From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth.
Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this.
I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative that make this worse for the employer by ultimately requiring more people who average lower confidence and lower capabilities than without, but I say that with a huge caveat.
The deeper problem is not market effect or panaceas like AI. The deeper problem is poorly qualified workers and hard to identify talent. It’s easy to over hire, and then fire, when everyone generally sucks and doesn’t matter. If the average employed developer is excellent at what they deliver these people would be easy to identify and tough to fire like engineers, doctors, and lawyers. If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative.
AI and these market shifts thus hide a lower level problem nobody wants to solve: qualification.
> If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative.
No. There is work done by AI today no developer can match in speed and speed is relevant for development cost. Excellent developers would very likely employ these tools.
This tracks, reminds me of Cory Doctorow's talk on reverse centaur situation where he gave a nice rundown of the tech market of the past 15+ years.
Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.
> Yesterday, the news of 16k Amazon layoffs plus two LinkedIn posts on the same topic back-to-back encouraged me to finally write about it.
Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.
With almost 1.6M workers, the layoffs there are at least in the 5 figures and they will not stop to do the easiest thing possible in order to increase profit margins and that is to take jobs away from warehouse workers (using robots) and corporate jobs (using AI agents).
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Leetcode can be easily gamed and cheated and is a waste of time.
Now you need to make money for yourself instead of dancing around performative interviews since an AI Agent + Human out performs over 90% of workers doing the mundane work at Amazon anyway.
I remember after the Brexit vote (i.e. years before anything actually changed) there was a rash of British companies who clearly would have gone bankrupt anyway blaming their ailing fortunes on Brexit.
There is remarkably little pushback on company narratives about layoffs or ailing economic fortunes from journalists which is weird because it's more normal that they are not truthful.
The Brexit vote is nothing like this though. AI is probably the biggest corporate gaslighting exercise I've ever seen in my entire life.
The industry was always a disaster, but if you take a disaster and put AI in the mix you get a disaster at light speed. It was always getting worse and worse but now it’s speedrunning it.
>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess.
> The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations.
Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly...
It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone?
I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!
Gravity is coming back to Silicon Valley: workers are realizing that the Bell Labs image they were sold was mostly innovation theater and hoarding talent for websites overstuffed with ads designed to manipulate users into buying junk
I am about to give my take on software development:
Most [sane] software out there, but not all, has a main development time which is ridiculous compared to its life cycle (you could code in binary machine code, for several ISAs, it would not even matter).
Then, it is extremely hard to justify _HONESTLY_ a permanent income in software development. Really, really hard.
Anecdotally, I didn't see more safety for engineers working on cash cows. Quite the contrary, if a product is already bringing revenue, it is an easy decision for the business to squeeze a bit more margin by letting people go. Stable, cash-generating projects are often first to be put into efficiency/maintenance mode.
Ofcourse, AI does have an impact. We can't close our eyes to that. Atleast, it created a belief that massive layoffs are affordable now without affecting productivity.
I don't really understand this writer's objection: Big tech is big money and big risks. If some giant FAANG company is going to take a gamble on paying you $350,000 TC you should be squirreling most of that away for yourself in case the bet goes south.
If you want stability, go write Java for an insurance company for $85,000/year in Hartford, CT.
OP is horrified to discover risky gambling happening in Las Vegas.
Unfortunately, I think the next head of the fed is going to be appointed specifically to reduce interest rates, so we’re probably just going to go back to the 0-rate trough.
The speculative nature of tech has always been present.
The point is mass media communication and frictionless money movements across the world and market access which is so freely availible to the small retail investor.
It's a recipe for disaster because an extraordinary claim can attract billions of dollars with nothing but hope and dreams to back it up.
Imagine if the Wright Brothers had today markets and mass media at their disposal, they'd be showered in billions or even trillions but the actual model didn't make any money because it was R&D
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Really grateful that the opportunities I've been given weren't predicated on knowing things completely irrelevant to my job. I have spent exactly zero time solving LeetCode problems in my career (beyond algorithm stuff in college).
As a Clojure developer I have the opposite experience. The more they ignore my open source work, the more they never call up any of my references, the more they give me useless test jobs and assignments unrelated to the actual work, the more it's a signal of a place with poor engineering culture and generally also not that great salaries.
However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been.
This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.
Westinghouse Electric Corporation built early electrical grid turbines, and worked extensively with consumer product markets to close the circle of demand. Accordingly, more retail products required more energy, and more energy required more turbines.
The LLM proponents are trying the same naive move with intangible assets, but dismissed finite limits of externalized costs on surrounding community infrastructure. "AI" puts it in direct competition with the foundational economic resources for modern civilization. The technical side just added a facade of legitimacy to an economic fiction.
Thus, as energy costs must go up, the living standards of Americans is bid down. Individuals can't fix irrational movements, but one may profit from its predictable outcome. We look forwards to stripping data centers for discounted GPUs. =3
"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)
The main issue IMHO is the monopolization of the industry, especially in the US. Once the giants do layoffs, the rest of the market can't absorb the people effectively, which leads to oversaturated job market.
We can of course discuss how many people got into industry during COVID heyday and whether they should have, but mostly I think it's about those behemoths having disproportionately high impact on the entire labour market.
> The result is the worst of both worlds. European engineers now face US-level job insecurity with European-level compensation and limited mobility.
Firing people in most of Europe is still not as easy as it is in the US.
The opposite is also true, it's not that easy to leave your employer and you have to give 1/3/6 months notice before leaving, depending on your role/seniority/contract.
Sometimes companies even make you sign 12 months notice contracts clause where they pay you a fixed monthly bonus but you can't leave without giving a 12 months notice, my SO has signed one.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadThen came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this.
I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative that make this worse for the employer by ultimately requiring more people who average lower confidence and lower capabilities than without, but I say that with a huge caveat.
The deeper problem is not market effect or panaceas like AI. The deeper problem is poorly qualified workers and hard to identify talent. It’s easy to over hire, and then fire, when everyone generally sucks and doesn’t matter. If the average employed developer is excellent at what they deliver these people would be easy to identify and tough to fire like engineers, doctors, and lawyers. If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative.
AI and these market shifts thus hide a lower level problem nobody wants to solve: qualification.
No. There is work done by AI today no developer can match in speed and speed is relevant for development cost. Excellent developers would very likely employ these tools.
Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.
Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins.
With almost 1.6M workers, the layoffs there are at least in the 5 figures and they will not stop to do the easiest thing possible in order to increase profit margins and that is to take jobs away from warehouse workers (using robots) and corporate jobs (using AI agents).
> Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.”
Leetcode can be easily gamed and cheated and is a waste of time.
Now you need to make money for yourself instead of dancing around performative interviews since an AI Agent + Human out performs over 90% of workers doing the mundane work at Amazon anyway.
You are being scammed without knowing it.
There is remarkably little pushback on company narratives about layoffs or ailing economic fortunes from journalists which is weird because it's more normal that they are not truthful.
The Brexit vote is nothing like this though. AI is probably the biggest corporate gaslighting exercise I've ever seen in my entire life.
Traditional factories do make wrong guesses about the future and overhire all the time. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ford+f150+lightning+laid+off...
Stay away from europe while you can.
Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly...
It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone?
I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!
Most [sane] software out there, but not all, has a main development time which is ridiculous compared to its life cycle (you could code in binary machine code, for several ISAs, it would not even matter).
Then, it is extremely hard to justify _HONESTLY_ a permanent income in software development. Really, really hard.
Here is Google complaint about not serving lobster biscue:
https://x.com/Andercot/status/1768346257486184566?s=20
Zero interest rate phenomenon.
If you want stability, go write Java for an insurance company for $85,000/year in Hartford, CT.
OP is horrified to discover risky gambling happening in Las Vegas.
The point is mass media communication and frictionless money movements across the world and market access which is so freely availible to the small retail investor.
It's a recipe for disaster because an extraordinary claim can attract billions of dollars with nothing but hope and dreams to back it up.
Imagine if the Wright Brothers had today markets and mass media at their disposal, they'd be showered in billions or even trillions but the actual model didn't make any money because it was R&D
Really grateful that the opportunities I've been given weren't predicated on knowing things completely irrelevant to my job. I have spent exactly zero time solving LeetCode problems in my career (beyond algorithm stuff in college).
However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been.
This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.
The LLM proponents are trying the same naive move with intangible assets, but dismissed finite limits of externalized costs on surrounding community infrastructure. "AI" puts it in direct competition with the foundational economic resources for modern civilization. The technical side just added a facade of legitimacy to an economic fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl...
Thus, as energy costs must go up, the living standards of Americans is bid down. Individuals can't fix irrational movements, but one may profit from its predictable outcome. We look forwards to stripping data centers for discounted GPUs. =3
"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
We can of course discuss how many people got into industry during COVID heyday and whether they should have, but mostly I think it's about those behemoths having disproportionately high impact on the entire labour market.
Firing people in most of Europe is still not as easy as it is in the US.
The opposite is also true, it's not that easy to leave your employer and you have to give 1/3/6 months notice before leaving, depending on your role/seniority/contract.
Sometimes companies even make you sign 12 months notice contracts clause where they pay you a fixed monthly bonus but you can't leave without giving a 12 months notice, my SO has signed one.