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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?

#71

Post by armchairhacker »

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…

I don’t think the average tech worker is dumb. They may even be better than the average in the 2000s/2010s (tech boom), maybe not, but I’m at least sure especially those at Google could get and stay hired in earlier times.

What I suspect is that tech companies have many more workers than needed, because most software simply doesn’t need many people to build and maintain. I remember massive tech companies running on teams of Google search, Github, AWS, Outlook, Facebook, Uber, IntelliJ. These are software behemoths, but at their core they’re rather simple, and a single developer could make an MVP of any in a few weeks, and with adequate testers and resources, something scalable and stable that could be used by professionals in a few months. And that’s creating it from scratch (well, existing libraries), though maintaining everything maybe doesn’t require much less, it surely doesn’t require more. I understand the big products have more, at least name recognition, and I understand that a big product needs more than programmers (asset creation, marketing, QA, tech support, accounting, etc.) But the software development side isn’t very big, especially if you already have the software.

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

#73

Post by drewcoo »

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…

I tend to agree.

The industry hired more people than the small percent of the population before that were attracted to tech.

The jobs needed to change to accommodate all the new, less-tech-interested people. They became more standardized and less thought-involving. More and more jobs are now about using frameworks and writing glue code instead of solving novel problems.

Even the new techier-than-average people are likely in less techy jobs. And jobs less oriented to making them grow into their best geek selves.

Because the jobs became oriented to hiring neophytes to do the bulk of the work, we also see title compression and a low cap to expected salaries. If someone seems too senior and starts to cost too much, this model allows replacing them with new tabula rasa (bootcamp) workers.

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

#74

Post by adamzochowski »

fritzo wrote: post #63
smiths1999 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. Aren't employee salaries a deductible expense? The above makes me think more along the lines of no longer being able to deduct GPU costs incurred from deep learning research.

IIUC, whereas previously companies could deduct salaries in year Y from revenue in that same year Y, now section 174 allows deduction of only 1/5 of those salaries in each of the 5 years [Y,Y+1,Y+2,Y+3,Y+4].

This is for specific R&D costs, like doing something patentable. Most developers are not doing R&D.

Most developers are fixing bugs, helping sales, keeping systems online, keeping up to date on patches, performing security scans, complying to some internal policies.

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

#75

Post by drewcoo »

kasey_junk wrote: post #66
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…

This exact complaint was common in 2001. Which hey maybe it’s true! Maybe the nerds from 2 generations ago could have built all this technology 10x over… except they didn’t.

> This exact complaint was common in 2001

I, for one, had the same complaint then. The dotcom boom pulled in lots of people not interested in tech, just in paychecks.

> Maybe the nerds from 2 generations ago could have built all this technology 10x over… except they didn’t

Fantasy math aside, the nerds don't really decide what tech to build. There was no mass of nerds 25 years ago arguing over NNTP about who could build the best ad platform for the newly-emerging World Wide Web. That's a suit thing.

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

#76

Post by enterprise_cog »

armchairhacker wrote: post #71
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…

I don’t think the average tech worker is dumb. They may even be better than the average in the 2000s/2010s (tech boom), maybe not, but I’m at least sure especially those at Google could get and stay hired in earlier times. What I suspect is that tech companies have many more workers than needed, because most software simply doesn’t need many people to build and maintain. I remember massive tech companies running on t…

A single dev can make an mvp of AWS? Or IntelliJ?

Let me guess, they could write Dropbox in a weekend too.

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

#77

Post by drewcoo »

babyshake wrote: post #30
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…

And yet, the engineering interviews still typically revolve around Leetcode algorithms instead of the messy but hardly CS-intensive day to day work that engineering typically involves.

That's (very charitably) because those are weed-out questions for early-stage engineers.

Lots of companies feel they need weed-out questions because they're swamped with applicants. How does applicant approach a problem? Does applicant describe their thought process figuring it out? Can applicant figure it out?

Did that tell anyone how good the applicant is at the job? No. It just provided some gates for the interviewer to say "no hire."

It's hard to differentiate the applicants' skills so early in their careers - not enough work history to go on. I have no idea why these would be used for senior positions except that "senior" is this year's "junior."

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

#78

Post by drewcoo »

flashgordon wrote: post #65
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…

I think this is only half the answer (or atleast part of it). This not only ends up attracting the make-quick-buck-with-certification types but also the political sociopaths who knows how to optimize time on the ladder over quality. This not only has lowered the bar but also made these places very toxic to work in! Passive aggressiveness anybody?

In ancient times, HP used to be one of the dream jobs. It was incredibly unusual in ways that I think are best expressed by "The HP Way."

https://www.hpalumni.org/hp_way.htm

It was a dream job because other tech jobs were almost nothing like that.

Most tech jobs featured techies managed by MBA-types and that can be a recipe for passive-aggressiveness.

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

#79

Post by LarsDu88 »

happyweasel wrote: post #49
LarsDu88 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are people still paying for this when blender exists?

Do you know the difference between CAD and polygonal 3d modellers ? btw, blender always existed. Like since 1998?

This is a CAD program? Strangely enough this is mentioned absolutely no where on the official website.

Hmm now I am considering buying a license...

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

#80

Post by okr »

enterprise_cog wrote: post #76
armchairhacker wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the average tech worker is dumb. They may even be better than the average in the 2000s/2010s (tech boom), maybe not, but I’m at least sure especially those at Google could get and stay hired in earlier times. What I suspect is that tech companies have many more workers than needed, because most software simply doesn’t need many people to build and maintain. I remember massive tech companies running on t…

A single dev can make an mvp of AWS? Or IntelliJ? Let me guess, they could write Dropbox in a weekend too.

Hey, chatgpt, write me a dropbox script, that mimics dropbox. Nono, this library does not have this function. No, this is also useless. What are you suggesting, aaaah, get me out of here.
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