Something else is afoot in the markets, I wouldn’t take rando tweets at face value, especially if they’re confirming a narrative you’re biased to accept.
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
601–610 of 720 posts
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
> somehow working and testable code, And then 1x developer comes and rewrites it to actually work.
I know it sounds like a good take, but I don’t really see it happening much in real life anymore. It’s more like the 1x developer gets frustrated and defensive, and shows the 5 stages of grief, try using AI and finds all the reason why it’s bad. Then goes ahead and refactors everything and breaks production.
I’m at this point too. I desperately want to hate AI, but it’s so incredibly competent. People who say LLM’s aren’t good generally just aren’t good at them
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. It's kind of like when the FAA does crash investigation -- a stunning amount of engineering and process insights have been generated by such work to the benefit of all of us.
> You learn the most valuable information from watching how things break and then fixing them. Trust me, you get plenty of experience in this as a founding engineer in a startup. Many of these comments make me wonder how many people here have actually worked at an early stage startup in a lead role. You learn a lot about what's maintainable and scalable, what breaks and what doesn't, in the process rapidly iterating…
Lots of stuff breaks only after 5 or 10 years. Because you most likely don’t have people who originally built stuff and knew why it was like that.
Then customers and market changed so you also most likely have different customers.
I had to undo a lot of over-engineering to fix performance issues that was implemented in good faith by people who ultimately left the company and they thought they did a good job future proofing our product.
I am with company from start and now it is 11 years. I knew why they built it like it was so I was able confidently what to fix. But it still took almost a year to undo stuff that was making our current customers miserable.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone can do 0 to 1. Because delivery drives dopamine. The it is the boring thing, but there comes experience to find interest in that part
Oh boy you're wrong. Many people (including myself) are experts at doing 0 to 0.8. The rest is much more difficult.
This is very subjective of course. Some might do only 0 to 0.1 and claim it is 1
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead. So have all the great engineers I've been working with - there's a deep desire for growth past the things that you're currently good at. The people worrying they might code themselves out of a job are in a different skill demographic. (Ironi…
> Counterpoint: I've been desperately trying to code myself out of a job for almost 4 decades now. I inevitably ended up (and keep ending up) getting more responsibilities instead. What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean you finished one project but your employer had another one for you, which you then were expected to work on instead of sitting idle? Or do you mean you coded yourself into a "promotion"? My com…
My take:
To "code yourself out of a job", you must first deliver the software product that you're currently working on: No critical bugs, feature complete, present it as done.
Paradoxically, once you do that, you'll get a new project. Why not? You just successfully delivered the last project!
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#606In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…
Not everyone is as capable as using AI.
I worked with someone that was trying to push code with all the tells that they didn't understand the code and that it had been through multiple LLM iterations, it burned a lot of the productivity in a project.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. Are you really recompiling 6000 things each time a dev in the company needs to add a line somewhere in the codebase? Have you thought about splitting that giant thing in smaller chunks?
> Are you really recompiling 6000 things each time a dev in the company needs to add a line somewhere in the codebase? It happens when someone modifies a widely included header file. Which there are a lot of thanks to our use of templates. And this is just our small team of 300 people. > Have you thought about splitting that giant thing in smaller chunks? Yes. We've tried but it's not scaling. Unfortunately, we've ba…
Thanks for the detailed breakdown. The template header cascade problem makes total sense, I underestimated how bad it gets at scale with heavy template usage.
The semiconductor fab constraint is interesting too. When test time costs that much per minute, banning pImpl on hot paths is a pretty obvious call, even if it makes compile times painful.
Appreciate the real-world context.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#608Wow it looks like people really didn't realise just how bad the overhiring was in 2020-2023...
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I think housing is the real index. CPI doesn’t make sense for individuals unless you build your own index.
I don't understand why. People spend money on other things besides housing. Because people spend money on multiple things, it doesn't really make that much sense to say that our index of inflation should track be one thing. I mean, if the price of food and healthcare tripled, I think you would probably say that the inflation metrics should go up. Ofc, focusing on just one thing is very convenient for people who want…
Thats the issue with CPI, it tells a skewed story because it makes presumptions about volumes of things people buy.
If Eggs go up 0% and Rent goes up 50%, CPI indicates a “25% growth” which is stupid.
Re: Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems wrong? Like if you look at a collection of open SWENG positions, most of them are maintenance roles at large companies. Greenfield software doesn't have the revenue needed to justify much headcount. In my experience separating the roles out is silly if you're an engineer yourself. We do this a lot and that leads to silly mentalities. Greenfield developer vs maintenance engineer, MVP engineer vs Big Tech de…
I wasn’t talking about segregating roles, but about personal preference. People do tend to prefer building new stuff over maintaining projects long-term, and I’d like the scale to tip a bit on that. Linus is indeed a good counterexample: He didn’t leave Linux after 1.0 to build the next new thing. But the latter is what developers in practice often prefer doing.
I mean, he didn't leave, but he did build the next new thing (git). It's just that it was so incredibly useful for everybody else, as well as for the other thing he already invented which was incredibly useful for everybody else.