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The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

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Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#131

Post by aaomidi »

908B64B197 wrote: post #122
smahs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is surely a gross oversimplification of what's happening. If you see layoffs.fyi, there are a lot of rows with more than 5% fired or where the numbers are in several hundreds to thousands. While some companies are known to regularly use the tactics you mention (and a lot others also do the same from time to time), they don't use mass firing as a means.

> layoffs.fyi Website started tracking sometime in 2022. > there are a lot of rows with more than 5% fired or where the numbers are in several hundreds to thousands. These include "Non-Technical staff" which have been the majority of laid off employees. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4] > they don't use mass firing as a means. They do. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple all had yearly layoffs for underperformers, while maintainin…

A lot of the people who got laid off from Google were not "under performers".

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#132

Post by antibasilisk »

bratao wrote: post #14

As a fellow developer who has been passionate about open-source programming since childhood, I was disgusted in this last hiring bubble how condescending and disrespectful the developers were towards other professions, which is disappointing. My general feeling was that it elevated developers to a seemingly different caste of "special" people, and here in my country (Brazil) there was advertisements everywhere about…

I notice that there is a huge difference in the attitudes of people who learned programming in childhood, compared to people who learned in adulthood. As someone in the former group, I find myself agreeing strongly with your assessment.

There is a lack of humility that is far too common, that manifests as a toxic attitude and bad spending habits. I see a similar issue with people in finance, and once the illusion fades such people are prone to suicide, as was the case in 2008.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#133

Post by 908B64B197 »

everforward wrote: post #129
908B64B197 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or what HTTP status codes mean. A junior hire I worked with a little while ago had actually done a college class on web development. I must admit the more senior engineers did rib him a little about it, being a little incredulous that a serious college would teach web dev and give out college credits for it. But nowadays there's even one at Stanford so we were wrong. Anyways, the first thing they learned in that cl…

I totally think colleges could teach HTTP. There's plenty of time to do it in. I generally think colleges do a meh to poor job of preparing CS grads for the real world, but they're leaps and bounds better than bootcamps. I'd probably give 50/50 odds on college grads knowing (or at least being able to remember) HTTP status codes. > At the same time, where are the aerospace engineering bootcamps? Where's the law or med…

> I totally think colleges could teach HTTP.

They do. Anyone who takes a web dev class or takes a Senior Project Course should be familiar with it. I was surprised bootcamp grads didn't know about it since it's most often the first slide of a web-dev class.

> I generally think colleges do a meh to poor job of preparing CS grads for the real world,

Often, an issue I've observed is that students will minor in CS and major in something else, or the way the CS program is structured, you can major in CS with mostly math classes. Which is the way to go if a student is aiming at grad school, but not the best in industry.

> They're probably right that someone could do a bootcamp and be on-par with actual engineers.

I'm very skeptical of that claim. I've never seen it play out. Cramming a 4 years degree into 12 weeks?

> I hate them because I feel like they're selling an expensive, unrealistic dream to people who have no way to know better.

I've interviewed someone from a bootcamp who, after 50 minutes, could not come up with a function to count the words in a string. I use it as a warmup question for freshmen who have completed one semester or CS and it usually takes them about 10 minutes.

So yeah, I completely agree if someone paid 12k for that, they got scammed.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#134

Post by watwut »

everforward wrote: post #94
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the fault of the devs or the broken processes where management promises unrealistic deadlines up the chain, so devs have no time to think about the bigger picture and just do everything in their power to ship something that barely works at the end of each sprint and move on to putting out the next fire? To me, the fault is in the industry and how the ships are run.

If that's happening, it's either a calculated decision or the senior devs aren't doing their job. Someone should be communicating to management that the solution won't scale, with estimates of when it will fail or maximum load and the amount of time it will take to do it correctly. Sometimes it's legitimately not worth optimizing something that will never need those optimizations. Sometimes management doesn't realize…

They will not believe you until actual issues happen. People in general are very good at dismissing problems that are right now biting someone else. You can see it all the time, even here in hacker news. And if anything, management is especially good at being confident that things will work out.

My senior experience is that if I see trouble that requires management intervention ahead, I communicate about it and then bail out. Trying to save it will just burn me out and as long as I am trying to fix issues, management thinks everything is ok and I am just stupid worrier. The issues must get real bad for them to be noticed and fairly often, it is best to let them go there fast.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#135

Post by 29083011397778 »

rednerrus wrote: post #126
soVeryTired wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past decade more and more devs have been out-earning surgeons and white-shoe lawyers. The tech salaries of today feel like the i-banking salaries of the early 2000s. It’s not just the c-suite that’s been earning crazy money.

No offense, but what we so is more complicated that lawyers and also more impactful on society.

A kid was stabbed to death on a bus last week. A lawyer will play a major role in whether his killer goes to jail.

People are evicted, set free, imprisoned, and suffer serious economic setbacks (or not) based on lawyers. This completely ignores any knock-on effect of jail time in a persons life.

What on Earth could you possibly do that would be more impactful to society?

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#136

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #21
bratao wrote: post #14

As a fellow developer who has been passionate about open-source programming since childhood, I was disgusted in this last hiring bubble how condescending and disrespectful the developers were towards other professions, which is disappointing. My general feeling was that it elevated developers to a seemingly different caste of "special" people, and here in my country (Brazil) there was advertisements everywhere about…

Don't worry, the sweet irony is hitting those condescending tech-bros now too the same way it hit the condescending crypto/stock bros who kept preaching "the market only goes up", "to the moon" and, my personal favorite which I read on HN, "developer demand is infinite". How's that infinite demand working out now tech-bros? Just ask Twitter employees. https://imgur.com/a/ZSEl44o A lot of people working in tech were d…

Not sure about learning to weld.

c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer , possible emergence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfa... , remote working, AI, and the implications of that.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#137

Post by randomdata »

everforward wrote: post #128
randomdata wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible for more than half of the sample to be below the median No. It is very much possible when the measure is undefined, as was the condition setup before the bet was made. If we take it to the logical end where your chosen measure is simply the inverse of my chosen measure, then those above the median by my measure fall below the median by your measure and vice versa, leaving the entire set of those out…

> No. It is very much possible when the measure is undefined, as was the condition setup before the bet was made. I promise you, it's not, because that's not how medians work. This is the Wikipedia definition of a median: > In statistics and probability theory, the median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. There have to be half on…

> Sure, but that's not a median. That's the intersection of people above 2 separate medians of 2 separate measures.

And? That's a given. The comment we are discussing made it clear that the are multiple measures, and that most developers will fall below the median (in at least one of those measures). Not that difficult to understand.

> You can't combine the median of separate measures

Sure. Which is why nobody did. What are you trying to add with this strawman? If you are simply trying to refresh your memory of your kindergarten-level math classes, I'll chuckle for a minute over the foolishness of me thinking you were trying to have a discussion and leave you to it.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#138

Post by tpoacher »

There was a blogpost recently on HN, which compared the "learn to code" campaigns as useful if one thinks of this along the same lines as "learn to cook". I liked that perspective.

The problem of course comes when someone who just learnt how to cook their first omelette feels ballsy enough to apply to a michelin restaurant as head chef ... and the hiring manager can't tell the difference.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#139

Post by cudgy »

aeternum wrote: post #97
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you it’s in a lot of way similar to the dotcom bubble but the issue seems to me simpler than you make it seems. Propped by an easy access to cheap investment fonds, companies massively over hired developers to work on projets which have actually no value. The massive demand leads to under qualified people being hired. The current layoff is a return to a sustainable situation. And even then if you look at…

In control systems, a common tradeoff is between a fast response that overshoots or a slow response that does not overshoot. We've seen that pace of innovation matters and if your goal is to maximize the pace of innovation, you want that fast response even if it means overshooting somewhat whenever there's a step change.

“We've seen that pace of innovation matters and if your goal is to maximize the pace of innovation, you want that fast response even if it means overshooting somewhat whenever there's a step change.”

Does the pace of innovation really matter as much as you think? Or is it possible execution on the business side can matter more?

Also, it has been proven that adding more software developers can actually slow down a project. Increased hiring, therefore, does not necessarily correlate with faster innovation.

Re: The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

#140

Post by aeternum »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #101
aeternum wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In control systems, a common tradeoff is between a fast response that overshoots or a slow response that does not overshoot. We've seen that pace of innovation matters and if your goal is to maximize the pace of innovation, you want that fast response even if it means overshooting somewhat whenever there's a step change.

I am not sure if you mean that dirt-cheap money accelerated the pace of innovation. But, if that is what you mean, i.e. historically low interest rates accelerate the pace of innovation, we would witness innovation gains in countries with negative or zero interest rates. But we haven't seen any shift. There's a difference between malinvestment and investing in projects that don't go anywhere. This is the difference b…

People really can't predict what investments represent the bonfire vs. good investments, and even if they get that right, it's even harder to get the timing right.

For example myspace vs. facebook, webvan vs. amazon vs. instacart. You can also look at physical industries like the aerospace boom after WW2 that brought us into the jet age. The high influx of cash allows huge numbers of companies to bloom, representing the testing of lots of ideas and designs in parallel. Many aerospace companies failed, just as many tech companies have failed, but those tests accelerate innovation.

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