61–70 of 535 posts
Don't take it personal. All business want to reduce costs. As long as people cost money, they'll want to reduce people.
Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing. Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive. Hey, it's just business.
Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now. Lower costs, smaller teams, and a lot of “good enough” duct-tape solutions are shipping fast.
Fewer developers are needed to deliver the same output. Mature frameworks, cloud, and AI have quietly changed the baseline productivity.
And yet, these companies still struggle to hire and retain people. Not because talent doesn’t exist, but because they want people who are immediately useful, adaptable, and can operate in messy environments.
Retention is hard when work is rushed, ownership is limited, and growth paths are unclear. People leave as soon as they find slightly better clarity or stability.
On the economy: it doesn’t feel like a crash, more like a slow grind. Capital is cautious. Hiring is defensive. Every role needs justification.
In this environment, it’s a good time for “hackers” — not security hackers, but people who can glue systems together, work with constraints, ship fast, and move without perfect information.
Comfort-driven careers are struggling. Leverage-driven careers are compounding.
Curious to see how others are experiencing this shift.
I recently did a higher education contract for one semester in a highly coding focused course. I have a few years of teaching experience pre-LLMs so I could evaluate the impact internally, my conclusion is that academic education as we know it is basically broken forever. If educators use AI to write/update the lectures and the assignments, students use AI to do the assignments, then AI evaluates the student's submis…
To replace humans permanently from the work force so they can focus on the things which matter like being good pets?
Or good techno-serfs...
A few observations from the current tech + services market: Service-led companies are doing relatively better right now. Lower costs, smaller teams, and a lot of “good enough” duct-tape solutions are shipping fast. Fewer developers are needed to deliver the same output. Mature frameworks, cloud, and AI have quietly changed the baseline productivity. And yet, these companies still struggle to hire and retain people. N…
I think pressure to ship is always there. I don’t know if that’s intensifying or not. I can understand where managers and executives think AI = magical work faster juice, but I imagine those expectations will hit their correction point at some time.
As I have heard from mid level managers and C suite types across a few dev jobs. Staff are the largest expense and the technology department is the largest cost center. I disagree because Sales couldn't exist with a product but that's a lost point. This is why those same mid level managers and C suite people are salivating over AI and mentioning it in every press release. The reality is that costs are being reduced b…
There are a lot of counterexamples throughout history.
This is the best explanation of (my take on) this I've seen so far. On top of the article's excellent breakdown of what is happening, I think it's important to note a couple of driving factors about why (I posit) it is happening: First, and this is touched upon in the OP but I think could be made more explicit, a lot of people who bemoan the existence of software development as a discipline see it as a morass of inci…
no need to worry; none of them know how to read well enough to make it this far into your comment
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why quiet quitting is the logical thing. Managers and business owners shouldn't take it personally that I do as little as possible and minimize the amount of labor I provide for the money I receive. Hey, it's just business.
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Do I want to lead a business filled with losers?
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At some point the low hanging automation fruit gets tapped out. What can be put online that isnt there already? Which business processes are obviously going to be made an order magnitude more efficient?
Moreover, we've never had more developers and we've exited an anomalous period of extraordinarily low interest rates.
The party might be over.
Of course semi-technical people can troubleshoot, it's part of nearly every job. (Some are better at it than others.)
But how many semi-technical people can design a system that facilitates troubleshooting? Even among my engineering acquaintances, there are plenty who cannot.