What a lazy and worthless analysis. It argues, poorly, that big tech created the golden age of programming until the economy destroyed it while purportedly arguing the opposite.
Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
81–90 of 178 posts
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#82Has the author heard of "outsourcing" before?
As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#83It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
It’s not high salary for low effort.
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#84This 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…
Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#85I wish I could like this post, but it unfortunately shows a lack of historical framing. So, as an elder millennial, I thought I'd backfill with some data from the 1990s onward. (I'm a bit of a management/tech history nerd as well and studied it in grad school)
TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common.
1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured.
1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant
2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust
2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession.
2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring.
2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock.
2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots.
If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#86No it did not.
It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#87I’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.
> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.
Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.
At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.
It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#88It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber sec…
The post title, and your comment, made me wonder - what criteria should we use for considering some period of time as a "golden age" in programming? I definitely agree it should not be the level of compensation, but it could still be any number of things:
* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.
* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.
* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.
* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.
* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.
etc.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#89Big 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.
> The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's
I think everyone's idea of the "golden age" of programming happens to coincide when they were young and everything was exciting.
Ask people of different ages and you'll get different answers.
Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming
#90My first programming job in SF paid $60k/year 10 years ago. I'd like to thank big tech for driving salaries up.
In 2015? That seems low for an entry-level job at a startup, then. $60k is more like 2010.