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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?

#151

Post by macca321 »

austin-cheney wrote: post #145
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…

My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.

Yes, real developers know the quirks of ie6 Vs Firefox 3

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

#152

Post by dsotirovski »

Apreche wrote: post #13

The same thing that always drives layoffs. You are a company. The system we have demands growth. Even very stable and reliable profits are seen as failure. There must be growth. The people who run a company can not press a magic button to increase revenues. They can't just pull a successful new project out of nowhere. Anything like that is going to be a risk, and will probably fail. It will also take time. The one th…

Fair point!

> And when some people do layoffs, everyone does them. They're all subject to the same market pressures in the same industry. One company doing them gives all the other companies in the sector permission to do likewise. If a company doesn't follow suit the market might even start to question why.

I'd like to try and simplify this - it's simply the new "normal" and companies can get away with it(meaning the labor side does not punish it, yet - no unionising etc). In the EU layoffs like this are not as easy to pull off by companies.

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

#153

Post by noduerme »

matrix87 wrote: post #114
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…

> It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech and don't want to go deeper than the bare minimum required by their job. The average day-to-day work is menial, for example investigating a production issue. That isn't something that people get into as a hobby, that's work in a very unromantic sense. Maybe having good systems backgroun…

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 side of we is therefore willfully brutal and repugnant to individual dignity. Presented without irony, is this some sort of fascism-light?

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

#154

Post by austin-cheney »

foofie wrote: post #149
austin-cheney wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.

> You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. What technology or data structure do you think developers don't understand if they work on React projects? Isn't it silly to claim any person is suddenly incompetent just because they are assigned to a project which uses a particular framework?

Yes, that is silly until the employer becomes over leveraged or the resulting product becomes too expensive. Then hard choices must be made. At that point it’s not silly anymore.

Having written JS full time for 15 years most JS developers are deeply uncomfortable navigating complex data structures of any kind. There is a deep emotional reliance on declarative APIs to do that for them. This is a skill super foundational to programming in any language learned from experience, but in modern JS the reliance on tools fails to foster those very necessary skills.

This is a challenge to describe to software developers who have no experience writing original software, such as without a framework, because they have no frame of reference to consider alternative points of view. People might find it challenging to explain modern astronomy to tribal people living in a jungle, for example, because the necessary intermediate education is absent.

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

#155

Post by whearyou »

noduerme wrote: post #153
matrix87 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech and don't want to go deeper than the bare minimum required by their job. The average day-to-day work is menial, for example investigating a production issue. That isn't something that people get into as a hobby, that's work in a very unromantic sense. Maybe having good systems backgroun…

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

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

#156

Post by voidnap »

ljm wrote: post #64
babyshake wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The more experience you rack up in your career, the more likely you are to walk away from jobs with laborious hiring processes too. I will politely decline any opportunity that requires me to do multiple code and architecture tests and several other lengthy meetings, usually spread out over the course of months, because it’s not worth my time to jump through so many hoops. It signals to me that there is already a ten…

It isn't about experience in your career as much as just being marketable.

I'm being a little pedantic, but it's a meaningful distinction because marketing yourself to a HR department is a skill to be worked at for some.

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

#157

Post by sershe »

foofie wrote: post #149
austin-cheney wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.

> You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. What technology or data structure do you think developers don't understand if they work on React projects? Isn't it silly to claim any person is suddenly incompetent just because they are assigned to a project which uses a particular framework?

It's not that. I used to work on web apps about 20 years ago, and we created some involved interfaces using hand-coded cross-browser AJAX and DOM (it was before jquery even existed; iirc I remember when prototype.js came out and it was very exciting). They were really fast. It took a fair amount of skill and perseverance to do that, and that filtered out a lot of the developers.

These days, the people who could do the above can instead do it better (and in much less time) with jQuery. However, the people who previously couldn't do it at all in any reasonable amount of time, can now also do it with jQuery... poorly.

There's a middle (the people who would struggle with the low level but are proficient enough to do a good job with jQuery) but they are, in my impression... not a majority.

I believe that's why most sites (especially non-tech e.g. Chase bank and Amex) and many Electron apps (Teams, Evernote, ...) are such bloated, slow, glitchy monstrosities. Well that, combined with what the top comment said about the money

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

#159

Post by vorador »

macca321 wrote: post #151
austin-cheney wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.

Yes, real developers know the quirks of ie6 Vs Firefox 3

Back in my day you needed a PhD in CSS to center a div vertically. We used to pore over the freshest W3C drafts with excitement. You don't see that anymore since jQuery.

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

#160

Post by Yizahi »

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 see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint." (c) Hesiod
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