Ask HN: What are well-paying alternative jobs to being a software developer?

As an (ex)EM, I don't think the likelihood of a first-level manager getting fired is all that different. What is different is the timeline - it takes longer to see whether the manager is underperforming (vs helping the team get out of a rough patch). There's also the consideration that a manager can at best influence their team's outcomes, while being fully accountable for them. This gets worse as you climb up the ladder, as the influencing gets more and more tenuous, while accountability only grows. The stress of this should not be underestimated by folks considering a move into management.

It's mixed and depends a lot on the specifics of the situation. I'd say that business-critical engineers (i.e. ones who have deep knowledge of a profit-center codebase) have more job security than non-business-critical managers (i.e. those who run "nice to have" projects), but business-critical managers have more job security than business-critical engineers and non-business-critical managers have more security than non-business-critical engineers, particularly senior ones.

If you're a CEO planning a layoff, your #1 priority is to minimize disruption to the organization. The worst employee is one who is still on the payroll but demoralized; hopelessness is contagious, so not only are they probably not productive themselves, but they make everyone around them unproductive. If you lay off a good manager, they're gone, but you've also demoralized all their reports. You get the same effect if you lay off a core engineer, one with deep knowledge of the codebase that everyone goes to for questions. However, you can lay off a garden variety IC, one that keeps to themselves and just does their job, without any serious repercussions to the org. And you can lay off a whole division without serious repercussions for the rest of the org, because everybody who knew them will no longer be there. This is why many companies try to structure layoffs as "We are exiting this line of business, and that is why the people who worked there are no longer with us."

The one big exception is executives, who usually have less job security than either ICs or managers. I've heard this as a reason why executive salaries are so high; few qualified people will take the job without the knowledge that they'll get F-U money in 2-3 years, because there's a decent chance they'll be fired and unhireable by then. This also fits into the framework above: typically, when an executive gets fired, it's because the business they lead is underperforming and the staff is already demoralized. At this point you lose nothing by getting rid of the executive in charge, because everyone wants to see him gone anyway.

The same logic applies to bad managers; you can and should fire these quickly, because they demoralize all of their reports.

It occurred to me recently that this may be why we have layoffs at all. The fairest approach, and one that maximizes general welfare, is to give everyone an equal pay cut when the company's revenues go down. The problem is that this demoralizes everyone. The good people will leave anyway, while the bad people will sit and do nothing useful while bleeding the company dry of the rest of its cash. So instead, companies create much greater pain across a smaller number of people, and then ensure that the people most affected are no longer with the company so they don't affect overall company morale. The ones left behind are more inclined to think of themselves as lucky, or skilled, or grateful they weren't the ones canned, which are all positives for performance.

Not in my experience. The most recent one was a developer who joined every standup from the ski slopes, when asked to work on a particular task responded with "I'd rather not work on that, can you give me something easier?", and failed to ever actually work on anything. We still had to go through the whole drawn out process of working on a performance improvement plan with them. They simply didn't care.

If you have a college degree and are willing to go through what essentially is an apprenticeship for 2 years, Residential Real Estate appraisal is not a bad gig. I’m just now getting my license after apprenticing since 2019, and there is a lot of work to be had in large metro areas (I’m in the Phoenix area). Having a degree gets you the highest level of licensure, but even with just specific appraisal classes alone and no degree you can still make a mint.

It’s pretty much data analysis and comparing apples to apples as close as you can get, adjusting for differences between homes; And while the forms you fill are repetitive, the homes you see are usually anything but. You can run your own shop and make a comfortable 300k+ a year, and if you really want, you can expand your services outside of working for appraisal management companies and mortgage companies.

There is a deficit of new blood entering the profession, and certainly not as many technically skilled people getting into it. This does mean that a lot of processes are a bit archaic (like submitting files in XML, or counties having aged FTP sites for their parcel maps), but the tide on a technical front is changing, ever so slowly (no one does their reports on index cards or uses microfilm readers like my grandfather used to).

One thing that might be tough if you look into this route is finding someone to train you. Most of these old guys (and truly I mean old guys) are happy with their little kingdoms of the area they cover, and their reluctance to train the new appraisers wanting to enter the field has created the lack of qualified workforce that has had people like me working overtime during the pandemic.

Great job, and has been the best choice of my life, and would not go back to front end dev or call centers; Cause nothing has given me the freedom of working for myself and running a business with my father, with the ability to start my own business when he retires.

I don't dispute the underperfomers are the typical case. But I've seen plenty of glaring exceptions. The point is: things aren't always what they seem. And we can't automatically assume that the people who make these decisions are making the right decisions, or even know what's happening under their noses.

BTW if they put the guy on PIP then that basically means they were in the process of firing him already. So if they called it a "layoff" that was for cosmetic purposes.