141–150 of 187 posts
you should never have allowed yourself to get sucked into corporate work. its the most common mistake that people make
Curse my foolish desire for food and shelter!
The tech industry was always a little slimy but it's out of hand now. I've lost too much respect for the role of innovation in this current version of our society. We've passed a point where it's used against people more than for people. Day after day here watching people with no substantive activity on their account spam their endless shovelware slop projects, I just can't feel like I want to be a part of this anymo…
"Used against people." Those are good words. I am also deeply tired of that. I'm absolutely guilty of being one of those idiots that still thinks we could have nice things and products that work for reasonable prices if we just cared a little.
Come to academia. I don't mean "become a professor"; I mean be a software developer at a college or university. They need them in large teams (IT department of a larger university) down to solo devs (working for a single department at a small liberal arts college—this is where I've been for 15 years). It's true that you won't get the same level of pay—frankly, I've been woefully underpaid—but, by and large, they're n…
He was forced into retirement after half a decade of what sounded like tortured politics, gross mismanagement and fiscal waste.
Many times they said they wanted something, he would do the legwork, collect requirements, and put up preliminary PoC, it would be approved, but then they scrap it at a cost of hundreds of thousands only 6 months later and then go with the 2nd outside vendor at a greater cost doing half of what was asked with 4x more people required on staff.
It turns out the first outside vendor was lied to initially by the Administration, they asked for and reviewed the existing work already done, and said they couldn't match or do better for the locked in budget amount already paid which met the needs they asked for, but ultimately didn't use at all. This almost never happens.
Those people who initially got hired as a result of that, were laid off within 1-2 years, and the work fell to helpdesk (without the resources).
The last few years they removed the various positions he had started with, eventually throwing him on helpdesk in-person and on the phones when they laid off the student/staff helpdesk people.
This was following Covid, and he was in that 90% fatality band of age demographics related to Covid, and they still forced him to in-person work.
In many areas, there is a large gap between needing something, and getting something. They may have a need, but they don't have the demand, and that's a structural issue that only gets worse over time until it fails and must be rebuilt from scratch.
Its really telling about these type of employment structures when the public data is known and shows certain age groups are at extreme risk, and they choose to put their workers in harms way anyway.
Given the many horror stories I've heard through the grapevine about academia (over decades), as well as the experiences that confirm many of those stories;
Sure there is a great need but through decades of scandals, mismanagement, and crises they've burnt the bridges and have a rightfully earned infamous level of notoriety.
The reason the need is so high is because they largely can't find anyone willing to subject themselves to that level of organizational malice.
The competent people won't even bother applying because there is no amount of money they would trade for their personal sanity.
First time? I don't know your background or experience but I do know there are a lot of people in tech now who have never experienced a recession. Also, this startup image (which persisted to these being big companies) of them being employee-friendly, maverick and casual was really just a function of the boom times. That veneer is long gone. We are now in the era of permanent layoffs to suppress wages and every one o…
Also: I lived through both 2001 and 2008 and today seems very different. During the previous downturns, life was still basically OK for those who managed to keep their jobs. All they needed to fear were the next round of layoffs. Today, executive leadership seems hell bent on both reducing staff AND griefing those employees they keep in various ways to make sure they know their place. Perks and benefits disappearing, compensation frozen, expanding work expectations, general antagonism, and so on. I don’t remember any of that happening in previous downturns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s specifically Reddit, but more like “normal life” bleeding into HN. The tech industry (and therefore, HN) has this weird “positive thoughts only” vibe where everything negative is considered whiny and curmudgeonly (as the newest HN posting guideline puts it). Uncritical “this is great, that is awesome, things are wonderful” posts get a pass here and are not held to some high academic discourse stand…
On the contrary, there are plenty of things to complain about and I personally find HN to be a tough, even cynical, audience. The guidelines don't say you can't be negative, you just have to explain your reasoning. One doesn't have to subscribe to toxic positivity to see the childish absurdity of a statement like "It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole soc…
The core issue here isn't just market conditions or bad hiring practices. It's that tech _workers_ have spent decades thinking they were somehow different from other _workers_, that they were 'partners' with capital rather than the labor behind it. You're experiencing what people in every other industry have dealt with for generations: being treated as a disposable cost center when it's convenient for ownership. The…
Software engineer from the 1970s here - it's run its course. It's like the music industry; it was what it was until it no longer was anymore. AI replaces processes, which replaces people. Qualified and educated software engineers coming out of Asia are cheap and plentiful, and the majors are stocking up on them and dumping the end of career Caucasians. Don't waste your time; unless you have a great idea then code tha…
Have better tools made software engineers irrelevant before? Lol no. They've meant more software which meant people needed more software engineers. AI is exactly the same.
It's like saying Ford's assembly line killed the automobile industry.
Note that many companies are pretending to hire in order to look successful/growing. They might be willing to hire if some unicorn candidate comes along, but in practice the job ad is just marketing.
I think it's basically become de rigueur, standard HR advice at this point. The the amount of fake job listings is off the charts, to the point you should assume it's fake until proven otherwise (on this side of the pond anyway)
The bar in FAANG, which I've been luckily employed at for 9 yrs, is to i) identify an important business problem ii) propose a design to solve it iii) implement the design yourself or with the team iv) demonstrate solution and/or real world impact.
Coding, it turns out, is the easy part, which can be done by AIs as of 2025 :)
Identifying important business problems to solve, and translating those into engineering systems is still beyond the reach of AIs (luckily).
That said, human's job is getting harder everyday. Expectations go up every f'in year. The demands often look impossible (it turns out this is how you get the most out of people).
So best of luck! It's pretty tough out there. Too many new grads struggling. And relatively few jobs.
That said, this too shall pass. I've seen 3 major downturns since 2000, and this is just one of them. Boom and bust happens...