are just domestic.
2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much)
3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs.
4 - Domestic only.
My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing.
I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995.
[0] - https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineeri...
But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.”
It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled.
Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems.
The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.
Big Tech and empire builders there followed the classic business rules, additionally highly encouraged by Wall Street.
When its cheap, grow fast, when its expensive shield the bottom line, don't make risky moves and cut the fat.
People are same everywhere, you can't just put the blame on Big Tech. Other industries would do same when given opportunity
It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring.
Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here.
The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.
Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content.
Dead internet theory in full effect.
But the author spends zero time explaining why he thinks internet-based data collection and surveillance is the "Golden Age" of programming.
A golden age, according to one definition, is a period of "peak achievement"
What exactly is the author's concept of achievement
Perhaps it is financial (not programming)
For example, the period may have been noteworthy for the so-called "tech" industry's ability to pay so many salaries from zero interest loans
Historically, data shows that interest rates fluctuate over time (Can we blame Big Tech for an increase in interest rates)
With respect to _programming_ some agree that innovation, improvement, progress, was actually stalled during this period (and still is) due to Big Tech's anti-competitive practices
From this end user's perspective the software created during this period, what the author calls a period of "fake jobs", is not the pinnacle of achievement in programming
To me, software quality is at an all-time low, and this "Big Tech" period does not stand as a "Golden Age of Programming"
Compared to the software I am using originally created in the 1970s it stinks
But opinions may differ
I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things.
I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit.
That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.
The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.
I am not using the word generous in the unselfish sense, but the large, abundant sense. Apologies for any confusion.
bigtech looks at the marginal cost of an employee compared to marginal revenue gains they'll drive and sees a clear win. from their perspective, employees are underpaid relative to the money they bring in.
employees look at a mid-six-figure TC package for a very cushy job with minimal accountability and think that they're getting away with something amazing.
It'll be interesting to see how the use of AI-based software development tools plays out, and affects the job market, but so far - together with offshoring - it seems to be mainly a matter of limiting entry level opportunities. Whether this persists or not remains to be seen - companies seem to be hoping/expecting that AI will let them cope with fewer entry level developers, but given that currently you need a human to use the tool it's not clear to what extent that is actually true.
Trump has recently, somewhat unexpectedly, been making noises about offshoring and H1B developers - saying that US companies need to be more patriotic in their hiring practices. It remains to be seen if this will progress from bullying to actual policy/law changes, but a reversal of offshoring would do a lot to improve the US job market for developers, especially entry level.
What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.
Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall.
I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...
TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common.
1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured.
1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant
2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust
2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession.
2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring.
2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock.
2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots.
If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...
If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.
I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.
It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore.
I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.
This industry is cyclical -- I mean, most industries outside of the absolute core like healthcare are cyclical -- and there are booms and busts. Everyone hires when everyone else is hiring. Every holds steady when everyone else is holding steady.
But by far the hugest influence right now is AI, and it is having a calamitous impact on everything. There is this broad industry feeling right now that such massive shifts are not only coming, they're already underway, that there is a wait and see sense all over the place.
The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20.
Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers.
Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession.
Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer.
All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
> All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
What does this have to do with Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe?
As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-ch...
And it was removed so tech CFOs are realigning their hiring/retainment to save money on taxes.
Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.
A dirt cheap notebook has 16gb of ram today. We are used to it now but that's an insane amount of ram for software.
Processors with 8-16 threads are the norm.
There are countless options for you to deploy your stack and run your software regardless of database or persistent storage layer.
You have so much, just sooo much free content to make you a better programmer in virtually any language, that for those you don't you can just... ask an LLM.
We have LLMs, Linux is stronger than ever, there is just so much stuff going on, I don't know what you guys are talking about with "the end of golden age for programming".
The golden age is NOW.
Maybe it's just the end of the golden age for capitalism for those seeking to become filthy rich?
In any case, if you buy into this crap talk about how the golden age is over all you are going to do is being left behind.
You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.
The rise and fall of programming as a job in Silicon Valley is a separate but related phenomenon. A gold rush, but not a golden age.
To that end, when corporate interests commoditized the web and everything became too complex and javascript got treated as bytecode and required a package manager and toolchain, the golden age was absolutely killed by big tech.
Could their behavior be a big part of what we should study in knowing how to control things better in the future? Almost certainly. Does it help to frame them as a villain? I'm far less sold on that. Especially if you don't offer any sort of path on how things could have been run better.
I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.
* maintenance on buildings
* growing corn
* building homes
* making tacos at taco bell
* roll your own guess
It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes.
We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control.
Done. Now get off HN and get to work.
Yeah, no, lol.