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.
It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
The author doesn't appear to have any industry experience whatsoever, which might have contributed to the post being a series of baseless assertions, followed by a non sequitur.
Times aren’t tight, the premise of this article is flawed. Big tech is insanely profitable and investors are loving it. The cuts are not a hard necessity but a choice made for a different reason.
This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two).
> 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.
If I get the contention of the article right, big tech was so greedy that they hired lots of people they didn't need, and paid them tonnes of money. I feel like I'm massively misunderstanding either the submission, or the definition of greed.
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.
I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire.
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?
These big tech companies are collectively hiring thousands of software engineers every week. Smaller companies and startups are hiring tens of thousands more. If you can't get a job, that's on you.
It is hard to get passed the first paragraph here. Even if I think "big tech" does terrible things, I think blaming them for a boom/bust cycle is idiotic.
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.
Never before it's been so easy to contribute to open source.
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.
I’m not buying this at all. Good people always find job, and if you don’t you need to work on better network or better skills or both. Author by the picture looks young. Maybe passionate about programming but lacking fundamental life experience that could let him look beyond personalization and typical socialistic view of bad corporations intentionally damaging job markets as targeted goal.. that’s just nonsense
The discussion here reminded me of a funny (but probably true) anecdote where all you had to do to actually get working answer from stackoverflow (RIP) is to create an answer that is blatantly wrong.
You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.
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.
> They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.
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.
When you pull a large portion of people that would normally be doing the following jobs:
* maintenance on buildings
* growing corn
* building homes
* making tacos at taco bell
* roll your own guess
And make them have job titles like "Head of Equity" or "People Partner Team Member" or "roll your own here too" and give them a 100k-200k+ salary, then everyone making Corn, Tacos, Homes are going to demand more money because why work at Taco Bell if you can literally get a job in Big Tech?
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.
45 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 42.0 ms ] threadThe 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.