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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?

#201

Post by democracy »

foofie wrote: post #139
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 don't think your take holds water. It reads as a mix between self-aggrandizing and ladder-pulling, typically pinned on the so-called boomer mindset. For the past 15 years you have seen universities producing graduates that are far better prepared for a cloud world in every single aspect of the business, and these graduates s…

"could land a job by passing yourself as a "programmer" which meant you knew the syntax of a programming language such as Pascal or Cobol"

Never and nowhere

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

#203

Post by vidro3 »

mixdup wrote: post #94

I'm convinced that it's because the recession that has been predicted for the past 3 years has not happened, and now we're in the election year and it must happen. The layoffs will continue until we get the macro outcome we're looking for It's the only explanation for companies that are at all time highs in revenue, profit, and stock value to be laying off double digit percentages of their employees

Why does an election year indicate a recession?

Rather, who precisely wants a recession now, in your opinion?

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

#204

Post by vidro3 »

anoxor wrote: post #3

The majority of wall street has accepted that there will be a recession, and interest rates are triple what they were a few years ago.

They've been saying "rescession soon" for 2 years. Wasn't gdp growth like 5% last quarter? Doesn't indicate a recession to me.

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

#205

Post by atraac »

gniv wrote: post #192
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. Not my experience. I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar. Based on anecdotes, I have another theory. The people that build the systems got old and are unwilling to work the crazy hours. The new folks are hired to work on maintaining these systems, and…

Not arguing over original point of quality of tech workers but...

> I've conducted 300+ interviews at FAANG in the last 15 years and haven't seen a meaningful drop in the hiring bar.

Are FAANG interviews these days an indicator of anything besides being good at FAANG interviews? Some of the best people I worked with that brought real value would never pass big tech leetcode interview...

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

#206

Post by graemep »

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.

Not 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe that level of knowledge was common in the 70s or 80s.

It is not possible either now - there is just too much complexity for people to know all layers of a stack. Look at how much more complex just a CPU is. Transistor counts in CPUs have gone up by five or six orders of magnitude since the 8 bit era. We now have all kinds of complex optimisations like out of order execution.

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

#208

Post by whiplash451 »

pera wrote: post #196
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP left a fair number of qualifiers in their post which you have conveniently ignored so that you could cherry pick an example of people being laid off from roles perceived to be comparatively hard / prestigious. This is a bad-faith argument. If you disagree with what they’re clearly trying to convey, and want to make a case against it, I’d be keen to hear one without cherry-picking some compiler engineering layoffs…

If you feel my argument is in bad faith it would be useful if you could provide evidence for OP's opinions. I personally find the comment quite uninsightful, unfounded and specially disrespectful towards those affected by this new wave of layoffs.

cqqxo4zV46cp is commenting about the way you reason about the topic, not whether the OP is 100% right, even less about the emotional aspect of things.

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

#209

Post by drewmaker78 »

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…

[dead]

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

#210

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

Having survived through many layoffs, this is 100% not the case. The modern layoffs don't even seem to consider whether or not the person was a top contributor or sme. They are done to reduce cost and look good to the board/investors/whoever.

I'm pretty sure I survive because my tco is probably more on the humble side but I'm far from cheap.

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