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Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

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131–140 of 236 posts

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#131
post #2

I did a lot of driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work, etc when junior in the job market after graduating near the top of my class with strong internship experience from a top 10 engineering college. Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there. Things may never look up, but when they do, I've found a lot…

> people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances. Isn’t there some quote about old men planting trees whose shade they’ll never know? Was that just a myth or did those generations actually exist?

The vast majority of trees are planted because the value of a sapling ismore than a seedling. It doesn't matter that you will never know the shade, and that the sapling is worthless for industrial purposes, you can profit quite quickly.

To be more explicit, the time value of something closer is higher than one further, so you can actually induce under even a hypercapitalist society any arbitrarily long delay investment with 0 'real' payoff until the end.

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#132
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t look to the white house for solutions. Instead of discouraging offshoring, they’re threatening the physical safety of highly skilled foreigners. Those people have been the glue that holds the US economy together since, what, WWII? If the US is no longer an attractive destination, they’ll set up shop overseas. Fast forward ten years, and the jobs they create will definitely not be in the US. Concretely: Sil…

All that needs to change. The glue to the US economy needs to be Americans. We have the best universities in the world but we decide to invest in foreign students instead of our own for wage reasons.

It just so obviously doesn’t, and even more obviously won’t. A pool of 9 billion > 340 million is a simple, hard reality that has trivially curb stomped any and all opposition since the dawning of the human race with the only variable being time-to-acceptance.

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#133
post #63

Commenting anon, because i'm very concerned about how we are leaving the industry for our children, and how little executives care about the future. 1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across ti…

>While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across timezones. compensation consultants dont care about that, they care about mean wage metrics 100% this. What you save in dollars is spent in time. Not just more documentation requirements, not just more meetings, not just changing your schedule t…

> What you save in dollars is spent in time.

If you're on salary, that costs nothing to the business, so they don't care until it starts to impact them...

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. > ...which is literally never the correct answer. But it's the answer chosen all the time. If "entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out," some (usually distributed) group made the decision to burn those new-grads plans to the ground. Why should they be insulated from similar decisions? Working "to burn it all the fuck down to the ground" is just…

You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.

> You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.

Oh, I totally understand that. HN is full of workers LARPing as tycoons; advocating for policies, attitudes, and ideology that are most likely going to end up being harmful to their own interests.

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#135

Most of this is not occurring due to AI or offshoring, that's just what's told to investors. In reality, it's the macroeconomic climate that has shifted since a few years ago, namely Section 174 changes for amortization of R&D expenditures, overhiring during covid, and higher Fed rates.

Section 174 was very unpopular when it came out and many people raised the alarm over it (although that seems to have simmered down over time.) If hiring was impacted by that, a lot of execs would be very vocal about it to increase public pressure on getting it reversed, no?

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#136
post #77

Commenting anon, because i'm very concerned about how we are leaving the industry for our children, and how little executives care about the future. 1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across ti…

Software Engineers need to get involved politically and demand regulations that systems that are critical for national security be developed by residents of the US on US soil by actual people with the right qualifications.

Qualifications are an interesting one, because they seem to be something that gets very little regard the development space.

Other areas like IT security or systems/network administration have tons of different qualifications/certifications that you can take, aligned to specific roles and career paths. Whether they're actually any good is another question - but at least there is some kind of structure there. And there are some attempts being made to further formalise it, with bodies like the UK Cyber Security Council establishing a professional register and chartership status.

But I don't think I've never met a developer who's talked about any programming-related certifications that they have. I'm sure that there must be some out there, but they don't seem to be widely used or respected.

And I suspect that any attempt to formalise the industry and require people to get certified to specific standards would result in a lot of pushback.

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#137
post #27

It's not AI it's offshoring. This is what I've seen and heard throughout my network. Relentless cost cutting is sold to public and internal staff as AI productivity gains. But it's just on-shore staff reductions. Moving support, design, development and product management away from customers and to the lowest bidder will work for a while. But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.

> But eventually it won't and the pendulum will swing back in the other direction.

The direction it will most likely swing is that legacy companies making poor decisions will be out-competed by new companies making better decisions.

Maybe those new companies will be from the US and the EU.

Maybe they won't.

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#138
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This used to be addressed by the fact that people were loyal to companies - so it was in the company's interest to spend years training them up investing in them, with the knowledge that they might get decades of productive work out of them afterwards. One of my grandparents joined a company as an apprentice as 16, got trained by them, and then worked there for 40 years until retirement. But nowadys with the culture…

> This used to be addressed by the fact that people were loyal to companies In my observation, employers stopped being loyal to employees long before employees stopped being loyal to employers.

I'm sure you can find plenty of example of both. But TBH, I don't think it really matters which side you try and point the finger at after decades of decline - the point is that the employee/employer relationship has fundamentally changed, and it's hard to see it ever changing back.

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#139
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor working environments? You mean the office is sometimes too noisy or too cold or the coffee runs out?

I would describe a poor office environment as an open one. Cubicles are much better, and offices a little better than that. These are not just unproductive environments, they're unpleasant. Having to be "on" for 8 hours a day because you don't even get a vague idea of privacy is exhausting.

Have you ever worked in a factory or restaurant or construction job site? I understand that some office environments aren't great for knowledge work but complaints about poor working conditions are a bit overblown.

Re: Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out

#140
post #45

Commenting anon, because i'm very concerned about how we are leaving the industry for our children, and how little executives care about the future. 1. anything we used to give to entry-level we now give to offshore workers, typically in Asia. While mean wages metrics look great, the cost savings are an illusion because we spend twice as much time communicating and tacking back and forth to the final answer across ti…

It's not offshoring as much as people think. If you look at statistics for typical IT offshoring and near shoring markets like India, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria they have been in crisis since 2022. Only to show a slight rebound in Q1 of 2025.

Can you point me towards some stats for these please? Are you looking at consultancy type companies or subsidiaries that hire locally?
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