It's a dark time too be right now.
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Executives: We’re doing more with less!
grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room
Executives: Better profits! Lower costs!
grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room
To be fair, those are the normal TARDIS sounds.
On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.
"It's a good time to unionize tech workers right now..."
Best time to form a union was yesterday. Next best is today.
I remember seeing articles on habr about unionization and that it is better done now when it is eazy.
When it was a dark time for the empire the shogun cut off the heads of 141 lords... Maybe we should start there.
Dotcom bubble. 2008 crash. Covid. Now this.
We've all been through these. Buckle down. Ignore the outliers. It's a chance to rethink and do what matters to you.
Also, ALWAYS have a Plan B, C, and D.
I work at a large tech company, and the feeling here is unlike anything I've ever felt before. There are a few camps:
- Workers on visas that are utterly petrified of losing their jobs, and are struggling to plan for anything long-term, since companies that lay people off can't file green cards for employees.
- Workers that are just numb to everything. They don't give a fuck, they are jaded with the bullshit their employer pulls, and work is just work.
- People that would happily take a voluntary layoff to GTFO, spend some time with family, and potentially move to something better.
What seems to be the dominating feeling that everyone has, is that they no longer support their leaders. They feel there are too many middle-managers, they realise that their C-Suite staff are fucking useless, and the CEO's are almost universally awful as leaders. Sundar has caused Google to nose-dive in popularity, Jassy is so ineffective that no one even knows he is CEO, Musk is a known sociopath going through a mental breakdown, Zuck bet everything on VR to mask huge privacy/product failings, and alongside all of this are dozens of CEO's that forced employees back to the office or laid people off for bullshit reasons.
My hope from this dark time is that companies arise that focus on the employee first, learn from the mistakes made by big tech, and purposefully manoeuvre around FAANG until they are relegated to boomer tech. Until then, like most SWE's, I'm just hoping things get better soon...
Sorry everyone, I made the mistake of trying to better myself and get out of this blue collar hell hole existence I live in and started learning web development last year. Naturally this has to happen then lol
:P
Bouncing between high paid tech work and driving forklifts and lifting boxes every few years is not fun. Wish this industry was more stable
This hasn't been my (anecdotal) experience, or that of anyone in my network.
The industry is unstable no doubt about that, but we've never had trouble finding better places to land.
IMO if you've been in tech building your skills for a few years, you really shouldn't have trouble finding work. '01 was weird but there was still plenty of work, especially in defense. '08 was scary but turned out to be a great time to join a startup. Sometimes it's a lateral move instead of up, sometimes it requires relocating , but if you've been doing good work and building your professional network you should never have to go back to driving forklifts (unless you choose to).
That's why I went back to factory/infrastructure. The highs are not high and the lows are not low.
Same. I have a low paying white collar job that I don’t enjoy. I thought I would start learning development just in time or AI and then layoffs. It makes me feel really sick and scared for the future.
A lot of posts and videos have been put up about how it will be fine. That AI won’t take jobs and even with the layoffs, they say head counts are still up, but it feels pretty hopeless to me.
I don’t know what else to do, so I’m just going to keep trying and keep pushing myself to be a better dev. Maybe I’ll get there someday.
Interesting trend in the comments - technology veterans who went through the dotCom crash have quietly moved to union jobs, and aren't sweating this iteration.
Worth keeping in mind.
We need a tech workers union.
I understand other workforces have it worse. however we could get there if we don't push back now.
1k job applications since June I'm ready for the inevitable end
700+ applications and multiple recruiting companies later and still only 3 interviews since May. With almost a decade of software development experience. It's actually a little reassuring that I'm not alone here and it's not just a problem with me. Best of luck in your search friend!
always been
Hmmm. I’ve seen threads on social media from experienced devs having been unemployed for a year now and rather devastated by it.
I know a guy who was let go a year ago. Dude's like 170 IQ - and while people say that, this guy's dizzyingly smart. 3 degrees, he can teach, code to spec, rebuild your delivery pipeline so it fucking howls, manage nerds, and he's been interviewing like it's his job for a year without lasting results.
Some shitty company in Connecticut just flew him out for a project wrap-up, as he's been helping save their ass since their completely out-of-his-depth manager reached out on a public forum for some clue. Like, without him they'd've been 4 kinds of fucked and he was looking for something to keep him sane for a few weeks.
Handshake and a free dinner and sent him packing. Because they could. They got what they needed, and they foolishly think they can get it again when this idiot fucks up again in a month.
I worry a lot of nerds are getting fish-hooked like that, when they just want to make things go and maybe also eat regularly.
I’m not disputing their experiences - I’ve replied otherwise on this thread - but I’m going to guess that a lot of those experienced devs didn’t go through the 2000-2002 ish dot com crash, or maybe even the 2008 recession.
Sometimes the money goes away for a while. The money has currently gone away. Eventually they drop the interest rates, people decide that real estate or EVs aren’t sexy anymore because they’re overbought, and the money floods back in. Then it gets too much, to the point that some kid gets $60M for the idea of selling barbecues and charcoal over the internet, and the cycle repeats.
We thought Keynes fixed this but then decided it was more fun for a handful of people to make shitloads of money and then crash the economy every decade or two.
It can also be a common occurrence and devastating to an individual at the same time. It sucks, and people vent.
I've been in this game a long time and been laid off from about half my gigs. It sucks every time. If it wasn't for the fact that the pay is good and that I like doing it, I probably would've moved to something more stable already.
A certain subset of dev thought they were untouchable. Now they are finding out they're the same level of peasant as the rest of us. Hard fall. :/
Learn plumbing, poo will always flow.
Sounds like a shitty job.
...I'll see myself out.
So they’re juicing their profit margins for a couple years. Let’s see what happens in another couple years when they failed to invest in the next things because they laid everyone off.
I wouldn't be too concerned. 300k is not really that many compared to the size of the industry. And there is a ton of aging software that is falling apart due to a lack of investment. Like the airlines. And all the utilities that keep getting hacked. And hospitals. With governments starting to hold companies responsible for getting hacked, there will be jobs to rebuild hold software a plenty.
Explain me like I’m five - why?
Because the big tech companies are laying off, all the tech companies have decided they too need to layoff people to lower costs, improve profits, report better earnings, etc.
Fast forward to next year when they’re up shit creek because their skeleton crews can’t possibly do All The Things. Executives retire, take huge bonuses; repeat.
Interest rates were low, which made banks lend money very cheaply. It also led to a lot of money being put in the stock market, which made it go up.
Companies used that money to, in part, hire people. A lot of people. The stock market doing well also means businesses try to grow, because everyone is spending more money.
Interest rates are starting to come back up. This means loans are more expensive, which means there's less cash available. It also means there's less money in the stock market.
Less cash on hand and lower stock value makes businesses want to cut costs, and people are very expensive, particularly in the tech sector.
Additionally, commercial real estate is running into major problems: people don't want or need to work in offices.
This means the contracts are being allowed to expire, and less money for the large companies that own the properties.
A lot of money is invested in these companies. Anticipation of them doing badly makes companies fear an economic downturn.
So with less money available, less tolerance for risk in the stock market, and a fear of a significant economic upset, companies are looking to cut expenses, and people hired because cash was cheap and risk was okay are easy to justify cutting.
They ideally would like to let go of people they can do without, keep their stock price high, and when the market bottoms out spend the cash they can justify with their high price to buy viable companies at a discount.
The industry is experiencing historic shrinkage post COVID due to unsustainable growth during COVID.
Startups need a lot of capital flowing in because they don’t turn a profit early on. Traditional smaller businesses usually don’t have this sort of funding because the reward is lower. With tech, there’s a strong chance that company could become public or could get bought out. Or it could stay private and eventually become profitable. Regardless, they need investments made so they can continue to operate to eventually deliver a valuable product that will possibly offer significant returns to the investors.
The pandemic happened, which led to several outcomes. For one, a lot of boomers retired. Boomers were earning a lot of money. Then they stopped earning money and started dipping into their savings. This had a strong reaction. Capital became more scarce. Don’t believe me? Look at what banks are paying for 12-month CDs and the interest rates in savings accounts. It’s insanely high compared to two or three years ago.
This trend likely won’t last forever. Gen Xers and millennials have been moving into vacated roles by the boomers and are now earning more than before. They’re able to generate excess capital that investors can use to fund startups. There’s no shortage of innovative ideas in the western world, but there is a shortage of capital.
Not every county in the west is going to recover the same way. The boomer generation is the largest generation in history. Not every country kept having kids at a relatively similar pace. Typically, developing countries have much higher population growth. As countries industrialize, we see certain trends like both men and women joining the workforce and people moving to the cities for work. People generally have fewer kids with these trends as they are more focused on their careers and have less room to raise them. Nobody wants to raise a child in a one-bed apartment!
The United States is one of the rare exceptions. With a trend of consistent domestic population growth and immigration, the U.S. has avoided the fallout from rapid industrialization. Because of that, we’re seeing some interesting trends:
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Under Biden, the post-pandemic POTUS, the U.S. has entered a prolonged period of rapid onshoring of manufacturing jobs. The addition of factories, distribution centers, and more have been increasing exponentially.
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Germany, Italy, South Korea, Japan, and other similar economies have seen the impacts of a shrinking younger population and a ballooning senior population. These nations will likely keep the design of their products onshore, but will send manufacturing offshore. The U.S. and Mexico are the biggest winners here, but Mexico is at a disadvantage compared to the U.S. due to a greater difficultly in maintaining infrastructure.
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Emerging technologies make the production of goods in the U.S. more feasible. Advancements in AI, robotics, and renewable energy will make production in the U.S. more logical despite the higher wages its workers command because less workers will be needed, or other savings in the realm of security, stability, and access to transportation infrastructure offset that factor.
There will not only be excess capital generation in the U.S., but there will also be excess capital flowing into the U.S. It’s also not to say that tech jobs will never recover outside of the U.S., but the reality is that we are in a capital shortage for a specific, acute reason. Less people of working age able to not only fill the vacated roles left by boomers, but also difficultly in paying the pensions and benefits offered to retirees. This will dry up even more capital in those particular nations.
Tech jobs have always been finicky. That won’t change going forward. But if you’re in the U.S., there’s a strong chance you’ll see things bounce back quicker than they will in other countries.
And seeing what mass copyright infringement corporation OpenAI just dropped we can expect it to be a million more by the end of the year.
So you are telling me that there is now 300,000 tech workers now able to focus on open source projects to keep their foot in the coding door while they drive forklifts or serve McDonald while waiting on the AI hiring bots to read their resumes?
Problem being, because big tech money has so distorted the economies of the cities it's clustered in, many of these people can only choose between finding another tech job ASAP, moving away from their industry to a lower cost metro with limited job opportunities, or imminent homelessness. Driving a forklift won't pay the rent, and commercial real estate is so absurdly priced that there may not even be a restaurant to wait tables at.