131–140 of 160 posts
Because of the downturn, I wonder how many people have given up on their careers at Tech? How many more will respond to the call of a different professional life that pays less, but that will be more fulfilling? Even as recent as yesterday I heard a past-colleague tell me "maybe Tech isn't for me, after all. I'll try my hand at this other thing."
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No, I don't think that's what happend. If I remember correctly, he reduced the content moderation team, which led to an increase in hate speech, misinformation and CSAM. That's why big advertisers left and revenues crashed. He then told those big advertisers to piss off and refocused his advertising business on smaller customers, which is why he doesn't need so many ad sales people any more. Perhaps he should hire so…
The first line is the narrative of the MSM that's in bed with government censors and hate that it's no longer controlled by political interests. It is also directly contradicted by independent studies commissioned by Twitter. But speaking of "misinformation", people tend to parrot what they hear whether it's true or not. Thankfully on Twitter that is less effective, thanks to community notes. Advertisers leaving is a…
You may ot even be wrong about "peer pressure", but that's how so much of the rest of the world works. Part of the downturn isnt based on economic logic but peer pressure: "BigCo is sizing down so we should too!". The aforementioned brand perception is the exact same way, but based on the consumers over the company. The Stock market as a whole is literally based on speculation.
As long as stuff is run by peoople, people will influence other people to make decisions based more on gut feelings than raw facts.
Because of the downturn, I wonder how many people have given up on their careers at Tech? How many more will respond to the call of a different professional life that pays less, but that will be more fulfilling? Even as recent as yesterday I heard a past-colleague tell me "maybe Tech isn't for me, after all. I'll try my hand at this other thing."
Tangential to the article since that was a voluntary departure, but this is absolutely happening, yes. My partner decided to get "into tech" in ~2018. Her reason more or less amounted to looking at me and determining "it's a cushy job that pays very well." For a while, I tried pointing her to various sources to start learning a bit about software development and programming; there's no barrier to installing PyCharm C…
1. I don't like the implication that junior = non-passionate. I'd even argue the opposite. Those new and hungry are most likely to be exploited and take whatever over the grizzled vet who's long had reality slap them in the face. There will always be non-passionate people but well: that falling passion seems to correlate quite well with the falling passion of companies to even pretend they want to better the world. Tit for tat.
2. The downturn is very much not correlated with passion. I've seen some 9-5'ers survive several rounds of layoffs and I've seen some of the hardest working engineers with almost a decade of experience slashed to the surprise of everyone. You look further in industry and you see some vets of even 15,20+ years cut. This isn't some calculated move to "drain the swamp". As usual, corporate is throwing darts on the board instead of seeing what each engineer brings to the table. If you're unlucky enough to be working on the wrong product at the wrong time (which at this point is just anything non-AI. Nothing is safe), it doesn't matter how talented you are.
The games industry is very much full of underpaid, underappreciated passion and is being hit just as hard as the rest of tech, so passion clearly isn't the answer to job security.
Because of the downturn, I wonder how many people have given up on their careers at Tech? How many more will respond to the call of a different professional life that pays less, but that will be more fulfilling? Even as recent as yesterday I heard a past-colleague tell me "maybe Tech isn't for me, after all. I'll try my hand at this other thing."
In my case, I dove deeper into tech, but I love this stuff. Since no one wants to work with a greyhair (no beard), I just do it for free, for folks that couldn't come close to affording the kind of work that I can do.
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>"until I left in late 2016 to join Fuchsia, largely because I was impatient to develop in Rust" Shows how different people are. I only care what I am developing. I have my preferences but if generally language is the last thing I care about bar some pathological cases.
I used to think that way until I ran into one of the pathological cases (Ruby) and now I'll think very carefully about which job offers to accept based on the language(s) involved.
Me, after Ruby: “fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.”
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I used to think that way until I ran into one of the pathological cases (Ruby) and now I'll think very carefully about which job offers to accept based on the language(s) involved.
Me, before Ruby: “languages are languages, I can usually pick up what I need to in order to contribute.” Me, after Ruby: “fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.”
Just like you shouldn't be so open-minded that your brain falls out, a language shouldn't be so dynamic that you can't tell anything about a line of code until you're in the middle of executing it. Maybe it's great for cranking out a CRUD web app in a weekend, but not so great for a product that's had 300 developers writing code for 10 years.
In all seriousness, career changes are very hard. I hope the best for him.
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It's not most people or even most people in tech obviously. But I know a fair number of people in tech, especially post-pandemic, who reassessed things and decided they had enough money and really weren't enjoying their jobs any longer so they moved on.
I know a number of people that were true believers until the the pandemic. I think that as tech workers, we are generally really isolated from a lot of real problems people face. I remember having sick family members, kids that were out of school with nowhere to go and nothing to do and I could watch the weight of boardom and loneliness weighing on them and the additional responsibilities of having the kitchen stocke…
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> Tech for tech's sake helps nobody If it wasn’t for science, art and tech for their own sake we would still be on the trees gathering bananas
Probably a true statement, in that those folks made contributions, but also misleading, since technology specifically, usually has a goal or outcome in mind. A problem to solve. Like let's assume one of the first technological innovations on that long arc from banana-gathering to whatever we're doing now , was somebody inventing a better way to gather bananas. Or a substitute for bananas. Or a way to grow your own ba…
sure, all ambitions have a goal. I think the point is that not all goals have some economic goal in mind. The original blogging platform and internet as a structure did not have the goal of monetizing writing. And we're honestly seeing the consequences of attempts and failures to try and monetize such stuff on the net.
Maybe there was prestige, or research grants, or whatnot, but it's clear that there's many pieces of tech who's goals wasn't to sell off to a billionaire and retire in style. I'd call such research "tech for tech's sake".
I always wanted to program, to create great things, got really good at it, but most of the time I was overtaken by folks playing politics that only used tech as a stepping stone to something they always wanted to do but only tech gave them financial resources to do that.
I feel lucky and privileged to be in that position. I get to do what I love and get paid very generously. If it wasn’t for “those people” or for tech being so lucrative to attract them, I would probably still do the same but struggle to make ends meet. So I’m very grateful that tech is what it is today.