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

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#151

Post by hbn » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 7:28 PM UTC

zwnow wrote: post #3

It 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.

Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time?

It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.

The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#152

Post by yyyk » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

ecb_penguin wrote: post #34

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…

Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent. > Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences. > blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? They explained their argument. > Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? It depends. A struggling company that nee…

>A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down?

What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.

* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#153

Post by Hilift » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 7:34 PM UTC

gishglish wrote: post #140

Hilift wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...

Oh man, was it implemented as an ISAPI extension? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.

Something like 4 million lines of code with hundreds of people working on the same thing. It was converted to Java by 2002 so they knew it was a crisis.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#154

Post by OldfieldFund » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 7:40 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #149

OldfieldFund wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog This is an old trick to get people to work hard. It's no accident that every tech company does this.

I mean, if you worked at any of these companies, you could see the bug list for yourself. These are not fake bugs filed by corporate conspirators. They're actual software defects that affect real users.

I'm not saying the bugs aren't real. But there is a non-specific frontier of control, so to speak. And the stock prices of the big companies are always going up, and there aren't any major disasters. Usually.

With more people, there could still be more bugs, and disasters could still happen. Limiting resources can work well in corporations.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#155

Post by sylvainr65 » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:09 PM UTC

Still hiring every other months in my company. Hard to find real talented developers. My guest : most of them are already employed. This article does not reflect my reality at all.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#156

Post by j45 » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #92

j45 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.

Well, it was a widely and strongly suspected behavior. It was never proven, to the best of my knowledge.

Yeah, seems like a behaviour that increased during ZIRP and started reversing when that went way.

At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing.

It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#157

Post by wiseowise » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 8:40 PM UTC

throwmeaway222 wrote: post #56

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 beca…

> We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work

Yeah, no, lol.

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#158

Post by bigbuppo » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #122

bigbuppo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't disagree, but I also don't think that gives the article a pass to make whatever claims they want without getting any pushback. Especially where they posted it to HN, they should be expecting to be challenged. I could (and probably should) have been nicer instead of calling it "terrible", but I don't think we (a site like HN dedicated to intellectual curiosity) should give bad claims a pass just because they a…

Where is your peer-reviewed research that shows your opinion on this is correct? Do you have the numbers to back that up? Is there any verified source of data that says, "I love it when the people of HN find my blog post and start screaming at me for shit that doesn't matter."

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#159

Post by jaymzcampbell » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

hbn wrote: post #151

zwnow wrote: post #3

It 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.

Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time? It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it se…

> a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement

I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with

Re: Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming

#160

Post by mathattack » Wed, Jul 30, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

bogdan wrote: post #31

mathattack wrote: post #24

It's supply and demand. It could also be a 4X increase in grads for Computer and Information Sciences degrees since the 90s. Source: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&qu...

How does this correlate to job demand? I imagine demand is on par if not higher.

Good question. A couple caveats on the data:

1 - These #s are just domestic.

2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much)

3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs.

4 - Domestic only.

My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing.

I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995.

[0] - https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineeri...