What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real, grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.
That's funny, I'm also thinking about Electrician.
Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
341–350 of 720 posts
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#342If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry don’t have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included.
I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hosting a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and trying to autoscale it to tens of thousands of vCPUs. The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstations (edit: transparently replace compiling ) because our codebase is really big and we've hired enough people this is viable. edit: to clarify, I'm using recc which wraps the compiler commands like distcc or ccache. It doesn't require developers to give…
> The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstation Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best engineers leave? I am half serious here. If you want your software to run slow, IT could equally well install corporate security software on developer laptops. Oops, I did it again. Oh well, in all seriousness, I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtu…
> I have never seen any performance problem being solved by running it on Azure's virtualization
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I am not virtualizing the workspace. I'm using `recc` which is like `distcc` or `ccache` in that it wraps the compiler job. Every developer keeps their workstation. It just routes the actual `clang` or `gcc` calls to a Kubernetes cluster which provides distributed build and cache.
> Isn't there a less convoluted way of making the best engineers leave?
We have 7000+ compiler jobs in a clean build because it is a big codebase. People are waiting hours for CI.
I'm sure that drives attrition and bringing that down to minutes will help retain talent.
> Tens of thousands of vCPUs for a single compilation run, or to accommodate 100 developers who try to compile their own changes?
Because it uses remote execution, it will ideally do both. My belief is that an individual developer launching 6000 compiler jobs because they changed a header will smooth out over 300 developers that generally do incremental builds. Likewise, this'll eliminate redundant recompilation when git pulling since this also serves as a cache.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#344Here's the same post on Bluesky for those who prefer that platform: https://bsky.app/profile/josephpolitano.bsky.social/post/3mg...
Thank you! Could HN switch the links? bsky doesn't require a login to view replies. bsky is just a superior viewing experience.
I don't know if switching from a extreme partisan site to another extreme partisan site is the right solution just because of the need of login credentials. In any case, Twitter/X has been online almost 20 years. Bluesky still has to prove its staying power long term.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. Maintaining and expanding is more challenging, which is why I’ve grown to prefer that. Greenfield and then leaving is too easy, you don’t learn the actually valuable lessons. As experience shows that projects won’t stay in the nice greenfield world, building them can feel like doing illusory…
Not sure what type of "greenfield" startup experience you've had, but most of the work I'm talking about involves solving problems that most people simply don't have the combined skill set to solve. Typically problems that involve a substantial amount of quantitative skills combined with the ability to bring those solutions to prod. Nearly all of the teams I've joined had problems they didn't know how to solve and of…
FWIW this is the best kind of job ever for me as well:
"when you started you didn't even know if there was a solution."
Regardless what the problem is - as long as I know _nobody knows if there is a solution_ it's an instant sugar rush.
You are free to bang your head against a stone wall for months trying to crack the damn thing.
OFC you need to deliver in the end. And this requires then ruthless "worse is better" mentality - ship something - anything. Preferably a the smallest package that can act as mvp that you know you can extend _if this is the thing_ what people want.
Because that's the other side of the coin - if the solution is not known - people are also not aware if the solution has true value or if it is a guess.
So in any case you have to rush to the mvp.
Such joy!
Of course the mvp must land, and must be extensible.
But these type of MVP:s are not a slam dunk.
The combined requirement of a) must ship within limited time b) nobody knows what _does_ require a certain mindset.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#346How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely. EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124... There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expec…
In Portland, there was a time in 2000-2002 where Nike and Intel had contract offers out to SW developers for $12/hour, and were getting slammed with applications.
I started my career at $14/hr in 1999, was at $19/hr in 2000, and switched to salary at $55k by 2001. I spent 15 years in corp IT running software teams... total comp got way better when I entered the big tech industry in 2015.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#347After reading many anecdotes of top school alumni struggling to even secure some interviews, I'm really curious about what opportunities available for median American freshgrads e.g. 3.0 GPA from T100-200 Unis.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#348Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#349What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER will be coding everything for their company lol.
Software will become cheaper to write and more software will be written. A senior will always outcompete a junior when it comes to logical thinking and a true understanding of IT. A programmer will always outcompete a non-programmer when it comes to using AI tools.
Bottom line, if programmers are fucked, so is just about anyone else.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#350There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more competition than before.
Those of us who have been in the industry for 15-20 years we remember a time when tech was just a job.
In the mid 2010s, then most notably in late 2020 - 2021, you had people who had no interest in tech entering the industry because they saw it as an easy career to make decent money in.
It got pretty bad in the late 2010s, but it become almost comical in 2021 with people who took a two-week coding bootcamps suddenly landing 6 figure jobs. Some of these people were even working at multiple companies at the same time.
The optimist in me hopes this all shakes out with those people who had no interest in tech moving on to other things. These types of people were not only bad employees, they were also bad for the industry, and in my opinion responsible for culture shift from tech being a place dominating by "nerds" and "geeks" in the 90/00s to the modern "tech-bro" stereotype.
The realist in me though will continue to warn people the tech job they're working at today is likely their last. Between tech industry growth slowing, the excessive over production of tech talent and AI + SASS automating a lot of traditional software development work it's going to be exponentially harder to remain employed in tech in the coming years.
So much so you might as well find a relatively worse paid job if it means you don't have periods of months of unemployment every year.