Just a few months ago I remember that "the industry" was very optimistic... hope I can still find a remote job..
Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
561–570 of 774 posts
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#562I've grown anxious the past few years watching salaries skyrocket while I've played it safe, remaining at my company with years of seniority, but average pay that has been eaten away by COL and inflation increases, though in a very stable industry related to defense. Every time I got the urge to hit Leetcode and start interviewing for a new gig with a 50% pay increase, I remember 2007-2009 and getting laid off from 3…
> Watching the market cool down leads me to believe we're going into another downturn, and I'm becoming more confident I made a good bet by not jumping ship in the last year or two. It just seems like you're afraid of making a change, and now you've found a new justification to keep avoiding discomfort. The reality is, there are tons of good companies out there and they will pay $350-400k for senior engineers even in…
With all the anxiety, sounds more like he's afraid of regret.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> . A developers job is not to write code. You happen to write code as part of your job, but your core responsibility is to implement solutions to business problems. My job is to write code. Nobody is interested in my opinions about business problems. I have to be aware, of course. I propose code to write some times, and I have to have some idea that it is a vaguely practical thing in business terms. I want to write…
Code is an expression of a business solution. The meat of any application is in the business rules it enables and enforces. In a very well oiled machine it might be possible to just receive some behavioral requirements and get to it, but in my experience that isn't the norm. To be an effective engineer, you need to have a solid understanding of how the code you're writing solves the needs of the company.
Unpacking that:
> Code is an expression of a business solution
At some very high level that may be true. The person who makes the final decision on what code I work on (who happens to be the brother of the CEO, poor fellow!) may have to consider "business requirements", but only lightly. We implement what we are told to implement. I am a worker.
> The meat of any application is in the business rules it enables and enforces
No. That is crazy, and very high level. Where I work the "meat" is tight loops, memory allocation, network latency, data reliability....
> To be an effective engineer
I have not been to Engineering School. I am not an engineer. Engineers are people who have been to engineering school. I am a computer programmer working on low level iOS plumbing. "Engineer"? Huh! Putting on airs, I do not do that.
> To be an effective engineer, you need to have a solid understanding of how the code you're writing solves the needs of the company.
To be an effective computer programmer I have to understand the requirements that my firm has of the hardware. I can give very good advice about whether the hardware can be persuaded to do what they want. I cannot give (good or valuable) business advice about whether the things the firm wants are the correct things.
I understand a lot of people here really want to be successful "founders" and come at it from an engineering perspective. Very good. It is different for them than for me.
A lot of us (at least one of us...) here are workers who want to do a job, for a salary. Happy to work for one of those founders if the money is right. (I have to make a business decision about who I work for, in the best scenario. In my case I took what I could get, and got lucky - thank you universe!) I am not qualified (I am actually, another story) and am not employed to give business advice, or to care. I am more valuable to everybody if I stick to my knitting.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it really a bad thing? Unemployment is pretty low.
Long term, poor allocation of resources into junk work and business that doesn’t make money leads to crashes and periods of high unemployment. In other words you can’t keep the party going forever and how things are now isn’t an excuse for irresponsibility.
That is illogical. Money-less economic models are unable to predict structural unemployment. In fact Say's law predicts that a theoretical barter economy is always at full employment.
Of course the modeling flaw is that money is saved as a goal in itself so it will cease to circulate at some point which is the real source of unemployment.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why slack? I never understood. I never liked IRC. But to not like it and pay for it? I do not understand. Am I a fossil?
Most people don't get to choose, in my case, it's our corporate IM system, so I have to use it whether I want to or not. It's got a lot of enterprise features that companies like, like SSO integration, message retention policies, security certifications like HIPAA and FedRAMP, and more. There are also a lot of pre-made apps for integrating with corporate apps like Jira, Gmail, Salesforce, etc. It's fine, I haven't lo…
> Most people don't get to choose
Is that a case of business people making technical decisions?
That I understand. Do not like, but I understand
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
What sucks is that fiscal policy, ie government spending, is also often not very efficient. Even when rampant corruption doesn’t destroy efficiency, crushing bureaucracy or just plain incompetence will. (Is the DMV a model of efficiency?) So you need a smart balance. And you need competent, honest people in both business AND government. I don’t think that government necessarily is inefficient. The DMV could be a very…
People keep using the DMV as an example of government inefficiency, but my state has made it run so painlessly I don't think I've spent more than 15 minutes in an office over the last 5 years. I think government can be efficient if you put technocrats in charge of implementation rather than elected officials who are subject to the electoral whims of the uninformed masses. The problem with the above is it weakens demo…
> People keep using the DMV as an example of government inefficiency, but my state has made it run so painlessly I don't think I've spent more than 15 minutes in an office over the last 5 years.
It's totally baffling to me when there's 'the DMV' in US films/tv, because that's just not a place (nor anything equivalent) we have to go to, whether it's 'only fifteen minutes' or more.
(Sure, when my driving licence expires in 10y, or I change address, I'll need to spend a minute or so on an online form.)
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DMV in my state requires you make an appointment 4-6 months out right now. Walk-in appointments are unavailable or only available during a few hours a few days a week, if they happen to have staff that day. Good luck if you have your drivers license stolen. I sold a car of mine to Carvana in October. I returned the license plate to the DMV immediately, which is how they're notified that you no longer own the vehi…
California right?
I have bought 3 used cars and gotten 2 teenagers thru permit and drivers test and license. Never had any appointments except for the driving test, and never had any long waits. All waits were much shorter than when I transferred my out of state license to CA in 2008 or 2009. Impressively well run bureaucracy, I'd say. And this with covid precautions to work around. Much better than the several east coast states I had prior experience with.
Now I do chose the office to visit with some care, and also (as an "elite WFH software engineer") time it so that the lines are likely to be shorter, so YMMV.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Housing cost is part of how inflation is computed.
The owner equivalent rent measure that the Fed uses in the US has been decoupled from Housing prices for a long time. House price increases or rent increases don't necessarily have an impact on inflation if few are paying the marginal rate, and they choose to eat the higher cost rather than asking for more money. When a critical mass of individuals pay the marginal rate for housing, and they choose to demand more for…
If your monthly payment stays the same and the interest rate is lowered you pay less interest to the bank which means the seller gets your money instead. The price increase literally doesn't matter to you.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DMV in my state requires you make an appointment 4-6 months out right now. Walk-in appointments are unavailable or only available during a few hours a few days a week, if they happen to have staff that day. Good luck if you have your drivers license stolen. I sold a car of mine to Carvana in October. I returned the license plate to the DMV immediately, which is how they're notified that you no longer own the vehi…
WTF? This must be because of willful political sabotage? The license plate should follow the car and ownership should be changed online as part of the transaction. It sounds incredibly wasteful that every time a car changes ownership the seller must hand over the plates in person to the DMV. And is there no national registry of cars or data sharing between states? Strange that a car can be registered twice. If your d…
The ultimate proof of ownership is a piece of paper.
You can do a lot of stuff electronically in my state, transferring a title isn't one of them.
Additional fun thing is that the buyer is supposed to go do that and it can cause the seller headaches if they don't.
Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place
#570I work for non-tech generating 100million+ in revenue. Cushy job, fully remote, good pay and full autonomy with flexible hours working as an IC. I recently talked to a startup, similar pay, culture would be a better fit since it was mostly techies and I'm a nerd by nature.....but things just got awkward as soon as I asked about their revenue....they were bleeding money and I was told they were being acquired by a big…
Is there any growing startup that's not bleeding money? Isn't what the seed and Series A and maybe B funding is about? After series A funding I'd expect some revenue stream, but not enough to pay expenses, after B series, they should have a plan to profitability and some proven customers that show that they can actually get that revenue, and after C I'd expect them to be executing to that plan. If bleeding money scar…
You're right - it's pretty definitionally hard for businesses to be profitable early on. The problem is that this unprofitable period has been extended towards ludicrous ends.
It used to be that you spend your Series A and B figuring out the business, and from Series C forward you've got your unit economics dialed in and are just pushing the "growth" button as hard as you can.
Nowadays you get all the way to IPO without ever achieving positive unit economics: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash... You have companies raising (or trying to raise) Series E, F, G while they lose money on every transaction and make it up in volume.
I suspect OP is talking more about that phenomenon - companies that are way too far along to not have positive unit economics on their core business.