Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 315 posts

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

#251

Post by Fervicus »

snarkyturtle wrote: post #232
Fervicus wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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lol those are the people who can't let go of their beloved, outdated stacks, no way can they develop as well as the new kids on the block

Yes, you are right. There are plenty of those too in that group sadly. But my point still stands - most of the smart, up to do date, experienced devs who have "seen it all" were probably writing god awful VB6 and PHP code when they were teenagers.

The "new kids on the block" were the ones I saw that decided that statically typed languages suck and dynamic is the way forward, only to discover how static types help and now they are bolting on static types to their dynamic stack.

I'll also say that I am not trying to generalize the newer generation as bad programmers; I have worked with plenty of very smart younger devs. It's just much more harder to come across them now in a sea of mediocre bootcamp devs.

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

#252

Post by ric2b »

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…

They are satire:

> The "Law" was first formulated as ten rules in Sandemose's satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks

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

#253

Post by mooreds »

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.

> The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year.

What about short term interest rates (in the USA) going from close to 0 to 5 percent over the past 2 years?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFEDTARU

Even if you have no debt, your customers might. And your stock returns are being compared to a risk free rate that has increased rapidly.

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

#254

Post by ric2b »

bennyelv wrote: post #146
kypro wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of your average tech worked has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. It's definitely got worse over the last ~10 years, but the pandemic era hiring from 2020-2021 took it to new level of bad at many companies. Anyone who had done some basic coding was getting hired at a great salary in 2021, and these individuals are still around today – some now calling themselves "senior developers". But I co…

I have evidence to support this - I lost people from my team who were offered "senior" or "lead" developer roles when they were nowhere near the level required for that kind of job. The level they were at was already a a stretch that they were growing into. ...and with a salary boost to match. Now in the UK salaries have flatlined and the number of jobs is way down, and this no longer seems to be a problem.

It was a problem that workers were getting a bigger share of the profit?

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

#255

Post by mooreds »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #246
yangcheng wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except Twitter is trying to hire a ton of people right now... I think they need more engineers pretty bad and Elon knows it.

Wow that is a pretty long list: https://careers.twitter.com/en

Wonder if all of them are real?

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

#256

Post by mooreds »

akmarinov wrote: post #124
rogerthis wrote: post #5

I've seen these answers: - excess hiring during the pandemic; - interest rates raised; - salaries too high; - cut in remote work (to ease return to office later); - some weird thing coming; - AI; (I could replace all those semi-colons with question marks.) (Edit: formatting)

What’s the weird thing?

The recession we've been expecting for the past year?

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

#257

Post by tensility »

pi-e-sigma wrote: post #24
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…

Even if we assume that what you think is true then it is still solely the companies' fault. Because if the prospective employees are so shit why would you hire them in the first place?

Because that's how managers promote themselves...by hiring.

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

#258

Post by Communitivity »

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 agree with the opinion, but not the timeframe. I would say the quality has nosedived over the last 8 years, based on my experience as the tech interviewer for potential new hire interviews across the last 12 years on different projects.

The last 4 years I've gotten comments from co-interviewers of 'you ask the hard questions', 'you are tough'. These are in response to questions such as 'What are your thoughts on composition vs inheritance in object oriented design', 'What are the arguments for Java as a better language than Javascript? How about the other way around?', 'What's a progressive web app, what aspects of React and what react-related libs help with creating one?'. These were all directly relevant to the positions being interviewed, and some of those were for senior engineer positions.

These are questions that I think should be answerable by any senior frontend engineer, and most senior software engineers.

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

#260

Post by Communitivity »

bnchrch wrote: post #244
caeril wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All abstractions leak like a sieve. Being a developer at ANY layer of the stack without knowing what's happening underneath you is default gross incompetence and a recipe for eventual disaster. Are we cool with surgeons not knowing what mitochondria are, or how cells work? All you gotta know is where to put the scalpel, bro. I'm sure it will work out just fine.

This is laughably over blown. I don’t expect my doctor to know the component parts of atoms. Nor do I need them to. I don’t expect a designer to know how a pixel works. At some point in the stack we have to draw a line and say this level of detailed knowledge is not generally useful to the majority. In terms of generic web development today, I would be fine at drawing that line at low level system concerns (memory al…

I recently had a conversation with a senior React dev about Redux with years of React experience. I mentioned during a dry run that you can clear the store, if a local storage store (default), with localStorage.clear() from the dev console. Response: "Cool, I didn't know that.". This guy is good at creating UIs, but that's an example of 'How this works' knowledge I'd of expected him to have. It's a pervasive epidemic of learn just what you need to ship, instead of learn what you need to ship a quality product and hone the tools in your toolbox.
Post reply on HN