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Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#301

Post by badpun »

mikewarot wrote: post #272
badpun wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovation, at least in our sector, requires capital investment. Hardly any startup can bootstrap. At high interest rates, and with people retiring and moving their money into safe assets, there will be little appetite to fund startups in the coming years. At least that's the theory that Peter Zeihan is presenting on his youtube channel.

Innovation happens in personal projects that eventually get commercialized.

And without commercialization, i.e. without millions to pay people to code and flesh out the actual product, there is little more that a cool PoC.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#302

Post by noduerme »

whearyou wrote: post #155
noduerme wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of that novel or these laws, but as an American it would be unthinkable to consider them anything other than Kafkaesque dark satire. The idea that they've moved from that to some sort of positive model for egalitarian society is downright creepy. Specifically, because they all contain the hypocrisy of saying explicitly as a group the very thing they're telling the individual not to say. Taking the sid…

Or communist-light, but the latter ideology doesn’t seem to hold the same sting as a descriptor despite very similar outcomes

Sure, if you like. Although a nit: communism historically doesn't mind celebrating individual heroics or achievements as such, if they're seen as selflessly done in service of the cause. The view of society as a single organism which knows better than you is more central to the definition and prototype of fascism, even if it's also a result of any kind of collective reordering of a society.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#303

Post by netsharc »

caeril wrote: post #169
pera wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google…

The LLVM layoffs notwithstanding, OP is still largely correct in general. Your typical developer could solder, knew how the CPU works, knew roughly how many clocks would retire a MOV, ADD, MUL, etc, was cognizant of wait states, understood cache lines, protection rings, instruction decode, memory mapping, etc. Try asking a typical Django or React developer today what a cache line even is.

Steve Wozniak, the Steve that built the first Apple computers, knew what every component on it did, and he wrote every line of the ROM. Nowadays it's, "Well a Stackoverflow comment said if I add this line in the config, it will work, and it did, so... I closed the ticket.", but the complexity of computers nowadays makes it unfeasible to learn everything inside out, at least not if you need a gazillion developers (I think only a low low sub-percent of them know their software and hardware stacks inside out) because everything needs to be software-ized.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#304

Post by blurbleblurble »

nsxwolf wrote: post #249
blurbleblurble wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you're not using LLMs to code without telling me you're not using LLMs to code ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

No way is anyone getting things delivered 10x faster because of ChatGPT. Software engineering isn't like folding bedsheets in the prison laundry.

I'm not counting cumulative hours of productive work, I'm counting duration from inception to working implementation.

I consider one person knocking something out in one day that would previously have taken them 10 days of wrestling with to be a 10x increase in productivity.

And I'd consider one person building a proof of concept in a couple hours that would have taken 5 people 10 weeks of back and forth meetings, planning, pushback and reluctance to be a 1000x improvement in productivity.

These tools are seriously reducing the bar for knocking stuff out that would have previously required much more significant time investment and risk to even consider let alone tackle.

I've personally used copilot and chatgpt to implement things that would have taken me months of study and wrestling with in just a few hours.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#305

Post by herval »

caeril wrote: post #169
pera wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google…

The LLVM layoffs notwithstanding, OP is still largely correct in general. Your typical developer could solder, knew how the CPU works, knew roughly how many clocks would retire a MOV, ADD, MUL, etc, was cognizant of wait states, understood cache lines, protection rings, instruction decode, memory mapping, etc. Try asking a typical Django or React developer today what a cache line even is.

Which one is able to deliver a web app faster?

Lots of people here completely missing the point - understanding assembly in the age of infinite cloud computing resources is equivalent to saying a guy who can build a wood hut on his own is more able to get jobs than a modern day construction worker. Even though they have some random or deeper technical knowledge, it doesn’t make them any more employable or relevant

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#306

Post by 66yatman »

nsxwolf wrote: post #231
znpy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 years ago you could do a lot with 8-16 mb ram and no internet connection. Nowadays... unplug a modern computer from the internet and it's mostly useless. Want to write a simple document, using a basic word preocessor? You're going to need at least 1GB ram, mate. VisualBasic allowed writing GUI-enabled applications that would be essentially be standalone, shipped as executable files sized at (usually) less than a m…

Comments like yours make me hopeful that I actually am an exceedingly valuable engineer. I have just been unable to convince companies of this fact.

I feel the same here

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#307

Post by savorypiano »

leetharris wrote: post #19

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

10 years ago people were complaining that candidates couldn't even write a for loop in interviews.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#308

Post by foofie »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #292
foofie wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is usually the opposite if I check known colleagues: null performers and phonies have outstanding profiles, the good or super programmer somtimes an awkward or does-not-care profile. I don't think you're interpreting these things right, and I'll tell you why. I know superb software engineers who don't update their online presence and didn't even bothered to update their LinkedIn profile to change their profile p…

I didn't interpret, just said as it is for people who I definitely know how good they are; yours is exactly one explanation why that is so also for fresh vs settled ones that way that I wouldn't (and didn't?) exclude, thr list of details is endless, didn't bring them all. Just wanted to say: evaluating experience and skills of people by LinkedIn profiles is pointless - you cannot compare objectively there.

> I didn't interpret, just said as it is for people who I definitely know how good they are;

You explicitly claimed that from your observation "null performers and phonies have outstanding profiles, the good or super programmer somtimes an awkward or does-not-care profile."

The matter of fact is that, contrary to your claim, the amount of care you invest in things like CV and job board profiles is not correlated with competence. It's instead correlated with the need for a career change.

Those who are not looking for a job are far less likely to waste their time curating a profile or online presence they gain nothing from. They're wasting their time. If instead you find yourself looking for a job, whether you're unemployed, about to be fired, or just looking for a better role, you're going to work on marketing yourself to prospective employers. This means updating your CV, updating a job board or two, and perhaps even write a cover letter.

If you're not wasting your time thinking of switching jobs, you don't waste time with the likes of LinkedIn.

It's like a healthy diet: most people only start to become mindful of its importance when they experience any form of health scare.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#309

Post by mnky9800n »

kcplate wrote: post #281
pera wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google…

Your comment is basically akin to complaining how rough and slow it would take a person with a machete to trailblaze a path through a dense forest as opposed to how long it takes a person to travel the beautiful paved road that was built on top of that trailblazed path. Somebody had to thrash through all the shit for that superhighway you are traveling on my friend. I was around back then. We didn’t have a magical br…

Haha I was talking about this to a colleague the other day. That if it was like 1987 and we wanted to use a fast Fourier transform, we would pull a book off the shelf like numerical recipes in C hoping it was there and implement what we find there. Then after a couple weeks of making sure that worked we would realize it's not fast enough so we would probably do things until it does what we want. Today you just use any one of the one liner libraries that offer it like scipy, pytorch, etc. but that's amazing because it offers us a sophisticated solution that we can use out of the box to design our own sophisticated solutions.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#310

Post by [deleted] »

leetharris wrote: post #19

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

[deleted]
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