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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?

#161

Post by blurbleblurble »

climatekid wrote: post #92
blurbleblurble wrote: post #82

The US Fed monetary policy has everything to do with it. Money is especially valuable right now. As well as the proliferation of new "AI" tools that increase worker productivity by 10x-1000x. Between the Fed tightening demand and the AI tools simultaneously heating up supply (productive output), it's no surprise these layoffs are happening.

> increase worker productivity by 10x-1000x. Tell me you're not an engineer without telling me you're not an engineer

Tell me you're not using LLMs to code without telling me you're not using LLMs to code

¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

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

#162

Post by pera »

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…

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years

I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP.

Meanwhile today it was announced that Google decided to lay off several compiler engineers working on LLVM, but sure, please tell me more about those low quality bootcamp kiddos that are ruining everything...

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

#163

Post by gnz11 »

eps wrote: post #134
metabro wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t mesh with my experience. I work at big tech co that went through massive rounds of layoffs. The criteria was a mixed bag. A lot of it was just entire products and associated teams being dismantled. Also, one can make the argument the other way as well. Tools and infra have gotten good enough that the work doesn’t require the “dedicated nerds”. So let’s get rid of the highest paid engineers as that’s the…

These are two sides of the same medal. What the GP said was how the bloat accumulated and why the professional quality went down. What you are saying is how they are trimming the bloat. It's not possible to trim by skill alone, because it would leave all teams and products understuffed. But the bloat is there and it is insane.

This assumes "professional quality" was somehow higher in the past when it's really just looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. There was plenty of crap and even bloated software written in the past.

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

#164

Post by frays »

I think that tech companies know they can get away with this now and are not scared to do it again (see Google, Amazon, etc).

Previously employees at tech companies were put on a pedestal with unbelievable perks and treatment. Now companies like Google can start to become more like conventional companies when all the other companies around them are becoming like that too.

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

#165

Post by anacrolix »

Mouse47 wrote: post #84
forward1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin

That only applies to the median, not the average. Every time I see this quote I can't help but think that. Funny tho

I always point that out too. And someone always points out that with distributions average and median are the same. That still doesn't make it right. What's worse is it's a quote about intelligence, so you would think it would use the correct word. Maybe that's the joke, it's summer dumbed down and smug in the knowledge that everyone that hears it thinks "thank god I'm above average!"

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

#166

Post by jppittma »

janalsncm wrote: post #113
theturtletalks wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year. I find it odd that everyone thinks Uber’s end game is automated cars, but no one seems to be talking about how tech companies end game is automated coders. LLMs are not even close, but what’s to say internally, they don’t have something that works. Or they have enough data to show they need fewer workers since they can leverage AI now.

It’s a fair hypothesis but is it true? Are companies actually replacing engineers with ChatGPT? I haven’t heard anything about this.

No, they're replacing compiler engineers with data scientists.

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

#167

Post by lm28469 »

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…

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years.

The average tech job requires much less skills though. It's not like we're all working on rockets or the building blocks of the internet. A good 70% of tech jobs today are crud api and basic web/mobile apps

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

#168

Post by maxlamb »

vorador wrote: post #159
macca321 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha! Reminds me of this sketch https://youtu.be/NAkAMDeo_NM?

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

#169

Post by caeril »

pera wrote: post #162
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…

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google…

The LLVM layoffs notwithstanding, OP is still largely correct in general. Your typical developer could solder, knew how the CPU works, knew roughly how many clocks would retire a MOV, ADD, MUL, etc, was cognizant of wait states, understood cache lines, protection rings, instruction decode, memory mapping, etc.

Try asking a typical Django or React developer today what a cache line even is.

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

#170

Post by zb10948 »

caeril wrote: post #169
pera wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google…

The LLVM layoffs notwithstanding, OP is still largely correct in general. Your typical developer could solder, knew how the CPU works, knew roughly how many clocks would retire a MOV, ADD, MUL, etc, was cognizant of wait states, understood cache lines, protection rings, instruction decode, memory mapping, etc. Try asking a typical Django or React developer today what a cache line even is.

Yeah the OP is quite correct. Ask your generic web developer about nuances of HTTP, SSL or even networking in general.
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