IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023 • Hacker News Board

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#301

Post by fuzztester » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:37 AM UTC

orochimaaru wrote: post #36

deathpanels wrote: post #25

Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditi…

I think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.

The overseas subsidiary business model was happening well before 2007. I left a company doing it, in 2004, for example. And they had been doing it for some years before I joined. And they were not the only one.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#302

Post by YetAnotherNick » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:37 AM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #39

Podgajski wrote: post #20

What happened to IT is the same thing that happened to blue-collar workers. They’ll use you until they actively create a lower cost labor market.

“there’s a power in the union..”

How would unions increase employment unless unions make employees less productive. You could claim that they increase employee's wellbeing, salary and make the job better, but it would likely have inverse effect for ease of getting the job. e.g. Film and fashion industries are unionized, but getting to them is significantly harder than software engineering.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#303

Post by tarxvf » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:40 AM UTC

unixfg wrote: post #271

pram wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: just don’t respond to the “good morning” messages. If they don’t follow up it wasn’t important anyway.

This is the reference I like: https://nohello.net

I like this one, it's a little more subtle: https://yeshello.org/

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#304

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:40 AM UTC

zztop44 wrote: post #299

deadghost wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs. An example to illustrate what I was worki…

That sounds like a frustrating experience. I wonder what caused this problem? We’re the people leading your company’s subsidiary’s hiring efforts incompetent? Was it a management issue? It’s not like there’s something about being German or British or Indian or Filipino or Australian, as opposed to American, that makes you think input validation doesn’t matter. With contracted outsourcing the root of the problem is ge…

Companies can have internal intermediaries.

Suppose you go to a country and talk to a charlatan who tells you that they have many qualified people and they'll work for 30% of what you're paying in the US. You hire them and tell them to hire more staff there.

Then it turns out there are many qualified people in that country, but they don't work for 30% of what you're paying in the US, because it's a global market and actually they can command the same wages as their skills imply anywhere else. But there are plenty of unqualified people who will sign on for lower wages, and you've been promised workers for lower wages, so that's what you get.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#305

Post by randomdata » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:41 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #231

giantg2 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many well-off people just don't care. They might support them in a poll but question their utility in a specific sector like software. Or how another commentor said they weren't concerned about competing with people writting c grade code in India since they have been writing software for 20 years. I don't think unionizing will help with off-shoring for development. I do think unionizing could bring about more…

No, a huge amount of Americans are actively hostile to unions as a concept. The very idea that employees should be able to negotiate as a block instead of individually has been scapegoated as basically all of society's ills. Consider the common refrain: I'd rather negotiate for myself It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work, as if you as a solo person in a 1000 person company could someho…

> It's like, a fundamental misunderstanding of how power dynamics work

The misunderstanding is yours. Workers understand what you say just fine, but don't care about out-negotiating the company. They will never meet the CEO at the bar, so it means nothing to them. They want to be able to out-negotiate their neighbour so they can peacock dominance over someone they actually interact with.

The purpose of a union is to establish a brotherhood between metaphorical neighbours so that they don't try to be assholes towards each other. While that does, indeed, improve the overall worker position against the company, it hinders the power dynamic between them. And that's where you find the pushback.

It's much like you find in 'middle-class' neighbourhoods where you see households trying to outdo each either with nicer yards, or fancier BMWs, or whatever, all while racking up crazy debt to pay for it all. If they invested the money they pour into that stuff instead they would be way better off, but being better off isn't the motivation.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#306

Post by mschuster91 » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:41 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #96

dayofthedaleks wrote: post #93

Every F500 company is Almost There on automating absolutely everything through ServiceNow and that's without AI being in the mix yet. There's always going to be a place for coders who can massage the API links between packages or run an ERP, but you don't need IT when your firm is disposable line staff, institutional knowledge lives in the codebase, and HR has mostly been replaced by Workday. UBI when?

Serious question: Why is the answer to firms automating everything "give me money for doing nothing" and not "get a different job?" Don't get me wrong I would love shorter work weeks, fewer hours a day, etc. for the same pay. That was the promise of all this additional productivity, after all. But even that is still getting paid for work. I just can't rationalize the idea of paying an entire population for nothing.

> Serious question: Why is the answer to firms automating everything "give me money for doing nothing" and not "get a different job?"

Because eventually, there will not be many jobs left that cannot be automated. Cleaning and some of the trades will remain as long as we get iRobot-style droids with dexterity and intelligence to match a human, as will politics and management, but everything else will get automated.

The question is, will we manage to shift our society away from the millennia-old model of "one's employment defines one's worth in society" to "everyone is worth the same in society" in time, or will there be bloody fights in the transition?

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#307

Post by tharkun__ » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:44 AM UTC

willsmith72 wrote: post #288

madsbuch wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am realising that this is what taxes pays for in Denmark. I have a masters in computer science (5 year, postgraduate + thesis, Aarhus University which is top 100 and even higher for PL + semantics, which is my thesis subject) that I received tuition free and I am continuing with a professional degree in business at a reasonable tuition at 10k USD for the entire degree . It appears like continual learning should be…

it depends what skills you're talking about. when i see people complaining about always having to learn new things, it's related to new libraries, frameworks, technologies (e.g. now i have to learn graphql, now i have to learn to make things cloud-native, now i have to learn go because it's cooler than java). this stuff in my experience is either taught badly or not at all in universities, and i don't even mind that.…

That would be OK if they actually let you learn while doing, which is my preferred way of learning. But they ask you to give ironclad estimates for how long it's going to take to implement in .

They can go do whatever they want to themselves. Either tell me what cool new tech you want me to try out and what problems we might want to solve soonish and I'll see which of those and how it might be applicable to or you tell me you want to build in whatever tech I think will get me there best and fastest. If you know so much, do it yourself. Oh you can't? Well then STFU (not you you but that proverbial manager type above you that seems to know so much)

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#308

Post by lesuorac » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:47 AM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #171

lesuorac wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated. They're not unrelated. Advertisers like to know that their ads work; you need staff to do that. Look at how much tailored the FaceBook ads were vs Twitter [1]. Advertisers would be sticking with Twitter if they thought the ads were worth it. > Facebook targeting allows advertisers to drill…

Facebook's features really don't have much to do with advertisers leaving due to twitter firing a bunch of employees.

FaceBook's features are just an example of how bad Twitter's targeting is; but also it is a zero-sum market. Nike has an advertising budget; if those dollars go to FaceBook they don't go to Twitter. Having worse engineering than your competition is a real problem.

However, my point is that the top parent's claim of Twitter's problems aren't engineering is wrong. Their targeting is god awful to the point that Advertisers don't want to bother with it anymore. If they had better ad targeting (aka Engineering) then Advertisers would sweep the problems under the rug.

There are also many non-engineering examples of this.

- "If Jeffrey Dahmer ran a 4.3, we'd call it an 'eating disorder.'"

- Russian Oil / Gas is still buyable by western countries.

- Lack of repercussions for Jamal Khasoggi assassination [1]

- Massive amounts of advertising on FaceBook post-Cambridge Analytica

- USA Companies selling your active location (to journalists pretending to be not-journalists).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#309

Post by changoplatanero » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:48 AM UTC

yesdocs wrote: post #98

giantg2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. My "team" is doubling in size, but all the hires are international.

It’s time we unionize as software developers. You saw what the UAW achieved, Software Engineering needs the same type of protections

the only thing i want from UAW is a refund for all the dues they made me pay in grad school

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#310

Post by oooyay » Tue, Jan 09, 2024, 1:49 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #240

deadghost wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs. An example to illustrate what I was worki…

My company's doing apprenticeships; take somebody with no CS education, not even a college degree, and teach them to code. It's an interesting model, I remember folks on HN calling for more companies to try it since it seems to have had some success in Germany, but I predict a lot more security bugs and unmaintainable code in the near future.

I'm not college educated and I've been coding since I was about nine in different capacities. I was inspired by two engineers my dad worked with that were the same; one of them was a SWE and the other was a Systems Engineer. I ended up dropping out before I hit any of my CS courses, so I basically did a repeat of high school.

The stuff you need to know for most jobs can be learned through books (DS&A); everyone, including grads, learn to actually code on the job. Systemic thinking and breaking problems down into manageable chunks is harder to train for; this is where I think something that's akin to apprenticeship could really help. At least the way I view it, and maybe I'm wrong, is that in the early 2000's, much less the 90's, there weren't many CS or CE schools - much less accredited ones that followed CAC standards. If your company is doing this then they're just getting back to the roots of what a computer programmer used to be.