Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs? • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by nsxwolf » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #194

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…

30 years ago you could do a lot with 8-16 mb ram and no internet connection. Nowadays... unplug a modern computer from the internet and it's mostly useless. Want to write a simple document, using a basic word preocessor? You're going to need at least 1GB ram, mate. VisualBasic allowed writing GUI-enabled applications that would be essentially be standalone, shipped as executable files sized at (usually) less than a m…

Comments like yours make me hopeful that I actually am an exceedingly valuable engineer. I have just been unable to convince companies of this fact.

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

#232

Post by snarkyturtle » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 5:14 PM UTC

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.

lol those are the people who can't let go of their beloved, outdated stacks, no way can they develop as well as the new kids on the block

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

#233

Post by runjake » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 5:15 PM UTC

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.

I still marvel our younger IT workers when I mention that in the 1990s, a very large percentage of sysadmins could not only program, but knew C and regularly wrote ad hoc tools in C (or Perl. Perl? What's Perl?).

These days, if you're a sysadmin who can program, you're considered some sort of wizard.

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

#234

Post by seanmcdirmid » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 5:17 PM UTC

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…

I guess you are calling Carmack a bad programmer?

But I agree that the layoffs probably aren't based on programmer quality. When big companies lay off, they generally select products, and if you are unlucky enough to be working on that product...off you go. Merit-based layoffs are more stealthy and continuous, those are definitely being ramped up now, but probably not in the numbers companies need to cut due to overhiring or hiring in the wrong areas.

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

#235

Post by Havoc » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 5:31 PM UTC

End of ZIRP.

But also sizable in-flood of bootcamp crowd

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

#236

Post by AtlasBarfed » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 5:49 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #118

I think it's a combination of things and will vary by company. For the largest companies, it's likely to some extent to put downward pressure on salaries in the market. For others it can be like the Twitter case were they hired way too many devs for what was needed and that simply makes a bigger communications mess not more productivity. For others still it's outside pressure to become financially stable or income po…

IMO, what has happened is that big tech has realized they are monopolies or cartels, and the ethos of these companies as innovators has fundamentally died. Because Facebook's Metaverse, Google's multiple ventures in self-driving and other alphabet things, etc, have all failed miserably, particularly from the investment payoff.

Facebook and Google in the last 10 years went from usable worthwhile sites to ad-dominated monstrosities, and their revenue exploded. Likely the beancounters have taken total control, and recognized that worker salaries for all the worker bee tasks in the big tech companies are vastly overpriced.

This executive management decision is the underpinning of Musk's takeover and destruction of Twitter. It probably would have succeeded if he wasn't insane.

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

#237

Post by AtlasBarfed » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

yangcheng wrote: post #135

lubujackson wrote: post #129

One reason I think not given enough weight is that it is now acceptable to do layoffs. These huge companies accrue a ton of dead weight and dead-end projects that they would love to flush routinely, but 5 years ago their stock prices would halve if they suddenly laid off 10% of their work force because of bad optics. Now it has become acceptable for all the various reasons so any company that wants to clean house is…

Agree, twitter layoff set an example that it's ok to layoff. Then all FAANG followed

Musk's bet, that every executive watched like a hawk, was to fire a whole bunch of "spoiled expensive developers" who would flap their wings about the sky falling (their perspective).

If Musk simply wanted to cut costs and get Twitter to the core of its profitability because the company had pretty much peaked, then it was a valid business plan in the Gordon Gecko realm.

But Elon talked out of all parts of his mouth nonstop, said he wanted vision and features but fired and hired for maintenance. It's weird that all the other companies too that as direction for their layoffs.

Executives were appalled at their lack of power in COVID too. I think the layoffs are an attempt to gain authority, I don't even think it is about the dollars and cents. Elites don't actually care about how rich they are after a certain point, what they care about is the gap between them and the "plebes", and the developer plebes were far too uppity in their view.

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

#238

Post by nsxwolf » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 6:01 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #167

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

I've heard people describe the corporate travel platform I work on described as a "simple CRUD app" so I'm not sure I believe this is true about almost any software company.

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

#239

Post by dijit » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 6:06 PM UTC

runjake wrote: post #233

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.

I still marvel our younger IT workers when I mention that in the 1990s, a very large percentage of sysadmins could not only program, but knew C and regularly wrote ad hoc tools in C (or Perl. Perl? What's Perl?). These days, if you're a sysadmin who can program, you're considered some sort of wizard.

Senior sysadmins in the late 2000's knew how to code for sure, usually perl and some C (though not to the level you'd want them writing code full time).

More fancy sysadmins who were "modern" would learn Ruby.

The issue with "sysadmin" was that it suffered an inflation treadmill, what used to be a very difficult job where you would need to understand programming, debugging, compilers, OS design, distributed systems and so forth became a title for senior helpdesk staff; who, naturally, did not know those things.

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

#240

Post by dijit » Fri, Jan 12, 2024, 6:11 PM UTC

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…

This is great, I find your opinion hilarious.

Yeah, Windows 95 BSOD'd a lot; however the people developing it were doing it for the very first time, largely with single-digits of megabytes of memory to work with and with a CPU that not only contained bugs[0] but was so slow that every single operation would take milliseconds of wall time[1].

It's not comparable, it's almost to the level that rendering a character on my screen right now consumes more CPU cycles than the entire operating system would have done in a day.

PHP was good, actually, but it's borne of its time- it's easy to use 20:20 vision of history to say it's a bad design when fundamentally:

A) it solved problems

B) it was working with the best of human knowledge in language design at the time

C) it remains one of the most well optimised web languages to this day, even a variant from the era would easily outperform any django webapp, I'd put money on this.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, good abstractions and lessons from these periods are what make our software so robust today. We made it a lot slower though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

[1]: a 60Hz CPU executes an clock tick once every 16ms, Pentium 1 was the most popular CPU when Windows 95 released, and it had a clock speed of 60/66MHz; it was the first to be able to do two instructions per clock, meaning it had a best case scenario of 7.5ms assuming the 66MHz option was available.