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Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

taylor.gl

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Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#61

Post by johnfn »

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…

+1

"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#63

Post by brianjlogan »

They didn't hire people to control labor. They were enabled to hire people for R&D because it gave them a tax loophole.

https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-ch...

And it was removed so tech CFOs are realigning their hiring/retainment to save money on taxes.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#64

Post by sugarpimpdorsey »

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…

> This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO

The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.

It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?

Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#65

Post by netcan »

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 hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it...

Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.

So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.

If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.

That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.

That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#66

Post by alephnerd »

jeffbee wrote: post #58
alephnerd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not taking offense to your dislike of the author's argument (I agree with you - it's not a strong argument), I'm just taking offense to your tone.

> you don't think anyone from the class of '08 got hired at Nvidia or whatever

1. I'm not saying no person from 08 would have been hired at NVDA. I'm saying statistically, it would have been harder simply because new and early career unemployment in all majors was at it's highest. If you miss the train or fall out (eg. layoffs or getting fired) it's very difficult to hop back on.

2. NVDA only became hot recently. I myself passed on an NVDA offer in the mid-2010s because their stock was essentially a penny stock and base salary was low by Bay Area standards. I kick myself to this day for that decision :') - and that gets to the crux of the failure of the author's argument.

Tech employment only became "hot" for barely a decade. The rest of the time, salaries weren't much different from other white collar roles. It was BigTech that made SWE salaries enticing.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#67

Post by castwide »

lokar wrote: post #32

I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire. From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects. The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount. I think the…

In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#68

Post by Kapura »

Concentrated capital strikes again. Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#69

Post by abixb »

>What happened wasn't just carelessness on the part of Big Tech. It was a power move. 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.

Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content.

Dead internet theory in full effect.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#70

Post by gishglish »

Kapura wrote: post #68

Concentrated capital strikes again. Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.

> Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.

It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore.

I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.

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