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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?

#311

Post by hnthrowaway0328 »

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…

Maybe it's just beneficial to move web developers to a different catalog? So you have the web developers who mostly chase new or cool frames/tools, prefer dealing with human problems than machines problems, and other developers.

Does it make sense?

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

#313

Post by fulladder »

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…

Around 2015, I read an article saying that computer science was the most popular major for Harvard undergraduates. I found it quite surprising. I would think that a Harvard student could basically do anything with their life that they want: medicine, law, business, politics, anything they set their minds to.

Why, I wondered, would they want to enter this strange industry with all our odd characters and personalities? To me it's like, this is a place where you're going to compete to fix or improve something in the Linux kernel in order for Linus to swear at you and publicly humiliate you in an immutable ledger called the LKML. (Welcome to tech!) Even now, I don't really understand how this could have become the most popular major at Harvard.

I think things will sort themselves out in time. A person might start a career with little inherent interest but stumble into something that excites them and excel at it. Or a person might work in technology for a while, decide it's not right for them, and move on to something else. We'll have to see where it goes.

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

#314

Post by deterministic »

kcplate wrote: post #281
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…

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 br…

Couldn't agree more. 30+ years of experience here. 10% of developers do 90% of the work. 10% of developers are so bad that productivity for the team would improve if you fired them.

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

#315

Post by lm28469 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #238
lm28469 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well it for sure isn't the Apollo guidance computer
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