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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?

#181

Post by sdf4j »

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.

That's nonsense. Your typical developer had to deal with all those things in the past maybe, but is no more than specialization knowledge.

You don't care about how many ticks you need to MOV with indirect addressing when you are developing Django.

Feels like complaining because someone that is not a Django developer doesn't know how proxy model inheritance works.

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

#183

Post by democracy »

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…

Nah, not true by any means

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

#184

Post by democracy »

Fervicus wrote: post #174
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…

Developers who were building atrocities with VB and PHP 20 years ago are the seasoned vets that you would want on a team today.

Haha not really, only as BAs or manager's maybe...

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

#185

Post by democracy »

zb10948 wrote: post #170
caeril wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ask your VB veteran about the same topics ))

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

#186

Post by 3vidence »

theturtletalks wrote: post #110
allturtles wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem to me to explain why the layoffs are happening now. AFAIK Google has never done a true layoff until last January in the entire history of the company. Now it seems to be already routine. As someone who grew up in the 80s-90s, my historical sense of layoffs is that they were a response to economic hard times, whether industry-wide or company-specific. Companies laid off when profits fell or disappear…

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.

I work at a FAANG, I can't speak for all companies divisions but I can pretty comfortably say that I have seen next to no evidence that AI tooling has become so productive that we "need" less engineers.

Actually it's somehow kind of the inverse, any AI related code has been subpar which has been putting a lot of stress on the core systems in terms of reviews and performance.

From my personal perspective, things overall seemed more productive pre ChatGPT for FAANG level companies.

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

#188

Post by democracy »

sph wrote: post #120
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…

Explains why tools like Copilot seems to be so hyped, yet I as an old school developer really can't find a place where it would help me. I guess most people really benefit from a tool to autogenerate an Erathostenes sieve in Python or a fizzbuzz function in Prolog or yet another React Router boilerplate. EDIT: a more nuanced version of this comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38965283

Copilot is great to do boilerplate, it guesses and completes code correctly most of the time

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

#189

Post by democracy »

bionsystem wrote: post #147
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'm scared about the skill level of some of my coworkers. They are 30+ yo and I hear them debating about whether or not docker needs vt-d activated, if .msi packages can be customized, if terraform is useful for deploying on a single esxi.... All things that can be foind out with 1s of googling they will talk about it for 5 to 15min in meetings (formal or not) and the conclusion is always "we will have to test this".

Best sarcasm is when u r not quite sure .. ))

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

#190

Post by xkqd »

bionsystem wrote: post #147
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'm scared about the skill level of some of my coworkers. They are 30+ yo and I hear them debating about whether or not docker needs vt-d activated, if .msi packages can be customized, if terraform is useful for deploying on a single esxi.... All things that can be foind out with 1s of googling they will talk about it for 5 to 15min in meetings (formal or not) and the conclusion is always "we will have to test this".

There’s a decent chance they want to chit-chat a bit. I’ll occasionally strike up a conversation I know I could avoid by googling, just to have a conversation.
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