Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming • Hacker News Board

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#51

Post by szundi » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

bigbuppo wrote: post #44

freedomben wrote: post #20

This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two). > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. Aside from all…

The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.

Parent commenter presents perfect arguments to show this opinion or whatever it is is based on questionable grounds

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#52

Post by bigbuppo » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

gishglish wrote: post #14

alephnerd wrote: post #2

This is cyclical to a certain extent. The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20. Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers. Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase,…

> Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession. Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships. Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer. All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become…

So, all these people laid off from big companies that were doing real non-chatbot AI and ML research combined with robotics or other machine control to do things that would have changed the world for the better if the project hadn't been killed because it was only making zero billion dollars (the $999,999,999.99 they brought in doesn't count), are perfectly capable of working some place else that wants to, you know, do that farming thing they were working on, or shift gears to building machines that make housing affordable by reducing the labor costs by 75%.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#53

Post by lbrito » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

Meh.

I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#54

Post by cwmoore » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #23

epolanski wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be naive, there was neither generosity nor support, it was always about business: talent was scarce and plenty of competition for it existed. Thus compensation kept going up. The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.

Adam Smith: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. I am not using the word generous in the unselfish sense, but the large, abundant sense. Apologies for any confusion.

Not the clearest word choice, is it?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generous

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#55

Post by falcor84 » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

> They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.

What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#56

Post by throwmeaway222 » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

When you pull a large portion of people that would normally be doing the following jobs:

  * maintenance on buildings
  * growing corn
  * building homes
  * making tacos at taco bell
  * roll your own guess

And make them have job titles like "Head of Equity" or "People Partner Team Member" or "roll your own here too" and give them a 100k-200k+ salary, then everyone making Corn, Tacos, Homes are going to demand more money because why work at Taco Bell if you can literally get a job in Big Tech?

It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes.

We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control.

Done. Now get off HN and get to work.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#57

Post by johnfn » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

bigbuppo wrote: post #44

freedomben wrote: post #20

This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two). > For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool. Aside from all…

The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.

Are we not supposed to pass judgement on a blog post just because it's opinion-based? If I put the most nonsensical opinions into my blog post, I hope people tell me that it's not very good.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#58

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #36

jeffbee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An HTML jockey who gets to call himself "full-stack" because they let him run the mysql server doesn't have the experience necessary to deride the careers of the roughly quarter million technical staff at the large companies as "fake work".

No offense, but as a SWE turned PM turned VC, you're all code monkeys to me anyhow. Dissing someone as a "HTML jockey" is just rude. People need to start somewhere, and the class of 20 and 21 had a horrid job market because of early COVID hiring freezes - it recovered for class of 22 but tanked immediately afterwards. I don't deny that I dislike his opinion on "fake work", but you are falling into the same trap as we…

Really, you don't think anyone from the class of '08 got hired at Nvidia or whatever? Give me a break. Anyway the author doesn't make the case for this in his post, it's just stuff he made up in his head.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#59

Post by parpfish » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #4

Big tech g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ lavishly supported programmers for a whole generation. This is something to be happy about.

bigtech salaries are weird because all sides feel like they're getting away with something.

bigtech looks at the marginal cost of an employee compared to marginal revenue gains they'll drive and sees a clear win. from their perspective, employees are underpaid relative to the money they bring in.

employees look at a mid-six-figure TC package for a very cushy job with minimal accountability and think that they're getting away with something amazing.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#60

Post by DaSHacka » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

wiseowise wrote: post #18

Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming by *checks notes* creating it in the first place?

The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's, before many of these big tech companies existed. Or at the very least, before all of them truly got to be "big" tech.