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The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

businessinsider.com

31–40 of 143 posts

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#31
post #25

This seems logical. The software engineers are likely going to be some of the highest paid employees, so laying off underperforming engineers is going to help reduce labor costs substantially. Many of these engineers have been hired for new business units that didn't end up being profitable with cheap credit going away. Others might be in business unit that is purely a cost center. Nothing has really changed over the…

The software engineers are likely going to be some of the highest paid employees, so laying off underperforming engineers is going to help reduce labor costs substantially. It might seem counter-intuitive, but often businesses lay off the high-performing-but-best-paid people because that drives the biggest savings while reducing the vanity headcount metric less, especially in companies where the effort of the team gr…

High performing people adding the most value to the business were rarely the highest paid ones as they had long tenure and the best institutional knowledge but got mediocre wage increases as a punishment for being to loyal too the business.

The highest paid ones were usually the ones who job hopped the most during the times of economic boom. They added little value where they went as their tenure was too short for that, but the market was so hot and the dev demand so high that tenure length and adding value didn't matter back then.

If you knew how, where and when to jump ship during the past boom, you could be an incompetent buffoon and you could still end up making way more than the tenured workers actually adding value to the company.

Now the companies are attempting to correcting that "mistake".

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#32
That chart showing software engineers having the highest share of laid off employees in 2023 only tells half the story, which doesn't surprirse me because that allows the author to push their "sky is falling for devs now too!" narrative.

To show the full picture, you would need to also see the share of new jobs filled from end of 2020 to end of 2021 that were software engineers positions. I don't think people really grasp how massive the hiring spree was for software engineers in that time period.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#34

It feels like we are facing a software security armageddon. There are millions of disgruntled coders, powerful AI tools to help hackers find security holes in record time, broken media, no trust in institutions, software complexity has grown out of control (increasing the surface area for security vulnerabilities)... Will centralized software survive the next decade?

This comment sounds like the output that ChatGPT would give you if you asked it to generate a discussion board comment that maximizes fear mongering and hyperbole.

Haha. It used to be an insult to have one's writing abilities compared to that of a bot but since GPT4, I take that as a compliment.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#35
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition, half of us are under the median.

But is that a useful measure? By definition half of the astronauts who went to the moon are under the "astronauts who went to the moon" skill median.

All those astronauts had to pass some kind uniform skill test by NASA. There is no uniform skill tests for all the Devs.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment sounds like the output that ChatGPT would give you if you asked it to generate a discussion board comment that maximizes fear mongering and hyperbole.

Haha. It used to be an insult to have one's writing abilities compared to that of a bot but since GPT4, I take that as a compliment.

I mean GPT4 was trained on hella patents, Wikipedia, StackOverflow, OSS, etc. etc. I also don't see the insult here heh

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#37

> Coders made up 14% of employees at tech companies Wow is this true? If so, I'm extremely surprised it is this low. No wonder Elon could cut 80% of jobs and everything would keep ticking along.

And the consensus was that Twitter wouldn't survive the next weekend.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#38
post #14

As a fellow developer who has been passionate about open-source programming since childhood, I was disgusted in this last hiring bubble how condescending and disrespectful the developers were towards other professions, which is disappointing. My general feeling was that it elevated developers to a seemingly different caste of "special" people, and here in my country (Brazil) there was advertisements everywhere about…

Don't worry, the sweet irony is hitting those condescending tech-bros now too the same way it hit the condescending crypto/stock bros who kept preaching "the market only goes up", "to the moon" and, my personal favorite which I read on HN, "developer demand is infinite". How's that infinite demand working out now tech-bros? Just ask Twitter employees. https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o A lot of people working in tech were d…

> https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o

I was around for the last 13 years, and I'm pretty certain that it was *self-identified left-leaning journalists* who told coal-miners "LearnToCode" and then got all huffy when they got told "#learntocode".

Developers weren't taking part in this mess.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#39
post #14

As a fellow developer who has been passionate about open-source programming since childhood, I was disgusted in this last hiring bubble how condescending and disrespectful the developers were towards other professions, which is disappointing. My general feeling was that it elevated developers to a seemingly different caste of "special" people, and here in my country (Brazil) there was advertisements everywhere about…

Don't worry, the sweet irony is hitting those condescending tech-bros now too the same way it hit the condescending crypto/stock bros who kept preaching "the market only goes up", "to the moon" and, my personal favorite which I read on HN, "developer demand is infinite". How's that infinite demand working out now tech-bros? Just ask Twitter employees. https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o A lot of people working in tech were d…

I'm a blue collar IBEW electrician that inevitably injured myself working in confined spaces. Summer 2022, I set out on my quest to become a technical writer, but by Holidays 2022 I was generating images and tip-toe-ing into the emerging ChatGPT stuff.

By January 2023, I was already certain that professional writing would be increasingly-difficult to enter (as a career field) as a novice content creator: I was already able to generate extensive copy and then just act as copy-editor-"writer"

Thankfully a natural disaster (landslide creep) has forced me to re-prioritize my life, down to potentially building yet another house — I'm not sure at this point I have the physical energy, but I certainly know that my brainpower cannot keep up (competitively) in a paid-market content onslaught (which is inevitable).

Whatdo? My body was so excited to sit in a desk, just shy of 40... and now I just don't see a point competing with all the more-qualified laid-offs (redundant white collar worklings, some replaced by AGI-like services, competing against novices like me... which GPT certainly outperforms, at 1/100th the price).

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#40
post #12

There are a lot of "software engineers" who can't code well. I see a lot of "google and copy paste until it works and deploy". No thoughts behind design. No idea about performance. No testing. No innovation. They all need to go.

Is that the fault of the devs or the broken processes where management promises unrealistic deadlines up the chain, so devs have no time to think about the bigger picture and just do everything in their power to ship something that barely works at the end of each sprint and move on to putting out the next fire? To me, the fault is in the industry and how the ships are run.

Pretty much this, there have been times in my career when I was prepared to do everything the right way, but deadlines and unrealistic expectations from people who don't even know what JavaScript is forced my hand, so the product was less pretty internally but still functioning.

For most people software engineering is about driving results, not making everything beautiful under the hood. Although it's nice to do that when you have time.

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