6 ms·

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are layi

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are laying off thousands, and most of them in tech/development? Even the places laying people off are still hiring those positions.

jorts 3y ago
More like everyone realized that they can trim down to improve margins without taking a lot of flack.
- downrightmike 3y ago
  Both
- polishdude20 3y ago
  Yep, fire the devs after they've built the software. Fire them because the software is already built. Slowly your software grinds to a halt and dies because you release features too slow or your software starts to become very bad.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    By the time that happens the person who gets to tout the savings on their resume has already leveraged that for a salary bump somewhere else. It's an unfortunate reality that if you're employed (not a founder) and you think more than a year or so out, you are going to be outcompeted by people who optimize for short term gain and leave before the bill comes due.
  - myth_drannon 3y ago
    And some of the fired devs go to work for the competitor or start their own business. This is a natural lifecycle of software. Slowly rot and let others grow.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    sounds good, that's Future CEO's problem to solve. Who may or may not be current CEO. Current CEO gets a nice small bump in stocks and a good resume to jump off with.
noodle 3y ago
Well, to give you my POV - my company is still hiring because the business fundamentals are still strong. We're making money and using that money to pay people. But I have friends in network who had to lay off because they were hiring against VC cash instead of revenue, with the expectation of raising another round later. But they now don't expect to be able to raise that next round so easily so they have to slow their burn rates. Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.
- vasili111 3y ago
  > Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate. Why it changed? What happened?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    A combination of fiscal policy (money is literally expensive at the moment, as central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation) and fear (a lot of people have been expecting a recession any day now for the last year, though it keeps getting postponed, and may yet be the recession that never was; while a good few countries dipped briefly into technical recession this year, fear of another proper global recession does seem to be abating a bit).
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    The over-simplified answer is "The fed started upping interest rates, after having held them ridiculously low for about a decade." There's arguably more to it than that, but when people talk about "cheap money" they mostly mean "low interest rates". If you just Google terms like "end of cheap money" you'll find lots of discussion on all of this. Some examples: https://www.ft.com/content/6d312b6c-9f74-4816-ad7e-7e797c5e0f6b https://www.ft.com/content/6d312b6c-9f74-4816-ad7e-7e797c5e0... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-30/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-debt-shocks-loom-as-rates-rise https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-30/what-s... https://fortune.com/2022/12/28/investing-outlook-2023-fed-interest-rates-stocks-inflation-cheap-money-era/ https://fortune.com/2022/12/28/investing-outlook-2023-fed-in... https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/end-cheap-money-reveals-global-debt-problem-2022-10-03/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/end-cheap-money-reveal... and so on.
shiftpgdn 3y ago
Tech leaders colluding with the government by abusing the H1B program and ultra-lax enforcement of anti-trust laws to absolutely crater tech salaries has been the name of the game for 15+ years.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  The number of H1B visas in relationship to the entire market is just a drop in the bucket.
  - slaw 3y ago
    600k H1B workers is quite a lot.
hunterhod 3y ago
How would such a joint-coordinated effort work? Is such collusion possible at this scale?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pkaye 3y ago
  I don't think its collusion but its possible when one major tech company does it the others think its safe to do it too. But I also think many of these companies over-hired during the pandemic and even with the layoffs have more employees that pre pandemic.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  Well, one arm of it is the H1-b program.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
People are spending less time on social media so web marketing spend is down. Businesses are focusing on event based marketing. Web marketing is a very large part of the demand for front end. That's not collusion, it's basic economics.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
What you call "collusion" is what economists call "the market". Collusion doesn't even make sense here when it's so broad based. I could entertain collusion if it were a relatively small number of companies, e.g. in the Apple/Google etc. anti-poaching case. But here tons of companies had layoffs, and it's not hard to see why: 1. There was a ton of over hiring done during the pandemic. I don't think anyone really denies this. We were getting close to the "anyone that can fog a mirror" bar that I last saw during the .com boom. 2. Most people don't understand how the raise in interest rates makes it much more difficult to defend additional headcount even for companies that are hugely profitable. I won't go into the full economic theory, but the short of it is that when cash now earns ~5%, the bar for what new projects need to earn also shoots up. Obviously when cash was earning nothing people were much more willing to make highly speculative investments. There is no collusion, and I think a lot of folks who didn't start in the job market until after the Great Recession never saw a downturn. In a note of optimism, I'd argue that I heard all the exact same things during the .com crash, e.g. "they're going to ship all our jobs to India." Yet software dev salaries absolutely exploded in the past 2 decades since. I've talked to some folks who have already seen a marked improvement in the job market over the past month or so - not stellar by any means, but not as awful as it was earlier in the year. In other words, I'm really confident "this too shall pass."
hattmall 3y ago
The overall quality of an individual employee has declined considerably. Mass hiring and layoffs are to an extent part of a more elaborate hiring process. Right now market dynamics are making this possible but as things tighten up there will be salary depression and more intern type roles coming back as the "hiring" process gets extended where previously it was compressed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwaway5371 3y ago
not really it turns out you need half the people to do the same job

jorts 3y ago

More like everyone realized that they can trim down to improve margins without taking a lot of flack.

downrightmike 3y ago
Both
polishdude20 3y ago
Yep, fire the devs after they've built the software. Fire them because the software is already built. Slowly your software grinds to a halt and dies because you release features too slow or your software starts to become very bad.
- fnimick 3y ago
  By the time that happens the person who gets to tout the savings on their resume has already leveraged that for a salary bump somewhere else. It's an unfortunate reality that if you're employed (not a founder) and you think more than a year or so out, you are going to be outcompeted by people who optimize for short term gain and leave before the bill comes due.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  And some of the fired devs go to work for the competitor or start their own business. This is a natural lifecycle of software. Slowly rot and let others grow.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  sounds good, that's Future CEO's problem to solve. Who may or may not be current CEO. Current CEO gets a nice small bump in stocks and a good resume to jump off with.

noodle 3y ago

Well, to give you my POV - my company is still hiring because the business fundamentals are still strong. We're making money and using that money to pay people. But I have friends in network who had to lay off because they were hiring against VC cash instead of revenue, with the expectation of raising another round later. But they now don't expect to be able to raise that next round so easily so they have to slow their burn rates. Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.

vasili111 3y ago
> Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate. Why it changed? What happened?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  A combination of fiscal policy (money is literally expensive at the moment, as central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation) and fear (a lot of people have been expecting a recession any day now for the last year, though it keeps getting postponed, and may yet be the recession that never was; while a good few countries dipped briefly into technical recession this year, fear of another proper global recession does seem to be abating a bit).
- mindcrime 3y ago
  The over-simplified answer is "The fed started upping interest rates, after having held them ridiculously low for about a decade." There's arguably more to it than that, but when people talk about "cheap money" they mostly mean "low interest rates". If you just Google terms like "end of cheap money" you'll find lots of discussion on all of this. Some examples: https://www.ft.com/content/6d312b6c-9f74-4816-ad7e-7e797c5e0f6b https://www.ft.com/content/6d312b6c-9f74-4816-ad7e-7e797c5e0... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-30/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-debt-shocks-loom-as-rates-rise https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-30/what-s... https://fortune.com/2022/12/28/investing-outlook-2023-fed-interest-rates-stocks-inflation-cheap-money-era/ https://fortune.com/2022/12/28/investing-outlook-2023-fed-in... https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/end-cheap-money-reveals-global-debt-problem-2022-10-03/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/end-cheap-money-reveal... and so on.

shiftpgdn 3y ago

Tech leaders colluding with the government by abusing the H1B program and ultra-lax enforcement of anti-trust laws to absolutely crater tech salaries has been the name of the game for 15+ years.

scarface_74 3y ago
The number of H1B visas in relationship to the entire market is just a drop in the bucket.
- slaw 3y ago
  600k H1B workers is quite a lot.

hunterhod 3y ago

How would such a joint-coordinated effort work? Is such collusion possible at this scale?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pkaye 3y ago
I don't think its collusion but its possible when one major tech company does it the others think its safe to do it too. But I also think many of these companies over-hired during the pandemic and even with the layoffs have more employees that pre pandemic.
foobiekr 3y ago
Well, one arm of it is the H1-b program.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

People are spending less time on social media so web marketing spend is down. Businesses are focusing on event based marketing. Web marketing is a very large part of the demand for front end. That's not collusion, it's basic economics.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

What you call "collusion" is what economists call "the market". Collusion doesn't even make sense here when it's so broad based. I could entertain collusion if it were a relatively small number of companies, e.g. in the Apple/Google etc. anti-poaching case. But here tons of companies had layoffs, and it's not hard to see why: 1. There was a ton of over hiring done during the pandemic. I don't think anyone really denies this. We were getting close to the "anyone that can fog a mirror" bar that I last saw during the .com boom. 2. Most people don't understand how the raise in interest rates makes it much more difficult to defend additional headcount even for companies that are hugely profitable. I won't go into the full economic theory, but the short of it is that when cash now earns ~5%, the bar for what new projects need to earn also shoots up. Obviously when cash was earning nothing people were much more willing to make highly speculative investments. There is no collusion, and I think a lot of folks who didn't start in the job market until after the Great Recession never saw a downturn. In a note of optimism, I'd argue that I heard all the exact same things during the .com crash, e.g. "they're going to ship all our jobs to India." Yet software dev salaries absolutely exploded in the past 2 decades since. I've talked to some folks who have already seen a marked improvement in the job market over the past month or so - not stellar by any means, but not as awful as it was earlier in the year. In other words, I'm really confident "this too shall pass."

hattmall 3y ago

The overall quality of an individual employee has declined considerably. Mass hiring and layoffs are to an extent part of a more elaborate hiring process. Right now market dynamics are making this possible but as things tighten up there will be salary depression and more intern type roles coming back as the "hiring" process gets extended where previously it was compressed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throwaway5371 3y ago

not really it turns out you need half the people to do the same job