That's the whole purpose of mass layoffs, right? Some of it seemed unnecessary; it seemed to be something everyone did in solidarity because salaries were going up unchecked.
Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#22Certainly they won't keep up with inflation. So it's possible they won't exactly regress, but they will fall back as things get more expensive, and salaries don't go up.
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#23I've been coding for 12+ years at some top tech companies. I think salaries will drop like a rock for anyone that is not absolutely top knotch. Claude 3.5 Sonnet can code a near perfect UI widget from a screen shot. The game is over on this whole thing, software development as we know it is over.
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#24In the US, in general? I believe so, yes. For a couple of years at least. In many European countries the salaries are already much lower (than US), so perhaps not as much wiggle room there.
I certainly don't see any decrease in the EU on my side indeed, if anything it's still increasing at a relatively low rate.
Thing is, in most EU countries, tech salaries are way lower than US.
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#25I've been coding for 12+ years at some top tech companies. I think salaries will drop like a rock for anyone that is not absolutely top knotch. Claude 3.5 Sonnet can code a near perfect UI widget from a screen shot. The game is over on this whole thing, software development as we know it is over.
> Claude 3.5 Sonnet can code a near perfect UI widget from a screen shot.
Not sure about Claude and "coding ui widgets", but a while ago I tried getting ChatGPT to make a simple demo program in C using some relatively new Linux-specific APIs. It spat out a piece of code that would not even compile, let alone work.
It was remarkably wrong. In the specifically interesting part, that is where it was supposed to use the relatively new Linux-specific APIs, it failed completely and used some POSIX-standard APIs (and used them wrong).
Dunno but it seems to me that some jobs are more at risk than others.
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Also: I routinely have to work with software that is supposed to do A, B and C according to its documentation but does B, Ç, Σ in practice. If an LLM was to "read" the documentation and act on production according to that, production would burn in a couple of hours. I think I'll be fine for a while.
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#26Obviously . At some point supply will catch up with demand. Software development is vastly overpaid compared to how complex it is, imagine a 6 month Bootcamp for becoming a civil engineer. High wages are purely the result of the enormous and continually increasing demand for the profession.
> Software development is vastly overpaid compared to how complex it is, imagine a 6 month Bootcamp for becoming a civil engineer. If anything, I think the past couple years have belied the idea that you can become a competent software developer in 6 months. It is this "lowest level" dev work anyway that I see under the most pressure from outsourcing.
I think this is only partially true.
I think Software development is vastly overpaid for junior profiles but largely underpaid for senior profiles.
If you think how central some key people are to some companies and how much those companies make (gross product)... You'll see that some key developers are probably worth even more than CEOs.
This has been largely not understood, in my opinion.
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#27In addition to the great points in the other comments, I'd also point out that remote work is a double edged sword. I remember in the early 00s when the .com bubble burst, and there was huge talk of software work being outsourced to India and China. It never really happened, for lots of different reasons. This time around, though, companies are much more comfortable with remote work, and Zoom/Meet/etc. has gotten muc…
There’s a difference between remote work within a country (the one everyone is in favour of) versus remote work worldwide (or at least to some range of time zones). The former doesn’t require anything extra regarding legal stuff, while the latter does (and it’s way less common than the former).
All the companies I have worked for in a remote fashion were offering remote within the country and also on the countries they have a legal presence (which were 2 or 3 at most)
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly don't see any decrease in the EU on my side indeed, if anything it's still increasing at a relatively low rate.
Thing is, in most EU countries, tech salaries are way lower than US.
That has been always the case, though. But in the context of Europe, salaries for software engineers have definitely improved. 10 years ago 6 figure salaries where unheard of, while nowadays it’s possible
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#29Yes, no, maybe. For people who are just doing glue code with no real understanding, yes. That market is going south. For the high end it’s more complicated: Comp (not salaries) took a huge upward swing because of an influx of VC money as well as a bull market. People at FAANG type companies could leverage their unvested stock to get higher comp at new companies. Let me explain. Bob joins Amazon in 2016. His initial c…
For every Bob in your example, there hundred of thousands who work in a totally different level: for instance myself. For the rest of us, the market looks good, still improving (regardless of the layoffs) and salaries and perks are better than a decade ago.
Re: Ask HN: Will salaries of software engineers regress?
#30In my case it froze instead of regressing.
My previous employer didn't give people raises and then later laid off me and most of my department. My new employer didn't give people raises and then laid people off, but not me.
My salary didn't decrease, but with inflation my buying power is lower.