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

281–290 of 315 posts

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

#281

Post by kcplate »

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…

Your comment is basically akin to complaining how rough and slow it would take a person with a machete to trailblaze a path through a dense forest as opposed to how long it takes a person to travel the beautiful paved road that was built on top of that trailblazed path. Somebody had to thrash through all the shit for that superhighway you are traveling on my friend.

I was around back then. We didn’t have a magical browser box that you could type a couple of key terms into to get a thousand articles, code samples, philosophical discussions from hundreds of smarter people than you who have already solved your problem a dozen different ways and got to chose, and improve one. You didn’t have hundreds of languages, libraries, and frameworks where you could selectively pick the right tool. Back then you had your problem and you experimented and invented until you solved it generally with the one or two tools that were available at the time.

And with the benefit of nearly 40 years in tech…I can attest to the OP’s opinion that the quality of the average tech worker has nosedived since then.

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

#282

Post by Shatnerz »

foofie wrote: post #143
Shatnerz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a normal distribution, like lets say a large population, the mean, median, and mode are all equal. I don't see a problem with the quote.

The set of people who pass the hiring bar at companies like Google are not modelled as the normal distribution of the average person you come across in the grocery store. Companies like Google are not known for hiring morons. It is a self-aggrandizing dumb comparison, and should be dismissed as such. It reads as a desperate attempt to rationalize away these layoffs as something that only applies to others.

The quote from George Carlin, a comedian, is about the general population. The quote itself is from "Doin' It Again / Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" a special in 1990 and predates Google.

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

#283

Post by mortallywounded »

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

> "those are the people who can't let go of their beloved, outdated stacks"

... said the nextjs/vercel/graphql/whateverishotthisweek developer. Ironically, your stack will be outdated next week.

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

#286

Post by Ancalagon »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #133
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…

There’s also just no process anymore. Product managers can’t even be bothered to fill out more than a title line in a ticket. Burndown charts? Ha who cares about points on the tickets.

Is this true at many places now? I thought it was just mine...

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

#287

Post by Ancalagon »

3vidence wrote: post #186
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.

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 overa…

OK, thank you for saying this.

Whats interesting is I think there might be a disconnect between AI capabilities and tech executives. I'm guessing executives believe AI will catch up to be good enough to multiply engineers productivity say 120% within the next few years - hence the 20% layoffs everywhere.

Maybe this will be the case. But for me on the ground its producing a lot more work. I now have to code review everything starting at a very high level working my way down and there's just so much MORE code now.

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

#288

Post by StreetChief »

The federal reserve raised interest rates to put people out of work and it was successful. Rising wages were a threat to corporate profitablity in the form of "inflation." The quality of workers has not dropped, but the quality of work products has, mainly due to cost cutting and short sightedness.
Post reply on HN