Tech workers demand high salaries despite hiring slowdown

I've lived through 3 of these times so far. The early 2000's when the stock market tanked. 2008, and now the last year.

The demand for people who can write software slows down, but we aren't anywhere near a peak plateau where software engineering jobs aren't needed. Silicon Valley isn't going to turn into the rust belt anytime soon.

What's changing are the types of skills needed, and engineers are imminently poised to do that. Unlike factory workers our skills are malleable and constantly changing.

Because pretending that happened and is still happening would be contrary to the narrative that labor (vs. Capital) needs to be reigned in to make the economy broadly functional again. Inflation is being driven by corporate price gouging and labor shortages (outside of those resulting from the pandemic) are being driven by the wildly unequal distribution of returns to owners vs workers.

COVID’s on track to kill another 200K people in the US this year, plus cause serious health problems for who knows how many more, so I don’t expect any of this to abate. They’ll just keep jacking up interest rates and screaming “NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE” until the whole thing implodes.

Skilled engineers are just in demand as ever, an engineer is different than a technician however. An engineer can take a problem and solve it using various tools, they can weigh the pros and cons of possible solutions and can determine what fits the situation. A skilled engineer understands the value of good coding practices, understands that even if an activity doesn't create value it is still important, such as documentation and testing.

A technician was a barista who went to a 3 month boot camp[1] that promised to turn him into a "Full Stack Developer" who got railroaded through the basics of the React-Express-Mongo stack (all of which is largely JS) and a certificate. A technician doesn't waste time understanding why the reports are coming out slightly wrong, they'll just go ahead and add some code that updates all the values that are off by 1. A technician is defined primarily by the tool they have and their ability to use it. A technician will do something like have an entire table returned to the client side and then filter through it in the frontend because it that's what they know how to do.[2]

For a while technician's could demand the salaries of skilled engineers by virtue of an enormous shortage, and the fact that VC capital meant there was always another unicorn to sling their code around at. The market is contracting now and the technicians are starting to be unable to demand six figure starting salaries, and get insulted that some of the offers are only 60-70k, which as an aside is still a decent salary for most people in the US, one of my good friends works in construction management and despite his years of experience he just transferred jobs, he was estatic at the prospect of possibly making 80k at his new job, but I digress. My point being I think that part of the problem is there was a bubble in tech salaries for a while that were unsustainable, and now we are seeing a mild corretion.

Notes:

1. I have nothing against boot camp grads who can be valuable engineers and contributors, if they either 1) Were already tinkering and interested in programming before and the boot camp was just their way of getting their foot in the door or 2) They understand the bootcamp is the beginning of their journey and not the end and are willing to put the effort into continuing education.

2. I know this comes off hard on technicians, but I have seen many even supposedly "senior" engineers who are overglorified technicians, the difference between a perpetual technician and an engineer is continually learning. Here's a tip, if you want to be a decent engineer you should probably have a decent grasp of at least 3 programming languages, be able to understand networking basics, and follow everything outlined in Norvig's "How to become a programmer in 10 years."

Supply and demand, a boat load of extremely talented FAANG engineers were dumped on a smaller market. You might not be willing to compromise on the price of your eggs, but your peer might and he might be almost as good as you, and probably 10x as good as what the company previously had access to.